Group items tagged

the form of definitive randomized controlled trials, the so-called gold standard for scientific research.

Yet the notion has taken hold that such expertise is fatally subjective and that only randomized controlled trials provide real knowledge.

the evidence-based medicine movement, which placed such trials atop a hierarchy of scientific methods, with expert opinion situated at the bottom.

Ethicists and physicians are concerned that, amid a desire to put an end to the Covid-19 pandemic, developers of drugs and vaccines have become overly enthusiastic about the chances their products will work.

Oxford has recently walked back some of its optimism, but for months, it set a tone that its vaccine was the most promising, without any solid evidence that this was based in fact.

Third, one leader in the Oxford team has gone so far as to denigrate other teams trying to get a Covid vaccine on the market, calling their technology "weird" and labeling it as merely "noise." Such name-calling is highly unusual and aggressive among scientists.

The jury chosen for the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, charged with murder in the death of George Floyd, is notable because it is significantly less white than Minneapolis itself.

three Black men, one Black woman and two jurors who identify as multiracial.

50% of the panel that will vote on Chauvin's fate will be Black or multiracial.

Jury selection continues for the second week in the trial of accused Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Later this week, the judge, prosecutors and defense attorneys are expected to question prospective jurors. They will ask about jurors’ backgrounds, their feelings about the death penalty and whether they already have an opinion about Tsarnaev.

. Some say brain science is likely to play a role in the trial, because courts are increasingly looking at what neuroscience tells us about adolescence and the developing brain.

When she was a young physician, Dr. Martha Gulati noticed that many of her mentors were prescribing vitamin E and folic acid to patients. Preliminary studies in the early 1990s had linked both supplements to a lower risk of heart disease.She urged her father to pop the pills as well: “Dad, you should be on these vitamins, because every cardiologist is taking them or putting their patients on [them],” recalled Dr. Gulati, now chief of cardiology for the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix

But just a few years later, she found herself reversing course, after rigorous clinical trials found neither vitamin E nor folic acid supplements did anything to protect the heart. Even worse, studies linked high-dose vitamin E to a higher risk of heart failure, prostate cancer and death from any cause.

More than half of Americans take vitamin supplements, including 68 percent of those age 65 and older, according to a 2013 Gallup poll. Among older adults, 29 percent take four or more supplements of any kind

Why did Depp, who had already lost a similar case in Britain, insist on going back to court? A public trial, during which allegations of physical, sexual, emotional and substance abuse against him were sure to be repeated, couldn’t be counted on to restore his reputation. Heard, his ex-wife, was counting on the opposite: that the world would hear, in detail, about the physical torments that led her to describe herself, in the Washington Post op-ed that led to the suit, as “a public figure representing domestic abuse.”

The fact that Heard’s partial victory, which involved not Depp’s words but those spoken in 2020 by Adam Waldman, his lawyer at the time, can be spun in that direction shows how such ambiguity served Depp all along.

Maybe they were both abusive. Who really knows what happened? The convention of courtroom journalism is to make a scruple of indeterminacy. And so we found ourselves in the familiar land of he said/she said.

newish is the rhetoric of unreality, the insistence, chiefly by Democrats, that some politicians are incapable of perceiving the truth because they have an epistemological deficit: they no longer believe in evidence, or even in objective reality.

the past of proof is strange and, on its uncertain future, much in public life turns. In the end, it comes down to this: the history of truth is cockamamie, and lately it’s been getting cockamamier.

. Michael P. Lynch is a philosopher of truth. His fascinating new book, “The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data,” begins with a thought experiment: “Imagine a society where smartphones are miniaturized and hooked directly into a person’s brain.” As thought experiments go, this one isn’t much of a stretch. (“Eventually, you’ll have an implant,” Google’s Larry Page has promised, “where if you think about a fact it will just tell you the answer.”) Now imagine that, after living with these implants for generations, people grow to rely on them, to know what they know and forget how people used to learn—by observation, inquiry, and reason. Then picture this: overnight, an environmental disaster destroys so much of the planet’s electronic-communications grid that everyone’s implant crashes. It would be, Lynch says, as if the whole world had suddenly gone blind. There would be no immediate basis on which to establish the truth of a fact. No one would really know anything anymore, because no one would know how to know. I Google, therefore I am not.

For the first time, a medication regime has been found effective for some patients with meth addiction in a large, placebo-controlled trial.

Unlike opioid addiction, for which medication-assisted treatment is the standard of care, no medication has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use with meth.

patients in clinics around the U.S. suffering from methamphetamine use disorder were treated for 12 weeks with a combination of medications — naltrexone and bupropion — or placebo.

That investigational vaccine, called mRNA-1273, has been developed by Moderna Therapeutics, and the clinical trial is being conducted at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Unit.

"not all potential vaccines will succeed, but there are several viable candidates."

"there is still much we don't know about the source of this pandemic and the complexity of this novel virus. So, we understand that one company, one vaccine, one test or one medicine will not be an effective solution to overcoming the tremendous task at hand."

In a landmark trial, a cocktail of immunotherapy medications harnessed patients’ immune systems to kill their own cancer cells and prompted “a positive trend in survival”, according to researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), London, and the Royal Marsden NHS foundation trust.

Scientists found the combination of nivolumab and ipilimumab medications led to a reduction in the size of tumours in terminally-ill head and neck patients. In some, their cancer vanished altogether, with doctors stunned to find no detectable sign of disease.

the immunotherapy treatment also triggered far fewer side-effects compared with the often gruelling nature of “extreme” chemotherapy,

(CNN)A jury has found both Amber Heard and Johnny Depp liable for defamation in their lawsuits against each other.

Depp sued Heard, his ex-wife, for defamation over a 2018 op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post in which she described herself as a "public figure representing domestic abuse." Though Depp was not named in the article, he claims it cost him lucrative acting roles. Heard countersued her ex-husband for defamation over statements Depp's attorney made about her abuse claims.

Heard kept her eyes down as the verdict was read. Depp was not present in court, but released a statement that said, in part, "the jury gave me my life back."

A judge’s decision that the word “victim” generally could not be used in court to refer to the people shot by Kyle Rittenhouse after protests in Kenosha, Wis., last year drew widespread attention and outrage this week.

Mr. Rittenhouse, who has been charged with six criminal counts, including first-degree reckless homicide, first-degree intentional homicide and attempted first-degree intentional homicide in the deaths of two men and the wounding of another, is expected to argue that he fired his gun because he feared for his life.

Prosecutors say he was a violent vigilante who illegally possessed the rifle and whose actions resulted in chaos and bloodshed.

Functional Medicine is the alternative medicine Bill Clinton credits with giving him his life back after his 2004 quadruple heart by-pass surgery. Its ideology is embraced by Oprah and regularly features on Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop.

Developed in 1990 by Dr Jeffrey Bland, who in 1991 set up the Institute of Functional Medicine with his wife Susan, today the field is spearheaded by US best-selling author Dr Mark Hyman, adviser to the Clintons and co-director of the controversial Cleveland Clinic for Functional Medicine.

"Functional Medicine is not about a test or a supplement or a particular protocol," he adds. "It's really a new paradigm of disease and how it arises and how to restore health. Within it there are many approaches that are effective, it's not exclusive, it doesn't exclude traditional medications, it includes all modalities depending on what's right for that patient."

A whistleblowing Russian lawyer whose death in custody became a symbol of rights abuses and strained relations with the United States will go on posthumous trial in what relatives say is revenge by the Kremlin.

The circumstances of his demise led the United States last year to bar entry to Russians accused of involvement in his case or in other rights abuses.

"It's inhuman to try a dead man. If I take part in this circus, I become an accomplice to this,"

but this has come with the side effect of a toxic combination of confirmation bias and Google, enabling us to easily find a study to support whatever it is that we already believe, without bothering to so much as look at research that might challenge our position

Indeed, this is a statement oft-used by fans of pseudoscience who take the claim at face value, without applying the principles behind it to their own evidence.

at present, most published findings are likely to be incorrect.

This phenomenon — in which someone feels better after receiving fake treatment — was once dismissed as an illusion. People who are ill often improve regardless of the treatment they receive. But neuroscientists are discovering that in some conditions, including pain, placebos create biological effects similar to those caused by drugs.

a key ingredient is expectation: The greater our belief that a treatment will work, the better we’ll respond.

Placebo effects in pain are so large, in fact, that drug manufacturers are finding it hard to beat them. Finding ways to minimize placebo effects in trials, for example by screening out those who are most susceptible, is now a big focus for research. But what if instead we seek to harness these effects? Placebos might ruin drug trials, but they also show us a new approach to treating pain.

If I were writing the dietary guidelines, I would give them a radical overhaul. I’d go so far as to radically overhaul the way we evaluate diet. Here’s why and how.

Lately, as scientists try, and fail, to reproduce results, all of science is taking a hard look at funding biases, statistical shenanigans and groupthink. All that criticism, and then some, applies to nutrition.

Prominent in the charge to change the way we do science is John Ioannidis, professor of health research and policy at Stanford University. In 2005, he published “Why Most Research Findings Are False” in the journal PLOS Medicin

In February-March 1616, the Catholic Church issued a prohibition against the Copernican theory of the earth’s motion.

This led later (1633) to the Inquisition trial and condemnation of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) as a suspected heretic, which generated a controversy that continues to our day.

In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. This book elaborated the (geokinetic and heliocentric) idea that the earth rotates daily on its own axis and revolves yearly around the sun

it appears a vaccine is better than natural infection in protecting people, calling it “a big, strong plug to get vaccinated” and a reality check for people who may have assumed that because they have already been infected, they are immune.

In the placebo group of the trial for Novavax’s vaccine, people with prior coronavirus infections appeared just as likely to get sick as people without them, meaning they weren’t fully protected against the B.1.351 variant that has swiftly become dominant in South Africa.

“The data really are quite suggestive: The level of immunity that you get from natural infection — either the degree of immunity, the intensity of the immunity or the breadth of immunity — is obviously not enough to protect against infection with the mutant,” Fauci said.