An anti-love drug?

Actually, if such a vaccine can be developed, it would be more of an anti-lust drug, let’s be honest.

But, this is America, where the two are often confused.

Cancer appears to start earlier than believed; new stem cell work

It appears would-be cancer cells can “prep themselves,,” so to speak, then remain dormant before metastasizing.

Meanwhile, there’s some new research on cell conversion that may well further stem cell research.

I don’t blame Indonesia on this

Indonesia and the U.S. were still unable to renew an agreement over allowing a U.S. Navy medical lab to operate in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital.

The hang-up? U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt says Jakarta won’t give the lab H5N1, or bird flu, virus samples, or to give them to the rest of the world. (Yes, for once, this is not an anti-U.S. thing!)

But, the holdup isn’t as simple as Leavitt puts it. As the story notes:

Indonesia fears pharmaceutical company may use samples of Indonesian virus to make a highly profitable vaccine that might not even be available to Indonesians.

Bayu Krisnamurthi, head of a national commission dealing with avian flu, said in March that Indonesia would only send virus samples on a case-by-case basis until a new virus-sharing mechanism currently being drawn up by the World Health Organization took effect.

Hey, that fear in the first paragraph is no idle one. Developing nations have seen Big Pharma practice “nature piracy” for decades. If the U.S. Navy won’t provide the Indonesian government with ironclad-enough assurances against that, well, then it will just have to wait.

And, Leavitt admits that is a holdup:

“(Indonesian health minister Siti Fadillah Supari’s) main point is that what she wants should not be considered ‘royalties’ or ‘compensation,’” Leavitt said. “What she says she wants is for the contributing countries to be eligible for some share of the value commercial companies create out of the influenza samples they provide.”

And, the shame here isn’t just on the U.S. on the other side of the table, either. After all, a number of members of Big Pharma are headquartered in European Union countries.

Medical research plagiarism real problem, not political plagiarism

Medical research plagiarism appears to have a fair amount of “traction,” shall we say. What else could you say about people doing this half a doz3en times or more.

And, what if people are dying over this?

Imagine people dying because one shoddy study overtouting a drug, or hiding interaction or reaction problems, gets plagiarized and spread.

Or, imagine Big Pharma actually paying somebody to plagiarize a study a pharma company has already paid for.

The PLoS antidepressants study, the ‘looseness’ of medical research statistics and ‘faith’ in meta-analysis

Way too loose of p-values for false positives in studies, in medicine (and social sciences) compared to natural sciences, is one reason to not read too much into any individual study that claims antidepressants are ineffective, like the Public Library of Science meta-analysis of individual studies did.

P-values of the same looseness as in medicine/social sciences have been used to claim intercessory prayer actually works on sick people (halfway down the linked page), for example, or here (two-third down the linked page):

Targ's paper is not the only questionable study on the efficacy of prayer that has been published by medical journals. The editors and referees of these journals have done a great disservice to both science and society by allowing such highly flawed papers to be published. I have previously commented about the low statistical significance threshold of these journals (p-value of 0.05) and how it is inappropriate for extraordinary claims (Skeptical Briefs, March 2001). This policy has given a false scientific credibility to the assertion that prayer or other spiritual techniques work miracles, and several best selling books have appeared that exploit that theme. Telling people what they want to hear, these authors have made millions.

Also, per a blogger, I came across a good statement on how many people misunderstand p-values in general:

First, the p value is often misinterpreted to mean the “probability for the result being due to chance”. In reality, the p-value makes no statement that a reported observation is real. “It only makes a statement about the expected frequency that the effect would result from chance when the effect is not real”.

In short, as I’ve tried to explain to people over at Kevin Drum’s blog, p values in medicine are simply too loose.

But, as the study’s authors claim, doesn’t meta-analysis take care of all those p-value problems? No.

Meta-analysis, no matter how much it’s defended, can’t totally cover that up.

I’m not saying that the results of a meta-analysis are no stronger than the weakest study in its umbrella. I am saying that, with p values as loose as they are in health/medicine (and social sciences), is that no massive amount of individual research studies being included under one meta-analysis will make the meta-analysis’ results anything more than a little bit stronger than the best individual study.

In other words, in medicine, and in social sciences, meta-analysis adds a very modest bump, nothing more. The problem is, most people believe it does much more than that when it doesn’t.

Or, to put it another way, meta-analysis is no better than the material it’s analyzing.

So, what’s needed is medical studies to continue with the p of 0.05, because we don’t want to risk screening out potentially life-saving study, but, to re-crunch research studies at the same time. I’m not saying we need to do that with a p of 0.0001, or 1/100 of 1 percent, like the natural sciences, especially physics, normally do. But to re-crunch with a p of 0.01, or 1 percent instead of 5 percent? Absolutely.

Research that made the 5 percent cutoff but not the 1 percent cutoff would be categorized as “worthy of further study but without any immediate conclusions from it being acceptable.”

A sidebar benefit would be that a lot of alt-medicine research would get a less than full imprimatur.