Coronavirus thread

[peterb]

No leeches or cupping?

Leeches are useful in modern medicine, but probably not for this.....

UTILITY OF LEECH THERAPY
The primary indication for use of leeches in the field of plastic and reconstructive surgery is to prevent venous congestion of flaps used for soft tissue coverage of defects (Beier, Horch, & Kneser, 2010). Leeches have been applied to reconstructive scenarios such as avulsion injuries (i.e., ear, lip, nose, and digit replantation), microvascular free-tissue transfer, and locoregional flap salvage (Herlin et al., 2017). A 2004 study found that 80% of plastic and reconstructive surgeons in the UK had used leech therapy in the past 5 years on compromised free-tissue transfer or replantation operations (Spear, 2016).

https://www.nursingcenter.com/journa...sue_ID=4771656

[Wondering Beard]

It is beginning to smell like this was an attempt by the first author (Mandeep Mehra) to juice his career and hop on the COVID train like many of us have.

Since I have no experience with medical research, I'm going to follow your take. However, and it's probably due to living in or near capital cities for decades, I feel (yes just the feelz, no proof) that there is more to it than just that.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

[Nephrology]

I feel (yes just the feelz, no proof) that there is more to it than just that.

What do you mean by that exactly? If you're implying some sort of organized conspiracy, I assure you that is not the case.

Unfortunately academic dishonesty is rampant in biomedical research. This has to do with the incentive structure in the academic research world; by being "right" (experimental results support the hypothesis of your grant application that is paying for your work), and publishing more papers, in "better" (higher impact factor) journals, you advance your career.

If you do not do that, you will stop being competitive for grant funding, and once the money dries up, your independent research career is basically over. If you are the PI (principal investigator) of a large lab, that means that your research techs are out of a job and your graduate students' trajectory towards graduation will be deeply interrupted.

So, basically, you're put in the position of re-applying for your job every 5 years, and the metric they use to judge your performance is based on a totally unrealistic definition of success. It's not hard to see why this happens a lot.

For MD research faculty - like the author in question - there are slightly different stakes but more or less the same phenomenon. You get rewarded for appearing accomplished on paper, and punished if you don't.

For a great example of this dynamic, give this article a read.

[Wondering Beard]

What do you mean by that exactly? If you're implying some sort of organized conspiracy, I assure you that is not the case.

There's no "exactly" because it's just the "feelz". :-)

The main thing that feels very wrong is Surgisphere. Maybe they're just scammers who attempted to insert themselves in the middle of COVID research to make money, contacted people like the author of the paper, whom they knew/guessed would want to make a name for himself in all this mess and thus get a foot in the door of bio-medical research and the large money pool it has. Maybe it's something else. Theranos is what keeps popping in my head and that ultimately involved a lot more people (most of whom were scammed) than it seemed at first, as I remember it (and my memory could be off)

As to organized conspiracy, one could say that if Surgisphere is just a few fraudsters, it is an organized conspiracy. If you mean that I'm implying some sort of large political conspiracy to attack Trump, I'm not there at all. There is a lot of money in bio-medical research and thus there are a lot of people who want their hands on some; a lot of them have no scruples whatsoever.

I understand the incentives you are describing, and I think , and maybe you'll agree, that they can set up some very bad behavior.

I'm about to get very busy for the next few hours so I won't get a chance to read the article you linked to for quite a while, but I will read it. :-)

[Nephrology]

There's no "exactly" because it's just the "feelz". :-)

The main thing that feels very wrong is Surgisphere. Maybe they're just scammers who attempted to insert themselves in the middle of COVID research to make money, contacted people like the author of the paper, whom they knew/guessed would want to make a name for himself in all this mess and thus get a foot in the door of bio-medical research and the large money pool it has. Maybe it's something else. Theranos is what keeps popping in my head and that ultimately involved a lot more people (most of whom were scammed) than it seemed at first, as I remember it (and my memory could be off)

As to organized conspiracy, one could say that if Surgisphere is just a few fraudsters, it is an organized conspiracy. If you mean that I'm implying some sort of large political conspiracy to attack Trump, I'm not there at all. There is a lot of money in bio-medical research and thus there are a lot of people who want their hands on some; a lot of them have no scruples whatsoever.

I understand the incentives you are describing, and I think , and maybe you'll agree, that they can set up some very bad behavior.

I'm about to get very busy for the next few hours so I won't get a chance to read the article you linked to for quite a while, but I will read it. :-)

Yeah, the Surgisphere thing is interesting. I don't really know enough about it, but from the article I believe you linked, it seems like it was probably a factitious company that was invented by one of the authors. I think it's the first time I've ever heard of something like this happening specifically, but frankly, it was only matter of time. Sort of a clever trick really.

There's definitely a lot of unscrupulous behavior due to the money in the biomedical realm. It tends to be more common at the intersection of the pharmaceutical industry and academic biomedical research, where a potential drug makes the leap from laboratory theory to product in commercial development, as this is where the "rubber meets the road" so to speak.

What's really sad is that it is often legitimized by the medical establishment. This is sort of a can of worms, but in my opinion, a lot of the new drugs that have been approved over the last ~5-10 years - particularly in certain fields, like oncology - really provide at best a marginal benefit to the patient, and come with great costs, not the least of which is financial.

Like I had mentioned to @ccmdfd earlier in this thread, drugs like Ofev and Esbriet are FDA approved to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and probably bring Boehringer Ingelheim millions and millions of dollars in revenue every year. At the American Thoracic Society (world's biggest ICU/lung doc society) annual meeting in 2018 and 19, they papered every possible surface with ads for these two drugs.

However, based on what I know about them, I would never recommend them to anyone that I care about. Their benefit is marginal, to be generous, and it comes with some pretty awful side effects and a hefty price tag to go with it. This is just one example, too - I could easily give you another half-dozen more, just off the top of my head.

To me, this kind of thing is far more criminal than an obvious fraudster like Mehra. It is very unlikely any of those authors benefitted financially from the bogus work they published, and most importantly, it did not cause harm to patients. I can't say the same for Ofev, Esbriet, Jynarque, Keytruda, Vioxx, and so on...

[MickAK]

There's no "exactly" because it's just the "feelz". :-)

The main thing that feels very wrong is Surgisphere. Maybe they're just scammers who attempted to insert themselves in the middle of COVID research to make money, contacted people like the author of the paper, whom they knew/guessed would want to make a name for himself in all this mess and thus get a foot in the door of bio-medical research and the large money pool it has. Maybe it's something else. Theranos is what keeps popping in my head and that ultimately involved a lot more people (most of whom were scammed) than it seemed at first, as I remember it (and my memory could be off)

As to organized conspiracy, one could say that if Surgisphere is just a few fraudsters, it is an organized conspiracy. If you mean that I'm implying some sort of large political conspiracy to attack Trump, I'm not there at all. There is a lot of money in bio-medical research and thus there are a lot of people who want their hands on some; a lot of them have no scruples whatsoever.

I understand the incentives you are describing, and I think , and maybe you'll agree, that they can set up some very bad behavior.

I'm about to get very busy for the next few hours so I won't get a chance to read the article you linked to for quite a while, but I will read it. :-)

I'm part of a generation that had large sections of it destroyed because the medical establishment decided it was ok to give everyone fucking heroin. It wasn't addictive because it was Heroin(TM) not heroin and they had studies and trials and all sorts of medical degrees backing their viewpoint.

So it's easy for me to see malicious intent in anything regarding pharmaceuticals. Is this going on with HcQ versus patented medicines? I don't think so. You can certainly do a follow the money thing with Surgisphere and the Lancet and how this went down. But the problem with follow the money is you can make a pattern too easily.

Most of the doctors that handed out heroin legitimately wanted to help people they saw in pain and most of the people that pushed this study everywhere thought they were legitimately battling magic crystal nonsense. Which still may be the case. The big problem I see is people that would normally be skeptical of information like this taking it as gospel because it fits their narrative. That's rampant these days.

[ccmdfd]

Leeches are useful in modern medicine, but probably not for this.....

UTILITY OF LEECH THERAPY
The primary indication for use of leeches in the field of plastic and reconstructive surgery is to prevent venous congestion of flaps used for soft tissue coverage of defects (Beier, Horch, & Kneser, 2010). Leeches have been applied to reconstructive scenarios such as avulsion injuries (i.e., ear, lip, nose, and digit replantation), microvascular free-tissue transfer, and locoregional flap salvage (Herlin et al., 2017). A 2004 study found that 80% of plastic and reconstructive surgeons in the UK had used leech therapy in the past 5 years on compromised free-tissue transfer or replantation operations (Spear, 2016).

https://www.nursingcenter.com/journa...sue_ID=4771656

The hospital I worked at previously had leeches in the pharmacy Department.

They also had cans of beer, Budweiser I believe.

[blues]

The hospital I worked at previously had leeches in the pharmacy Department.

They also had cans of beer, Budweiser I believe.

That's not beer.

[ccmdfd]

Just my own feelings, but there's something just wrong with Surgisphere, and that is its name. For some reason it just sounds smarmy, and would be associated with fraud, or crackpot research.

Their marketing department didn't just miss the bull's-eye, but the entire target with that one, at least for me.

As for medical research, in addition to the points that Nephrology pointed out above, I would add that I just love how they will get a new drug and prove that it works better than placebo. However they never do the research to see if it works better than the old drug that's been out for 20 years which treats the same problem and costs just a few as opposed to a thousands of dollars and has a good side effect profile.

[ccmdfd]

That's not beer.

For you and me, I agree.

For the clientele that that hospital served, it was most likely a step or two up from what they were used to.