Aggregated News
I know that when my medical school sends us all an announcement that we’ve broken a record for funded research, I’m supposed to be happy. Wrong week for that.
Shortly before this, we faculty got an e-mail from one of our clinician-researchers looking for subjects for an industry-sponsored trial of an experimental surgery aimed at a nonelective medical need. I was disturbed to see what our IRB had approved; the set-up looked seriously coercive, with subjects having all expenses paid – to the tune of thousands upon thousands of dollars – if they would subject themselves to surgical experimentation to get their medical needs (hopefully) met. Mind you, a perfectly standard surgery exists for the problem in question, but you can’t get that paid for if you’re uninsured and not in dire poverty. Meanwhile, the experimental surgery sounded so bizarre that my internist husband assured me the e-mail solicitation was just an out-of-season April Fools’ joke.
No joke. And I tried talking to the researcher about it. He seemed like a genuinely concerned guy. But he was sure our IRB...