I was in my office one day and the receptionist said there was someone there to see me. I said, “tell him that I am busy, and he needs to make an appointment.” She calls back 30 seconds later and said “it is an FBI agent!” I said, “how do you know that?” She said, “I asked for ID, and he showed me…
A laboratory can identify a drug while relying on outside information to classify its prescription status. A national urine-testing study combined analytical results with medication information supplied by the ordering clinician. Two information streams McClure and colleagues analyzed 231,228 test-result sets from 144,535 patients tested for both opioids and benzodiazepines….
Read Article: How Did a Laboratory Study Decide That a Detected Drug Was Non-Prescribed?
When a study evaluates psychological treatment, medication changes can complicate attribution of improvement. The 2017 Seren@ctif protocol described how investigators planned to address this issue in a trial of adjustment disorder with anxiety. The planned comparison Servant and colleagues proposed three randomized groups receiving computer-based stress management, an equivalent face-to-face…
Read Article: How Did a Stress-Management Trial Protocol Handle Medication Changes?
A treatment that appears useful for one toxicant raises a separate scientific question when proposed for another. Eisenkraft and Falk’s 2016 review of lipid emulsion and chemical-agent poisoning provides an example of that evidence gap. Several evidence types The authors discussed proposed lipid-scavenging, metabolic, and cardiovascular mechanisms. They reviewed laboratory…
Read Article: What Evidence Supports Extending Lipid Rescue to a Different Poison?