Tag: efficacy

Professor Gives Grades to Alternative Medicine

Edzard Ernst assigns a grade to 150 alternative medicine modalities, evaluating plausibility, efficacy, safety, cost, and risk/benefit balance. A very useful reference.

/ September 17, 2019

Meet the new drugs, same as the old drugs?

“Targeted therapy.” It’s the holy grail of cancer research these days. If you listen to its most vocal proponents, it’s the path towards “personalized medicine” that improves survival with much lower toxicity. With the advent of the revolution in genomics that has transformed cancer research over the last decade, including the petabytes of sequence and gene expression data that pour out of...

/ July 23, 2012

Don’t Believe The Hype: Cholinesterase Inhibitors As A Treatment For Dementia

I distinctly remember the day I attended a “drug lunch” (as a PM&R resident in New York City) to learn about the value of donepezil (Aricept) for the treatment of dementia. I was astonished by the drug’s lack of efficacy – the graph displayed in the PowerPoint show demonstrated a 2-point improvement on the Mini Mental State Exam (MMSE), an effect that...

/ January 21, 2010