Anaxagoras
I will spell this out for you in my best typewritting mode knowing how
demanding you can be in your acceptance of literary manuscripts. I hope
you'll realize how hard it is for me to do this being that I haven't
typed for>30 years ( I dictate and hospital secretaries type; a much faster way
and more conducive to keeping up with the underlying accelerated thought
process. I will even re-read this and correct it to ensure the degree
of perfection that you look for and that , I hope ,you are accustomed
to. And all this without the computer spell checker ( which I wouldn't
know how to use anyway since I will admit to my computer illiteracy: just
never had any use for the computer I suppose until recently when my
kids started making fun of me at which point I felt compelled to act
and her I am.
So here we go: First off Anaxagoras , most physicians ( 99.999% ) don't
get their medical info from press releases because they have not passed
editorial muster: what that means is that they have not been proof read
by the appropriate specia list in that particular field that the article
in question deals with. And the reason for this is that we are not
interested in reading " garbage " ( a little french lingo here ). Hundreds
of thousands of articles are written daily and most of them are of
little clinical ( read bedside ), ( don,t confuse with Muse ) significance.
Second,the standards that the best docs adhere to are very high and thus
they will limit their reading to only blue chip journals such as the
New England Journal of Medicine. The NEJM for example will NOT publish
anything that has been submitted first to a)the lay press, b)to another
journal,c)these days, in the Internet.
May I suggest that if you are going to start reading and interpreting
medical info such as the one you e-mailed to me today on Zonagen that
you always start from the last paragraph which states , and I have taken
the liberty to paraphrase it for you, that we at ZONA take no responsability
for any monetary losses that you , Anaxagoras, may sustain as a result
of having taken what we wrote at face value and acted on it.
I would like to conclude now my introductory lesson on reading medical
literature by also suggesting that you do what ~ 99.999% of U.S. physicians
do( they may be onto something ): namely that youlimit yourself to the US ( and
Canadian) ) medical literature: it is much more accurate and of better
quality than anything from overseas including Mexico and Germany. For
example the hospital I practice in does the most open heart surgery
in my state as well as a tremendous volume of Urology and kidney
transplants: when I recently asked our librarian for a copy of the
British Journal or Urology were the first ( and only ) article written
in English on Viagra was published I was told they discontinued the
subscription in 1987 because nobody had asked to read any of the issues!
The general approach that I have seen my fellow physicians take in the
past on foreign medical literature is that it is best to assume it is
wrong till proven otherwise;and in cases where it is followed by the
one paragraph disclaimer that Zona put out then we immediately start
to worry about possible fraud.( You will not find ANY disclaimers in
any or the tens and tens of the highly reputable U.S.journals I
spoke about earlier: i.e., the authors have the required mental
fortitude to stand by their research.
Finally, since this thread does not aspire yet, I believe, to the above
high standards of the NEJM I thus wish to also add a diclaimer: let
nothing that I have said above be construed as investment advice; so
that if you feel that ZONA is a great buy please don't let anything I
have said prevent you from buying it.
( you may not realize how hard it has been for me Anaxagoras to complete
this piece since English is a 3rd language for me. I hope you will
appreciate the effort. ) |
