Society Needs Regulations to Prevent Research Abuses

Society Needs Regulations to Prevent Research Abuses

A tension exists between scientists/doctors and government regulators.

(© wladimir1804/Fotolia)


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Robert Klitzman
Robert Klitzman, MD, is a professor of psychiatry at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Joseph Mailman School of Public Health, and the director of the Masters in Bioethics program at Columbia University. He has published over 130 scientific journal articles and eight books, including When Doctors Become Patients; A Year-Long Night: Tales of a Medical Internship; In a House of Dreams and Glass: Becoming a Psychiatrist; Being Positive: The Lives of Men and Women With HIV; The Trembling Mountain: A Personal Account of Kuru, Cannibals and Mad Cow Disease; Mortal Secrets: Truth and Lies in the Age of AIDS (with Ronald Bayer); Am I My Genes? Confronting Fate and Other Genetic Journeys; and The Ethics Police?: The Struggle to Make Human Research Safe. He has received numerous awards for his work, is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a regular contributor to the New York Times and CNN.
Smartwatches can track COVID-19 symptoms, study finds

University of Michigan researchers found that new signals embedded in heart rate indicated when individuals were infected with COVID-19 and how ill they became.

If a COVID-19 infection develops, a wearable device may eventually be able to clue you in. A study at the University of Michigan found that a smartwatch can monitor how symptoms progress.

The study evaluated the effects of COVID-19 with various factors derived from heart-rate data. This method also could be employed to detect other diseases, such as influenza and the common cold, at home or when medical resources are limited, such as during a pandemic or in developing countries.

Tracking students and medical interns across the country, the University of Michigan researchers found that new signals embedded in heart rate indicated when individuals were infected with COVID-19 and how ill they became.

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Susan Kreimer
Susan Kreimer is a New York-based freelance journalist who has followed the landscape of health care since the late 1990s, initially as a staff reporter for major daily newspapers. She writes about breakthrough studies, personal health, and the business of clinical practice. Raised in the Chicago area, she holds a B.A. in Journalism/Mass Communication and French, with minors in German and Russian, from the University of Iowa and an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Trading syphilis for malaria: How doctors treated one deadly disease by infecting patients with another

In the 1920s, doctors induced a high fever in patients - so called "fever therapy" - as a way to help them recover from syphilis, though it involved ethical problems.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

If you had lived one hundred years ago, syphilis – a bacterial infection spread by sexual contact – would likely have been one of your worst nightmares. Even though syphilis still exists, it can now be detected early and cured quickly with a course of antibiotics. Back then, however, before antibiotics and without an easy way to detect the disease, syphilis was very often a death sentence.

To understand how feared syphilis once was, it’s important to understand exactly what it does if it’s allowed to progress: the infections start off as small, painless sores or even a single sore near the vagina, penis, anus, or mouth. The sores disappear around three to six weeks after the initial infection – but untreated, syphilis moves into a secondary stage, often presenting as a mild rash in various areas of the body (such as the palms of a person’s hands) or through other minor symptoms. The disease progresses from there, often quietly and without noticeable symptoms, sometimes for decades before it reaches its final stages, where it can cause blindness, organ damage, and even dementia. Research indicates, in fact, that as much as 10 percent of psychiatric admissions in the early 20th century were due to dementia caused by syphilis, also known as neurosyphilis.

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Sarah Watts

Sarah Watts is a health and science writer based in Chicago.