Additional Safety Assessments Needed for Diamide Insecticides

Assessments of empathy in medical school admissions: what additional evidence is needed?

The Association for the Study of Medical Education (ASME) sponsored a symposium on the theme of Examining the Evidence with Regard to Character, Personality and Values in Medical School Selection which was held on October 14, 2013 at the University of Sheffield Medical School in the United Kingdom. I was invited to speak about credibility issues related to personality assessments in health prof...

Food for Thought ... Integrated Testing Strategies for Safety Assessments

Replacing a test on a living organism with a cellular, chemicoanalytical, or computational approach obviously is reductionistic. Sometimes this might work well, e.g., when an extreme pH is a clear indication of corrosivity. In general, however, it is naïve to expect a single system to substitute for all mechanisms, the entire applicability domain (substance classes), and degrees of severity. St...

Commonsense approach needed in dealing with safety.

Early fluid loading for septic patients: Any safety limit needed?

Early adequate fluid loading was the corner stone of hemodynamic optimization for sepsis and septic shock. Meanwhile, recent recommended protocol for fluid resuscitation was increasingly debated on hemodynamic stability vs risk of overloading. In recent publications, it was found that a priority was often given to hemodynamic stability rather than organ function alternation in the early fluid r...

Is a safety guidewire needed for retrograde ureteroscopy?

INTRODUCTION It is generally advised to have a safety guidewire (SGW) present during ureteroscopy (URS) to manage possible complications. However, it increases the strenght needed to insert and retract the endoscope during the procedure, and, currently, there is a lack of solid data supporting the need for SGW in all procedures. We reviewed the literature about SGW utilization during URS. MET...