Benefits and Harms of Wastewater in Agriculture

Balancing benefits and harms in health care.

Editor—The theme issue on balancing benefits and harms in health care highlighted the need to create better systems to detect and share information about adverse events associated with newly licensed drugs or drugs used off licence or for indications not supported by evidence from clinical trials. 2 3 A new project, CICERO (www.pacehealthsystems.com/ cicero.html), proposes to create a global on...

Judging the benefits and harms of medicines.

How should society judge the safety and efficacy of drugs? This was the question posed by England’s chief medical officer, Sally Davies, in February 2015. Citing controversies about oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and statins, as well as growing disquiet about overmedication by doctors and conflicts of interest among researchers, she feared an erosion of public trust and asked the Academy of Medical Scie...

The benefits and harms of deprescribing.

Deprescribing is the process of trial withdrawal of inappropriate medications. Currently, the strongest evidence for benefit of deprescribing is from cohort and observational studies of withdrawal of specific medication classes that have shown better patient outcomes, mainly through resolution of adverse drug reactions. Additional potential benefits of deprescribing include reduced financial co...

Thiazolidinediones: do harms outweigh benefits?

Harms and benefits from social imitation

We study the role of imitation within a model of economics with adaptive agents. The basic ingredients are those of the Minority Game. We add the possibility of local information exchange and imitation of the neighbour’s strategy. Imitators should pay a fee to the imitated. Connected groups are formed, which act as if they were single players. Coherent spatial areas of rich and poor agents resu...