Early stage Hodgkin's disease: Can we have our cake and eat it, too?

Early detection of prostate cancer: can we have our cake and eat it too?

Accountable Care Organizations: can we have our cake and eat it too?

The health care debate has largely focused on the provisions of the Affordable Care Act (the ACA) aimed at expanding health insurance coverage to all Americans, most notably the individual mandate requirement. The ACA, however, also takes important steps to address the companion challenge of making health care coverage affordable by reigning in health care costs. These steps include various ini...

Rigorous evaluations of evolving interventions: can we have our cake and eat it too?

The years immediately following the widespread interest in patient safety and then healthcare quality saw considerable debate between pragmatically oriented improvers and research-oriented evaluators —or between ‘evangelists’ and ‘snails’ as one longtime observer characterised the two groups. Too often, enthusiastic improvers (‘evangelists’) relied on simple pre-post designs within a single con...

Encouraging distributed generation of power that improves air quality: can we have our cake and eat it too?

The goal of electric power deregulation in the United States is to lower electricity costs through market competition and greater consumer choice. This goal raises important questions: exactly what kinds of distributed generation (DG) should energy and environmental policy favor? What level of government is best-suited and/or most capable of governing DG? And what is the range of regulations th...

Hypothermia, immune suppression and SDD: can we have our cake and eat it?

In vitro studies and clinical observations suggest that both accidental and controlled/therapeutic hypothermia have a strong immunosuppressive effect, and that hypothermia increases the risk of infections, especially wound infections and pneumonia. In the previous issue of Critical Care, Kamps and colleagues report that when hypothermia was used for prolonged periods in patients with severe tra...