Harm’s Way

PRISMA harms checklist: improving harms reporting in systematic reviews.

INTRODUCTION For any health intervention, accurate knowledge of both benefits and harms is needed. Systematic reviews often compound poor reporting of harms in primary studies by failing to report harms or doing so inadequately. While the PRISMA statement (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) helps systematic review authors ensure complete and transparent reportin...

Thiazolidinediones: do harms outweigh benefits?

Virtual harms and real responsibility

In traditional communities, some actions are widely regarded as bad and unethical. But in online “communities,” the virtual analog of those actions may not be regarded with the same clarity. Since “virtual” behaviors are distinct from ordinary acts, they require further analysis to determine whether they are right or wrong. In this chapter we consider an incident on the Internet that illustrate...

European rating of drug harms.

BACKGROUND The present paper describes the results of a rating study performed by a group of European Union (EU) drug experts using the multi-criteria decision analysis model for evaluating drug harms. METHODS Forty drug experts from throughout the EU scored 20 drugs on 16 harm criteria. The expert group also assessed criteria weights that would apply, on average, across the EU. Weighted aver...

Sociological analysis of social harms and their influence on health

Social health, along with physical and mental health, constitute the main pillars of health. The simultaneous dependence of social health on the characteristics of society and the individual makes a society to be healthy in which there is equal access for everyone to necessary goods and services for full functioning as a citizen. National security takes place when not only people have no harm b...