Cordyceps, a well-known traditional Chinese medicine, is an endoparasitic and/or symbiotic macrofungus in the body of insect and other arthropod, and has received increasing attention worldwide due to its rarity and outstanding curative effects for different diseases. Recent years, however, the counterfeits and mimics of Cordyceps are frequently found in markets because of its scarce in nature ...

This article addresses the barriers to personalized medicine, focusing on the burgeoning field of biomarkers research. The author begins by framing intellectual property issues as more than a product of industry incentives and suggests that these issues are deeply entangled with other barriers facing personalized medicine such as regulatory framework deficiencies. The author proposes a set of f...

Court-appointed Technical Consultants (CTCs) are fundamental figures in the Italian judicial system. CTCs are experts appointed by judges in order to supplement their activities by ascertaining, collecting and analyzing facts concerning the specific subject of a lawsuit. These experts formulate opinions, gather motivations and perform checks to provide clear, objective and irrefutable answers t...

BACKGROUND Concern over rising healthcare expenditures has led to increased scrutiny of medical practices. As medical liability and malpractice risk rise to crisis levels, the medical-legal environment has contributed to the practice of defensive medicine as practitioners attempt to mitigate liability risk. High-risk specialties, such as neurosurgery, are particularly affected and neurosurgeons...

INTRODUCTION First-in-class drugs use a unique mechanism of action. This study assessed the therapeutic innovativeness and safety of these drugs approved by Health Canada from 1997-2012. METHODS A list of new drugs was compiled and a database from the Food and Drug Administration was used to determine first-in-class status. Post-market safety warnings and drugs withdrawn for safety reasons we...

ReDuNing injection (RDN) is a patented traditional Chinese medicine, and the components of it were proven to have antiviral and important anti-inflammatory activities. Several reports showed that RDN had potential effects in the treatment of influenza and pneumonia. Though there were several experimental reports about RDN, the experimental results were not enough and complete due to that it was...

PROBLEM Screening tools exist to help identify patient issues related to social determinants of health (SDH), but solutions to many of these problems remain elusive to health care providers as they require legal solutions. Interprofessional medical-legal education is essential to optimizing health care delivery. APPROACH In 2011, the authors implemented a four-session didactic interprofession...

Physicians today are facing numerous and powerful attacks on the exercise of many of their most basic functions. If asked to identify one source most responsible for these challenges, many physicians would name the legal profession. Legal intrusion into the medical profession goes beyond challenges to the physician's income; it threatens what many physicians believe to be the traditions that ma...

We recently published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine describing a crisis in cognitive testing, as doctors and medical researchers increasingly face copyright claims in sets of questions used for testing mental state. We encouraged the creation of a cultural norm in medicine, in which medical researchers would ensure continued availability of their tests through open source li...