IntroductIon Numerous products are developed, studied and ultimately reviewed yearly by the Food and Drug Administration. It is estimated that only 5-out-of-5,000 developed compounds actually receive FDA approval.1 Throughout 2010 and 2011, a number of products have been approved for patient use. For the busy clinician, it is extremely difficult to keep up with all of the newly approved product...

A 47-year-old man with a long history of alcohol dependence and impaired control over intake has refused all the approaches suggested to him (e.g., detoxification followed by residential treatment, Alcoholics Anonymous, cognitive–behavioural therapy). He maintains a reasonable psychosocial adjustment (i.e., family relations, work, leisure), and physical damage (neurological, cardiovascular, liv...

For the purposes of this article, we define clinical research as that form of medical research that involves human beings as the direct subjects of the research at the individual or a population level. The research may involve the study of biological samples (eg, blood, genes, proteins, and tissue) as a means to understand the individual or the group, but the ultimate objective for the clinical...

Today, modern Western medicine is facing a quality-of-care crisis that is undermining the patient-physician relationship. In this paper, a notion of the epistemically virtuous clinician is proposed in terms of both the reliabilist and responsibilist versions of virtue epistemology, in order to help address this crisis. To that end, a clinical case study from the literature is first reconstructe...

Case Presentation: J.A. is a 63year-old man with type II diabetes and hypercholesterolemia. He has suffered 2 previous myocardial infarctions and has chronic angina. Previous angiography showed diffuse 3-vessel coronary artery disease not amenable to conventional revascularization. What are the current concepts surrounding the use of therapeutic coronary angiogenesis in this setting? Since reco...

Not long ago, the idea of making education the focus of an academic career in neurology would have been heretical. Many of us were taught that to be an academic neurologist, anything less than a triple threat—a master clinician, teacher, and researcher—was unacceptable. For a variety of reasons, the triple threat is no longer maintained as a universal ideal, and academic neurologists whose focu...

IT IS SAID of the Irish that our memories are far too long and instead of preparing for the future we live in the past. This may apply to our socio-political outlook but we are all too ready to forget the giants on whose shoulders we stand. The only advantage in looking backwards is to prepare for the future and by examining the life and work of one of those giants, whose name is better known t...

vice served him well: ‘Keep warm, don’t complain, and if you get a break, take it.’ In the 60-odd years since, his over 200 publications have certainly justified his being fished out of the South Atlantic [2] . During his long career, although most of his publications have shown the name as a simple C.M. Fisher, some Charles Miller Fisher, MD, died quietly on April 14, 2012, a few months shy of...

I T HAS BEEN ALMOST 10 years since the viability of the clinician-scientist in ophthalmology was considered in an ARCHIVES editorial. At that time, Epstein opined that many departments of ophthalmology had turned away from supporting clinician-scientists. The economic imperative of increasing patient care activities to compensate for shrinking clinical reimbursements was a central reason, among...