Friday feces blogging (part 2)

Since Dan had to go and bring up the subject of feces, I would like to direct our readers to a new article in Slate on fecal transplantation for C. difficile. Although Slate is written for the general public, this article does a good job explaining the procedure and the controversy that surrounds it. Of course, the issue of lack of randomized trials to support this intervention comes up in the article. I would respond by asking this question:  if you had diarrhea for 6 months unresponsive to treatment, would you try it, or would you wait for an investigator to perform a trial and publish it before you agree to giving it a try? And the other interesting question is whether randomized trials are always needed. On that one, I'll point you to an interesting paper in BMJ from a few years ago.

Comments

  1. Thanks, Mike! Reminds me of another paper in BMJ on RCTs: http://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459.abstract

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks for submitting your comment to the Controversies blog. To reduce spam, all comments will be reviewed by the blog moderator prior to publishing. However, all legitimate comments will be published, whether they agree with or oppose the content of the post.

Most Read Posts (Last 30 Days)