From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Subject: Re: Lower Your Cholesterol Risk Factor
Date: 04 May 1997
Newsgroups: sci.med.nutrition,misc.health.alternative,sci.med.cardiology,
	sci.med

In <336C3031.20B5@emory.edu> Andrew Chung <achung@emory.edu> writes:
>
>
>Steven B. Harris wrote:
>
>>     There AREN'T any!   Blame the Federal government for that.   The
>> NIH is very conservative, which means that NIH money follows seed
>> research. Only drug companies have much money for seed research. If
>> you've read Ornish's books, you'll see what problems he had getting
>> together private money to do his initial study. He has some government
>> money now, but you can bet he's STILL not testing his diet head to head
>> with drugs. It's the Feds' job to make sure studies like that get done,
>> and they drop the ball, generally. Which is why we don't know more
>> about conventional vs alternative approaches from most diseases.
>
>also clinical researchers need to share part of the blame because pilot
>studies are usually not very expensive and could be done as a part-time
>side-project in labs that already receive grant support from NIH for
>other related vascular biology studies.
>
>--
>Andrew Chung



    Except that in these days of nasty human subjects review
committees, it takes so much time to do a human subjects pilot that
they AREN'T cheap anymore.   It's getting so only drug companies have
enough money for them.  And you can't bootleg them anymore because even
grant review committees want to see your human subjects committee
signoff.

   The Feds won't even let you experiment on yourself, something that
would be perfectly fine with the WHO Helsinki declaration.  But our
government knows better.  A male grad student I knew needed sperm DNA
to calibrate a certain test, and was getting set to get it in the usual
way, when he realized he now couldn't, according to regs, without
getting permission.  So he wrote up the forms and submitted them to the
proper committee, for approval. The Committee thought it was perverse,
but had no choice.  If you mention human sperm in a paper, somebody on
some publication ethics committee is going to want to know where it
came from, and if you don't have HUAC approval, you're in deep doo doo.
I thought I'd seen government permission for everything, until I saw
this.

                                      Steve Harris, M.D.