Paula - I understand your reluctance to accept anything as new, especially when it confirms behavior we already recognize. The cool, and original, aspects of this research is that it was done by a doctor in clinical practice who noticed what was happening to her patients when an agonist was decreased or stopped - and then did something about it.

I wrote to Robin Elliott at PDF about it. He says that Dr. Nirenberg's research is genuinely original, and "I have talked to her at length about her work. It was she – alone – who saw these patterns of response to agonist withdrawal, in her own practice. She put two and two together, shared her tentative hypothesis with colleagues at a Cornell Grand Rounds last Fall (I was present), and then submitted her article to peer review. Now it has become a contribution to the science, and part of the lingua franca of discussions about agonists."

This is a doctor who was paying attention to her patients. Robin sent my email to her and she promptly replied, saying "One of the things that I discussed with Robin (while I was waiting for the paper to be published) was my frustration with the slow pace of the peer review process. But unfortunately, in academia, nothing is true until it is published in a peer reviewed journal. So although I presented the data at grand rounds and discussed it extensively with all of my patients who were taking (or contemplating taking) an agonist, it was not until now that the findings could be widely publicized. I am relieved that this time has finally arrived."

This project was retrospective - it used data already collected on patients. Seems to me we could benefit from more of this kind of research.