Dear H4tB -

Now I remember why that abstract re the Stanford BTA blocks looked so familiar, because I posted on it back in Novermber!!!

See, LSB with botulinum toxin to treat CRPS or Stanford Pain Med., the good and the ugly at http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/sh...d.php?t=109277:

In the article, the authors explain how this unfunded pilot study took just under three years to recruit 9 subjects who met the author's rigid inclusion criteria (essenetially people who had had lower extremity CRPS-1 for at least six months, failed other therapies, and yet still had at least a 50% reduction im pain, lasting 4 or more hores to conventional sympathetic blocks) and while they hade been hoping for ten subjects, they finally cut it off at 9. And of those 9, only 7 of the subjects could be used in the end. Yet out of the 7, statistically significant results were obtained . . . .

So what's the Stanford UGLY? Something that appreared in the htlm copy of the article, but inexplicably didn't make it to the [PMC] pdf file I've shared with you. Immediately after the Conclusion and before the References, the html copy has the following:

Footnotes
Potential conflict of interest: The authors report filing a patent for the use of botulinum toxins in sympathetic block.

Additional Supporting Information may be found in the online version of this article. [Empahsis added.]

[A couple of typos cleaned up in quoting from the prior post.]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...ool=pubmed#FN3

There's more re the issue of patents on medical procedures, including the case now under submission in the Supreme Court, which may well be an end of term blockbuster.

But the fact that I entirely forgot about a thread I put some time and energy into less than 4 months ago just blows me away. And it's almost as creepy as the notion of medical school professors being, shall we say, circumspect, in describing their selection criteria, as in greater than 6 months (but just maybe less than 9).

Mike