Sunday, April 01, 2007

Hospital yesterday, hospital tomorrow...

Went to have my ears looked at yesterday - because of ongoing dizziness - there is nothing wrong with them, apparently I am anaemic. I doubt it, but will ask the clinic tomorrow if this is a possibility.
Clinic tomorrow - have just been printing off abstracts to take with me and say "does this mean..." - I also found an article that said PGS does help with unexplained RPL. I find all this research published by people who might get paid for doing the therapies, on a piecework basis, against my deep-seated research-is-neutral biases. No-one pays me if they use the results of my findings, but those apocryphal "desperate couples" (i.e. us) are very likely to pay to go to a clinic that has published that therapy X may help someone in their situation. Fishy, I sometimes feel. Anyway I have two European articles and two US articles and both the US articles say PGD/S helps and one European article says it doesn't (and the other one is on risk factors).
I've been worrying more and more recently about my brother and the way he is (not) raising his daughters - posted for some advice on a forum I frequent - had some helpful and some not so helpful replies. Two people suggested my brother needs to "get some help", one of whom private-messaged me to ask if he was abusing my sister-in-law. I'm torn between "how dare she" and "yes, if she thought it might be happening, she should say something, even if she is way off and might well be projecting her own experiences". I replied with something slightly politer than the second.

1 comment:

Thalia said...

I wonder if it's investigator bias as much as the sample size in most of these studies is so small that it's not surprising different studies end up with somewhat different results - cf a lot of studies showing that agonist iVF protocols are better than antagonist, then enough data is collected over time, someone finally does a retrospective analysis, and it turns out the two protocols are fairly comparable. Part of that presumably was because clinics took a while to get good enough at antagonist protocols to be able to get the best results out of them.

Sorry to hear you might be anaemic, I hope they can get that sorted quickly. My accupuncturist told me to take floridex which is liquid iron, but when I was on it the clinic suddenly had problems getting blood out of my veins, so I decided she was wrong and stopped pdq. Perhaps it might help you, though.