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The article presents abstracts on medical topics which include the gastroscopy rate in general practitioner practice populations in Great Britain, randomised prospective trial of transnasal and standard upper diagnostic endoscopy under local anesthetic, and guidelines on the endoscopic assessment of gastric polyps.

In this paper, the author argues that the requirement to conduct randomised clinical trials to inform policy in cases where one wants to identify a cheaper alternative to known effective but expensive interventions raises an important ethical issue. This situation will eventually arise whenever there are resource constraints, and a policy decision has been made not to fund an intervention on cost effectiveness grounds. It has been thought that this is an issue only in extremely resource poor settings. This paper gives an example from the United Kingdom illustrating that this is also a problem faced by richer countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local review of research by ethics committees in the UK has long been held to be an important right of the local research ethics committee and, even with the introduction of the European Clinical Trials Directive, the governance arrangements for research ethics committees continue to allow for local review of multicentre studies. There is no requirement for local review in either the European Union directive or in the guidelines on good clinical practice, and there is little evidence of it anywhere else in Europe. The idea that there can be "local", as opposed to "central" ethical issues in research is an interesting one, which raises important issues about the nature of research ethics and ethical review. The aim of this paper is to argue that there are no such things as local issues in research ethics, and suggest that those questions currently addressed as local issues properly belong within the research governance framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's evaluation of several articles contained in the references provided by British Chiropractic Association vice president Richard Brown to support his statements on chiropractic for paediatric conditions. The articles included a comparison of regular manipulations with sham manipulations for asthma, a systematic review of chiropractic care for non-spinal conditions, and a randomised clinical trial that involved children with colic. The author claims that the papers failed to demonstrate the effectiveness of chiropractic.

Reports that a year long struggle over funding of the Cochrane Collaboration has been settled. What the collaboration is and its purpose which is to review health interventions and disseminate the information world wide; Decision of the collaboration to limit industry funding which has some claiming it will hurt research; Other changes to the original collaboration papers; Appointment of a funding arbiter who will oversee management of the difficult cases; Problems with the Cochrane work.