Questions from patients, answering

Draw patient s attention to the patient information leaflet (PIL) and ask if she has any questions. The patient asks should she apply the cream before or after application of her E45 cream. What would be your answer You should advise the patient to apply her steroid cream (the betamethasone valerate cream) first. Allow an hour before applying the emollient (the E45 cream) to prevent the emollient from diluting the steroid cream. 

Boundary lines are essential, not only for subject coverage but also for the time period, source coverage, and even the uses the information is to serve. The searcher must discipline himself to formulate his interests exactly. When he is instructing a professional searcher as to the requirements, accurate statement is all the more important. The temptation to proceed from quick-and-easy but fuzzy premises is strong and must be resisted. Professional searchers should question inquirers patiently until the boundary is clear. Inquirers should respond with equal care and patience, making sure the record is straight before the search begins. Often an inquirer is not clear in his own mind until the question-and-answer session blows away the mists. 

Should physicians answer questions from insurance companies or employers (Not without a release from the patient)... 

Should physicians answer questions from the patient s family without the patient s explicit permission (No)... 

Selection of a number of cases from patient subsets in a given microarray slide is amenable to statistical modeling to enhance analysis of results. Different microarrays can be constructed to answer different scientific questions. The microarrays can also be produced from archival material, using paraffin blocks of already characterized tumors with clinical follow-up. This would provide a rapid evaluation of clinically well-characterized tumors. The viability of this approach has been tested with prostate carcinomas, renal cell carcinomas, and other tumors (5,6). 

Clinical trialists also weigh benefit-risk, every time a protocol is written. Often, unlike for approved drugs, there is much less information to go on. In early clinical development, extrapolations are obligatory. However, unlike in general medical practice, these extrapolations are often not from clinical experience, but rather from pharmacokinetic models or animal data, or at best from patients who are clearly dissimilar from those proposed in the new trial. This is obligatory if the answers to the clinical trial questions were known, then there would be little point in doing the trial. 

Since then I have learnt a great deal about conjugated polymers from a large number of people. Donal Bradley, Paul Lane (both then in Sheffield) and Simon Martin are three experimentalists who patiently answered many questions on the optoelectronic properties of conjugated polymers. 

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