While it may be harmful and disingenuous to insist upon a single algorithm or best approach to practicing medicine, it could be helpful to at least provide clear guidance so that physicians would know to avoid certain therapeutic approaches.

Patients who take a close look at medical science in search of treatments are often appalled by what they discover. On the one hand, there's academic research, a self-contained and self-absorbed universe of its own where data may be internally consistent (on a good day) and robustly reproducible, yet often has little relevance to real-world clinical conditions.

For the last decade, as the biopharmaceutical industry has struggled — largely unsuccessfully — to live up to its anticipated potential, a litany of experts, analysts, participants, and commentators have offered up their diagnosis and treatment for pharma’s productivity problem.

The basic question they’re all trying to solve: how can...

While biopharmaceutical companies may be thought of as mission oriented, they are almost certainly the poster children for adaptation. They need to focus on finding the most pressing relevant issues to help their patients.

The core of medicine, and medical research, is and must be the patient, and the success of future drug development will depend upon our ability to keep patients in the front of our minds and at the center of our efforts.

Successfully translating scientific discoveries requires a sense of urgency, which some disease foundations seem to have, and many big pharmas appear to need. Patients waiting expectantly for medical research to produce important new cures are finding bad news almost everywhere they turn.

Without profound changes in the scientific and regulatory environment, things will remain very tough for the agile disruptor -- relatively good news for established giants, presumably less good news for patients and for progress.

Consumers have been in the doldrums throughout this weak recovery, but the mood has gone from sour to despairing in recent months. The numbers have been so bad that the relatively obscure "Index of Consumer Sentiment" constructed by the University of Michigan has begun to receive the attention of political handicappers.