.....Dr. New. 

 

Wow....I was trying soooooooo hard to contain myself, but this really makes me #!@*%* livid!  Out of all the probably hundreds of studies that have been done on this subject, I cannot believe that this is the first one that the "world expert" on CAH chooses to turn up.  Does Dr. New actually believe that there is absolutely no difference in results, no matter how you do things, which is kinda the conclusion you might draw from this study, if you took it at face value?  I note, though, that even the authors of this study were, themselves, cautious about saying such a thing....they probably knew better. 

 

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that she chose this one, to boost her case.  Her own two studies on final height and CAH also contained the surprising conclusion that she found no statistical differences in final height between treated patients and those who were completely untreated!  If she truly believed that good or bad control makes absolutely no difference, one might wonder why she is even bothering to achieve any sort of control, at this point---why not just write her patients a prescription for a year's supply of meds and forego all the follow-up visits and tests?

 

There are many ways that scientists can come up with the results that they do.  If you are a GOOD scientist, and you know that the results that you come up with don't make sense and contradict known FACTS, you go back and you try again.  You examine where you might have been wrong in your original hypothesis and methods---and you test and revise, test and revise, until you are certain of your conclusions.  This is how knowledge is advanced.

 

On a personal level, I suppose this should actually make me happy....I was waiting with bated breath to see what pearls of wisdom Dr. New would throw this way.  We were patients of hers for awhile and I was shocked to discover, after a fairly short period of time, that I just didn't think she was very good at clinical practice.  Within several short months, she made a number of proveable errors with my son, and when confronted with the evidence---instead of addressing the problem---told me, "If you don't like what we are doing, why don't you leave?"  Among the things that I had discovered was a medication dosage error.  I had all the numbers to prove my case, and instead of telling me where my thinking was wrong (which was, in fact, what I expected to happen) her response to me was (and I quote), "I don't do calculations!" 

 

I suppose our experience with her was a bit like Dorothy discovering that the Wizard of Oz was just a bald little man pulling a string.  In the last year and a half, I have often wondered if we just ran into a bit of bad luck with her, or if our experience was typical, and we were lucky to have found out what we did after only 4 months.  I suppose that is why I have become somewhat fanatical in the last two years about doing research on this subject, so I can better tell the difference between what makes sense and what doesn't, when I come up against contradictory information. 

 

Here is an example of what I am talking about, when I say that you often have to be careful in interpreting conclusions in a study.  While surfing the Net a short while ago, I found a letter to the editor of the JCEM written by Dr. Perrin White, another medical authority on CAH (who has co-authored papers in the past with Dr. New.) In a nutshell, the letter was written as rebuttal to a finding in another paper about a situation where CAH was found in a patient without demonstrable genetic mutations.  The last sentence of the first paragraph in Dr. White's letter, in referring to this other study, was, "This hypothesis is untenable." 

 

I do not pretend to understand all the details in the rest of Dr. White's letter, but it was clear that he thought that, in making the findings that they did, that these other researchers hadn't fully done their homework or thought through their approach.  Just out of curiousity, I clicked on the paper he was talking about, which was footnoted at the end.  Well, gosh darned, if he wasn't talking about a study that had been done at Cornell, co-authored by Dr. New!