In a fascinating and important blog post, Gervasio Lamas offers a deeply personal perspective on the long and contentious journey of the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT), for which he was the principal investigator.
Here are a few quotes from his post, but I can’t urge you strongly enough to read the entire post over on CardioExchange. (Click here for my brief summary of TACT.)
Changing minds is difficult. Unexpected results meet resistance. Out of the mainstream research is subject to heavy criticism. I guess I knew all these truisms when we embarked on the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT). Still, I thought we were answering an important clinical question.
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To say that this trial was controversial is an understatement. I had previously worked peacefully in other clinical trials, worrying about enrollment, about the DSMB, and about interpretation of data. Not so, here. In retrospect, I had always thought that the adversaries to this study would be the chelation practitioners. After all, they were using an unproven therapy. Why would they want us to show it did not work?
The opposite was true. The chelation practitioners and their main professional organization, the American College for Advancement in Medicine, helped us at every turn. They felt they were doing good, and that bringing chelation to the crucible of a clinical trial would lead to many more patients being helped.
In fact, the principal obstructionists were groups of self-appointed anti-chelation “experts”, who had never administered chelation, had never designed or run clinical trials, but who knew how to make noise and recruit media to their dubious cause – that scientific thought should not be brought to bear on the question of whether chelation was safe and effective.
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The gist of the objections to the trial, once legitimate methodological concerns were addressed, was an outcry that, because cardiologists believed that EDTA was quackery, the study had to be negative. Therefore we had done something wrong. Just imagine if this had been stem cells or a new anti-platelet: Kudos all the way, right? Humble chelation got heckles and hecklers. I told my dean at Columbia that people were very upset because they did not like the results. He said “That’s why you do research.”
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So now what? Do we recommend chelation? This is where the cautious scientist has to take control. We reported a subgroup, and we have been fooled by subgroups before, so more research has to take place before all of us can jump on this bandwagon.
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