RLabNet Asia-Pacific scientific meeting at Shangrila Manila Hotel in 2007. Dr. Brian Acacio spoke on In-Vitro Fertilization, a medical and lab technology to help couples conceive.

Dr Brian Acacio with subspecialists in various fields and patients in attendance.

Local VIPs in attendance were Drs Leonardo Almeda, Walfrido Sumpaico and Ma. Trinidad R Vera who were authorities in Reproductive Medicine. Matemal-Fetal Medicine and OB GYN Sonography respectively.

Dyslexia is a reading disorder which affects 1 in 10 individuals. It does not reflect low intelligence and many are bright and creative. There are different levels of severity so that dyslexic children or individuals varies. Dyslexic celebrities who declare themselves to having difficulty reading during childhood are Steven Spielberg, Whoopi Goldberg, Keanu Reeves, Orland Bloom, and many more.

Research LabNet of usa AKA Research LabNet LLC is conceptualized to help provide safe and responsible health care and medical advances. A network of notable scientists and associate professionals work in collaboration rather than competition in bringing out the best solutions. The usa in lower case stands for United Scientists and Associates.
RLabNet – Research LabNet’s acronym, also refers to ”WE” on statements, terms & policies.
rNt* – an initial denoting originals of Research LabNet, which may show up on statements, news, stories, quotes, opinions sections, medical aids or new devices and more.
AP – Attending Physician who knows your current case or health issues, more than any of the other physicians you saw. They are usually the family or primary physicians.

In 1979, Donald Perry , biologist from California State University, Northridge, was doing research in the rainforest of Costa Rica. Perry devised a better way to make his way through the trees: a self-designed zipline. Perry described his first zipline adventure, of watching afloat as he ecstatically glided past branch tips and into the airways of butterflies and birds. Perry’s inventive way of exploring the rainforest soon attracted media coverage from Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, and Geo (Germany’s National Geographic). -Wikipedia

Cybercrooks have been consistent threats to internet users. Their aim of stealing personal data is either to sell personal information, or open credit cards and accounts to take out loans using victims’ names and SSNs. Other Cybercrooks are hired, paid for other motives. In early 2015, the data analytics firm ‘Cambridge Analytica’ harvested 50 million Facebook profiles of US subscribers, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches and used them for disinformation. The company closed operation in 2018 due to the data scandal. To date, data breach has been rampant still. US’s biggest healthcare provider-United Healthcare had their over 100 million personal information stolen in early 2024. In April 2024, AT&T learned that customer data was illegally downloaded from their workspace on a third-party cloud platform. And UCLA said it was the latest victim of a May 2024 cyberattack, but university officials did not specify what information was accessed or whether any information was posted online.

A clinical trial is a type of medical research study that tests an intervention to answer questions concerning the identification, treatment and management of illnesses and disease. An intervention may be a drug, device, procedure or a change in behavior (diet, nutrition or exercise).

Clinical trials depend on human volunteers (participants) to answer these questions and improve health.

Clinical trials are carefully conducted and must follow a strict set of rules and regulations, called a protocol. The protocol is designed to protect the safety of the volunteer to the highest degree.

Clinical trials must also be approved by an independent committee, called an Institutional Review Board, or IRB, that examines the risks and benefits of the study and determines if risks are reasonable.

Focus of Clinical Trials

There are different types of clinical trials; they do not always test medicines. Some look at the long-term effects of treatment or the impact of diet, nutrition and exercise on incidence of an illness or disease. Some need volunteers with specific illnesses and some need healthy volunteers. Some examine the effects of a new drug, vaccine or treatment and others examine large populations in natural settings.

Phases of Research

Clinical trials are conducted as part of one of four phases, and each phase has a specific goal.

Phase I

Phase I trials explore how a new medicine or treatment should be given (orally, topically, intravenously) as well as how often and at what dose. Some phase I trials are adding new medicines into known regimens. These trials typically include a small group ( around 20 to 80 ) of patients.

Phase II

Phase II trials may include up to several hundred people further explore the safety and efficacy of a treatment or approach to disease management.

Phase III

Phase III trials may include up to several thousand participants (usually around 3000 ) and are focused on gathering more information about the intervention’s safety and effectiveness. After a phase III trial is successfully completed, the FDA will use this data to determine whether to approve the new medication or medical device.

Phase IV

Phase IV trials evaluate the long-term side effects of an FDA-approved treatment.

What is a research study?

A clinical research study involves research using human volunteers (also called participants) that is intended to add to medical knowledge. There are 2 main types of clinical studies: clinical trials (also called interventional studies) and observational studies. Clinical Trials is the study that will need participants.

If I want to get involved in a research study, what do I do?

It’s easy to get started. Participating in clinical research can make a life-saving difference in the lives of other people with similar conditions. Patient participants may also benefit directly. If you want to look by yourself on choosing where you intend to participate, check ongoing studies at clinicaltrials.org. Most top -rated hospitals and institutions also have research studies in their respective sites.

Can I get paid for participating?

Some research studies offer compensation for your time. Please visit the study’s web site to learn if a particular study provides paid participation.

Who can participate in a research study?

The eligibility requirements are determined by a research study’s protocol. Some studies seek participants who have the illnesses or conditions being studied, and others are looking for healthy people.

Why Participate in a Clinical Trial?

Participating in clinical research can make a life-saving difference in the lives of other people with similar conditions. Patients who volunteer for clinical trials may also personally benefit in other ways, as these patients may have access to new approaches to manage disease.

For example, some trials involve extra tests and scans, so participation may provide patients with additional information about their illness or disease behavior. Data from the trial can help doctors determine if and how treatments are working. And, because clinical trials study how well new medicines and other types of treatments or management processes work, patients who participate typically get at least the best-known standard treatment.

Is research confidential?

The same ethical and legal codes that apply to medical practice also apply to research. Clinical research is federally regulated, and this protects all volunteers and their personal information. All personal and medical information remain confidential—only seen by those authorized to do so.

What are the risks of participating in a clinical trial?

Before participating in a clinical trial, a study team member will review all information about the trial including specific risks and potential benefits. Through this informed-consent process, clinical trial participants receive the information they need to decide if they wish to take part.

Can a participant leave a clinical study?

Yes. Clinical trial participants who agree to take part in a research study may choose to leave at any point in time. If withdrawing from a study, the participant should contact the research team to inform them and provide the reasons for leaving the study. The participant may be asked to return for a safety evaluation before withdrawing from the study. – more info on clinicaltrials.gov

Tertiary Hospital is a referral hospital providing multidisciplinary fields including Internal Medicine, Family Care, obstetrics, gynecology, various branches of surgery, pediatrics, psychiatry and more. Commonly known as higher level for also providing specific sub-specialty care and services in Hematology and Oncology, Interventional Radiology, Cardiology and more.

AI- generated data are not fool proof because they are amassed data that are not verified. The former Trump attorney-Michael Cohen says he unknowingly submitted fake AI-generated legal cases to his lawyer after mistaking Google Bard for a search engine. He said in a court filing on Friday-Dec 2023, that he accidentally sent his lawyer fictitious artificial intelligence-generated citations that were later submitted to court. The cases produced by the artificial intelligence service did not exist, he wrote in a filing first reported by The New York Times.

The No Surprises Act, which became law in 2021, was intended to prevent patients from receiving surprise medical bills. However, it also comes with another loophole: The law protects patients receiving care only from out-of-network providers and emergency services, but it doesn’t apply in circumstances when the care is being provided by in-network providers, regardless of whether or not it should be free for the patient.

On other points, errors on coding and billing ( including unscrupulous upping or changing of the medical codes to charge more ) is another reason for surprise or outrageous medical billings. Oftentimes overpayments are hard to reimburse, so patients end up the main losers for being billed on routine procedures that typically are fully covered by their health insurance.

Adriana Belmonte / Yahoo Finance

Retraction is the way to counter, remove flawed or fake data by research monitoring group like the retraction watch staff of the U.S. Office of Research Integrity. Examples of retracted materials published in the Lancet and NEJM ( New England Journal of Medicine).

Flawed research are either carried out purposely or results of improper conduction of studies as exemplified in one below.

Cancer Researcher Faked Data for 24 Images in Work Funded by Nine NIH Grants: Federal Watchdog

Retraction Watch Staff April 06, 2022

A cancer researcher faked data in a grant application, her PhD thesis, and seven published papers, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

Toni Brand, who earned her PhD from the University of Wisconsin and served as a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly or recklessly falsifying or fabricating western blot data, by reusing and relabeling data to represent expression of proteins in control experiments measuring the purity of cytoplasmic and nuclear cell fractionation, measurements of proteins of interest, and measurements of the same protein under different experimental conditions or loading controls,” the ORI said in a report published today.

One of Brand’s papers, published in Science Signaling, was retracted in November 2021. The notice said that the Wisconsin committee found that 11 images in the paper were “duplicated, mislabeled, or had other anomalies” but “found that these issues were due to carelessness and lack of attention to detail rather than through any intent to deceive, and thus concluded that no research misconduct was committed.”Brand, who “neither admits nor denies ORI’s findings of research misconduct,” agreed to have any research of hers funded by the Public Health Service – the parent agency of the NIH – supervised for four years. She also agreed to retract three additional papers which have been cited more than 150 times in total. Medscape / Retraction Watch Staff © 2022

Bayesian analysis/ inference is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes’ theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available. Fundamentally, Bayesian inference uses prior knowledge, in the form of a prior distribution in order to estimate posterior probabilities. Wikipedia

Many prominent critics have questioned P value as gauge of significance. Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak, in a book and a series of papers over the last 25 years, have been influential in helping steer the debate towards a broader, more substantial look at what “significance” means. The two authors argue that statistical significance is not the final arbiter of what matters in using economic science to explore the world. In most econometric studies and texts, “there is no mention of economic as against statistical significance”. In fact, by statistical definition, the coefficients of the variables are not considered important unless the variation is small enough: “‘significant’ means ‘signifying a characteristic of the population from which the sample is drawn,’ regardless of whether the characteristic is important” (Wallis and Roberts, 1965 quoted in McCloskey, Ziliak, 1996, 102).

An article published in the February 2, 2010 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology questioned P value limitation by authors- Drs Sanjay Kaul and George Diamond (Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA). Kaul and Diamond claimed: “Misinterpreting the results of trials can misinform future research and lead to suboptimal clinical practice.” Many examples of trials have such limitations and point out that, in contrast to the well-established standards for statistical significance ( P values), no guidelines exist for deciding what magnitude of difference is clinically significant or practically important. Because of this, they believe there has been an erroneous tendency to equate statistical significance with clinical significance.

Following the WSJ story from whistleblower that prompted a late 2015 inspection, Theranos announced that it would voluntarily suspend its tests apart from the FDA-approved herpes simplex virus (HSV-1) test. In January 2016 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sent a letter to Theranos upon inspection that the Newark, California, lab facility caused “immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety” due to a test to determine the correct dose of the blood-thinning drug warfarin. In February same year, Cleveland Clinic completed a validation study of Theranos’ technology, a study authored by 13 scientists appeared in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, where it was stated that the company’s blood test results were flagged “outside their normal range 1.6× more often than other testing services”, that 68 percent of lab measurements evaluated “showed significant interservice variability”, and that “lipid panel test results between Theranos and other clinical services” were “nonequivalent”. By April 2016 Theranos came under criminal investigation by federal prosecutors and the SEC for allegedly misleading investors and government officials about its technology and CMS had revoked its Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) certificate and issued sanctions prohibiting its owners and operators from owning or operating a clinical laboratory for two years, suspension of approval to receive Medicare and Medicaid payments, and a penalty fine. More lawsuits unfolded and settlements with different sectors followed till late same year, Theranos announced that it would close its laboratory operations and wellness centers and lay off about 40% of its work force, followed by another 41% laid off the following year in January 2017. Closed down of the last remaining blood-testing facility followed after the lab failed a second major U.S. regulatory inspection. On September 4, 2018, Theranos announced in an email to investors that it would cease operations and release its assets and remaining cash to creditors after all efforts to find a buyer were fruitless. Most of the company’s remaining employees had been laid off likewise. CEO Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh Balwani , a software engineer, were indicted on multiple counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and 3 months in prison. On May 30, 2023, Holmes began serving her sentence at Federal Prison Camp, Bryan in Bryan, Texas. – Wikipedia

REACT – Regional Emergency Assistance Communication Team

Official website: http://www.react.org.ph/

REACT Philippines, Inc. based in Camp General Emilio Aguinaldo, Quezon City was duly registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1982 under the close supervision of the civil Relations Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

REACT team has become the largest Radio Civic Organization aiding the Philippine government in the national and local levels, times of emergencies and calamities. It has helped deliver programs in public order and safety, environmental and other community development activities through the rapid gathering and dissemination of information throughout the country.

Airborne is an American brand of dietary supplement containing herbal extracts, amino acids, antioxidants, electrolytes, vitamins, and other ingredients originally marketed as preventing, and helping ease the common colds.

Because it is sold as a dietary supplement and not as a drug, current American law allows Airborne to be marketed without prior review and approval of testing results that demonstrate that it provides a medical remedy. It was offered for sale over-the-counter in many U.S. retail stores in multiple forms: effervescent tablet, gummy, chewable tablet, lozenge, tablet, or powder. In 1997, specialty grocery chain Trader Joe’s ordered 300 cases of Airborne tablets to sell, and by 1999 other larger chains, such as Wal-Mart and Rite Aid, began stocking Airborne.

The creators / former owners of Airborne were fined by the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive advertising and were the subject of successful class actions. Victoria Knight-McDowell and Thomas John McDowell ( creators ) , “made false claims that Airborne products are CLINICALLY proven to treat colds.” and has certain THERAPEUTIC properties, including the ability to cure or prevent the common cold. The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) participated in the class action lawsuit against Airborne. Defendants denied any wrongdoing or illegal conduct but agreed to settle the litigation.[14] On August 14, 2008, a press release from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) stated that the former owners of Airborne Health, Inc., ( and other defendants) had agreed to pay up to $30 million to settle FTC charges Shortly after the settlements, a new management team( Marti Morfitt, former CEO and director of Breathe Right) was brought in to run the company. Airborne was purchased by GF Capital Management and Advisors, LLC, in 2009 before Schiff Nutrition acquired Airborne, Inc In March 2012. In November 2012, Reckitt Benckiser bought Schiff Nutrition for $1.4 billion.[18] – Wikipedia

John P. A. Ioannidis is a Greek-American physician-scientist, writer and Stanford University professor who has made contributions to evidence-based medicine, epidemiology, and clinical research. Ioannidis studies scientific research itself, meta-research primarily in clinical medicine and the social sciences. Wikipedia

In 1992, the term Evidence-based Medicine (EBM) came up as a seminal article in the medical journal -JAMA. Its concept made medical decision-making processes questionable, which were based on prevailing or “experts’ opinions. For instance, double mastectomy of fibrocystic breast disease- because experts believe in the breast cancer risks; surgical removal of uterus and ovaries on peri-menopausal bleeding to avoid the chance of developing uterine and ovarian cancers; or back surgery because it’s back surgeon’s treatment for herniated disks with back pains. The current trend of EBM which are based on clinical trials and research, has evolved then and today we have heard of the term too frequently. At times, EBM term has been abused to bolster some of the drug representatives’ claims about their products or to support doctors’ personal opinions and biases.

‘ A confounding variable, is a third variable in a study examining a potential cause-and-effect relationship. It is related to both the supposed cause and the supposed effect of the study. Some confounding variables are age, gender, race, ethnicity etc.. It can be difficult to separate the true effect of the independent variable from the effect of the confounding variable. In research design, it’s important to identify potential confounding variables and plan how one will reduce their impact.’

‘Thomas, L. (2023, June 22). Confounding Variables | Definition, Examples & Controls. Scribbr. Retrieved October 9, 2023, from

Research studies, at some points, confuse rather than helps. For instance, the Harvard 1991 Large epidemiological study on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) showed estrogen intake after menopause lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease in women. But in 2002, the randomized clinical trial (RCT) from Women’s Health Initiatives reported not so. It even showed an increased risk of breast cancer. And there are more contradicting studies regarding coffee consumption. Today you read coffee is good, and next time a study overturned the claim. These are due to confounding variables on subjects and varied methodologies or designs in conduction of studies.

National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) reported on January 11, 2021, the newly developed measures used to evaluate cause-of-death data quality by presenting a novel list of unsuitable underlying causes of death (UCOD). This list is intended to facilitate the measurement of the quality of cause-of-death reporting by medical certifiers in terms of completeness, as assessed by a UCOD that is sufficiently specific. The list helps clarify cause-of-death reporting.