My Perspective

Here are some limitations of using Randomized Control Trials (RCT) for Mental Health (MH) research. In the selection of people to RCTs, one needs to include subjects of a single condition or diagnostic category. However, in psychiatry the diagnosis can be unstable, changing, apart from secondary conditions, undiagnosed comorbid conditions. This also implies that the external validity of the RCT results are limited for MH.

Psychotic-like-experiences (PLE) are prodromal symptoms of psychosis. Their analysis not only has the advantage of early detection but also circumvents the disadvantage of confounding due to medication. These motivate the authors [1-2] to study

What is tinnitus? It is a debilitating disorder where people suffer from a chronic "phantom hearing sensation" i.e. perception of sound in the absence of any acoustic stimuli. It is often perceived as hissing or ringing sound in the ears. Who is at risk? Tinnitus could happen to anyone among us. Even listening to music at high volume for several hours daily is a known cause.

I came across an interesting article published in 1985 in the Artificial Intelligence magazine of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence ( AAAI ). This article titled "Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence" by Rick Briggs, from Ames Research Center, NASA talks about

In an article titled "Post-publication peer review: opening up scientific conversation", the inventors of and original advocates for open access now propose a radically new model of “publish first and then referee openly later” system. Faculty of 1000 ( F1000  London) where the author of this article belongs to, its remit is to work with named experts to identify and recommend the most interesting papers published across different subject areas in biology and medicine. Quoting the article, "Open access removes barriers for readers. Open, post-publication refereeing removes barriers for readers and authors alike, and it refocuses the role of peer review from, at its worst, a behind-the-scenes variety of censorship to, at its best, the process of expert criticism and advice that has always been its core and upon which the progress of science depends". What I liked most about the proposed model is its