Comments on: only in romania http://www.mudphudder.com/2009/04/only-in-romania/ an academic medicine weblog Fri, 18 May 2012 03:07:36 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7.1 hourly 1 By: mudphudder http://www.mudphudder.com/2009/04/only-in-romania/comment-page-1/#comment-3622 mudphudder Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:23:28 +0000 http://www.mudphudder.com/?p=2977#comment-3622 iar - my assumption was that any orphanage would be a horrible place to be raised and it sounds like it may be even worse in romania. i agree, i'm still not convinced that this study really needed to have been done... antipode - "But will they act on it?" Do they ever act on it? More than likely people will point to this study (whose results are not that earth shattering) as evidence but nothing will get done about for a long time... iar - my assumption was that any orphanage would be a horrible place to be raised and it sounds like it may be even worse in romania. i agree, i’m still not convinced that this study really needed to have been done…

antipode - “But will they act on it?” Do they ever act on it? More than likely people will point to this study (whose results are not that earth shattering) as evidence but nothing will get done about for a long time…

]]> By: antipodean http://www.mudphudder.com/2009/04/only-in-romania/comment-page-1/#comment-3311 antipodean Sun, 26 Apr 2009 22:26:10 +0000 http://www.mudphudder.com/?p=2977#comment-3311 What would be really unethical would have been to have never done a study in the first place- because institutional and governmental inertia would have stopped any meaningful change. Having said that randomising children who have no caregivers to give informed consent is more than just a little bit of a grey area I agree. But in a resource poor environment it may be ethically defensible as a pragmatic investigation of what was already going to happen. And now they have rock solid social policy evidence that this needs to stop. But will they act on it? What would be really unethical would have been to have never done a study in the first place- because institutional and governmental inertia would have stopped any meaningful change.

Having said that randomising children who have no caregivers to give informed consent is more than just a little bit of a grey area I agree. But in a resource poor environment it may be ethically defensible as a pragmatic investigation of what was already going to happen.

And now they have rock solid social policy evidence that this needs to stop. But will they act on it?

]]> By: iar http://www.mudphudder.com/2009/04/only-in-romania/comment-page-1/#comment-3234 iar Sat, 25 Apr 2009 18:49:01 +0000 http://www.mudphudder.com/?p=2977#comment-3234 HA! so i guess at this point i should share that i am originally from romania...and that while we lived there my dad actually worked with a charity to help some of Bucharest's street children, so i have over the years met some of the homeless children which chose to come and live in a sort of orphanage in our home town. so let me first say that you should not give so much credit to the study by assuming IRB's exist. and second, if you ever walked into an orphanage there, you would wonder why they even neeeeeed to study the problem-just to give an example, the solution to the large child-to-caregiver ratio is to tie the kids to their beds so that they can't hurt themselves or others kids or do anything else for that matter. as for the randomized part, i'm going to assume that it probably means that the compared the kids which were "randomly" and luckily adopted to the ones who weren't. HA! so i guess at this point i should share that i am originally from romania…and that while we lived there my dad actually worked with a charity to help some of Bucharest’s street children, so i have over the years met some of the homeless children which chose to come and live in a sort of orphanage in our home town. so let me first say that you should not give so much credit to the study by assuming IRB’s exist. and second, if you ever walked into an orphanage there, you would wonder why they even neeeeeed to study the problem-just to give an example, the solution to the large child-to-caregiver ratio is to tie the kids to their beds so that they can’t hurt themselves or others kids or do anything else for that matter.
as for the randomized part, i’m going to assume that it probably means that the compared the kids which were “randomly” and luckily adopted to the ones who weren’t.

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