In regards to Dr. Weisenthal's Amazon.com review of Dr. Nagourney's book, I've been involved in internet cancer research for 17 years and I've been following cell function analysis over 12 years. I've read and studied the history of it dating back decades.
While reading the book, when I came across the information about Oncotech and Medicare reimbursement, I knew Dr. Nagourney was wrong. I thought Dr. Weisenthal's comments were a very helpful review of the book.
There were "others" that were running Oncotech at the time Drs. Nagourney & Weisenthal decided to leave the company. It was taken over by venture (vulture) capitalists, like a lot of private laboratories.
There was one individual running the company that steered the EDR (extreme drug resistance) assay into dominance, the one that Dr. Nagourney is more critical of than Dr. Weisenthal is.
When business people take over a medical laboratory, common sense and science is generally sacrificed. Like when "investigators" dominate over "discoverers" in cancer medicine.
Dr. Nagourney is a practicing oncologist as well as a medical director of an assay lab. As a physician, he could not recommend his patients use his laboratory assay, it's against the Stark law - named after former Rep. Pete Stark - which restricts physicians on self referral patterns.
Dr. Weisenthal is a medical director of an assay lab only. He always had fought for Medicare reimbursement of assays (any assays). After the Medicare meeting in Baltimore in 1999, CMS decided to reimburse for the drug "resistance" part of the testing (half the science is better than no science at all).
It allowed at least one-third of the more accurate assay to be reimbursed for Medicare patients. They only had to pay for two-thirds (not 100%). In 2006, however, CMS decided to reimburse 100% for both resistance AND sensitivity testing.
But when Palmetto, GBA took over for NHIC, they "arbitrarily" decided to drop reimbursing for the assay, period. They've been doing the same kind of stuff with not reimbursing for Avastin, or when it comes to Pet Scans, and so forth. So it's nothing new with them.
In regards to the randomized clinical trial paradigm, there is a lot of caveats about it.
http://cancerfocus.org/forum/showthread.php?t=3692