[Hopeful]

I think the correspondence is trying to define what standards a treatment has to meet in order to be called, "standard of care," and has concluded that the term has a definition in a court of law, but no real definition in medicine: "the term standard of care should be used with caution. Currently, it can be self-awarded either by a group of like-minded individuals or by a specialist society or organization and is a term which can be abused with the intention of providing impact and authenticity to a point of view. At worst it could be considered to be self-promoting. This possiblity is acknowledged by the National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Program, which states the following 'Most other scientific and medical conferences rely on content experts to make reccomendations; however, this raises the possibility of potential conflicts of interest given the expert's financial and career ties to the topic.'"

Hopeful