Study of Chelation Therapy should Not be Abandoned‪.‬

In May 2008, George D. Lundberg, M.D., editor of the Medscape Journal of Medicine and former editor of JAMA, facilitated the publishing of an "original article" entitled, "Why the NIH Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) Should Be Abandoned," authored by Kimball C. Atwood IV, M.D.; Elizabeth Woeckner, A.B., M.A.; Robert S. Baratz, M.D., D.D.S., Ph.D.; and Wallace 1. Sampson, M.D. (1) The 51-page article asserts that the authors have "investigated the method and the trial" and concluded that the trial is "unethical, dangerous, pointless, and wasteful." They claim that 30 deaths have occurred (over 50 years) from chelation therapy, and therefore the product is too dangerous for use in a clinical trial. Later in the article, they claim that nine documented deaths have occurred in 15 years. The development and implementation of a well-designed and well-managed trial of EDTA chelation therapy, funded and managed through the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), is seen by many in the medical community as an important public health research activity that is well underway and that should be completed. But "a tiny but shrill minority of physicians," to use these authors' own phrase, appears to stand against scientific inquiry. Readers may be unaware that several of the authors of the Atwood paper have made a cottage industry of their opposition to chelation therapy and to complementary and alternative medicine.