An Oversight in Oversight

Medicine is founded on innovation. For as long as patients have been becoming ill, we have been searching for newer, better, and easier ways to care for them. This ingenuity has led not only to some of the greatest breakthroughs in history but also to treatments and devices that were later found to be harmful. The past decade has witnessed unprecedented advances in chest medicine, with such technologies as custom airway stents, electromagnetic navigation, and robotic bronchoscopy. Despite their exciting potential, robust clinical data that evaluate the safety and effectiveness of these new technologies are conspicuously, and surprisingly, lacking.