Many people took My IRB Nightmare as an opportunity to share their own IRB stories. From an emergency medicine doctor:

Thanks for the great post about IRBs. I lived the same absurd nightmare in 2015-2016, as an attending, and it’s amazing how your experience matches my own, despite my being in Canada. 1 of our residents had an idea for an extremely simple physiological study of COPD exacerbations, where she’d basically look at the patient and monitor his RR, saturation, exhaled CO2 temporal changes during initial treatment. Just as you were, I was really naive back in 2015, and expected we wouldn’t even a consent form, since she didn’t even have to talk to the patients, much less perform any intervention. Boy I was wrong ! The IRB, of course, insisted on a 2-page consent form discussing risks and benefits of the intervention, and many other forms. I had to help her file over 300 pages (!) of various forms. Just as in your case, we had to abandon the study when, 2 years after the first contact with the IRB, they suggested hilarious “adjustments” to the study protocol “in order to mitigate possible risks”.

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