Interest in the Report of a New Treatment

To the Editor.  —The Wall Street Journal's "Heard on the Street" column appears to have been usurped in the June 1988 issue of the Archives. However, the high standards normally required for acceptance by both publications do not seem to be met by two letters.^1,2The photographs used in the first letter¹ were provided by the manufacturer. These are the same photographs that appear in a promotional brochure prepared by the manufacturer. Such a source is normally considered suspect and unacceptable in a clinical study. An added point—minor but indicative of poor preparation—is that Fig 2 is a reversed printing of the photograph as it appears in the manufacturer's brochure.In their letter, Polack and Goodman¹ suggest reliance on subjective responses from patients that apparently were not substantiated by objective observations by the authors.In the second letter, Leibowitz and Capino² suspect that the formulation