Bereavement after the death of someone close is universal, and clinicians may be uncertain if or what interventions may be beneficial.

Real-time federal surveillance of diseases and health care delivery informs clinical guidance and public health policy. However, in 2025, some U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) databases seemed to have "unexplained pauses" and ceased or delayed updates. The CDC public data catalog was audited to identify paused databases that had previously been updated at least monthly and evaluated their characteristics. Of 1359 catalog records examined on 28 October 2025, eighty-two were previously updated at least monthly. On the basis of each database's stated periodicity, allowing for an additional 30-day grace period, their status was classified as either current or paused as of 28 October 2025. Forty-four databases (54%) were current, and 38 (46%) were paused. Thirty-four of the 38 databases (89%) had no data entries dated within 6 months of the date of analysis, whereas 4 (11%) paused more recently. Of the 38 paused databases, 33 (87%) were vaccination-related topics compared with none of the 44 current databases. Of the 5 paused databases on other topics, 4 addressed respiratory diseases, including disease burden and nonvaccine prevention measures, whereas 1 addressed public health (drug overdose deaths). The persistence of pauses as of 2 December 2025 was examined. Only 1 of the 38 paused databases had been updated. Such long pauses may have compromised evidence for decision making and policies by clinicians, administrators, professional organizations, and policymakers. Federal databases should adopt minimum transparency standards, including displaying the current update status, with a rationale if paused, and next expected update with criteria for resumption. Without such standards, unexplained pauses in surveillance risk undermining evidence-based medicine and public trust.

In embarking on randomized clinical trials (RCTs), researchers can hypothesize that a more intensive treatment is better than a less intensive treatment (positive hypothesis) or that a less intensive treatment is similar or noninferior to a more intensive treatment (negative hypothesis). Researchers may design noninferiority RCTs (NI-RCTs) to support negative hypotheses and standard RCTs (S-RCTs) to support negative or positive hypotheses. Regardless of hypotheses, S-RCTs and NI-RCTs should produce consistent results when assessing similar participants, interventions, control, and outcomes.

Slow correction of severe hyponatremia is recommended to prevent osmotic demyelination syndrome but is associated with higher mortality.

Hospital-based violence intervention programs (HVIPs) are widespread, but their effectiveness for violence prevention is unclear.