It’s not a bad definition as definitions of subjectivity go. But the most important part of this Wikipedia entry may well be the broom. Somebody thought this article didn’t live up to Wikipedia’s standards, though they couldn’t exactly come up with a reason. I’ll make a stab at a reason. Wikipedia’s quality standards are based […]
NASA VIDEO
When epidemiologists talk about bias, they have a jargon they clearly understand and use it in discussions. One of their terms is "publication bias" and I was thinking about it, trying to get it straight what things they were including in that category. I had run across a usage that didn’t make intuitive sense. But […]
Remember the DSM-5? the controversy over removing the Bereavement Exclusion? Grief, Depression, and the DSM-5 by Zisook S, Pies R, and Iglewicz A. Journal of Psychiatric Practice. 2013 19:386-396. Based on a review of the best available evidence and the importance of providing clinicians an opportunity to ensure that patients and their families receive the […]
Propose for a moment you are about to say something that you know people don’t want to hear and will argue with you angrily, saying that your motives are devious and self aggrandizing. They might quote books you’ve already read yourself or mount arguments you’ve heard endlessly before. Perhaps they’ll end up saying that your […]
It’s a funny thing – getting old. When you read something that’s really wise, you still almost automatically think of the author as older and wiser, at least I do. I often feel that way when I read Howard Brody’s blog Hooked: Ethics, Medicine, and Pharma. He just seems to be able to step further […]
When you happen onto a really long blog post with lots of quotes, you can usually count on the fact that the blogger is out to prove something and getting his/her facts in a row. I usually skip to the end [or move on], being an impatient scanner myself. So I thought I’d start with […]
Well chasing down the leads from the last post was disappointing. Brain Resource [the sponsor of iSPOT] does indeed have a data sharing plan, but it’s not sharing of a particular study like iSPOT. It’s a related but separate organization called BRAINnet. BRAINnet is a large database of neuroscientific data on both normal and a […]
Among the strange stories that will be told looking back on the second age of psycho·pharmacology, none will likely rival the quest to improve the efficacy of the SSRI and other antidepressants. As they rolled onto the market following Prozac’s introduction, there was an intense competition for market share, with the manufacturer of each new […]
In all of the offers of cooperation about data transparency in Clinical Trials that have been made by the pharmaceutical companies in response to the various campaigns, there is one deal-breaker at the core of every proposal: The pharmaceutical company itself chooses what is to be released That is, in fact, the problem in the […]