Under the Influence: the Interplay among Industry, Publishing, and Drug Regulation. by Lisa Cosgrove, Steven Vannoy, Barbara Mintzes, and Allen Shaughnessy Accountability in Research. 2016 23[5]:257-279. [full text on-line ?] The relationships among academe, publishing, and industry can facilitate commercial bias in how drug efficacy and safety data are obtained, interpreted, and presented to regulatory […]
With the Paxil Study 329 paper, our problem getting it in print didn’t have to do with journal shopping, it had to do with a tough love review process and a year of uncertainty that went with it. It was a top journal [British Medical Journal Impact Factor 17.445] and I’m glad it’s there. The […]
Publication bias is the term for what occurs whenever the research that appears in the published literature is systematically unrepresentative of the population of completed studies. Simply put, when the research that is readily available differs in its results from the results of all the research that has been done in an area, readers and […]
“…it has become standard practice for pharmaceutical companies to pay medical communication companies to write articles [based on industry-designed studies], for academic physicians to be paid to essentially sign off on the articles, and then for communication companies to place the articles in prestigious medical journals, a process known as “ghost management.” Ghost management has […]
There are times when being wrong is just fine. When I first read about Ben Goldacre‘s COMPare Project, I didn’t think it would have much of an impact. What he was proposing to do was put together an army of medical students who would look over Clinical Trial papers and when they found one that […]
For the last week, I’ve been unable to focus on anything very far from a single article [see the jewel in the crown…, why is that?…, the hope diamond…, and the obvious irony… ]. And it’s been frustrating in that the article has been behind the pay-wall. But now, the International Journal of Risk & […]
We don’t need a lofty scientific explanation for why we should demand that Clinical Trials of medication follow [and report the results of] the a priori Protocol. Common sense and historical fact offer reasons enough. If I can regress to my monotonous diagram of the Clinical Trial process for a moment, the a priori Protocol […]
Since it’s almost Friday the 13th, I thought I’d post some good news follow-ups to neutralize any bad luck juju that might be out and about: Unfortunately, the rainy season coincided with the pollen season this year, interfering with the smoothness of my yearly graph on Seasonal Dementia [a new entity… and seasonal dementia update…]: […]
[click image to link to her slides] Dorothy Bishop is a Developmental Psychologist who focuses on Dyslexia and other Language Disorders. This is not an article, just the slides from a presentation she gave to the Rhodes Biomedical Association last week on the reproducibility crisis. Her slides tell a story well known to us. And […]
When I retired a lot of people kept asking me what I was going to do. Their questions made me aware that I had no idea, so I made up something. "I want to find my inner boredom" I would say. Later, I found a more accurate answer, "I want to think about what I […]