{"id":65862,"date":"2016-05-25T17:24:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-25T21:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=65862"},"modified":"2016-05-25T17:24:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-25T21:24:00","slug":"thatll-preach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2016\/05\/25\/thatll-preach\/","title":{"rendered":"“that’ll preach”…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
My good friend Andy died a couple of years back. By education, he was a minister, but he did other things instead, mostly good. Maybe he’d left the pulpit, but his way of saying things betrayed his history, so when he ran across something that really mattered or was unusually right, he’d smile and say "That’ll preach!" Reading this editorial, I heard his voice…<\/font><\/em><\/strong><\/sup><\/div>\n
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Money back guarantees for non-reproducible results?<\/a><\/div>\n
There are better solutions to the “reproducibility crisis” in research<\/font><\/strong><\/div>\n
by Eric J. Topol <\/div>\n
British Medical Journal<\/font><\/strong>. 2016 353:i2770.<\/div>\n
[full text on-line<\/a>] <\/div>\n

Money back guarantees are generally unheard of in biomedicine and healthcare. Recently, the US provider Geisenger Health System, in Pennsylvania, started a programme to give patients their money back if they were dissatisfied. That came as quite a surprise. Soon thereafter, the chief medical officer at Merck launched an even bigger one, proposing an “incentive-based approach” to non-reproducible results — what he termed a “reproducibility crisis” that “threatens the entire biomedical research enterprise.”<\/p>\n

The problem of irreproducibility in biomedical research is real and has been emphasised in multiple reports.  In the same vein, the retraction of academic papers has been rising, attributable, in nearly equal parts, to irreproducible results or data that have been falsified. But this problem is not confined to basic science or animal model work from academic laboratories. Clinical trials, the final common pathway for the validation and approval of new drugs, have been plagued with serious drawbacks.<\/p>\n

The bad science in clinical trials has been well documented and includes selective publication of positive results, data dredging, P hacking, HARKing, and changing the outcomes that were prespecified at the beginning of the study [below]. Indeed, the high prevalence of switching outcomes in drug industry funded trials led Ben Goldacre and colleagues at the University of Oxford to organise Compare, an initiative to track this considerable problem. Furthermore, the disparity between what appears in peer reviewed journals and what has been filed with regulatory agencies is long standing and unacceptable.<\/div>\n