Giving a lecture on old-timey quack medicines tomorrow

[HiPointDem]

80. your assumptions are showing again -- and you're back to the name-calling.

also, i note you don't address the fairly well-known fact that there's a significant culling that takes place before publication, or the well-known fact that many researchers make lots of money from pharma ties, or the well-known fact that some editors do as well.

all of which skews the 'data'.

and it's not just 'woo' types who say so.

Concerns about the influence of industry money have prompted universities such as Stanford and the University of Colorado-Denver to ban drug sales representatives from the halls of their hospitals and bar doctors from paid promotional speaking.

Yet, one area of medicine still welcomes the largesse: societies that represent specialists. It’s a relationship largely hidden from public view, said David Rothman, who studies conflicts of interest in medicine as director of the Center on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University.

http://www.propublica.org/article/medical-societies-and-financial-ties-to-drug-and-device-makers-industry

Payments to Doctors by Pharmaceutical Companies Raise Issues of Conflicts

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/us/payments-to-doctors-by-pharmaceutical-companies-raise-issues-of-conflicts.html

Publication bias:

Publication bias is a bias with regard to what is likely to be published, among what is available to be published....

one very problematic, and much discussed bias is the tendency of researchers, editors, and pharmaceutical companies to handle the reporting of experimental results that are positive (i.e. showing a significant finding) differently from results that are negative (i.e. supporting the null hypothesis) or inconclusive, leading to a misleading bias in the overall published literature.

Such bias occurs despite the fact that studies with significant results do not appear to be superior to studies with a null result with respect to quality of design.

It has been found that statistically significant results are three times more likely to be published than papers affirming a null result....

The effect of this is that published studies may not be truly representative of all valid studies undertaken, and this bias may distort meta-analyses and systematic reviews of large numbers of studies—on which evidence-based medicine, for example, increasingly relies. The problem may be particularly significant when the research is sponsored by entities that may have a financial or ideological interest in achieving favorable results.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias

Funding bias:

The terms funding bias, sponsorship bias, funding outcome bias, or funding publication bias refer to an observed tendency of the conclusion of a scientific research study to support the interests of the study's financial sponsor. This phenomenon is recognized sufficiently that researchers undertake studies to examine bias in past published studies. Funding bias is an instance of experimenter's bias...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_bias


Publication Bias Again, This Time For Antipsychotics

As we reported earlier today, new research has discovered that pharmaceutical companies withheld a handful of nonsignificant and negative data from publication when working to get the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve atypical antipsychotics. However, the problem was significantly less severe than the publication bias researchers found when looking at antidepressants...

In 1998 Moore used the Freedom of Information Act to pry such data from the FDA. The total came to 47 company-sponsored studies—on Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Serzone, and Celexa—that Kirsch and colleagues then pored over. (As an aside, it turned out that about 40 percent of the clinical trials had never been published. That is significantly higher than for other classes of drugs, says Lisa Bero of the University of California, San Francisco; overall, 22 percent of clinical trials of drugs are not published. “By and large,” says Kirsch, “the unpublished studies were those that had failed to show a significant benefit from taking the actual drug.”)

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2012/03/21/publication-bias-again-this-time-for-antipsychotics/