POOR SCIENCE.
Drug companies often publish the good results of drug trials, but very little is published when trials are not successful. This leads to a distortion of the basic research.
The raw data should be available to all, especially those who participated in the drug trials.!
For further information go to Alltrials.net .
Summary,
Last year during TEDMED 2012, in “The cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine”: Ben Goldacre on the missing data, he covered the vitally important news that a lot of medical research has gone missing, leading to a severely corrupted foundation for evidence-based medicine. If you haven’t read that quick post with 6 minute video interview, please do.
How can families or doctors make effective choices if we don’t have the relevant information?? Imagine the auto industry suppressing crash test results that didn’t go well! Not only is it ludicrous; imagine the impact on families who drove those cars.
It is a basic of the evidence based medicine that we’re taught to follow and apply.
The remedy is Open Science. Importantly, the definition includes open data, so others can check the reasoning for what was included and what was not.
Open data is such a big deal that in a 2009 TED Talk Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, taught his audience to say out loud: “Raw Data Now! Raw Data Now!” His talk was titled The Next Web, and four years later it’s become real – that movement’s website tracks what people are doing with open data and the difference it’s making.
Medicine must catch up. Raw data now!
TEDMED 2012: The Tip of the Missing Data Iceberg. This data suppression being “the cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.”
FOR Example: of 74 trials of antidepressants –
• Only 38 (about half) came out positive – no better than a random coin toss
• But 37 of the 38 were published (92% of them!)
• And of the 34 failed tests, only THREE were published
So: an earnest doctor looks at the evidence, and sees that 37 of 40 published papers are positive. The stuff clearly works, right? Wrong; the publication process fell short of producing reliable information for the doctor (and the patient).
Impact:
• Inhibits patients from getting good information.
• Inhibits doctors from having good information, too, with which to treat their patients
• It’s a severe disservice to the patients who put themselves at risk by being in a clinical trial to help improve the body of scientific knowledge.
• Makes an absolutely mockery of evidence-based medicine
Doctors and research scientists are taught to ask “What’s the evidence?” If the evidence has been made unreliable by editorial mistakes (or corruption), it weakens the whole system.
Dick