Evidence that there is still lots of potential for study researchers and their sponsors to only let you see what they want you to see
Posted on 2 September 2009
While some people put a lot of faith in published scientific and medical research, there are a number of reasons why we sometimes need to be a bit sceptical about what we read in scientific journals. One fundamental issue here concerns what is known as
Published September 2, 2009 . Filed under: Food and Medical Politics
Dr. Briffa Excellent Post. Currently, the only groups with enough money to do large scale research are the government or the drug companies. The gov. only researches what is politicly correct and when the results will support current gov. policy. (subsidies for grain production). The drug compancies have their obvious conflict of interest as you have shown. They also fund much of the journals thru their ads and they sponsor many of the medical mtgs held for physicians (along with surgical equip companies). Thus the information stream that good physicians use to learn how to be the best they can be has been tainted!
September 5, 2009 @ 3:32 pm
Many years ago I wrote to a psychologist working in a famous dental hospital in London. I told her about how the dental hospital near to where I live was labelling patients depressed or mentally ill after incompetent/negligent dental treatment had left them with chronic, severe toothache. In other words, these patients were being told that they were not really in pain, they were just depressed! I had hoped that she would do something to prevent this devious, dishonest practice.
In her reply, however, she claimed that a research project proved that chronic toothache was really depression and sent me a copy of the paper. In the preamble to the paper it was stated that the purpose of the study was to prove that chronic toothache is really depression! And where it was found that subjects who were intended to be part of the research actually did have painful dental problems causing their pain, they were excluded from the research! – ‘Nuff said!
September 6, 2009 @ 3:04 pm
Couldn’t agree more: “evidence based” medicine falls down when the evidence is little more than infomercials for the current profitable drug of choice.
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” – for example where are the studies on well controlled diabetics? We are legion on forums, blogs and newsgroups but routinely turned down for studies for being “too well controlled”, thus doctors have no “evidence” that it is possible to improve significantly on Conventional Wisdom.
Do you know what became of a recent UK dietary study? Did it come up with the “wrong” results and get sat on, or are they still tweaking the statistics to “prove” that low carb doesn’t work?
September 11, 2009 @ 5:41 pm