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The pressure to fudge medical research findings

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There's also the problem that they more specific & advanced the topic being reviewed (i.e. all the "cutting-edge" stuff), the fewer "peers" there are available to review it. So if you're trying to publish a paper about a new technique to create glow-in-the-dark cats, there might not be too many people who are qualified to review your work. And chances are that they'll say "oh, this methodology looks familiar from those GlowKitty 1.0 studies by Goober et al, I know those guys", and then go on to either think: "oh, Goober's a good fella, this must be fine, I don't need to read the rest of it", or: "Goober's a self-righteous git who didn't credit my work on that first GlowKitty study, fuck him & his children & this paper - FAIL".

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There's also the problem that they more specific & advanced the topic being reviewed (i.e. all the "cutting-edge" stuff), the fewer "peers" there are available to review it. So if you're trying to publish a paper about a new technique to create glow-in-the-dark cats, there might not be too many people who are qualified to review your work. And chances are that they'll say "oh, this methodology looks familiar from those GlowKitty 1.0 studies by Goober et al, I know those guys", and then go on to either think: "oh, Goober's a good fella, this must be fine, I don't need to read the rest of it", or: "Goober's a self-righteous git who didn't credit my work on that first GlowKitty study, fuck him & his children & this paper - FAIL".

Could not agree more with this

Far too easy for people to be biased based on who they are marking.

Not what I thought science was about. It's a real shame.

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The journals that publish some of the horseshit must be responsible on some level too. They love to use the phrase "evidence backed medicine" when often there is no evidence at all.

Just look at the shit that flowed from the office of Dr Scott Reuben, he falsified "evidence" in almost every paper he ever published and wrote many articles based on pure fantasy and fabrication. In some of his "studies" there were not even any patients enrolled. The last I heard there were 30 studies published by him proven to be phony.

He published bullshit about vioxx and celebrex and several other drugs. It could be argued that hundreds of thousands of people died because of his work. Drug companies made billions of dollars on the back of his "work"

It's no surprise to see that his "studies" were being funded by the pharmaceutical companies that manufactured and profited from the drugs.

The peer review process may be anonymous, but if the review board is stacked with people with connections to the drug companies or are board members of those companies then anonymity is a sheild not a failsafe.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-medical-madoff-anesthestesiologist-faked-data/

Edited by Sally
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I think the peer review process is said to be anonymous. I don't think there is much anonymity at all.

And this whole thing points out some issues
There are more cases of this exact thing too

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen

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Not what I thought science was about. It's a real shame.

The circus known as academia is not the endpoint of a lot of sciences :wink:

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What do you mean by that waterboy?
industry?

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which industry ace? I am trying to define you approach to the definition of "science".

why shouldn't science be a game? If it wasnt I wouldnt want to be the best at it I can be...lol

A degree only kicks shit off

EDIT - also sorry I've jumped across two threads

Edited by waterboy 2.0

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Really with medical science who is paying for the research positions.....?

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There's also the problem that they more specific & advanced the topic being reviewed (i.e. all the "cutting-edge" stuff), the fewer "peers" there are available to review it. So if you're trying to publish a paper about a new technique to create glow-in-the-dark cats, there might not be too many people who are qualified to review your work. And chances are that they'll say "oh, this methodology looks familiar from those GlowKitty 1.0 studies by Goober et al, I know those guys", and then go on to either think: "oh, Goober's a good fella, this must be fine, I don't need to read the rest of it", or: "Goober's a self-righteous git who didn't credit my work on that first GlowKitty study, fuck him & his children & this paper - FAIL".

Yep. In practice, the peer review process is broken these days. It's not a reason to dump it tho.

Main reasons IMO are as Anodyne says above. And I think it was mentioned earlier here that much research these days is so highly specialised there aren't many people who are qualified to rebut any dubious statements in public fora.

Are we distinguishing here between successful pharmacological clinical trials here and general academic publication or are we drawing parallels between them? I'd rather keep the two discussions separate for the purposes of this thread. Forging or forcing clinical documentation is one thing and has potentially greater repercussions but perhaps mending the process could be a model with wider application.

Personally I am drawn to the Alltrials ethos. If your work diverts from a previously published process or endpoint, a working group could replicate that branching point as a part of the regulation process and then continue in it's own direction through the rest of the trial

Yes, that could mean an expensive duplication of a particular clinical trial phase, but would confirm ( or not ) the work done by the previous group at that point.

I have no idea how pie-in-the-sky this is, but the Alltrials campaign has gained some ground. And in the process re-opened the discussion about the publication of negative results being just as valid and a part of the necessary scientific process as positive results.

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Are we distinguishing here between successful pharmacological clinical trials here and general academic publication or are we drawing parallels between them? I'd rather keep the two discussions separate for the purposes of this thread. Forging or forcing clinical documentation is one thing and has potentially greater repercussions but perhaps mending the process could be a model with wider application.

I'm just trying to get my head around this statement DL

Is there an underlying belief in academia that pharmaceutical research is more likely to be fudged as compared to research in other fields ?

From my outside perspective science is science, so the need for divergence seems almost irrelevant.

I can see that I could be vastly oversimplifying the issue, I have had 2 bottles of red.

Not trying to pick a fight, I'm just after clarification.

Edited by Sally
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Is there an underlying belief in academia that pharmaceutical research is more likely to be fudged as compared to research in other fields ?

From my outside perspective science is science, so the need for divergence seems almost irrelevant.

Yep the last point is the one I'm interested in for the purposes of the discussion, but I don't want to hijack the thread

Theoretically, successful human clinical trials are supposed to be thorough, having been tried on actual human beings, the margin for error should be theoretically smaller, capacity to replicate greater etc.

And for human clinical trials of pharma products, the consequences of poor or corrupt reportage are potentially fatal. Much more so than, say, Glowkitty theoretical project described above, or a paper on hamster gut cell receptor genetics.

And yet... and yet... that hasn't stopped the apparent falsification of data in some instances

You're prolly right Sally, it's the same issue

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