If you played a coin-flipping game where you could show all your winners and hide your losing tosses, you’d be way ahead. But nobody would let you get away with that, would they? If you’re Big Pharma, you get away with hiding the evidence every day, as Dr. Ben Goldacre explains in an op-ed in….
Continue ReadingResearch Studies
Internal Memos Focus Spotlight on Hip Implant’s Design Flaw
How does a medical device company talk internally about design flaws discovered in a hip implant it is promoting to thousands of surgeons? “We will ultimately need a cup redesign, but the short-term action is manage perceptions.” That’s what one sales official of DePuy, the Johnson & Johnson unit that makes hip implants, wrote in….
Continue ReadingChocolate and Brain Power: Scientific Proof Just in Time for the Holidays
Here it is, statistical proof that eating lots of chocolate improves your odds to get a Nobel prize (well, maybe). This chart says it all: The vertical axis shows the number of Nobel laureates per 10 million population in an assortment of countries, and the horizontal axis shows chocolate consumption per year per person in….
Continue ReadingMany Food Studies Serve Up Only Big Portions of Fear
In support of holding the line on “too much information,” a study recently published by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed how data devoid of context is often useless and sometimes misleading. The study concerned the abundant amount of research associating certain foods with disease risk, and how bold claims so often make their….
Continue ReadingWhen Medical Research Studies Overreach (Pretty Often)
News outlets love “breakthrough” stories about medical research studies, which seem to promise a new cure almost every week. A new report shows how the scientists who conduct such research sometimes add to the hype. The problem, according to a researcher at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, is that research claiming sweeping effect usually is….
Continue ReadingWe Know More About Medical Error and the Harm It Creates … But Not Enough
Twelve years ago, Helen Haskell’s son died because of a series of medical errors. That sad episode prompted her to found Mothers Against Medical Error (MAME), which offers support and advice for people who share such tragedy. Haskell’s ongoing effort to quantify medical errors and the harm they can cause are detailed in her story….
Continue ReadingMore Evidence that Throwing Bucks at Cancer May Not Improve Survival
A recent study published in Health Affairs either proves the superiority of U.S. medical care for cancer, or illustrates again how ignorance of basic statistical principles can lead to wrong conclusions. The study found that U.S. cancer patients who were diagnosed between 1995 and 1999 lived, on average, 11.1 years after their diagnosis. Similar patients….
Continue ReadingVictims of Rare Diseases See New Focus on “Orphan Drug” Research
A recently introduced bill in the House of Representatives seeks to update legislation for “orphan” diseases and drugs. “Orphan” status denotes disorders that are extremely rare-generally afflicting 6,000 or fewer patients. Pharmaceutical companies have no financial incentive to develop drugs and treatments for them because there aren’t enough users to pay the costs and sustain….
Continue ReadingTobacco Industry Manipulates Study Results
In the latest edition of “will they ever learn,” tobacco industry studies conclude that additives such as menthol do not make cigarettes more toxic. Except, of course, they do. As reported on MedPage Today, more objective researchers-who had to sue for access to the industry studies in question-concluded that the smoke of cigarettes with flavor….
Continue ReadingThe Real News on Chocolate Is Not So Dramatic
We’ve come to expect inflated or simplistic “news” offered by careless, undertrained and/or headline-hungry media covering medical and health topics. Now, even the people in charge of publicizing a recent scientific study published in BMJ (formerly called the British Medical Journal) are guilty of pandering at best and dumbing down at worst. “It’s official –….
Continue Reading