With thanks to The Annals of Surgery 12 February 2013 doi: 10.1097/SLA.0b013e3182864fa3 

 

 

 

 

From http://journals.lww.com/annalsofsurgery/Abstract/publishahead/Comparison_of_Registered_and_Published_Primary.98546.aspx

Comparison of Registered and Published Primary Outcomes in Randomized Clinical Trials of Surgical Interventions

Hannink, Gerjon PhD; Gooszen, Hein G. MD, PhD; Rovers, Maroeska M. PhD Read the rest of this entry »

With thanks to the Guardian Alok Jha, science correspondent Thursday 13 September 2012:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/sep/13/scientific-research-fraud-bad-practice

The Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel was found to have published fabricated data in 30 peer-reviewed papers. Dirk Smeesters had spent several years of his career as a social psychologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam studying how consumers behaved in different situations. Did colour have an effect on what they bought? How did death-related stories in the media affect how people picked products? And was it better to use supermodels in cosmetics adverts than average-looking women?

The questions are certainly intriguing, but unfortunately for anyone wanting truthful answers, some of Smeesters’ work turned out to be fraudulent. The psychologist, who admitted “massaging” the data in some of his papers, resigned from his position in June after being investigated by his university, which had been tipped off by Uri Simonsohn from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Simonsohn carried out an independent analysis of the data and was suspicious of how perfect many of Smeesters’ results seemed when, statistically speaking, there should have been more variation in his measurements. Read the rest of this entry »

With thanks to Natural News  17.5.12:

The day is coming when the host of antibiotics doctors currently use to fight off bacterial infections won’t work anymore, leaving the world’s population vulnerable to everything from scratches on your knee to disease, according to the United Nation‘s (UN)World Health Organization(WHO).

That’s because bacteria are becoming so resistant to common antibiotics that the phenomenon will bring about the “end of modern medicine as we know it,” warns Margaret Chan, the director-general of WHO.

http://www.euro.who.int/en/who-we-are/governance/regional-committee-for-europe/news/news/2012/1/margaret-chan,-who-director-general,-nominated-for-second-term

www.naturalnews.com/035890_antibiotics_resistance_WHO.html

Read the rest of this entry »

With thanks to The Guardian and Alok Jha, science correspondent guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 May 2012 21.04 BST

Academic spring campaign aims to make all taxpayer-funded academic research available for free online. Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, is to help the government in its bid to make taxpayer-funded research available for free online.  The government has drafted in the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to help make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain available online to anyone who wants to read or use it.

The initiative, which has the backing of No 10 and should be up and running in two years, will be announced by the universities and science minister, David Willetts, in a speech to the Publishers Association on Wednesday.

Note: the Academic Spring was started by Timothy Gowers (Royal Society Research Professor at the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at Cambridge University) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Gowers ‘… In January 2012 Timothy Gowers made a post on his personal blog which initiated a project called The Cost of Knowledge. The blog post called for a boycott of Elsevier. The Cost of Knowledge is a petition for change in which researchers commit to discontinue support for Elsevier journals. As a result, Timothy Gowers has been credited with starting the Academic Spring…’

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With thanks to the One Click Group 12.4.12:

One Click Note: Succinctly put for the layman, this paper means that many of the big-seller pharma drugs doled out to you by your drug dealer doctor are suss because their data has been purposefully suppressed by the pharmaceutical industry. Moreover this data suppression has been actively sanctioned by the various authorities charged with the overview of drug ‘safety’. Combine this with the cosy relationship enjoyed by pharma with the medical press stuffed with ghost writers and bent academics means that the general public are experiencing drug deception on a truly monstrous scale.

The noxious smell currently wafting over the medical industry in all its guises is beginning to stink as badly as Bhopal.

Read the rest of this entry »

With thanks to Alok Jha science correspondent at The Guardian 9.4.2012:

Wellcome backs campaign to break stranglehold of academic journals and allow all research papers to be shared free online

Wellcome’s move adds weight to the campaign for open access to academic knowledge, which could lead to benefits across a broad range of research fields. One of the world’s largest funders of science is to throw its weight behind a growing campaign to break the stranglehold of academic journals and allow all research papers to be shared online.

Nearly 9,000 researchers have already signed up to a boycott of journals that restrict free sharing as part of a campaign dubbed the “academic spring” by supporters due to its potential for revolutionising the spread of knowledge. Read the rest of this entry »

With thanks to the One Click Group 5.4.12

Pharma’s influence over published clinical evidence by Adam Dunn Research Fellow at University of New South Wales: 

TRANSPARENCY AND MEDICINE – A series examining issues from ethics to the evidence in evidence-based medicine, the influence of medical journals to the role of Big Pharma in our present and future health.

Here Adam Dunn discusses his research into authorship networks, which revealed the position of industry researchers in academic publishing. There’s growing concern that large pharmaceutical companies are capable of undermining the truth about the published evidence doctors use to treat patients. The suspicion is that pharmaceutical companies may be trading lives for profits. Read the rest of this entry »

With thanks to the One Click Group 3.4.12

Cancer Research False Claims 29 March 2012

100 Amgen scientists were astonished to find that they were able to replicate the results of only 6 of 53 widely cited landmark cancer research papers. A committee of the National Academy of Sciences heard testimony about the tenfold increase during the last decade, in the number of scientific journal articles that had to be retracted.

But that number may obscure the far greater number of unsupportable published reports in so-called peer reviewed academic journals that are never retracted. A report in NATURE, by Glenn Begley (former head of cancer research at Amgen) and Lee Ellis (surgical oncologist at MD Anderson), Drug development: Raise standards for preclinical cancer research describes the effort of 100 Amgen scientists to replicate the results claimed by the authors of 53 widely cited landmark cancer research papers.

The Amgen scientists were astonished to find that they were able to replicate only 6 (11%) of the published conclusions.

Read the rest of this entry »

With thanks to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting August 2009:

While it should go without saying that correlation is not causation—and MSNBC’s example proves that interlocking directorates are hardly the only factor in media coverage—this study indicates that, at the very least, corporate media and the insurance and pharmaceutical industries’ interests are fundamentally aligned.

The study also found crossover between these media corporations and several large pharmaceutical companies, such as Eli Lilly, Merck and Novartis, whose profits would also likely be negatively impacted by a single-payer system. Out of the nine media corporations studied, six had directors who also represented the interests of at least one pharmaceutical company. In fact, save for CBS, every media corporation had board connections to either an insurance or pharmaceutical company.

The Leveson Inquiry has been established under the Inquiries Act 2005 and has the power to summon witnesses. It is expected that a range of witnesses, including newspaper reporters, management, proprietors, police officers and politicians of all parties will give evidence under oath and in public. It will make recommendations on the future of press regulation and governance consistent with maintaining freedom of the press and ensuring the highest ethical and professional standards.

With thanks to The One CLick Group and Mike Barrett, Natural Society, March 11, 2012:

Medical doctors are nearly revered by many individuals for their medical knowledge accumulated after years of schooling. These doctors have gone through years of training in what is regarded as the western based medicine philosophy, where drugs and surgery are more or less their specialties. In addition to knowing virtually nothing about nutrition, natural solutions, and how to address the root causes of health conditions, many doctors, as well as scientist, have also been shown to be falsifying data in order to have research published. What’s more, many colleagues of the scandalous individuals are urged to keep quiet about what they know.   Read the rest of this entry »