October 3rd, 2010 by DrRich in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion, Research
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DrRich has said many times that clinical science is among the least exact of the sciences, and therefore, the results of clinical research are particularly susceptible to “spinning” by various interested parties, in order to yield the kind of results they would prefer to see.
Until recent times in American medicine, the parties who have been most interested in spinning clinical research have been the people who run drug companies and medical device companies (who need clinical research which supports the use of their products), and the medical specialists (who are more likely to be paid for performing medical procedures that are supported by clinical research). In writing about such data-spinning abuses, DrRich has particularly targeted his own Cardiology Guild, but only because he knows and loves cardiologists the best. He suspects that other specialists are doing exactly the same thing.
While DrRich has used reasonably gentle humor (laced, to be sure, with sarcasm and irony) to criticize doctors and their industry collaborators for twisting clinical data to their own ends, others have expressed the same concerns in much more indignant terms, and have threatened to employ professional sanctions, civil and criminal penalties, and everlasting perdition, to curtail such behaviors. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*
April 8th, 2010 by David H. Gorski, M.D., Ph.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion, Research
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One of the things about science-based medicine that makes it so fascinating is that it encompasses such a wide variety of modalities that it takes a similarly wide variety of science and scientific techniques to investigate various diseases. Some medical disciplines consist of mainly of problems that are relatively straightforward to study. Don’t get me wrong, though. By “straightforward” I don’t mean that they’re easy, simply that the experimental design of a clinical trial to test a treatment is fairly easily encompassed by the paradigm of randomized clinical trials.
Medical oncology is just one example, where new drugs can be tested in randomized, double-blinded trials against or in addition to the standard of care without having to account for many difficulties that arise from difficulties blinding. We’ve discussed such difficulties before, for instance, in the context of constructing adequate placebos for acupuncture trials.
Indeed, this topic is critical to the application of science-based medicine to various “complementary and alternative medicine” modalities, which do not as easily lend themselves to randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trials, although I would hasten to point out that, just because it can be very difficult to do such trials is not an excuse for not doing them. The development of various “sham acupuncture” controls, one of which consisted even of just twirling a toothpick gently poked onto the skin, shows that.
One area of medicine where it is difficult to construct randomized controlled trials is surgery. The reasons are multiple. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*