How medical research is accepted without rigorous independent assessment has me stuffed. The climate researchers use the same techniques to get published.
How many children died because peer reviewed data was buried and results cherry-picked?
This example below shows the dangers of cherry picked and buried data. It shows how great news and joy can be reported from rancid results, and the only protection against this is open access. When the taxpayer funds research that is not fully and transparently public, and immediately available, the people are funding PR rather than science. “Peer review” does little to stop this, little to clean up the mess after it happens, and the truth can take years to be set free.
Ten percent of teenagers taking an anti-depressant harmed themselves or attempted suicide. This was ten times the rate of the teens on the placebo. The results of this clinical trial were published in 2001, but those alarming statistics were not reported. The drug went on to be widely used. A new reanalysis of the data, reported in the BMJ, revealed the dark and hidden dangers. The company that funded the research, Glaxo Smith Kline, has already faced record fines of $4.2 billion. The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry won’t retract the paper.
Big money at stake, and bad statistics go unspoken:
The controversy eventually contributed to a record $4.2 billion fine against GlaxoSmithKline, whose constituent company SmithKline Beecham had funded the study during the 1990s, for withholding data and misleading consumers. But theJournal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, which published the 2001 paper, dismissed retraction calls.
The new study re-analysed records extracted from the company during legal proceedings and subsequent negotiations. It found that more than 10 per cent of the teenagers who took paroxetine during the trial had harmed themselves or attempted suicide, compared with about 1 per cent of patients who took a placebo.
