A while back I wrote a short piece in the New York Times Magazine about a researcher named John Ioannidis who had found that over half of all new research findings later prove false: Many of us consider science the most reliable, accountable way of explaining how the world works. We trust it. Should we? […]
Continue reading →The ever-excellent Neurocritic has an interesting post looking at “lesion studies” of depression. As he notes, he was hoping for real lesions, from people who’d had psychosurgery years ago, but had to settle for a simulation study that used MRIs from a large sample of control participants.
Continue reading →Doctors and academics – who should feel optimism at working with the drug companies to develop new treatments – feel nausea instead, knowing that there are only informal systems to deal with buried data, and these have clearly failed. In 2005 the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors put its foot down and said its journals would only publish trials that were fully registered before they started, which should make any that went missing much easier to spot.
Continue reading →Evolution, healthcare reform, baboons, and Cheever in his underwear
Continue reading →Mind, brain, and body (including those gene things) While reading Wolpert’s review of Greenberg’s book, I found that the Guardian has a particularly rich trove of writings and resources on depression , some of it drawing on resources at BMJ (the journal formerly known as the British Medical Journal). … The backchannel is the twitter stream that audience members now rather routinely produce while a conference speaker or panel holds forth at the front of the room; it carries hideous dangers for the unwary, unprepared, or just plain unlikeable speaker.
Continue reading →PTSD, pharma, adjuvants, bad movies — these are a few of my favorite things, and readers’ too. How’d Neil get in here? I love him.
Continue reading →It was a riveting, invigorating, almost intoxicating experience. It seemed a glimpse of the sort of honesty, rigor, transparency, and quality of thought and discussion that a more open system of science communication and discussion might generate.
Continue reading →The Rise Of Marketing-Based Medicine 64 Comments By Ed Silverman // January 28th, 2010 // 7:57 am You’ve heard of evidence-based medicine. Well, a new paper summarizes a panoply of practices employed over the past two decades or so – ghostwriting, suppressing or spinning data, disease mongering and managing side effect perceptions among docs – […]
Continue reading →The week’s best — with new features!
Continue reading →Gary Kasparov ponders the limitations of technology as a means of playing chess truly well. His critique could be applied equally well to pharma.
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