Tag: bias in research

Ayurdhi Dhar interviews Erick Turner about publication bias in antidepressant trials, compromised psychotherapeutic research, and a culture of journal worship.

The researchers suggest that their finding implies a common genetic cause behind five different “disorders.” This is big news! If true, it validates the biomedical view of mental “illness” and suggests that future medical treatments could “cure” these conditions. However, that grand conclusion is not supported by the data.

From Ars Technica: Psychologist Nicolas Guéguen's numerous research studies in the field of social psychology have yielded results that demonstrate and fuel binary models of...

From The Lown Institute: Every year, we spend $240 billion to fund biomedical research. According to a science reporter and author Richard Harris, as much as half...

From The Atlantic: Neuroimaging studies have traditionally scanned the brains of unrepresentative samples, focusing on Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic populations. Although the results...

For The Conversation, a team of researchers from the University of Aberdeen report that a substantial number of research trials produce unreliable results. “If that...

Pharmalot’s Ed Silverman reports on a Senate bill aimed at loosening requirements around the reporting of financial conflicts of interest between companies and physicians....

From STAT: “Imagine that someone offers to give you a guard dog. When the wretched creature arrives, you find out that she is calf-high,...

Richard Smith, the chair of the board of trustees at BMJ, penned an editorial yesterday bringing increased scrutiny to research misconduct and medical fraud in the UK. Smith identifies denial about the seriousness of the problem and the reluctance of universities to submit themselves to reviews as the two major reasons that Britain has failed to address these issues.

"Every year since 2006 in the U.S., the amount of new medical research in humans that’s funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has gone down, while the number of industry-funded trials has gone up, a new study shows.”

Yesterday, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) released an editorial entitled “Confluence, Not Conflict of Interest: Name Change Necessary.” The authors argue that the phrase “conflict of interest is pejorative,” and a better term “would be confluence of interest, implying an alingnment of primary and secondary interests.”