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NY Times slams rampant corruption in medical research.

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E-NEWS FROM THE NATIONAL VACCINE INFORMATION CENTER Vienna, Virginia

http://www.nvic.org * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * UNITED

WAY/COMBINED FEDERAL CAMPAIGN #8122 * * * * * * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * * * " Protecting the health and informed consent rights of

children since 1982. "

================================================================================\

========== BL Fisher Note: It is no wonder M.D./Ph.D. researchers find

themselves in a credibility gap. We have put them on a pedestal for far too

long, creating an elitist class which considers themselves entitled to

special entitlements and protection from ethical constraints. For far too

long, the American public has been worshipping at the feet of those who

practice science and medicine, naively assuming men and women who gravitate

toward the healing arts are somehow exempt from human flaws that tempt them

to cut corners or

exploit others for profit, career advancement and fame. It has been a costly

mistake to allow scientists and doctors to police themselves because we have

based our entire health care system on a collective trust they are always

telling the truth. Transparency, accountability and justice are three

values which will help keep the scientific research process and those who

operate it truthful. The public should have full access to all scientific

data and analysis used to proclaim a medical intervention is safe and

effective for human use. Those who accept responsibility for proclaiming a

medical intervention safe and effective should be held accountable if they

are not truthful. And those who are harmed by a medical intervention which

has been falsely proclaimed to be safe and effective should be able to access

the civil court system to seek justice.

htp://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/health/02docs.html?ei=5088 & en=989fce7c62c8e

849 & ex=1304222400 & partner=rssnyt & emc=rss & pagewanted=all The NY Times May

2, 2006 The Doctor's World For Science's Gatekeepers, a Credibility Gap By

LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D. Recent disclosures of fraudulent or flawed studies

in medical and scientific journals have called into question as never before

the merits of their peer-review system. The system is based on journals

inviting independent experts to critique submitted manuscripts. The stated

aim is to weed out sloppy and bad research, ensuring the integrity of the what

it has published. Because findings published in peer-reviewed journals

affect patient care, public policy and the authors' academic promotions,

journal editors contend that new scientific information should be published

in a peer-reviewed journal before it is presented to doctors and the public.

That message, however, has created a widespread misimpression that passing

peer review is the scientific equivalent

of the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Virtually every major

scientific and medical journal has been humbled recently by publishing findings

that are later discredited. The flurry of episodes has led many people to ask

why authors, editors and independent expert reviewers all failed to detect

the problems before publication. The publication process is complex. Many

factors can allow error, even fraud, to slip through. They include economic

pressures for journals to avoid investigating suspected errors; the desire to

avoid displeasing the authors and the experts who review manuscripts; and the

fear that angry scientists will withhold the manuscripts that are the lifeline

of the journals, putting them out of business.By promoting the sanctity of

peer review and using it to justify a number of their actions in recent

years, journals have added to their enormous power. The release of news

about scientific and medical findings is among the

most tightly managed in country. Journals control when the public learns

about findings from taxpayer-supported research by setting dates when the

research can be published. They also impose severe restrictions on what authors

can say publicly, even before they submit a manuscript, and they have

penalized authors for infractions by refusing to publish their papers.

Exceptions are made for scientific meetings and health emergencies. But

many authors have still withheld information for fear that journals would pull

their papers for an infraction. Increasingly, journals and authors'

institutions also send out news releases ahead of time about a peer-reviewed

discovery so that reports from news organizations coincide with a journal's

date of issue. A barrage of news reports can follow. But often the news

release is sent without the full paper, so reports may be based only on the

spin created by a journal or an institution. Journal editors

say publicity about corrections and retractions distorts and erodes

confidence in science, which is an honorable business. Editors also say they

are gatekeepers, not detectives, and that even though peer review is not

intended to detect fraud, it catches flawed research and improves the quality

of the thousands of published papers. However, even the system's most ardent

supporters acknowledge that peer review does not eliminate mediocre and

inferior papers and has never passed the very test for which it is used.

Studies have found that journals publish findings based on sloppy statistics.

If peer review were a drug, it would never be marketed, say critics,

including journal editors. None of the recent flawed studies have been as

humiliating as an article in 1972 in the journal Pediatrics that labeled

sudden infant death syndrome a hereditary disorder, when, in the case

examined, the real cause was murder. Twenty-three years later, the

mother was convicted of smothering her five children. Scientific naïveté

surely contributed to the false conclusion, but a forensic pathologist was

not one of the reviewers. The faulty research in part prompted the National

Institutes of Health to spend millions of dollars on a wrong line of

research. Fraud, flawed articles and corrections have haunted general

interest news organizations. But such problems are far more embarrassing for

scientific journals because of their claims for the superiority of their system

of editing. A widespread belief among nonscientists is that journal editors

and their reviewers check authors' research firsthand and even repeat the

research. In fact, journal editors do not routinely examine authors' scientific

notebooks. Instead, they rely on peer reviewers' criticisms, which are based

on the information submitted by the authors. While editors and reviewers may

ask authors for more information, journals

and their invited experts examine raw data only under the most unusual

circumstances. In that respect, journal editors are like newspaper editors,

who check the content of reporters' copy for facts and internal

inconsistencies but generally not their notes. Still, journal editors have

refused to call peer review what many others say it is — a form of vetting or

technical editing. In spot checks, many scientists and nonscientists said

they believed that editors decided what to publish by counting reviewers'

votes. But journal editors say that they are not tally clerks and that

decisions to publish are theirs, not the reviewers'. Editors say they have

accepted a number of papers that reviewers have harshly criticized as unworthy

of publication and have rejected many that received high plaudits. Many

nonscientists perceive reviewers to be impartial. But the reviewers, called

independent experts, in fact are often competitors of the

authors of the papers they scrutinize, raising potential conflicts of

interest. Except when gaffes are publicized, there is little scrutiny of the

quality of what journals publish. Journals have rejected calls to make the

process scientific by conducting random audits like those used to monitor

quality control in medicine. The costs and the potential for creating

distrust are the most commonly cited reasons for not auditing. In

defending themselves, journal editors often shift blame to the authors and

excuse themselves and their peer reviewers. Journals seldom investigate

frauds that they have published, contending that they are not investigative

bodies and that they could not afford the costs. Instead, the journals say

that the investigations are up to the accused authors' employers and agencies

that financed the research. Editors also insist that science corrects its

errors. But corrections often require whistle-blowers or

prodding by lawyers. Editors at The New England Journal of Medicine said

they would not have learned about a problem that led them to publish two

letters of concern about omission of data concerning the arthritis drug Vioxx

unless lawyers for the drug's manufacturer, Merck, had asked them questions

in depositions. Fraud has also slipped through in part because editors have

long been loath to question the authors. " A request from an editor for

primary data to support the honesty of an author's findings in a manuscript

under review would probably poison the air and make civil discourse between

authors and editors even more difficult than it is now, " Dr. Arnold S. Relman

wrote in 1983. At the time, he was editor of The New England Journal of

Medicine, and it had published a fraudulent paper. Fraud is a substantial

problem, and the attitude toward it has changed little over the years, other

editors say. Some journals fail to retract known

cases of fraud for fear of lawsuits. Journals have no widely accepted way to

retract papers, said Donald Kennedy, editor in chief of Science, after the it

retracted two papers by the South Korean researcher Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, who

fabricated evidence that he had cloned human cells. In the April 18 issue

of Annals of Internal Medicine, its editor, Dr. Harold C. Sox, wrote about

lessons learned after the journal retracted an article on menopause by Dr.

Eric Poehlman of the University of Vermont. When an author is found to have

fabricated data in one paper, scientists rarely examine all of that author's

publications, so the scientific literature may be more polluted than believed,

Dr. Sox said. Dr. Sox and other scientists have documented that invalid work

is not effectively purged from the scientific literature because the authors

of new papers continue to cite retracted ones. When journals try to retract

discredited papers, Dr. Sox said,

the process is slow, and the system used to inform readers faulty. Authors

often use euphemisms instead of the words " fabrication " or " research

misconduct, " and finding published retractions can be costly because some

affected journals charge readers a fee to visit their Web sites to learn

about them, Dr. Sox said. Despite its flaws, scientists favor the system

in part because they need to publish or perish. The institutions where the

scientists work and the private and government agencies that pay for their

grants seek publicity in their eagerness to show financial backers results

for their efforts. The public and many scientists tend to overlook the

journals' economic benefits that stem from linking their embargo policies to

peer review. Some journals are owned by private for-profit companies, while

others are owned by professional societies that rely on income from the

journals. The costs of running journals are low because authors

and reviewers are generally not paid. A few journals that not long ago

measured profits in the tens of thousands of dollars a year now make

millions, according to at least three editors who agreed to discuss finances

only if granted anonymity, because they were not authorized to speak about

finances. Any influential system that profits from taxpayer-financed research

should be held publicly accountable for how the revenues are spent. Journals

generally decline to disclose such data. Although editors of some journals

say they demand statements from their editing staff members that they have no

financial conflicts of interest, there is no way to be sure. At least one

editor of a leading American journal had to resign because of conflicts of

interest with industry. Journals have devolved into information-laundering

operations for the pharmaceutical industry, say Dr. Richard Smith, the former

editor of BMJ, the British medical journal, and

Dr. Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, also based in Britain. The

journals rely on revenues from industry advertisements. But because journals

also profit handsomely by selling drug companies reprints of articles reporting

findings from large clinical trials involving their products, editors may " face

a frighteningly stark conflict of interest " in deciding whether to publish

such a study, Dr. Smith said. =============================================

News is a free service of the National Vaccine Information Center and

is supported through membership donations. Learn more about vaccines,

diseases and how to protect your informed consent rights http://www.nvic.org

Become a member and support NVIC's work

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" Our ideal is not the spirituality that withdraws from life but the conquest

of life by the power of the spirit. " - Aurobindo.

 

 

 

 

 

is disappearing messages to the group again. Messages

which have a content that isn't politically correct are going missing.

 

This isn't the first time that such practices, as well as other

things, have been used against this group as well as other groups. In

fact, I suspect that the problem is probably quite widespread, and has

been ongoing in one form or another, for quite some time now.

 

Please be aware of the situation and alert others and other groups.

 

Sometimes, I have had to post the same message to the group as many as

5 or 6 times to finally get one copy to slip through. All would have been

considered not politically correct. It seems that is, once again,

politically censoring messages in violation of free speech.

 

Sometimes the message will get posted to the group's message section but then

it seems that it doesn't go out as group email to the members.

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