From Alternatives, P.O. Box 2000, Ranson, WV 25438-2000; 1-800-844-1462
How to Rig a Medical Study!
"I comb through dozens of studies daily and I can tell you one thing for sure. If you torture the numbers long enough, you can make them confess to anything. Here's how to do it:
1. Cheap Way. Conduct a "meta-study." You don't study people - just other studies. First you find a thousand studies already done on your subject. Next you pick out 19 that seem to make your point. (In a big enough sample, you'll find all kinds of anomalies.) Finally, you figure out a clever rationale to knock out the 981 studies that don't agree with you. Some meta-studies are fine, but they're famously easy to fudge. This is precisely how they recently "proved" that vitamin E is harmful.
2. Expensive way. Do a series of double-blind, clinical studies (the "gold standard" of medical research). Keep changing the variables until at last you get ONE favorable result. Publish that one only - and suppress all the studies that show you're full of hooey. Shocking? This is exactly what drug firms have been doing for years." (1)
"Independent Research?
"Fact: Studies at Medical Schools and Institutes are not independent. Drug firms sink hundreds of millions of dollars into endowments at these places. Worse, a 2003 study found that nearly half of the medical school faculty who sit on Institutional Review Boards to advise on new research also serve as consultants tot he pharmaceutical industry. How likely would you be to bite the hand that feeds you?
Fact: Peer-review journals are being bought off. Scientific method depends on these scholarly journals to examine new studies and keep them honest. But Big Pharma advertising now account for the MAJORITY of revenue at one of the biggest peer-reviewed journals. So long, science!