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Disappointing Cancer Study Results Go Unreported
An anonymous reader writes "Science News reports on a new study showing that most cancer drug trial results are never published, probably leaving patients vulnerable to cocktails that have already been shown to be dangerous or useless."
Where's the surprise in this? No news here.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
This sounds reasonable. From now on I'll be emailing my pals every time I don't get laid.
Summary? You're practically forcing me to read TFA
Cancer patients are already vulnerable to cancer.
Not sure what the point of this story is. Sometimes things don't work out the way everyone wishes they would. Apparently every decision to say something or not say something always has to be second-guessed by third parties who have no responsibility or accountability -- but they get to demand things anyway.
I'm sure a lot more of these failed trials would be published if there was a financial incentive. The complainers should start a foundation and start paying the people who have better things to do than to write papers and publish info that's of no use to them. They should do that instead of complaining.
The obvious reason is that it takes time and money to publish study results, neither of which are recouped currently if the study showed negative results.
The obvious fix is to reward pharmaceutical companies financially for publishing all results. Form a subentity within the NIH with the power to purchase study data and results that can be published by the government or a peer-reviewed journal.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
This very subject was addressed, very eloquently as usual, by Richard Feynman in his famous Cargo Cult Science lecture.
Many of the older anti-drinking crowd in these parts, and others, commonly refer to beer as horse's piss so I guess I will just stick with beer. Though its price has risen absurdly in my lifetime, it isn't quite to $9/oz yet.
It's called the "file drawer problem" and impacts every field of science. If you don't find significant results, you don't get published, and you stick your "failed" study in the file drawer. As a result, "failed" studies on ANY topic usually get swept away. It's unfortunate, but there's nothing particular sinister about it (as the article seems to imply). There's just no incentive to publish the trials and studies that didn't work.
I have fresh horse urine for only $9 per ounce. Do you want to be cured, or not?
Nay.
No, they'd much rather have those 10 years worth of payments up front, so they can invest or re-invest it.
You seriously don't think people would pay more for a week-long cure than for a week's worth of "treatment-in-perpetuity?"
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
If you can actually cure cancer, you can charge whatever you want for the treatment, so no one is going to throw out their cure because it isn't profitable. If they found a cure, they would still sell you add ons for years anyway to get money out of you. What usually happens is that they can't create a cure, so the treatments they can come up with only lessen symptoms. And since everything is on a gradient, you only test as far as insurance companies are interested, not to the limit of the drugs.
Horse urine can't cure cancer, although it is used in hormone replacement therapy. I suppose some cancer patients driven to early menopause due to radiation and chemotherapy do use it, though...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premarin
It's called publication bias and it exists in most fields. Publisher want to break significant results, so even if your research was extremely well designed, and the fact that you found negative results could be extremely important, they won't publish it.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
I'm not at all surprised that findings don't get published. The only way to force them to be published would be to make it a condition of doing the study or a legal requirement. The pharm companies couldn't care less that patients die - they prefer the competition wastes time repeating the same tests rather than taking advantage of the work they've already done.
The entire way that the medical system works really needs a shake up. Other industries with less at stake have more stringent quality control processes. The medical profession has medical boards that amount to little more than exclusive clubs. The amount of shit I've heard about in the last few years would be beyond belief had I not experienced some of the incredible incompetence I've seen first hand that have done harm to me and mine. At this point I no longer consider it safe to take medical advice without reviewing it and researching it thoroughly using every corner of the internet at my disposal - from Google to Pubmed. Sure, if it's life and death and requires immediate attention, you have no alternative but to take what expert care a doctor can provide then and there without questioning it. However for anything where you have more than a few hours to make a decision trusting a doctor - particularly a specialist, and particularly a doctor you don't know well - is quite like playing Russian roulette.
I'm sure there will be a few in the medical profession who read this and think "Not another one who self diagnoses". To them a big "fuck you". When I can get doctors that can check the fucking contraindications on a medication before repeatedly upping the dosage (and almost killing someone dear to me) or doctors who aren't quick to try to scare me into doing unnecessary surgery assuring me I'd be crippled long ago if I didn't get it done, then I'll think about trusting my doctor to get it right. As it is I've even had a GP fuck up something as simple as removing ear wax.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
In the science world most unsuccessful experiments go unreported which means that millions of dollars are spent by different research groups repeating the same failed experiments/techniques. The main problem is that nobody wants to report failures because there is no incentive to do so.
Some scientists are interested on getting all data published, even if it didn't result in big news. They call this the "dark data".
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/15-10/st_essay
My mother went through a 6 week series of trials of epsom salts against colo-rectal cancer.
The mixture was ineffective.
My, how very useful this information is for cancer patients!
Would my mother have received the quality of the care she eventually did get if her doctors had missed relevant articles in medical journals thanks to the massive signal to noise ratio?
If every failure were published, the cancer research community would suffer the same "eternal september" the usenet community did.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
.
The "cure for cancer" is just the beginning - at that point you can begin to think seriously about directing research towards the anti-aging drugs, the rejuvenation techniques, that have been stuff of epic myth, science fiction and fantasy since the beginnings of human history.
Too bad that particularly nasty trait (greed) is built right into our genes. I don't ever see any well-meaning social movement eradicating it from our species.
One reason I oppose the doctrine that we're all equal is that I've observed the more intelligent, confident and physically attractive people are less greedy.
There are people out there who, unlike Hollywood stars, look great without makeup, went to good schools and have good careers doing things that (unlike Hollywood) make life better for people.
Then there are the ugly fat guys in Porsches who seem to think that having their own business as a patent sniper makes them "equal" to someone who is smarter, more attractive, and has greater moral character...
Something worth thinking about, at least.
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
Yes, because that is exactly the same thing. *sigh*
What if the researchers developing new drugs and treatments had access to the failures of others so that they knew what *not* to try. Outside of your pathetically childish and facetious example about Epsom salts, this information could be invaluable. Would you have wanted your mother to die because scientists working for Pfizer didn't tell the community about a failed treatment that they had already tried which GlaxoSmithkline then spent 2 years replicating, at the expense of another possibly more fruitful avenue of research?
I wouldn't have been able to see so far had I not been standing on the shoulders of giants applies to stuff that doesn't work as well. Some things, Like medicine, are too important not to have companies and researchers work together on. This is just an example of how legislature is created by money. The Golden rule: those who have all the gold, make all the rules!
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
There's a wide assumption that the researchers themselves really want to publish all results.
Unfortunately, as in almost the entire field of "science" nowadays, it's not the case.
Researchers themselves have a tendency to hide failures - given that most experiments result in failure, they tend to focus on reporting the ones reporting success.
This use of time simply makes most sense - they don't have the time to report all the failures, and reports of failures not as valuable as reports of success only makes it worse - think about what kind of views your peers will have towards you if most of your publications are negative results.
Sadly, this thinking is parasitic and is very prevalent across all research fields.
Journals are very selective given the limited number of pages they have. If I were a journal, I'd pick reports of success first. It's the evil of centrally-controlled publication, and the mindset that, "if a research is of any good value, it must appear on some journal".
Granted, peer review is a good thing, but there must be a way to give researches credibility without getting published on some journal.
Compounded with big-pharma-sourced funding with very fine strings attached...we have a really screwed up system.
Even if only half of the unreported studies were because of poor results, that's enough to skew things very, very badly.
The basic idea is that you should only use drugs or drug combinations for which there is evidence that they work and are not harmful. If there's nothing published, don't use it!
but by not publishing results they're creating fraudulent overall data, with possibly deadly results. This needs to stop.
There's nothing "fraudulent" about it. Studies often fail for many reasons completely unrelated to the drugs themselves.
Scientific experiments are usually one-sided: a positive result tells you something, a negative result tells you nothing.