Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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?!
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
First of all, the mod who gave you "redundant" apparently doesn't realize that this has been widely known for a long time.
Second, this is new because someone's done the actual study and shown the degree to which studies don't go reported. Even if only half of the unreported studies were because of poor results, that's enough to skew things very, very badly.
Anyone doing this should get put in jail for a long, long time. It may not be fraud in the sense that they're publishing fraudulent results, but by not publishing results they're creating fraudulent overall data, with possibly deadly results. This needs to stop.
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?
Anyone doing this should get put in jail for a long, long time. It may not be fraud in the sense that they're publishing fraudulent results, but by not publishing results they're creating fraudulent overall data, with possibly deadly results. This needs to stop.
That's a bit simplistic - often nobody is directly responsible for not publishing results, it comes about because major medical journals are not interested in pubishing negative findings. There are of course exceptions, when the negative findings come as a big surprise or there is a lot of anticipation about them, like the reports of the Alzheimer's disease vaccination not working earlier this year.
The medical journals themselves know this is a problem, but they aren't sure what to do about it. One suggestion has been the journals should make a 'commitment to publish' for a trial based on its design and importance, and then publish the findings whatever they are, but that would of course mean they'd be publishing a lot less interesting stuff.
Also scientists can't be bothered to write up negative findings, because there are proportionally so many more of them than positive ones.
There is a problem of pharma companies suppressing bad findings or writing misleading journal articles, but that's a wholly independant issue and should be dealt with by the schemes in develpment for enforcing results to be left in public databases after the trials are finishsed. The problem with that is that not many GPs will be searching through these databases
The real solution is probably for doctors not to rely on scientific journals for information (which they often don't really understand), but to wait for advice from bodies like the National Institute for Clinical Excellence or the Cochrane Collaboration who do very thorough searches and synthesis.
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.