This just really opened my eyes to how the whole scientific literature system works.

Everyone says “don’t listen to one study, look at the whole. Look at meta- analyses.” And while I still usually agree with that, there is a whole other part we need to look at.
Industries flood the literature with an overwhelming number of studies, meta-analyses use the same data in a duplicate manner and don’t realize it, using ghost writers is the norm even if they’re from a pharmaceutical company, unfavorable data just doesn’t make it to publication, etc.

Published on Jan 14, 2012
REPRESENTATION OF DRUG BENEFITS VS HARMS: THE IMPACT OF CONFLICT OF INTEREST
Filmed at the Vaccine Safety Conference, 2011. For more information please goto www.vaccinesafetyconference.com
Dr. Beatrice A. Golomb is Associate Professor of Medicine and of Family and Preventive Medicine at UCSD and a practicing internist. She holds a BSc in physics from the University of Southern California (summa cum laude), a PhD in biology and an MD degree (from the University of California, San Diego). She trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute (Computational Neurobiology Laboratory) and at RAND/UCLA (as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar) and has served as a Health Consultant at RAND. She is a foreign fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. As a Robert Wood Johnson Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar (2003-2007), she piloted a patient-targeted adverse-event surveillance approach, and has published (among other findings) on physician responses to patient reports of drug adverse effects. Golomb authored several RAND reports examining the relation of exposures to illness in Gulf War illness: One of these studies targeted vaccinations (unreleased).
Her research interests include medical reasoning; conflict of interest, placebos, treatment risk-benefit balance and drug adverse effects, cholesterol and statin drugs, diet influences on health, mood and behavior, illness in Gulf War veterans; and the impact of oxidative stress and mitochondrial function in autism, health, aging, and disease. Golomb’s research has been featured extensively in media ranging from NY Times and Wall Street Journal, to Time magazine, The Economist, and Business Week — to Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.
 
h/t orangearbuds
 

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