Healthy Skepticism Library item: 10137

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Cunningham MR, Warme WJ, Schaad DC, Wolf FM, Leopold SS.
Industry-funded positive studies not associated with better design or larger size.
Clin Orthop Relat Res 2007 Apr; 457:235-41:
http://meta.wkhealth.com/pt/pt-core/template-journal/lwwgateway/media/landingpage.htm?doi=10.1097/BLO.0b013e3180312057

Abstract:

Previous studies have associated commercial funding with positive outcomes in orthopaedic research. Those reports, however, failed to account for potential confounding variables that can lead to a disproportion of positive outcomes, including sample size, study design, and study quality. We tested the hypothesis that nonscientific factors (funding source, orthopaedic subspecialty, and geographic region of origin) are associated with positive study outcomes, but not the result of differences in study design, study quality, or sample size. All 747 abstracts presented at the 2004 American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons annual meeting underwent blinded analysis using previously published criteria. Studies that received commercial funding were more likely to conclude with positive outcomes. Subspecialty and country of origin were not associated with positive outcomes. Commercially funded studies were not more likely than non-funded studies to be well-designed. When control groups were used, those in commercially funded studies were not larger than those used in nonfunded studies. Our data suggest commercial funding was associated with positive outcomes, but we found no evidence to suggest commercially funded studies were better designed or larger than non-funded studies.

Keywords:
Publication Types: Comparative Study MeSH Terms: Drug Industry*/statistics & numerical data Equipment and Supplies*/statistics & numerical data Humans Orthopedics* Publishing/economics* Research Design*/statistics & numerical data Research Support/economics* Research Support/methods Single-Blind Method Treatment Outcome

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909