Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12965

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: news

Goldstein J.
Hip-Protector Maker Sues Harvard Doc Over JAMA Study
The Wall Street Journal Health Blog 2008 Feb 29
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/02/29/hip-protector-maker-sues-harvard-doc-over-jama-study/

Full text:

A Harvard doc who published a study in JAMA that concluded hip protectors don’t reduce the risk of fractures in the elderly is being sued by a company that makes hip protectors.

The researcher’s “JAMA-published conclusions have wrongfully damaged the entire field of hip protection, including the HipSaver brand,” the president of HipSaver Inc. said in a statement quoted by the Boston Globe’s blog White Coat Notes.

JAMA wouldn’t comment and the author, Douglas P. Kiel, couldn’t be reached, the Globe said. Kiel declined to comment for a story on the lawsuit that ran this week in the Harvard Crimson.

The study, published last year, is online here. More than 1,000 people at 37 different nursing homes wore a hip protector on one side of the body. Over 20 months of follow-up, the study found that the rate of fracture was no different between the protected and the unprotected side.

“These results add to the increasing body of evidence that hip protectors, as currently designed, are not effective for preventing hip fracture among nursing home residents,” Kiel and his colleagues wrote. The paper included 47 footnotes citing relevant research.

“It would have been more appropriate and scientifically accurate for Dr. Kiel to limit his conclusions to the specific hip protector that he studied,” HipSaver’s president said in his statement. The company said in a refutation of the JAMA study on its Web site: “It is totally irresponsible for public health opinion leaders with tax-funded grants to study and publish the results of a dud hip protector and then trash the entire field of hip protection.”

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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