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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15498

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

Dudley N
JAMA's rule needs time limit.
BMJ. 2009 Apr 21; 338:b1615:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/338/apr21_3/b1615


Abstract:

JAMA’s policy in relation to those who may raise concerns about selective disclosures or misleading information in a published article is not altogether unreasonable if it had a time limit for the period of requested silence during a fair investigation of concerns.1 The real question for journal editors should be how long is reasonable: five weeks, five months, 15 months?

The BMJ’s standard seems to be something less than five months, given that it published Leo’s concerns. If the desirable investigation period is agreed to be less than five months, what should it be so as to account for matters such as complexity or ease of contact with authors? Medical journal editors should work together to come up with a universal policy that is fair to both a journal and the person raising any concern about a journal’s potentially misleading or incorrect content.

 

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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