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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16468

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

Wise J
International trials registry is missing important information, study finds
BMJ 2009 Sep 7; 339:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/339/sep07_1/b3627


Abstract:

Researchers have found that important information is missing from many trials recorded on the international register of clinical trials ClinicalTrials.gov, a publicly accessible database of clinical trials managed by the US National Library of Medicine.

Joseph Ross, assistant professor of geriatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, and colleagues sampled a cross section of trials on the registry. After excluding phase I safety trials, they identified 7515 trials that were registered within ClinicalTrials.gov after 31 December 1999 and whose record indicated trial completion by 8 June 2007.

All of the trials reported the essential information required by the registry, but optional data including the primary outcome of the trial and start and end dates were less complete. For example, only two thirds of the trials reported their primary outcome (www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000144).

Dr Ross warns, “The potential of ClinicalTrials.gov registry to address selective publication and better inform . . .

 

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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