"About AllTrials:
The AllTrials campaign was launched in January 2013 and calls for all past and present clinical trials to be registered and their results reported. It is an initiative of Bad Science, BMJ, Centre for Evidence-based Medicine, Cochrane Collaboration, James Lind Initiative, PLOS and Sense About Science and is being led in the US by Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice. Since then, the AllTrials petition has been signed by 79138 people and 489 organisations."
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What you can do today:
http://www.alltrials.net/get-involved/individuals/
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All Trials News:
http://www.alltrials.net/news/
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TEDMED 2012:"Ben Goldacre: What doctors don't know about the drugs they prescribe" ( video 13:29 )
https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_kn...
"When a new drug gets tested, the results of the trials should be published for the rest of the medical world — except much of the time, negative or inconclusive findings go unreported, leaving doctors and researchers in the dark. In this impassioned talk, Ben Goldacre explains why these unreported instances of negative data are especially misleading and dangerous."
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...
Now you might say, well, that's an extremely unusual example, and I wouldn't want to be guilty of the same kind of cherry-picking and selective referencing that I'm accusing other people of. But it turns out that this phenomenon of publication bias has actually been very, very well studied. So here is one example of how you approach it. The classic model is, you get a bunch of studies where you know that they've been conducted and completed, and then you go and see if they've been published anywhere in the academic literature. So this took all of the trials that had ever been conducted on antidepressants that were approved over a 15-year period by the FDA. They took all of the trials which were submitted to the FDA as part of the approval package. So that's not all of the trials that were ever conducted on these drugs, because we can never know if we have those, but it is the ones that were conducted in order to get the marketing authorization. And then they went to see if these trials had been published in the peer-reviewed academic literature. And this is what they found. It was pretty much a 50-50 split. Half of these trials were positive, half of them were negative, in reality. But when they went to look for these trials in the peer-reviewed academic literature, what they found was a very different picture. Only three of the negative trials were published, but all but one of the positive trials were published. Now if we just flick back and forth between those two, you can see what a staggering difference there was between reality and what doctors, patients, commissioners of health services, and academics were able to see in the peer-reviewed academic literature. We were misled, and this is a systematic flaw in the core of medicine.
8:18
In fact, there have been so many studies conducted on publication bias now, over a hundred, that they've been collected in a systematic review, published in 2010, that took every single study on publication bias that they could find. Publication bias affects every field of medicine. About half of all trials, on average, go missing in action, and we know that positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings.
8:45
This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine. If I flipped a coin 100 times but then withheld the results from you from half of those tosses, I could make it look as if I had a coin that always came up heads. But that wouldn't mean that I had a two-headed coin. That would mean that I was a chancer and you were an idiot for letting me get away with it. (Laughter) But this is exactly what we blindly tolerate in the whole of evidence-based medicine. And to me, this is research misconduct. If I conducted one study and I withheld half of the data points from that one study, you would rightly accuse me, essentially, of research fraud. And yet, for some reason, if somebody conducts 10 studies but only publishes the five that give the result that they want, we don't consider that to be research misconduct. And when that responsibility is diffused between a whole network of researchers, academics, industry sponsors, journal editors, for some reason we find it more acceptable, but the effect on patients is damning.
...
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