This sucks: negative drug trial reports often get buried

[thewayne]

"When doctors are looking to treat an illness, they often rely on reports in medical journals. Sometimes those reports describe striking successes with a particular therapy. Less frequently, they highlight failures. To physicians, learning what doesn’t work or has troubling side effects can be as important as knowing which therapies hit a home run.

Yet doctors — and the reporters who highlight research news — are getting a very skewed picture of research findings if they rely on what makes it into major medical journals.

The reason: Data from fewer than one in five research trials are ever published. Findings from the vast majority of human trials become buried for reasons that may never come to light, according to a new study in The Oncologist. It’s published early and online September 24."

*sigh* Too early in the morning to comment on shit like this.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/36805/title/Cancer_data_Burying_bad_news

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/27/2240209

Comments

[silveradept]

Ugh. And that brilliant person who would see how to tweak the formula to make it work never gets the chance, do they?