Avoiding bad science III
A student may ask us:
Are there any more things I should watch out for to avoid bad science?
We may say:
Yes, we may ask ourselves where the research originates.
If a company or some other group that wants a specific result paid for the research, we should be careful about taking the results seriously. The findings may be reliable, or the company or group may have put pressure on the researchers to produce certain data.
The student may also ask:
Is there any way I can tell about bad science from the way an article or book is written?
Our reply:
Look up the articles cited in any research paper to see if the results are found elsewhere, especially for any new claims.
If any experiment claims to find wonderful new data that was never seen before, it may because some flaw in the research methods produced the new results. Science experiments should produce the same results under the same conditions. Otherwise any claims about new findings are not reliable, if they cannot be reproduced by other researchers.
If the student wants to know:
Are there any other websites about avoiding bad science?
We may explain:
Dr. Goldacre, mentioned in the first part of this series of blogs on avoiding bad science, has launched a website, AllTrials.
As the website notes:
AllTrials calls for all past and present clinical trials to be registered and their full methods and summary results reported….
What trial information needs to be registered and reported?
- Registration
- Summary results reporting
- A full report
- Individual patient data
Clinical trials are investigations designed to assess the effects – wanted and unwanted – of healthcare interventions in people. The Declaration of Helsinki, which is the World Medical Association’s statement of principles for medical research involving people, states that every investigator running a clinical trial should register it and report its results. Millions of volunteers have participated in clinical trials to help find out more about the effects of treatments on disease, yet that important ethical principle about reporting has been widely ignored. Information on what was done and what was found in these trials could be lost forever to doctors and researchers, leading to bad treatment decisions, missed opportunities for good medicine, and trials being repeated.This is what led to the AllTrials campaign in January 2013, a campaign which is now supported by thousands of individual patients, clinicians and researchers across the world, and by hundreds of organisations representing millions of people. This document sets out more information about achieving a situation globally where all trials are registered and results reported. It is an achievement that will involve regulators and registries, clinical trial funders, universities and institutes, professional and learned societies and medical journals, patients and researchers.
The student may wish to know:
Are there any specific cases of bad science that Dr. Goldacre advises us to be careful about?
Our reply might be:
Yes, there are articles he wrote in The Guardian Newspaper and also a blog that he stopped updating in 2017.
Bad Science warns readers about the scientific claims in detox treatments, which he claims to be false. Also, cosmetics companies often use difficult scientific-sounding words to try to sell their products to customers who do not know much about science. Scientific claims made for homeopathic treatments and vitamin supplements are also discussed.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)