Some additional thoughts on systematic reviews

This article has been read over 8,500 times and has opened up numerous separate discussions around systematic reviews and the nature of evidence.  It's still a topic I find fascinating and have moved my thinking on further.This post follows my presentation at the Rethinking Evidence-Based Medicine: from rubbish to real meeting a short while ago....In 2005 Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ wrote the article Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies in Plos Medicine.  It starts with a quote from the editor of The Lancet, Richard Horton, "Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry".  It's well worth a read but the salient point is that journals are being co-opted by pharma to help push a skewed view of the research base for a given intervention.  As Richard's article states: "The companies seem to get the results they want not by fiddling the results, which would be far too crude and possibly detectable by peer review, but rather by asking the “right” questions....but there are many ways to hugely increase the chance of producing favourable results, and there are many hired guns who will think up new ways and stay one jump ahead of peer reviewers."Recently he was on Twitter with the same message: Another 'trick' is publication bias, so well presented in the Turner's 2008 NEJM article Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent...
Source: Liberating the literature - Category: Technology Consultants Source Type: blogs