Category Archives: Ethics

Dodgy statistics, Ethics, Pseudoscience

The dishonesty of the All Trials campaign

6 Comments

The All Trials campaign is very fond of quoting the statistic that only half of all clinical trials have ever been published. That statistic is not based on good evidence, as I have explained at some length previously.

Now, if they are just sending the odd tweet or writing the odd blogpost with dodgy statistics, that is perhaps not the most important thing in the whole world, as the wonderful XKCD pointed out some time ago:

Wrong on the internet

But when they are using dodgy statistics for fundraising purposes, that is an entirely different matter. On their USA fundraising page, they prominently quote the evidence-free statistic about half of clinical trials not having been published.

Giving people misleading information when you are trying to get money from them is a serious matter. I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the definition of fraud is not dissimilar to that.

The All Trials fundraising page allows comments to be posted, so I posted a comment questioning their “half of all clinical trials unpublished” statistic. Here is a screenshot of the comments section of the page after I posted my comment,  in case you want to see what I wrote:Screenshot from 2016-02-02 18:16:32

Now, if the All Trials campaign genuinely believed their “half of all trials unpublished” statistic to be correct, they could have engaged with my comment. They could have explained why they thought they were right and I was wrong. Perhaps they thought there was an important piece of evidence that I had overlooked. Perhaps they thought there was a logical flaw in my arguments.

But no, they didn’t engage. They just deleted the comment within hours of my posting it. That is the stuff of homeopaths and anti-vaccinationists. It is not the way that those committed to transparency and honesty in science behave.

I am struggling to think of any reasonable explanation for this behaviour other than that they know their “half of all clinical trials unpublished” statistic to be on shaky ground and simply do not wish anyone to draw attention to it. That, in my book, is dishonest.

This is such a shame. The stated aim of the All Trials campaign is entirely honourable. They say that their aim is for all clinical trials to be published. This is undoubtedly important. All reasonable people would agree that to do a clinical trial and keep the results secret is unethical. I do not see why they need to spoil the campaign by using exactly the sort of intellectual dishonesty themselves that they are campaigning against.

Dodgy reporting, Ethics

Chocolate, clueless reporting, and ethics

7 Comments

I have just seen a report of a little hoax pulled on the media by John Bohannon. What he did was to run a small and deliberately badly designed clinical trial, the results of which showed that eating chocolate helps you lose weight.

The trial showed no such thing, of course, as Bohannon points out. It just used bad design and blatant statistical trickery to come up with the result, which should not have fooled anyone who read the paper even with half an eye open.

Bohannon then sent press releases about the study to various media outlets, many of which printed the story completely uncritically. Here’s an example from the Daily Express.

This may be a lovely little demonstration of how lazy and clueless the media are, but I have a nasty feeling it’s actually highly problematic.

The problem is that neither Bohannon’s description of the hoax nor the paper publishing the results of the study make any mention of ethical review. Let’s remember that although the science was deliberately flawed, there was still a real clinical trial here with real human participants.

What were those participants told? Were they deceived about the true nature of the study? According to Bohannon,

“They used Facebook to recruit subjects around Frankfurt, offering 150 Euros to anyone willing to go on a diet for 3 weeks. They made it clear that this was part of a documentary film about dieting, but they didn’t give more detail.”

That certainly sounds to me like deception. It is an absolutely essential feature of clinical research that all research must be approved by an independent ethics committee. This is all the more important if participants are being deceived, which is always a tricky ethical issue. There is no rule that gives an exception to research done as a hoax.

The research was apparently done under the supervision of a German doctor, Gunter Frank. While I can’t claim to be an expert in professional requirements of German doctors, I would be astonished if running a clinical trial without ethical approval was not a serious disciplinary matter.

And yet there is no mention anywhere of ethical approval for this study. I really, really hope that’s just an oversight. Recruiting human participants to a clinical trial without proper ethical approval is absolutely not acceptable.

Update 29 May:

According to the normally reliable Retraction Watch, my fears about this study were justified. They are reporting that Bohannon had confirmed to them that the study did not have ethical approval.

Also, the paper has mysteriously disappeared from the journal’s website, so I’ve replaced the link to the paper with a link to a copy of it preserved thanks to Google’s web cache and Freezepage.