{"id":41839,"date":"2014-02-27T10:16:43","date_gmt":"2014-02-27T15:16:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/?post_type=voices&p=41839"},"modified":"2014-02-27T10:24:03","modified_gmt":"2014-02-27T15:24:03","slug":"poor-medical-research-what-has-changed-in-20-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/2014\/02\/27\/poor-medical-research-what-has-changed-in-20-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Poor Medical Research: What Has Changed in 20 Years?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a recent BMJ.com blog<\/a>, Richard Smith, former Editor of the BMJ<\/em>, comments on the Lancet<\/em> series on waste in research<\/a> and refers to an editorial by statistician Doug Altman<\/a> \u2013 published 20 years ago. I wanted to quote from the Smith blog (which quotes from the Altman editorial) and get some discussion going on our site. I found it to be quite profound.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy, asked Altman, is so much research poor? Because ‘researchers feel compelled for career reasons to carry out research that they are ill equipped to perform, and nobody stops them.’ In other words, too much medical research was conducted by amateurs who were required to do some research in order to progress in their medical careers. Ethics committees, who had to approve research, were ill equipped to detect scientific flaws, and the flaws were eventually detected by statisticians, like Altman, working as firefighters. Quality assurance should be built in at the beginning of research not the end, particularly as many journals lacked statistical skills and simply went ahead and published misleading research.<\/em><\/p>\n

‘The poor quality of much medical research is widely acknowledged,’ wrote Altman, ‘yet disturbingly the leaders of the medical profession seem only minimally concerned about the problem and make no apparent efforts to find a solution.’<\/em><\/p>\n

Altman\u2019s conclusion was: ‘We need less research, better research, and research done for the right reasons. Abandoning using the number of publications as a measure of ability would be a start.’\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

What do you think?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent blog and a 20-year-old editorial has Harlan Krumholz wondering: Why there is so much poor medical research?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":211,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1404,1554],"class_list":["post-41839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-research","tag-research-misconduct"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/211"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41839\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}