3 replies to this topic

[stocks]

Implications
The principal implication of our findings, when taken together with the previous studies cited above, is that journal editors should not assume that their reviewers will detect most major flaws in manuscripts. The study paints a rather bleak picture of the effectiveness of peer review.


Results The number of major errors detected varied over the three papers. The interventions had small effects. At baseline (Paper 1) reviewers found an average of 2.58 of the nine major errors, with no notable difference between the groups.

Conclusions Editors should not assume that reviewers will detect most major errors, particularly those concerned with the context of study. Short training packages have only a slight impact on improving error detection.


http://jrsm.rsmjourn...full/101/10/507

[maineman]

Nothing is perfect. And yet, we've cured Leukemia, hypertension, breast cancer, and made huge inroads into previously deadly diseases like Lung cancer. We've developed potent drugs against devastating infectious diseases. We've made vaccinations that prevent horrible deaths and morbidity. We have terrific tools for diabetics and patients with Multiple Sclerosis and cystic fibrosis. We have outstanding understanding of disease at the most molecular level. This week alone we decoded the cancerous genes on a leukemic patient who died, giving us an understanding of treatment resistance which will open new doors to genetic analysis (and treatment) of cancer. Like all boy scouts our motto is do your best. mm

[stocks]

Nothing is perfect. And yet, we've cured Leukemia, hypertension, breast cancer, and made huge inroads into previously deadly diseases like Lung cancer. We've developed potent drugs against devastating infectious diseases. We've made vaccinations that prevent horrible deaths and morbidity. We have terrific tools for diabetics and patients with Multiple Sclerosis and cystic fibrosis. We have outstanding understanding of disease at the most molecular level. This week alone we decoded the cancerous genes on a leukemic patient who died, giving us an understanding of treatment resistance which will open new doors to genetic analysis (and treatment) of cancer.

Like all boy scouts our motto is do your best.

mm

Bless modern medicine.
Travel the world and you'll see that is what people (who don't have it) ache for.

Unfortunately, junk science and scare epidemiology have made inroads in recent decades.
This 'wrong turn' will be reversed in time, but the damage has been great.

[stocks]

Can living in rainy areas really cause one-third of autism cases?

At first, this study sounded like it might have been published in the Journal of Spurious Correlations or an entry for the Spurious Correlations Contest and would provide a note of levity.

One section of that original paper has just been republished in Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, a journal of the American Medical Association. For real. It reported a correlation between higher amounts of rain and snowfall during 1987-2001 in Northwest coastal areas and autism rates among school-aged children in 2005.

That’s it.

Yet, the authors concluded that this association supports their hypothesis of an environmental trigger for autism and went on to speculate on “a number of possibilities of what such an environmental trigger might be.” The first was television and video viewing because “it seems plausible” that it’s associated with precipitation and could possibly be associated with “more serious health problems such as autism.” They went on to put forth even more fanciful and worrying possibilities of unseen environmental exposures, as we’ll look at in a minute, and concluded that this paper proved further research into this link was warranted.


This isn’t funny anymore. If this is what now constitutes medical research in a peer-reviewed journal and is actually being taken seriously by the medical community and major universities, we are in serious trouble.


A critical look at this paper is warranted, in honor of Steve Allen, who coined the term “Dumbth” to describe his “literally daily frustration with the degree of goofola thinking, speech and behavior that had become dominant.” He noted back in the 1990s that most students lacked even a basic grasp of science and ability to reason, and he lamented the dramatic and continuing erosion of American education and intelligence. Many of those students are today’s scientists, educators and doctors.


http://junkfoodscien...ally-cause.html