Disappointing Cancer Study Results Go Unreported 77
An anonymous reader writes "Science News reports on a new study showing that most cancer drug trial results are never published, probably leaving patients vulnerable to cocktails that have already been shown to be dangerous or useless."
First Post ... sadly (Score:1, Insightful)
Where's the surprise in this? No news here.
More complaining and second-guessing (Score:2, Insightful)
Cancer patients are already vulnerable to cancer.
Not sure what the point of this story is. Sometimes things don't work out the way everyone wishes they would. Apparently every decision to say something or not say something always has to be second-guessed by third parties who have no responsibility or accountability -- but they get to demand things anyway.
I'm sure a lot more of these failed trials would be published if there was a financial incentive. The complainers should start a foundation and start paying the people who have better things to do than to write papers and publish info that's of no use to them. They should do that instead of complaining.
Re:More complaining and second-guessing (Score:5, Insightful)
Cargo Cult Science (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing new (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cancer treatment is a product (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they'd much rather have those 10 years worth of payments up front, so they can invest or re-invest it.
You seriously don't think people would pay more for a week-long cure than for a week's worth of "treatment-in-perpetuity?"
Re:More complaining and second-guessing (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just cherry picking - which wouldn't matter so much in itself. Drugs are very hit and miss you expect lots of things to just not work.
The problem is they study drugs X, Y, and Z in combination and find that not only does it not help it makes the patients worse. They don't bother publishing since they didn't get anything useful out of it and no one is going to cite them...
A year later another group decides to study X, Y, and Z in combination. So a pointless study that harms patients is done because this second group never found out about the previous study in their literature search.
Re:First Post ... sadly (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, this is new because someone's done the actual study and shown the degree to which studies don't go reported. Even if only half of the unreported studies were because of poor results, that's enough to skew things very, very badly.
Anyone doing this should get put in jail for a long, long time. It may not be fraud in the sense that they're publishing fraudulent results, but by not publishing results they're creating fraudulent overall data, with possibly deadly results. This needs to stop.
Re:I'm publishing the results of a failed cancer t (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, because that is exactly the same thing. *sigh*
What if the researchers developing new drugs and treatments had access to the failures of others so that they knew what *not* to try. Outside of your pathetically childish and facetious example about Epsom salts, this information could be invaluable. Would you have wanted your mother to die because scientists working for Pfizer didn't tell the community about a failed treatment that they had already tried which GlaxoSmithkline then spent 2 years replicating, at the expense of another possibly more fruitful avenue of research?