(researchers can never say “You didn’t give us the effect we expected, so we think you’re cheating and we’re not going to pay you for this study and we’re blacklisting you for future studies” without opening a can of worms)
I linked the previous post on my Facebook and got this comment from Paul Riddell:
“This reminds me of tales related by friends living in Austin, which has both the University of Texas and a big pharmaceutical testing facility. Although researchers would swear up and down that they’d never withhold payment for testing if a test subject showed, say, severe allergic reations, it happened all of the time. To that end, subjects learned very early on, and they’d pass it on to friends in need of cash, that they should never report adverse symptoms. And now we see the legacy of this, with lots of very disturbing side effects only now being recognized from the line of antidepressants tested there.”
The research itself is full of bad incentives. Ben Goldacre has frequently suggested a database of all clinical trials, including failed ones. He has a raft of newspaper columns on the hows and whys of bad science in medicine. Professional patients are the very least of it.
I linked the previous post on my Facebook and got this comment from Paul Riddell:
“This reminds me of tales related by friends living in Austin, which has both the University of Texas and a big pharmaceutical testing facility. Although researchers would swear up and down that they’d never withhold payment for testing if a test subject showed, say, severe allergic reations, it happened all of the time. To that end, subjects learned very early on, and they’d pass it on to friends in need of cash, that they should never report adverse symptoms. And now we see the legacy of this, with lots of very disturbing side effects only now being recognized from the line of antidepressants tested there.”
That is seriously f’ed up.
Likewise, the fact that we’re better at checking for serial credit card applicants than serial test patients.
The research itself is full of bad incentives. Ben Goldacre has frequently suggested a database of all clinical trials, including failed ones. He has a raft of newspaper columns on the hows and whys of bad science in medicine. Professional patients are the very least of it.