Ben Goldacre: checking if clinical trials reported what they said they would

[Hip]

BG makes a lot of money from writing on bad science.

Where did you read that? The Guardian pays journalists £310 per 1,000 words, so I should think Goldacre gets around £200 for each Bad Science article he writes. With his weekly articles, that will amount to around £10,000 a year; hardly a fortune.

 

[barbc56]

I think it would be prudent to do some fact checking before posting.

I get the impression, @Hip, that because some may not like BG, posters are putting him in a no win situation and it seems that if others that we do like would not be criticized for the same behavior.

This is getting off topic. It might be better if we address what BG says.

Barb

LOL I didn't realize this thread was started last Dec. Everyone's just repeating themselves and that includes me!

 

[BurnA]

Where did you read that? The Guardian pays journalists £310 per 1,000 words, so I should think Goldacre gets around £200 for each Bad Science article he writes. With his weekly articles, that will amount to around £10,000 a year; hardly a fortune.

He sells a lot of books. One of them is even called Bad Science.

Did you really not know that ?

 

[BurnA]

I think it would be prudent to do some fact checking before posting.

I get the impression, @Hip, that because some may not like BG, posters are putting him in a no win situation and it seems that if others that we do like would not be criticized for the same behavior.

This is getting off topic. It might be better if we address what BG says.

Barb

LOL I didn't realize this thread was started last Dec. Everyone's just repeating themselves and that includes me!

Barb, I dont know how you form your impressions but I can assure you I have nothing personal against BG.
I even bought a book of his one time, and although I didn't enjoy it I won't hold it against him.
I am just surprised there are people here who refuse to question that he has shown absolutely no interest in PACE even though this is exactly the type of thing he should be all over..

His only excuse is that he is too busy....eh too busy doing what ...writing about bad science ?

I think he put himself in this situation.

 

[worldbackwards]

Not going to get my hopes up but this is good to see

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/695222601371754498

If you read that whole sequence, he says he isn't going to get involved because he's got a lot on and he's sick of James Coyne sending him insults. Which is hardly surprising, whichever way you look at it.

 

[wdb]

Here's the whole thing, at least it ends on a positive note

 

[user9876]

If you read that whole sequence, he says he isn't going to get involved because he's got a lot on and he's sick of James Coyne sending him insults. Which is hardly surprising, whichever way you look at it.

Worth saying PACE has been obviously bad form many years Coyne has only recently got involved. Those who claim to be skeptics in the UK such as Goldacre have been silent (others were very supportive of PACE). So I think it is misleading for Goldacre to say he is not getting involved because of Coynes style he was not getting involved prior to Coyne being involved. I think one of Goldacre's few comments on it or around ME was to call patients vile in a tweet.

 

[worldbackwards]

Worth saying PACE has been obviously bad form many years Coyne has only recently got involved. Those who claim to be skeptics in the UK such as Goldacre have been silent (others were very supportive of PACE). So I think it is misleading for Goldacre to say he is not getting involved because of Coynes style he was not getting involved prior to Coyne being involved. I think one of Goldacre's few comments on it or around ME was to call patients vile in a tweet.

I don't doubt Goldacre would never have gotten involved, or why. But Coyne makes it easy for him to look like the wronged party going on like he has done.

 

[Mrs Sowester]

Ewww, that wasn't pretty... But Goldacre was never going to push Wessely under the bus, quite something that he criticised PACE, well kind of.

 

[TiredSam]

ben goldacre ‏@bengoldacre 5 Std.vor 5 Stunden
@CoyneoftheRealm You moved on to repeatedly pretend to your followers that I want PACE exempted from usual considerations on transparency.

CoyneoftheRealm doesn't lead or have followers, he's just telling the story. Pretending that Coyne has decided to become the guru to a band of known trouble-makers is an annoying narrative that seems to be popping up at the moment. PWME made up their mind about Ben Goldacre a long time before Coyne came on the scene, pretending we're being whipped up against BG by Coyne is spin and bullshit. He's just come to the same conclusions that we came to a long time ago.

So much personal bollox. BG should be getting involved for his own sake, as PACE goes against everything he's preached about bad science.

 

[Chrisb]

CoyneoftheRealm doesn't lead or have followers, he's just telling the story. Pretending that Coyne has decided to become the guru to a band of known trouble-makers is an annoying narrative that seems to be popping up at the moment. PWME made up their mind about Ben Goldacre a long time before Coyne came on the scene, pretending we're being whipped up against BG by Coyne is spin and bullshit. He's just come to the same conclusions that we came to a long time ago.

One might give BG the benefit of the doubt on this. He might be using the term "followers" merely to indicate those who follow JC on Twitter rather than in any wider sense, although it is ambiguous.

 

[BurnA]

Ewww, that wasn't pretty... But Goldacre was never going to push Wessely under the bus, quite something that he criticised PACE, well kind of.

That's the thing....kind of. Well actually he didn't really - as his comments are qualified such as: "common in trials throughout medicine", "in many cases" etc.
Very non specific sitting on the fence type general comments.

As @user9876 points out, he has had years to talk about PACE, Coyne has only been around for less than a year. we can't buy that one.

 

[Hip]

He sells a lot of books. One of them is even called Bad Science. Did you really not know that ?

I am well aware he writes books. However, as for his selling a lot of books, have you seen his sales figures?

 

[BurnA]

I am well aware he writes books. However, as for his selling a lot of books, have you seen his sales figures?

Half a million for bad science.
What's your point ? I feel this is going nowhere and you are raising questions for the sake of it. You could have easily looked that up on Google. If you have a point by all means express it. If you don't think he makes a lot of money from writing about bad science you are entitled to your opinion but that's not how I see it.

 

[Mrs Sowester]

That's the thing....kind of. Well actually he didn't really - as his comments are qualified such as: "common in trials throughout medicine", "in many cases" etc.
Very non specific sitting on the fence type general comments.

As @user9876 points out, he has had years to talk about PACE, Coyne has only been around for less than a year. we can't buy that one.

Expecting BG to criticise Wessely is too much to hope for, the UK scientific establishment is too small and close knit. When it's not what you know, but who you know it would be one hell of a risk for him to stab his mentor in the back - and it's just not cricket is it? BG's 'criticism' of PACE was carefully worded and qualified and, I think, the best we'll get from him on the matter.
This is why we need an advocate like Coyne, who, being from a different culture isn't bound by our British politeness.

 

[Hip]

You could have easily looked that up on Google.

I did, but could not find any info. Where did you see the half million sales figure for Bad Science, may I ask?

If you don't think he makes a lot of money from writing about bad science you are entitled to your opinion but that's not how I see it.

Even if he does make a decent amount of money, I don't really see how this makes it incumbent upon Goldacre to come to the rescue of ME/CFS patients.

 

[Hip]

Expecting BG to criticise Wessely is too much to hope for, the UK scientific establishment is too small and close knit. When it's not what you know, but who you know it would be one hell of a risk for him to stab his mentor in the back - and it's just not cricket is it?

Exactly. Ben Goldacre may be stabbing a former mentor in the back, and shooting himself in the foot at the same. Not what I would consider smart move.

 

[Aurator]

Here's the whole thing
View attachment 14523

Goldacre was always going to be after any opportunity to seize the moral high ground if doing so offered a plausible way of wriggling out of denouncing PACE. He says he doesn't want PACE exempted from the usual considerations on transparency, and yet he still says nothing to denounce it.

Saying that he's "sure PACE exhibits many of the bad features that are common in trials throughout medicine" implies
a). he hasn't looked at the specific flaws in PACE;
b). he's sure the flaws will just be the usual problems you'd commonly expect with medical trials.

Neither of these makes Goldacre look good.

a). suggests an unaccountable lack of interest on his part in the very thing about which there is so much controversy and upon which he's spending so much time responding to Coyne;
b). is an attempt to get people to regard PACE's flaws as unexceptional and therefore not particularly serious.

All the negative criticism of PACE over the years from far more people than just Coyne, together with the extreme lengths the PACE investigators are currently going to to keep the data under wraps, should tell anyone who is even half awake that PACE's flaws are anything but unexceptional, and their seriousness can be quantified by the large number of sick people who can testify to not having been helped, or actually harmed, by the clinical application of the trial's conclusions (or should that be "hypotheses"?).

The extent of the damage done by PACE's "bad features" is something Goldacre has not given sufficient consideration to, it seems; if he had given it sufficient consideration, he might feel less justified in wriggling out of obligations that his loudly professed intellectual priorities already place him under.

 

[Snowdrop]

I think he put himself in this situation.

Since his mission in life is to call out bad science--I would have to agree.
All he had to do was check out the criticisms and see if they held any merit. Then do a little digging to verify. Not all that much effort since the initial work was done for him--in abundance and thoroughly and clearly.

And we are a group of people who could benefit greatly from a champion of bad science pointing this out.
It's not just a theoretical adjustment fixing some bad numbers--it has a real affect on so many people's lives.

We can misbehave (we haven't) but if we did it shouldn't have any affect on how BG takes his responsibility toward calling out bad science.

 

[Mrs Sowester]

@Aurator & Snowdrop,
It is really disappointing he's not come through for us, but we can't demand the man commit professional suicide. We can't demand he become an advocate. But the tide is turning elsewhere, the rest of the planet is turning on PACE and it will either be blown out of the water dramatically or it'll be side-lined and allowed to die quietly forgotten in a corner.

I know someone who was a nurse in London during the 70s, she nursed a man who died of Crohnes in his last days. Even after he died the party line was that his illness was somatic - and that is how the NHS operates - until a clear cause or cure is found for an illness it is seen as the fault of the patient. When the results of the Rituximab trials are published everything will change for the better.