Cochrane blog: 'cardinal rule: separate clinical evaluation of innovations from their innovators

[Esther12]

Seems an obvious point of relevance to us:

This illustrates what we feel should become a cardinal rule: the need to separate the clinical evaluation of innovations from their innovators, who irrespective of any of their endeavours to be ‘neutral’ have a substantial investment, whether emotional, perhaps financial, or in terms of professional or international status, in the successful implementation of their idea. It is noteworthy, but perhaps incidental, that the finding of the Japanese trial in favour of external immobilisation is in contrast to a lack of differences between external and internal immobilisation found by the other two randomised trials, both of which were at high risk of bias only from lack of blinding.

The blog itself is mainly about an example of this, but could be of interest:

http://www.thecochranelibrary.com/d...eness-the-haphazard-route-to-finding-out.html