Richard Smith: Medical research—still a scandal
Twenty years ago this week the statistician Doug Altman published an editorial in the BMJ arguing that much medical research was of poor quality and misleading. In his editorial entitled, […]
Twenty years ago this week the statistician Doug Altman published an editorial in the BMJ arguing that much medical research was of poor quality and misleading. In his editorial entitled, […]
The recent House of Commons Public Accounts Committee Report illuminates the absurd cost and failures of the NHS Test and Trace service. [1,2] It seems that the UK government is […]
“Much poor research arises because researchers feel compelled for career reasons to carry out research that they are ill equipped to perform” — Douglas Altman 1994 The research literature has […]
A year on from his death, Marialena Trivella remembers Doug Altman and his lasting legacy on medical research, his colleagues, and friends […]
“Hurrah, another group just published the research findings that we are about to report!” These are words of comfort to authors who feel disappointed when they are confronted with ideas […]
Seamus O’Mahony, a gastroenterologist from Cork, has written the most devastating critique of modern medicine since Ivan Illich in Medical Nemesis in 1975. O’Mahony cites Illich and argues that many […]
Alex Nowbar reviews the latest research from the top medical journals […]
In 2010, Paolo Macchiarini, an Italian doctor and researcher, was recruited as a guest professor to the Karolinska Institute, and as a surgeon to the Karolinska University Hospital. In 2008, […]
When I teach young doctors in Amsterdam about responding to NCD (non-communicable disease) in low and middle income countries, I ask them how they would allocate 100 units of resource. […]
We knew that we had “a colossal problem of quality” when we began the peer review congresses in 1989, said Drummond Rennie, creator of the congresses, at the seventh congress […]