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, […]
Search Results for: medical research still a scandal
Covid-19 test and trace scandal—it’s not too late to change the story
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 […]
Specialist college training: a potential source of research wastage
“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 […]
Marialena Trivella: The Albus Dumbledore of the medical research world—what would Doug Altman think?
A year on from his death, Marialena Trivella remembers Doug Altman and his lasting legacy on medical research, his colleagues, and friends […]
Kristien Verdonck: “Hurrah, another group just published the research findings that we are about to report”
“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 […]
Richard Smith: The most devastating critique of medicine since Medical Nemesis by Ivan Illich in 1975
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’s research reviews—22 October 2018
Alex Nowbar reviews the latest research from the top medical journals […]
Clara Hellner Gumpert: The Karolinska Institute after the Macchiarini scandal
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, […]
Richard Smith: Is global health too medicalised?
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. […]
Richard Smith: Medical journals: “a colossal problem of quality”
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 […]