to be a little in love with Ben Goldacre?

[entropyglitter]

Just read 'bad science' (finally) and I think I am in love.....

my favourite bit was Gillian McKeith thinking that oxygen (generated by chlorophyll) in your gut is not only plausible, but at all a good idea....

presumably this is at the same time as main lining anti-oxidants (which had been shown to increase your risk of disease rather than decrease it).

I think I may finally have gotten to the bottom of all this perceived CoI and being in the pocket of business.

I think it is about facts. See there can be two reasons why you might agree with someone. One you are biased and only agree because you have something to gain by it. Two that person is correct (in that they are supported by the balance of evidence).

BG agrees with and supports the view of a lot of scientists because both his view and theirs are based on the balance of the evidence.

Gaia-Health appear to be accusing SAS of bias because they are stating facts that are agreed on and indeed used in drug discovery processes by big pharma. That doesnt make them biased, it makes them accurate.

The flip side of this is that if you strongly agree with someone who's opinion goes strongly against the balance of evidence then there usually is some sort of CoI behind it.

As a final analogy, its easier to prove that student A was copying exam answers off student B if both students have identical WRONG answers than if they have identical RIGHT answers.

I do wish people would read what others have written.

I never mentioned any controversy over the link between HIV and AIDS.

I mentioned clinical diagnostic criteria being used in place of blood testing to give AIDS diagnoses and drugs to sub-Saharan Africans. I perfectly openly said that I didn't know much about it, I was just aware that it seemed to be an area of controversy.

That might have been clearer if you hadn't quoted me out of context and then I wouldn't have needed to bother reminding you of what I actually said.

With regards to lobbying to change libel laws - presumably these things work both ways. I mean, would the changes SAS are lobbying for stop something like Wakefield suing the editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal for example? (I'm using this as a hypothetical example as Wakefield's lawsuit has been filed in the US so UK laws don't apply.)

The problem with your analysis though entropy is that things like Vioxx happen. So it would seem that there are problems with the balance of evidence system as it operates in the real world.

This is not because there is anything wrong with the concept of balance of evidence. It is because it does not operate within a financial and political vacuum and is open to manipulation.

Sorry beach not being deliberately think honestly but I dont get the connection to vioxx?

Im saying that its expected that people agree when the balance of evidence is heavily on one side.

What does this have to do with vioxx? Dont most people agree that they fiddled the numbers and that is a bad thing? Certainly BG has said as much?

The balance of evidence can change btw. And when this happens most scientists will change with it, even if it their own hypothesis that has been disproved, or their own data that turns out to have been the statistical outlier.

thick..sorry

Beach, Ben Goldacre is very critical of Merck and how they operated in the vioxx scandal. How on earth is the vioxx scandal anything to do with Ben Goldacre - other than he has criticised the way big pharma present/suppress their drug trial results? It's one of the first thing he talks about on the youtube clip I posted.

Boulevard you ask what authority I assess conflict of interest, I write for journals which ask you to declare your conflict of interests and assess these when reviewing the work of others (in good peer review journals, not a newspaper). I am pretty familiar with all kinds of declared conflicts of interest, but having a father who once did some work in a similar vein, or indeed having colleagues who also work in a similar vein and agree with your position is not a conflict of interest. In fact, it's very normal, especially as others have said if the position taken is pretty mainstream and supported by the weight of evidence at any one time.

"I mean, would the changes SAS are lobbying for stop something like Wakefield suing the editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal for example?"

I thought the SAS were supposed to be protecting the interests of Big Pharma and agribusiness. It is clearly in their interests to be able to use their money to silence legitimate scientific criticism of their products.

I'm not sure why your minor example of Wakefield suing the BMJ would be something Big Pharma would intervene in, to the detriment of their own position.

If that is what you are suggesting, that somehow Sense About Science's libel reform campaign is somehow in Big Pharma's interests?

Why would you be so wedded to the idea that Sense About Science are Big Pharma that you would attempt that sort of convoluted thinking? Does the whole conspiracy theory start looking a bit shaky if you accept that they might be legitimate?

Hardgoing it was Thunderboltsandlightning who questioned you, not Boulevard.

Just to go back to the original post, he is on QI at 10pm tonight. Think its a repeat but still a chance to watch the man himself.

I love this article on Gaiahealth.

gaia-health.com/gaia-blog/2011-09-23/subnuclear-particles-may-move-faster-than-light-who-says-homeopathy-cant-work/

Ooops, thanks 'SweetLilyTea' and sorry to Boulevard.

Before anyone says, but you are talking about journal disclosure of conflict of interest and not newspapers, the criteria for journals is much much higher and they do print them before a paper. When did you ever see a disclosure in a newspaper (like how the beauty editors get all those lovely products, or who sent the newspaper a press release that they printed as fact...)?

You know it feels a bit vindictive with 8 or 9 of us going on at poor beach. Seemed a bit more balanced before JF got withdrawn (more by post volume than numbers obviously)

Will admit to a little childish cackling at the Gaia-Health page.....

I think the Vioxx thing could happen in any system because it was basically fraud...

I guess the only way you could avoid that would be if there was public funding for drug trials and the information was published for free. And that's never going to happen because it's far too expensive for any government to contemplate, so we are very much dependant on the pharma companies doing the right thing. Surprising it works as well as it does, considering.

Surprising it works as well as it does, considering

Doesn't suprise me too much. Because at the heart of pharma there are scientists, most of whom have a regard for reality, and most of whom really do get a buzz out of creating medicines which help people.

Thread doesn't make much sense now all JF's posts have been deleted. Is it all part of the conspiracy? Is Mumsnet in the pocket of Big Pharma?

I mentioned Vioxx with regards to how the scientific principle of balance of evidence is open to manipulation. It took a long time and thousands of deaths for Merck's manipulation of the balance of evidence to come to light.

Sweetlily, I don't think BG has anything to do with the Vioxx scandal

As for Sense About Science;

A summary from Monbiot in the Guardian

Fiona Fox chief executive of the Science Media Centre and also involved in Sense About Science's Working Party on Peer Review (scroll to page 8 for her name).

Michael Fitzpatrick frequent contributor to Spiked online and trustee for Sense About Science

Claire Fox director of the Institute of Ideas

A more in depth examination of what Monbiot covers.

So it would seem that there is something not quite right going on here.

The Monbiot article cited by Beachcomber - which rightly draws attention to the cultishness of the old Living Marxism brigade and their entryist tactics across a swathe of organisations not just SAS - is from 2003. The working party on Peer Review is from the same period. Fiona Fox, one of the 20 people who worked on it, may have obnoxious personal politics (Rwandan genocide denial) but that doesn't invalidate the report on a completely different subject.

If you want up to date info about the SAS leadership, its board of Trustees is here www.senseaboutscience.org/pages/board-of-trustees.html and advisory board here www.senseaboutscience.org/pages/advisory-council.html. Whatever issues they may have had a decade ago, I can't see anyone on those lists now who is not credible or eminent in their field.

On a side note there's been some excellent investigative work done into the Vioxx scandal. By, er, Brian Deer. The ultimate antivaccer hatefigure who is always accused of being a big pharma shill.

Ahh but what is a mere 9 years outdatedness between friends....

I've actually found that Sense About Science stuff quite interesting, and will do some more reading. The Monbiot piece, in particular.

I think this thread is possibly the most bizarre I've ever contributed on tbh! Beach, sorry to pick at you, but why mention vioxx then, if you acknowledge BG had nothing to do with it. I don't think you'll find anyone here disagrees that it was a scandalous fraud. Including BG.

Catkin the link you just gave to the board of trustees of SAS is the same as the one I just gave - the one with Michael Fitzpatrick on it

I appreciate that Monbiot's article is not recent but it does not seem that SAS is a completely different organisation now, to the one it was in 2003.

Tracy Brown is still the managing director for instance.

I linked to the peer review document, not because I have an issue with it, but because it demonstrates a connection between Fiona Fox of the Science Media Centre, and Sense About Science.

Montbiot talked to Lobbywatch about this - link for anyone interested.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that everybody who has anything to do with SAS is dodgy. There are many respected and eminent mainstream scientists who are associated with it.

Montbiot talks a bit about that in the interview.

The libel law stuff would seem to fit in more with the Marxism roots than protecting the interests of Big Pharma. That doesn't seem to fit so much. The GM thing about a manufactured controversy, however, does seem dodgy, although the last site doesn't do its credibility much good when it whines about homeopathy.

However, I agree with the earlier post that the organisation has grown greatly since the early days and at least seems to be making the effort to meet its stated aims.

No worries Sweetlily.

I think Vioxx came up in the first place because I suggested that Goldacre's Guardian article on the affair was pretty wishy washy.

I'm not drawing any particular conclusions from that - it just came up as part of the discussion of him going after easy targets. Somebody suggested that he went after big pharma too, and I linked to BG's article and commented that I thought he had been pretty easy on both Merck and Elesiver considering the scale of their fraud and the thousands of lives lost due to it.

That's all really.

Vioxx came up again with the balance of evidence thing only because it is an easy well known example of manipulation and abuse of scientific practice. I used Vioxx because it is recent and people know about it - I could have used thalidomide as an example here. Nothing to do with Goldacre specifically.

It is the nature of MN threads to have the odd tangent that is only tenuously related to the OP.

The climate change angle is interesting, too. As is the bit in the interview with Monbiot asking about the eminent scientists and whether they know the background of some of the people with links to the group. As Giraffe says, it doesn't seem to be a Pharma link, so much as a Marxist one. Odd!