IQWIG.de: “Reporting Bias in medical Research”

Prabhupada, April 10, 1977, Bombay: …They want to be cured immediately. Go to the doctor. “Give me injection, give me tablet, cure me immediately.” That is the Western treatment. Immediately stop it. Here also. A man, a worker, he’s earning twenty rupees a day, and the doctors also take advantage of this rational. “You want to be treated quickly or let…?” And naturally he will say “Quickly.” “Then you have to take injection.” Injection means each injection at least five rupees. He may inject water.

Tamala Krishna: They do that sometimes.

Prabhupada: They do that. This is going on. They do actually, I know. Unnecessarily, little distilled water, and take from him five rupees. If he gives him mixture, he cannot charge from him. But these innocent persons, they have earned. “You want to be treated very quickly or slowly?” He says that “I am earning twenty rupees per day. If required, I will give you so much money. And give me quickly.” Everything cheating and… I know. I was in the medical line. Dr. Bose admitted. He was talking with me very freely because I was just like his son. “My dear boy, I sometimes cheat. We are most sinful.” He said like that. “As soon as we find some rich person, unnecessarily we harass.”

Tamala Krishna: That’s the business of the doctors and the lawyers.

Prabhupada: Right.

Tamala Krishna: How to draw on the condition longer and longer to make more money.

Prabhupada: And if the client is rich, draw.

Tamala Krishna: I have noticed that in the West now they have…, they know that there are certain cures for serious illnesses, and they have outlawed these cures, because they will lose so much money.

Prabhupada: Everything business. “Bring money. Bring money.” Because money is the medium of sense gratification. They have been accustomed to sense gratification. Money is required. So bring money some way or other. And here, the civilization was plain living, simple living. Minimize the expenditure and develop Krishna consciousness. Then you will be happy.
Full Conversation

“Reporting Bias in medical Research – a narrative Review”

IQWiG (Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care) produces HTA reports of drug and non-drug interventions for the decision-making body of the statutory health care funds, the Federal Joint Committee. The process of report production includes requesting information on published and unpublished studies from manufacturers; unfortunately, compliance by manufacturers is inconsistent, as recently shown in the attempted concealment of studies on antidepressants [69]. Reporting bias in antidepressant research has been shown before [16,70]; other well-known cases include Class I anti-arrhythmic drugs [71,72] and selective COX-2 inhibitors [73,74].

The aim of this narrative review was to gain an overview of reporting bias in the medical literature, focussing on publication bias and selective outcome reporting. We wished to explore whether this type of bias has been shown in areas beyond the well-known cases noted above, in order to obtain an impression of how widespread this problem is. The review was based on the screening of full-text publications on reporting bias that had either been obtained by the Institute in the context of its HTA reports and other research work or were identified by the screening of the reference lists of the on-site publications. The retrieved examples were organized according to indications and interventions. We also discuss the effects of reporting bias, as well as the measures that have been implemented to solve this problem.

The term “reporting bias” traditionally refers to the reporting of clinical trials and other types of studies; if one extends this term beyond experimental settings, for example, to the withholding of information on any beneficial medical innovation, then an early example of reporting bias was noted by Rosenberg in his article “Secrecy in medical research”, which describes the invention of the obstetrical forceps. This device was developed by the Chamberlen brothers in Europe in the 17th century; however, it was kept secret for commercial reasons for 3 generations and as a result, many women and neonates died during childbirth [75]. In the context of our paper, we also considered this extended definition of reporting bias.
FULL ARTICLE

Speak Your Mind

*

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.