I thought this article was relevant because we so often see this kind of thing in everything from diet trials to statin tests.

Some researchers took a sampling of academic scientific studies that had negative results and found that it’s very common to put ‘spin’ on the results.


Don't like your findings? Spin them away

They took every trial published over one month that had a negative result – 72 in total – and then went through each trial report to look for evidence of "spin": people trying to present the results in a positive light, or distract the reader from the fact that the trial was negative.
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So what was in these trial reports? Spin. Sometimes the researchers found some other positive result in the spreadsheets and pretended that this was what they intended to count as a positive result all along. Sometimes they reported a dodgy subgroup analysis. Sometimes they claimed to have found that their treatment was "non-inferior" to the comparison treatment (when in reality a "non-inferiority" trial requires a bigger sample of people, because you might have missed a true difference simply by chance). Sometimes they just brazenly banged on about how great the treatment was, despite the evidence.
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There a lots of things in place to stop this kind of stuff from happening. Trials are supposed to be registered, before they begin, with their protocol described in full, so that highly motivated individuals can go back and check if researchers changed their minds about what constituted a positive result, retrospectively, after the results came in. There are also reporting guidelines, such as Consort, which formalise the information that is supposed to appear in any scientific paper resulting from a trial.

But there is no enforcement for any of this, everyone is free to ignore it, and commonly enough – as with newspapers, politicians, and quacks – uncomfortable facts are cheerfully spun away.


Full article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentis...ad-science-spin

Why am I not surprised? We see more and more evidence of spin as actually data comes out supporting a low carb diet. Just this morning I heard Dr. Rosenfeld on Fox saying that the latest data showed eating less meat will help you lose weight regardless of calorie intake.

Really??? Based on what? How does it supposedly work? What was the study?

Nice article, Turtle; thanks for posting. I might head over the local university library and see if I can get a copy of the JAMA issue that this appeared in. I'd love to see some actual examples of what they found.