In article <b9401f8a.0311191424.27fd784e@posting.google.com>,
jspaceman@linuxquestions.net (Jason Spaceman) wrote:

No, not Christian students at Bob Jones U. or Oral Roberts U., but at
the U. of Oslo in Norway??!!

From the article:
------------------------------
Medical student John David Johannessen and the leader of the Christian
Medical Students Circle have petitioned the medical faculty at the
University of Oslo for lectures "that not only argue the cause for
evolution, but also the evidence against", student newspaper
Universitas reports.
-----------------------------

Read it at
http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article.jhtml?articleID=672888

I'd hate to wake up on an operating table someday and see one of these
lunkheads standing over me with a scalpel in his hand.

News Admin <news@news.demon.net> wrote:

The Mad Doctor <sawbones@uniserve.com> averred

At presentations by drug companies, I rarely hear about the mechanism
of action for drugs, or definitive studies showing empirical evidence
for the use of new drugs. For that I have to pull out the journal
articles myself... Knowing how a creationist studies evolution, one
can imagine the eptness with which they can define a worthy drug study
from one that isn't.

Papers published in medical journals are renowned for their lack of
scientific rigour and dubious data provenance. God only knows what the
ones that get rejected are like.

Back that up. I work at a medical research institute and I know how hard
the data has to be before it gets submitted. There are, to be sure, poor
qulaity journals, as there are in every field of science. But if you get
a paper into Cell or EMBO J or NEJoM your paper is well attested.

pz <pzmyers@pharyngula.org> wrote in message news:<pzmyers-CE2E1C.07241020112003@news.fu-berlin.de>...

In article <b9401f8a.0311191424.27fd784e@posting.google.com>,
jspaceman@linuxquestions.net (Jason Spaceman) wrote:

No, not Christian students at Bob Jones U. or Oral Roberts U., but at
the U. of Oslo in Norway??!!

From the article:
------------------------------
Medical student John David Johannessen and the leader of the Christian
Medical Students Circle have petitioned the medical faculty at the
University of Oslo for lectures "that not only argue the cause for
evolution, but also the evidence against", student newspaper
Universitas reports.
-----------------------------

Read it at
http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article.jhtml?articleID=672888

These are the kind of spoiled, arrogant, ignorant students who
probably marched into their first grade class and demanded that the
teacher teach them that 2+2=5, because the Theory of Mathematics
required it.

Is there any way we can follow this bozos career from promising
medical student to sewer worker ?
He could be charismatic in the crapper

PeteM <PeteM@rockall.net> wrote:

John Wilkins <

News Admin <news@news.demon.net> wrote:

The Mad Doctor <sawbones@uniserve.com> averred

At presentations by drug companies, I rarely hear about the mechanism
of action for drugs, or definitive studies showing empirical evidence
for the use of new drugs. For that I have to pull out the journal
articles myself... Knowing how a creationist studies evolution, one
can imagine the eptness with which they can define a worthy drug study
from one that isn't.

Papers published in medical journals are renowned for their lack of
scientific rigour and dubious data provenance. God only knows what the
ones that get rejected are like.

Back that up. I work at a medical research institute and I know how hard
the data has to be before it gets submitted. There are, to be sure, poor
qulaity journals, as there are in every field of science. But if you get
a paper into Cell or EMBO J or NEJoM your paper is well attested.

Douglas Altman and Ian Chalmers are the best known British experts in
this field. Both are highly respected figures in the UK medical research
establishment. .

Altman has studied the subject for many years. In 1994 he wrote in the
BMJ "What should we think about researchers who use the wrong techniques
(either wilfully or in ignorance), use the right techniques wrongly,
misinterpret their results, report their results selectively, cite the
literature selectively, and draw unjustified conclusions? We should be
appalled. Yet numerous studies of the medical literature, in both
general and specialist journals, have shown that all of the above
phenomena are common. This is surely a scandal. [BMJ 1994;308:283-284]

He goes on: "Why are errors so common? Put simply, much poor research
arises because researchers feel compelled for career reasons to carry
out research that they are ill equipped to perform, and nobody stops
them ... Amazingly, it is widely considered acceptable for medical
researchers to be ignorant of statistics. Many are not ashamed (and some
seem proud) to admit) that they don't know anything about statistics".

Things haven't improved much. In a paper published last year (JAMA
2002;287;2765-2767), Altman says "there is considerable evidence that
many published reports of randomised clinical trials are poor or even
wrong ... many readers seem to assume that articles published in
peer-reviewed journals are scientifically sound, despite much evidence
to the contrary".

Altman cites an analysis of 308 published journal papers that reported
phase 2 clinical trials. The analysis (published in 2000) found that 250
(81%) of the papers did not report an identifiable statistical design.

He cites another study that found "serious statistical errors" in 40% of
164 articles published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, and in 19%
of 145 articles published in Am J Ob & Gyn.

The paper gives a table listing some common methodological problems in
published medical research. For example, in 51% of 506 reports in cystic
fibrosis journals, the authors failed to state whether blinding was
used; the figures were 33% in rheumatoid arthritis and 38% in
dermatology. (It is staggering to me that the authors of a clinical
trial *did*not*say* whether blinding was used!)

Ian Chalmers wrote in 1998: "Systematic reviews of some of the hundreds
of thousands of reports of trials published since 1948 are beginning to
make painfully clear that, in most of these studies, inadequate steps
were taken to control biases, many questions and outcomes of interest to
patients were ignored, and insufficient numbers of participants were
studied to yield reliable estimates of treatment effects.18 In brief, a
massive amount of research effort, the goodwill of hundreds of thousands
of patients, and millions of pounds have been wasted". (BMJ
1998;317:1167-1168 ).

And here is an extract from a joint paper by Chalmers and Altman: "...
there have been over 500 reports of controlled trials of a wide variety
of drugs used to prevent or reduce the unpleasant movement disorders
suffered by people taking antipsychotic drugs. These have been published
over several decades in journals that claim to use peer review, but
recent systematic reviews have shown that this vast body of research
yields no information upon which practice can be based with any
confidence. There is depressing evidence that the therapeutic efforts of
journals remain inadequate ... and these reporting deficiencies are
present in some of the world's most prestigious medical journals.
(Lancet 1999; 353: 490-93)

Interesting. I must follow this up now in my amazing amounts of spare
time (ha!). Thank you.

I suspect that this is more a problem of theraeutic trials/drug use
journals than the primary science, but I will admit that medical
researchers - those who have a MB BS/MD degree only - tend to be rather
dismissive of the need for a knowledge of experimental design and stats,
and they do tend to think they can easily apply any method just by
following a book - I had one try to do a cladogram here based on MHC
alleles.

Still, you mustn't overgeneralise. Basic science is usually hard to do
and hard to get published. Someone whose PhD is in an experimental
science is not likely to make the kinds of egregious errors of a simple
MD, as they will have done an apprenticeship under established
experimental researchers.

At presentations by drug companies, I rarely hear about the mechanism
of action for drugs, or definitive studies showing empirical evidence
for the use of new drugs. For that I have to pull out the journal
articles myself... Knowing how a creationist studies evolution, one
can imagine the eptness with which they can define a worthy drug study
from one that isn't.

These days as a physician it lets me discard a lot of papers from
journals by reading the abstract and realixing the study isn't worth
the paper it's on