Concerns about Cochrane

Michiel Tack said:
Could you explain this a little more? Do you mean that he focuses too much on the pharmacological industry as a source of bias + his aversion to vaccines and anti-depressants?
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Kind of... I'm not sure it's fair to say he has an 'aversion to vaccines' generally, but to me he seems to have gone too far in some of his criticism of the HPV vaccine.

Also, while I see the pharma industry as pretty corrupt, I also think of pharma research as generally being of better quality than what we see from the biopsychosocial stuff we see, but some researchers critical of pharma can ignore problems elsewhere.

Maybe I shouldn't comment on this, as I've not gone through taking detailed notes on Gøtzsche, so this impression is really no more than a hunch.
 
Esther12 said:
It looks like now anyone can join Cochrane, so patients wanting to try to improve the quality of their work can contribute and vote in any future elections:

https://community.cochrane.org/organizational-info/resources/support-cet/membership

https://www.cochrane.org/join-cochrane

This is something we probably should have been aware of before the last election.

This Cochrane stuff is so complicated that I'm sure we're missing loads of oportunities to make things better.
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This might be useful for a new thread? I'm sure many are not aware. I may mis-remember, but belive I've seen some workshop with patients advocates as well
 
Mad in America - Institutional Corruption in the Cochrane Collaboration, by Peter Gøtzsche.

Not sure what part to quote - it's about what happened around the expelling and the board meeting. Also about launching his new initiative "Instititute for Scientific Freedom".

The moral decline in Cochrane started in 2011 and accelerated when a new CEO, Mark Wilson, was employed in 2012, who does not seem to understand what science is about but focuses on “brand” and “business” instead of getting the science right and fostering free scientific debate. He favours scientific censorship and was unfortunately supported in this by a majority of the Cochrane Governing Board when I was expelled by the Board in September 2017 and later fired from my job as head of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen. Our access to documents in Denmark via the Freedom of Information Act revealed that the CEO had required my dismissal, although he had no mandate to make such a requirement.
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‘Evidence-Based Medicine’ and the Expulsion of Peter Gøtzsche
Gøtzsche became the closest thing the world of statistical analysis had to a full-fledged celebrity. His findings were trumpeted, repeatedly, in The New York Times, with his mammography findings even making the front page in 2001. He became the subject of a documentary and was featured in at least one other. “The Daily Show” once had him play a kind of Big Pharma Deep Throat in a segment on the opioid crisis. Viewed by many as a relentless fighter who has accused entire disciplines of nigh-irredeemable corruption, Gøtzsche’s crusades earned him the respect of powerful peers and a loyal following of layperson-skeptics around the world.

So it came as a surprise, at least to outsiders, when Gøtzsche was summarily expelled in fall of last year from the organization he helped found. He was voted off the board, then stripped of his position as director of the Nordic Cochrane Center, Cochrane’s Danish outpost. The stated reason for his termination was, according to a statement from Cochrane’s governing board, “an ongoing, consistent pattern of disruptive and inappropriate behaviors,” along with a breach of the organization’s spokesperson policy, which requires collaborators to clearly identify whether they’re speaking on behalf of themselves or of Cochrane.
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https://undark.org/2019/12/30/peter-gotzsche-cochrane/
 
Andy said:
‘Evidence-Based Medicine’ and the Expulsion of Peter Gøtzsche

https://undark.org/2019/12/30/peter-gotzsche-cochrane/
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The article was picked up by Medscape. Long, but interesting read.

The seeming suddenness of his expulsion, and what critics view as its misguided pretext, has exposed rifts that go back decades: debates about the pharmaceutical industry's influence on medicine and about the research community's tolerance of dissent. More fundamentally, Gøtzsche's expulsion has crystalized a longstanding debate about the proper role of data in the practice of medicine.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/923214
 
Blog post from Hilda Bastian summarising the Gøtzsche/Cochrane saga.

Gøtzsche and the Cochrane collaboration: A timeline

Too much bureaucracy is bad, for sure. But for a research institute, so is too little. Transparency and accountability, even when you don’t think you need advice, safeguard honesty and integrity in public life. Skirting around anyone who could slow you down and make you consider and justify things more carefully, and demonizing people who criticize your ideas or your tactics, is not a path to integrity, good science, or policy in the public interest.

Gøtzsche has said: “My view is that a hero is someone who has other genes than non-heroes…There are a few odd people like me who have something different in our genes….” It’s a biological trait that constitutes him for leadership, and communities turn to people like him with these “special genes” in a crisis, he said. I think that belief and self-image explains a lot. I am glad the Cochrane Collaboration is no longer tethered to every issue he might take up.
 
On 16 October, the editors of the journal that had published the critique of the Cochrane HPV vaccine review reported that they had investigated the critiques of the critique (including mine), and come to the conclusion that corrections to the paper by Gøtzsche & co were needed. They called for responses to their findings, and said corrections/clarifications would be made within about 6 weeks. I welcomed this, and although their proposed corrections were substantial, I did not think they went far enough, and I wrote a post about it, tweeting the link to them.
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Note: Although correction was proposed within six weeks of October 2018, as of 8 February 2020, the critique had no formal correction, and it has no editorial note or link to the editors’ post reporting errors.
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BMJ again.
The Cochrane review has not been updated, and it has no note either of the issues the Cochrane editors identified in their evaluation.
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don't think Cochrane are blameless; but it would seem that Gotzsche is not the messiah but a very naughty boy.
 
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Sly Saint said:
don't think Cochrane are blameless; but it would seem that Gotzche is not the messiah but a very naughty boy.
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He is on the wrong side of the ME issue (and I guess discriminated chronic diseases as well?) so there isn't much hope that whatever he "heroically" does has any positive impact on us. He seems very much into BPS woo, unless I totally misread him, as a principle against overmedicalisation and preferring any alternative to drugs, no matter how kooky. Which has its merits, but the BPS/FND/MUS model is way worse for us so not an improvement. If Cochrane does lose some of its influence to his initiative, it's doubtful it would be any better.

Frankly it mostly appears to be a personal thing for him. Not sure, but I think this is more about politics than about science. I'm not confident it will be any good for the patients. The status quo is disastrous however so any change is preferable if it keeps the usual suspects at bay, but I'm not sure that it would.
 
strategist said:
Gøtzsche has not taken a position on the PACE trial, MUS, CBT/GET, ME/CFS as far as I know. Some people tried to bring this to his attention but he doesn't seem interested.
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I thought he had written some papers with Sharpe or even co-authored the Cochrane exercise review but that was a derp I just mixed his name with Paul Glasziou, which isn't particularly close so yay brain.
 
rvallee said:
He is on the wrong side of the ME issue (and I guess discriminated chronic diseases as well?) so there isn't much hope that whatever he "heroically" does has any positive impact on us. He seems very much into BPS woo, unless I totally misread him, as a principle against overmedicalisation and preferring any alternative to drugs, no matter how kooky. Which has its merits, but the BPS/FND/MUS model is way worse for us so not an improvement. If Cochrane does lose some of its influence to his initiative, it's doubtful it would be any better.

Frankly it mostly appears to be a personal thing for him. Not sure, but I think this is more about politics than about science. I'm not confident it will be any good for the patients. The status quo is disastrous however so any change is preferable if it keeps the usual suspects at bay, but I'm not sure that it would.
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Yes, it's much more about politics than science. And yes, he is obsessed with the evils of drugs - with good reason - but so ignores the crap science churned out by the BPS brigade.
 
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