News from Cochrane

I am sorry to hear this how terrifying!
How is your son doing now?

I’m just astounded at the hypocrisy of claims made to be saving us from harm through commitment to evidence, at the beginning.

 

He still seems to be doing his best to follow its trajectory. He's going to need a submersible to dive deep enough soon.

 

Paul has made a truly extraordinary contribution to Cochrane.

Indeed, more than anyone else he has blown their cover.

He should be should get the Toto Medal - for revealing the Wizard for what he was.

 

Hilda has always maintained she is not and never will be a member of Cochrane whilst they fail to make all their content open access. She left Cochrane over this issue I believe, despite being a founder member. So she should have rejected the membership, as Rob Scholten did. I wonder why he did that. I have met RS a few times (he was the director of Cochrane Netherlands since the beginning of Cochrane, and he seemed very sensible to me. Very interested in patient involvement as far as I remember). I may have tried to get him interested in this at some point, as I did with Peter Gotzsche, who got kicked out of Cochrane, and Jos Verbeek, another person from the Netherlands, who was head of Cochrane Work (review group). I suggested Cochrane Work would be the best review group to manage a review of treatments for ME, as the ability to work or participate in education is such a key and objectively measurable outcome for people with ME. I did suggest that at some point certainly to Jos,, and maybe also to Hilda.

 

Sounds like Cochrane highly approves of Garner's method of evidence synthesis consisting of "my personal anecdote proves it beyond any doubt, and we should promote positive anecdotes and silence negative anecdotes about mind-brain-body-spiritual conjoinship healing, and also healing hands and neurolinguistic programming should get money shoveled at it while biomedical research that debunks it should be shut down".

It's impossible that they don't know of it, if you look at his twitter feed it's been an obsession for the last 3.5 years. Most of his posts since then are about this, and his only published work in that time, the Cochrane review on the triple therapy for microclots, wasn't even needed or made sense. In fact it makes a mockery of evidence-based medicine since there hasn't even been a single clinical trial of it yet, and the entire "evidence pyramid" of EBM depends on trials to make systematic reviews. It was, in effect, a review about nothing, highly motivated by politics, ideology and personal obsession, and he used his status at Cochrane to promote it.

Cochrane thinks that only promoting personal and other people's positive anecdotes of wishful thinking healing while silencing a far greater number of negative and neutral reports is good evidence synthesis, is the most Cochrane thing ever. Cochrane is to the original concept of evidence-based medicine what North Korea is to a democratic republic.

 

Oh, Paul likes diving! Seem to remember him going on a diving trip/ conference, one whilst 'oh so compromised post (long) covid'....

 

Posted on Twitter by the Cochrane Consumers account.....

"The University of Alberta’s free online critical thinking and science literacy course to help people differentiate science from pseudoscience"
https://www.ualberta.ca/admissions-programs/online-courses/science-literacy.html

I wonder if they ensure that their review authors take it?

 

For people who work in glass houses, they sure do love to throw stones.

 

Boulders even

 

Copied post

Cochrane UK will be closing its doors for the final time this Thursday 28th March 2024, due to the loss of NIHR funding.

https://uk.cochrane.org/news/goodbye-and-thank-you-cochrane-uk-team

 

Thursday, October 24, 2024
Cochrane announces new scientific strategy

Cochrane announces new scientific strategy | Cochrane

 

Cochrane blasts off for a (no -return) trip to planet Zog.

 

Tuesday, October 8, 2024
Cochrane helps launch new WHO guidance on best practices for clinical trials

Cochrane helps launch new WHO guidance on best practices for clinical trials | Cochrane

 

If blinding of an allocated trial intervention is not feasible (for example in trials of different types of patient management or surgical procedures), blinded or masked outcome assessment should be pursued for objectively determined outcomes, for example through use of a prospective randomized open-label blinded endpoint (PROBE) design (see also Section 2.1.9 ascertainment of outcomes).

This suggests some confusion. If an endpoint is truly objective then there is no need to blind or mask. I have never heard of PROBE but it sounds dubious. Usually these acronyms are there to weasel through dodgy practices by making them sound respectable.

Recommending GRADE isn't good.

All the right words seem to be there, but the impression given is that as long as everyone follows a mindless recipe all will be fine (and you can cut a few corners if you really have to).