Seeing what you want to see in randomised controlled trials

doi:10.1136/bmj.321.7268.1078

BMJ 2000;321:1078 ( 28 October )

Letters

Seeing what you want to see in randomised controlled trials

Authors' choice of study was ill informed

Meta-analyses may suffer from interpretation bias too

Authors' reply

Authors' choice of study was ill informed

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ McCormack and Greenhalgh's suggestion that those involved in running and reporting clinical trials might be able toengineer a worldwide "groupthink" spin on the results is an intriguingnotion.¹ But their choice of the United Kingdom prospectivediabetes study (UKPDS) as an example to support their hypothesisis ill informed given the manner in which this study wasreported.

We note with interest Greenhalgh's earlier commentary on an article by Horton concerning the "spin that authors place on theirown work."² In this, she highlighted the "unjustified assumptionthat this spin is necessarily evil, insidious, and the last remainingbastion of caprice in the otherwise objective terrain of scientificpublication," and she challenged Horton to "produce a single,clinically important instance of scientific heads being turnedby rhetoric and rhetoricalone."

There was a complete embargo on all outcome data from the United Kingdom prospective diabetes study before . . . [Full text of this article]

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Seeing what you want to see in randomised controlled trials: versions and perversions of UKPDS data: James McCormack and Trisha Greenhalgh
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