This post co-authored with Rafael Fonseca, MD, Chairman of the Department of Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Phoenix, AZ
Much has been written about how politics and ideology influence research funding, suppress research in certain areas, and lead to the cherry-picking and misrepresentation of evidence in support of a narrative or agenda. Science journalist John Tierney explored “The Real War on Science” in an excellent essay in City Journal in 2016. Reflecting on this phenomenon in 2011, Patrick J. Michaels stated:
The process is synergistic and self-fulfilling. Periodicals like Science are what academia uses to define the current truth. But the monolithic leftward inclination of the reviewing community clearly permits one interpretation (even if not supported by the results) and not another. This type of blatant politicized science is becoming the norm in the environmental arena, and probably has infiltrated most every other discipline, too.
It certainly has infiltrated research into the emotionally charged opioid overdose problem afflicting the US and many other western nations. Policy decisions have been rooted in a narrative seemingly immune to the facts: that the problem is largely the result of greedy pharmaceutical companies manipulating careless and poorly-trained doctors into “hooking” patients on highly addictive opioids and condemning them to a nightmarish life of drug addiction.
Tierney writes of confirmation bias—the tendency of people to seek out and accept information that confirms their beliefs and prejudices. He bemoans the “groupthink” that allows confirmation bias to infiltrate the peer review process. He cites a well-known study that demonstrated reviewers were more likely to find problems with a study’s methodology if the findings were contrary to their prejudices yet overlook methodological shortcomings if the findings were confirmatory.
Sometimes investigators try to “spin” their findings to make them comport to the narrative and appear confirmatory, increasing the likelihood that their research gets published.
Both of us are practicing physicians, and each of us recently experienced reminders that research into the opioid overdose issue is not exempt from politicization and confirmation bias. We would like to present two recent examples where this confirmation bias became self-evident.
One of us, Rafael Fonseca, recently encountered a peer reviewed publication that asserted, and concluded by conjecture, that opioid manufacturers, by providing meals to physicians at educational presentations, were skewing prescription patterns and increasing the number of opioids being prescribed. A cursory review of the published data suggested that correcting for variables such as specialty was needed to understand such putative association. After undertaking a full data analysis (reported in the Healthcare Blog with Dr. John Tucker), we were able to refute the findings of that publication. In short, we found that the influence of meals provided on prescribing was negligible, and that similar effects were seen when providers attended meals provided by companies that produce other products used for the treatment of pain, but not opioids. We provided a compelling case that increased attendance to these meals, and opioid prescription, was more of a reflection of the practice pattern of such physicians (i.e. they treat pain patients) rather than a heinous quid pro quo. Readers are referred to our analysis and the original paper.
We remain disappointed by the apparent ease with which such publications appear in major medical journals as well as the scarcity of detailed rebuttals. The authors of this paper did not discuss considerations that are relevant such as multivariate analyses. Not only were these missing, but the article concluded by suggesting that policy changes…
