{"id":46,"date":"2006-06-26T18:14:32","date_gmt":"2006-06-26T18:14:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/2006\/06\/26\/a-great-quote-about-methods\/"},"modified":"2006-06-26T18:14:32","modified_gmt":"2006-06-26T18:14:32","slug":"a-great-quote-about-methods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/2006\/06\/26\/a-great-quote-about-methods\/","title":{"rendered":"A Great Quote about Methods"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On my way home from picking up my kids from school, I heard a story on NPR that included a line from one of the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine, which I thought was worth repeating here.<br \/>\nThey were discussing an article in this month&#8217;s NEJM about [vioxx\/rofecoxib][nejm]. The article is a correction to an earlier NEJM article that concluded that the cardiac risks of Vioxx were not really significant until around 18 months of continued use. With more data available, it appears that the 18 month was just an artifact, not a real phenomenon, and the data appears to show that the cardiac risks of Vioxx start very quickly.<br \/>\n[nejm]: http:\/\/content.nejm.org\/cgi\/reprint\/NEJMc066260v1.pdf<br \/>\nAs usual for something like this, the authors and the corporate sponsors of the work are all consulted in the publication of a correction or retraction. But in this case, the drug maker objected to the correction, because they wanted the correction to include an <em>additional analysis<\/em>, which appears to show an 18-month threshold for cardiac risk.<br \/>\nThe editors response, paraphrased (since I heard it on the radio and don&#8217;t have the exact quote):<br \/>\n&#8220;That&#8217;s not how you do science. You don&#8217;t get all of the data, and then<br \/>\nlook for an analysis that produces the results you want. You agree on the<br \/>\nanalysis you&#8217;re going to do *before* you start the study, and then you use<br \/>\nthe analysis that you said you were going to use.&#8221;<br \/>\nHey [Geiers][geier], you listening?<br \/>\n[geier]: http:\/\/goodmath.blogspot.com\/2006\/03\/math-slop-autism-and-mercury.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On my way home from picking up my kids from school, I heard a story on NPR that included a line from one of the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine, which I thought was worth repeating here. They were discussing an article in this month&#8217;s NEJM about [vioxx\/rofecoxib][nejm]. The article is a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-goodmath"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-K","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}