Funders and regulators have the principal power to implement most of the solutions needed to reduce research waste […]
Paul Glasziou and Iain Chalmers: Funders and regulators are more important than journals in fixing the waste in research
Category: Paul Glasziou
Paul Glasziou and Iain Chalmers: Can it really be true that 50% of research is unpublished?
Whatever the precise non-publication rate is, it is a serious waste of the roughly $180 billion annually invested in health and medical research globally […]
Paul Glasziou and Iain Chalmers: Ill informed replications will increase our avoidable waste of research
How does the replicability crisis relate to the estimated 85% waste in medical research? […]
Paul Glasziou: How to hide trial results in plain sight
Paul Glasziou discusses why trial results need to be better presented, so that readers can understand and act on the results. […]
Paul Glasziou: Still no evidence for homeopathy
When the National Health and Medical Research Council report on homeopathy concluded that “There was no reliable evidence from research in humans that homeopathy was effective for treating the range of health conditions considered” few in conventional medicine were surprised, but the homeopathy community were outraged. As chair of the working party which produced the […]
Paul Glasziou and Iain Chalmers: Is 85% of health research really “wasted”?
Our estimate that 85% of all health research is being avoidably “wasted” [Chalmers & Glasziou, 2009] commonly elicits disbelief. Our own first reaction was similar: “that can’t be right?” Not only did 85% sound too much, but given that $200 billion per year is spent globally on health and medical research, it implied an annual […]
Paul Glasziou and Iain Chalmers: How systematic reviews can reduce waste in research
If you asked a member of the public “Should researchers review relevant, existing research systematically before embarking on further research?” they would probably be puzzled. Why would you ask a question with such an obvious answer? But in the current research system, researchers are only rarely required by research funders and regulators to do this. […]
Paul Glasziou: Six proposals for evidence based medicine’s future
This blog is part of a series of blogs linked with BMJ Clinical Evidence, a database of systematic overviews of the best available evidence on the effectiveness of commonly used interventions. Gordon Guyatt coined the term “Evidence based medicine” (EBM) over 20 years ago, and it has had a remarkable global influence. But EBM is […]
Paul Glasziou: Of parachutes, nasal peas, and RCTs
Deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease is a remarkable therapy. Over lunch a colleague recently described how it transformed her life: from slow shaky dysfunctional movement to almost normal. It is one of those small cadres of treatments that does not need randomized trial evidence to know it works: turn off the stimulator and the […]
Paul Glasziou: Beware the hyperactive therapeutic reflex
Nearly 15 years ago when I first presented the results of our systematic review on antibiotics for acute otitis media, one paediatrician snarled, “You’re making it too complicated. It’s simple: otitis media is an infection; the treatment of infection is antibiotics.” So that was that. The art of therapeutics could be boiled down to a […]