Solving the fake news problem in science (Link)
Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics, NOT!
Five sentences. Longer than a tweet but shorter than the average elementary school essay. That’s the length of an influential letter published in 1980 in the New England Journal of Medicine, the world’s most prestigious medical journal. It alleged that narcotics are not addictive. This letter, combined with aggressive marketing efforts by pharmaceutical companies and the emergence of improving pain control as a focus for physicians and hospitals, led doctors to begin prescribing opioids as painkillers for conditions that once simply called for aspirin.
The outcome of this perfect storm? Millions of Americans addicted to opioids, and more than 200,000 dead by overdose between 1999 and 2016. And that number keeps growing.
Why was such a short letter so influential? It has what are considered to be the hallmarks of a reliable scientific publication: It appears in a prestigious journal and it has been highly cited by other researchers, 608 times as of 2017.
When a group of researchers analyzed the hundreds of papers citing the letter, their findings prompted NEJM to append the letter with a stark warning: “For reasons of public health, readers should be aware that this letter has been ‘heavily and uncritically cited’ as evidence that addiction is rare with opioid therapy.”
Source statnews.com: Solving the fake news problem in science