https://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Charting_Out...
Weirdly Pediatrics (chart 7) skews the other way (less publications tended to get into residency programs)? Are those doctors/administrators/programs somehow seeing through the nonsense?
I can see the reason where fictional cases could be used here as teaching aid - based on real cases/ilnesses but simplified to make the learning points succinctly, but surely if the cases are being cited elsewhere someone should have raised the issue earlier?
Rather it would be the entire form of these short highlight articles that would make you keep searching for a proper citation, unless you're lazy or pressed for time.
I mean. Except if your pedestrian example does not reflect reality, then that is bad.
It's even common during talks to display diagnostic images that have had any identifying marks redacted.
Obviously the poor labelling is bad, but 9 bad citations per year isn't the end of science and better labelling wouldn't discourage all the lazy authors who chose to cite these highlight articles, it'll just shift whos is to blame.
The real problem is hosting a review article about research that was retracted, and it sounds like they aren't moving very quickly on taking that piece down.
There was indeed much negative information that the public was not aware of, and they should perhaps have held more skepticism than they did. But the gleeful acceptance of outright anti-science lies implies that they were never really in a position to make a sound judgment one way or the other.
In those circumstances I'll settle for people reaching the correct action: that practically all accepted medicine is correct and they should follow their doctor's advice. If they choose to over-inflate the importance of things that do indeed go wrong, then they are the ones failing to reach valid conclusions.
These are straight out falsehoods, collected for you deliberately, which you are repeating because you didn't even pretend to examine them critically. There is no way to discuss the actual mistakes made during the pandemic when it takes me ten times as long to refute the lies you're spreading.
Much easier to review for whomever wants to review it.
What is stopping anyone from faking the data they use in their research papers?
Sure it might be verifiable but if the data was made to give the desired results, i.e. faked to be what is required for the paper.
Case reports are descriptive not determinative and should be treated as such by other scholars. They are 'I saw this' not 'this is generalizably true'. They can (and often are) replicated or countered but they are not per se research as you are thinking about it. Whether it is fictitious or not, other scholars should be cautious in citing them as proof/evidence in papers that fit into the 'research' mold.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/d...
The IRB for a particular organization can impose additional restrictions.
Maybe we should revisit the routine practice of infant male genital mutilation?
The "Baby Boy Blue" (2010) case is the clearest example of the harm. An infant allegedly exposed to opioids through breast milk. That case influenced clinical guidance on codeine safety in nursing for years. The CARE guidelines (Consensus-based Clinical Case Reporting Guidelines) exist specifically to create transparency in case reporting. They're voluntary, which is how a journal can run a 25-year undisclosed fiction program and technically say the authors knew.
>all or almost all were cases of very well recognized conditions [...] where a single case report would not generate any interest or ever be cited.
"The peer-reviewed articles don’t state anywhere the cases described are fictional."
Peer review by peers who are trained by non-replicable science is not helpful...
> One author of a case report was surprised to learn of the correction — because the case described in her article is true.
So they managed to mess up even the correction of their giant mess.
> correcting the correction "would be difficult."
I bet. That's why they should have got it right in the first place. I would be absolutely ballistic if they would be libelling my work like that.
Thought note that in the situation of the mislabeled real case, the formal solution is could be a retraction of the entire highlight article since it is against the (poorly implemented) policy to have a real case study.
Don't know how patient consent for being used in a case study works, did this author get a perpetual license, did they just copy something from another article they wrote, or from an article someone else wrote?
It looks like it has a short intro paragraph that talks about a specific case with no identifying details (beyond "a previously healthy 4-month-old boy"), citing this report by other doctors: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27503268/ followed by further discussions of physician reports and survey data.
The correction is explicitly listed as applying to that article (https://academic.oup.com/pch/article-abstract/24/2/132/51642...), which itself seems false since that article doesn't seem to include a fictional vignette.
Does it? That's directly at odds with what the article and editor say
> “Based on the New Yorker article, we made the decision to add a correction notice to all 138 publications..."
Emphasis mine.
Sounds like they were asking authors for fiction, so probably plenty of them are.
Genuine question, could they sue for this? It seems like a pretty good case.