That’s a great example of why Science Based Medicine is just industry propaganda. They completely ignored the dozens of studies that empirically show that corporate sponsorship of research is an enormous problem, and instead came to the conclusion that it isn’t a big problem based on the ‘facts’ that:
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“Frivolous accusations of conflict has a ‘chilling’ effect on the conduct of industry research.”
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“Those who claim, falsely, that there is an association between vaccines and autism have used the slightest appearance of conflict to dismiss the evidence against any role of vaccines in autism.”
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“There also seems to be an unfair asymmetry. While mainstream medicine is wrangling with this thorny issue, those on the fringe may ignore their own conflicts.”
So even though it’s a proven fact that by far the biggest predictor of whether or not a trial will be ‘successful’ is whether or not it’s corporately funded and/or conducted by researchers with industry ties[1], none of this matters (and is not even worth mentioning) because of something something alternative medicine.
Of all the blogs I’ve read, SBM has got to be by far the most intellectually dishonest. Literally every single post is dripping with all sorts of logical fallacies and other dishonesty in order to promote whatever the current pharma-drug-of-the-day is. And whenever it comes time to actually demonstrate the safety or efficacy of whatever they’re promoting, they always change the subject by bashing some random thing from alternative medicine that has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
[1] Too many studies to list, but a couple examples:
