How can this woman retain her Medical License?
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I mean, as a physician and a scientist, aren’t you obligated to report the findings even and especially if it contradicts your own claims and bias?
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of course science is first vetted by social acceptability. Any scientific finding that has some inflammatory political / cultural valence will be carefully controlled, one way or another. Generally by the scientists themselves, self-interested in their career prospects. I accept that, and the only thing I take exception to is when people claim the science around certain political issues is actually purely objective and transparently searching for truth, wherever it lies.
Education is extremely important.
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@Horace said in How can this woman retain her Medical License?:
of course science is first vetted by social acceptability. Any scientific finding that has some inflammatory political / cultural valence will be carefully controlled, one way or another. Generally by the scientists themselves, self-interested in their career prospects. I accept that, and the only thing I take exception to is when people claim the science around certain political issues is actually purely objective and transparently searching for truth, wherever it lies.
The doctor that conducted the study is one of the more notorious gender clinicians made infamous by several teen detransitioners.
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I read about this and it’s obviously horrifying.
But to the underlying generic question, I have a little experience.
The underlying question is ‘what if I fund research and they don’t publish?’
This happens and it has happened to us (meaning my Foundation). Our official position as regards research is ‘if the results ain’t in PubMed it didn’t happen’. This is important because we don’t fund research studies to inform the PI (principal investigator), we fund research to inform the community of researchers - IOW to make scientific progress. If someone doesn’t publish the results of research we paid for, we’ve wasted our money.
But normally - indeed almost always - the failure to publish isn’t for nefarious reasons at all. The researcher can’t get an interesting result, knows no decent journal will publish her negative result, and gives up. Or they run into some problem they didn’t anticipate, the current funding they’ve secured won’t let them surmount it, and they sorta give up. Or maybe they give up after being unsuccessful in a follow up grant application. IOW the non-publication is usually out of the investigator’s control ergo can’t be mandated.
Ok, what I described is very different than what happened in this case. So how do you fix this situation where the lack of publication is very much in their control?
I think the answer is to have funders (like the NIH and, to a far lesser extent, organizations like mine) mandate that the data along with some sort of conclusion or wrap-up article be made available to the funder to publish on their own site.
Obviously this woman could pretend she’s still working on the analysis and put it off indefinitely. But we could get around it by specifying a timeframe by which we demand the data for publication.
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By the way my foundation has been discussing the issue of non-publication of negative or inconclusive or uninteresting results for some time. It took this use case for me to think of this idea. Maybe we’ll implement it.
Or, more probably, I’ll tee up this suggestion and someone with more experience will tell me why it’s not workable.
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By refusing to publish, she’s likely made it worse. She easily could have covered by saying “puberty blockers are only 1 aspect of GAC. While we never expected PB’s to have a psychological effect, themselves, they are a vital tool in giving the physician and patient time to determine the best course of treatment”.
By not publishing, she’s allowing the public to make far darker assumptions. How bad was it? Do puberty blockers strengthen the dysphoria and make it worse (which I find likely)?
And if you’re willing to bury a scientific study, what does that say about your ethics and morals in other matters?
One last thought, the study failed their parameters, even though it was likely p-hacked. When you are looking for a set of results, you will likely find those results. So again, what does that tell you? It tells me that a more independent and neutral group better conduct another study ASAP.
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Apropos of "socially conscious science":
Link to videoThe reason I don't complain about science being affected by the self-righteous attitudes of the scientists, is because it's too inevitable to waste any negativity on. But there remains a special place in the pantheon of idiots for those who claim that culturally valent science is not biased.
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@jon-nyc said in How can this woman retain her Medical License?:
But normally - indeed almost always - the failure to publish isn’t for nefarious reasons at all. The researcher can’t get an interesting result, knows no decent journal will publish her negative result, and gives up. Or they run into some problem they didn’t anticipate, the current funding they’ve secured won’t let them surmount it, and they sorta give up. Or maybe they give up after being unsuccessful in a follow up grant application. IOW the non-publication is usually out of the investigator’s control ergo can’t be mandated.
The book "Bullshit" talks about that. No one wants to read a paper that has no results.
what I described is very different than what happened in this case
But as you say, showing a negative effect of a treatment should be high up on the ethics scale when it comes to medical, if not all, scientific publication.
When you show that thalidomide causes phocomelia and you decide to not publish those results, there's something seriously wrong with you.
