There appear to have been at least 8 studies involving a Rotta prep (pg 12) – five using Lequesne index and 3 using WOMAC scores (two of which also looked at joint space).

One oddity is that they don’t appear to have separated those Rotta studies with adequate allocation concealment from the general Rotta subgroup. This would have seemed to be a sensible approach.

However, leaving Rotta to one side for a moment and looking at the good quality studies, to make any conclusions one way or the other one still needs to decide that WOMAC is more relevant than Lequesne or vice versa.

If (like I pretty much have) one gives up on making head or tail of the full paper and trusts the Cochrane researchers to make a fair summary in the plain text section, their conclusion does seem to be “grey area” rather than “no good”.

I guess there’s nothing wrong with this in terms of what they could glean from the data available – it is to their credit in fact that after all that research they didn’t come up with something more concrete either way. I wish I could find the original source which made me think they’d said concretely that glucosamine was useless though, because this would seem to be just as flagrant a cherry-picking as the homeopaths are guilty of.

www.badscience.net/2010/01/the-wakefield-mmr-verdict/

nevajism – thank you for reinforcing the original point of the article with your comments about peer review; by means of a selective, impressionistic semi-anecdote/reported opinion about peer review you hope to offer a critique of it. A cursory glance at PubMed would reveal a large amount of literature about the subject which documents its shortcomings and engages in trying to tackle them.

Similarly a cursory glance at the comments columns of these pages would reveal that groupthink is very far from what has gone on here.

I think the reason why the word troll was used is that over a series of posts comprising what amounts to an off-topic polemic you have yet to convince that you know what a systematic review is, or why it is non-interptretive. Plus the fact that it seems like you are drawing the conclusions that your preconceptions expected, rather than what has been said.

But to be frank I’m bored with this now so if you respond I’m sorry it will probably be for your own benefit.

I categorically disagree. There is clearly not enough regulation of the free market (in any sphere you care to name). Even those organisations which do exist to supposedly oversee various systems seem to lack a solid foundation, a clear purpose, and are not armed with any genuine sanctions to keep in check those who fall foul of their guidelines.

We’ll agree to disagree. Little point entrenching ourselves.

Your link doesnt appear to be even remotely linked to this thread, just containing a wooly arguement regardiing collectivism vs individualism. And ‘no such thing as forests, only trees’, I’d best let my chemistry colleagues know that theres no such thing as compounds, only elements, the compound is merely a concept.

But to get back to your arguement of spreading ideas due to resonance being a sign of rightness has quite a few holes, as multiple systematic reviews have shown. Such as steroids for head injury (a very resonant idea, head injury causes brain swelling which is a bad thing, ergo a drug which reduces inflammation will be a good thing), and beta agonists for asthma (an idea so incredibly resonant that it has spread throuhgout the world, and which does work on the immediate level [eg relief of asthatic symptoms] but which systematic reviews show to slightly increase long term risk of death, making it a second line drug now).

The second point against this idea is that, to make a decision at any one point, would require knowing the most widely held opinion of the community. This would of course require a moderator to look at all views, and summarise them, otherwise how would the person know if they had accidently read a non-representative portion of threads that didnt resonate with the greater community. This moderator would wield an immense power, arguably like someone doing a systematic review, but with no details of their methodology and no reasoning behind their conclusion beyond it being ‘resonant and widely held’.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-Dhv59JYpA

sorry if you people consider me a troll- but a debating forum would be a bit dull if everyone had the same opinion don’t you think? have you ever heard of the concept of group think

At the risk of feeding the troll, could I ask what you would propose as either a better system of peer review or where we need to make improvements to the existing system.

The point is that peer review isn’t perfect–no-one’s claiming it is–but it’s the best system we’ve yet devised. Of course you’re going to get problems. It does, after all, have to involve people with their biases and flaws, even the conscientious ones. It’s like pointing out the flaws in democracy as a system of government: anyone can spot the cracks but putting forward solutions is far harder.

Could you add something constructive? I can’t, but I being honest in stating so. How about you?

My own experience with the peer review process is that it is often far from ojective, a senior collegue of mine reckons that it is always easier to get a bad paper published than a groundbreaking one – because the latter will ruffle a few feathers.

I would say that in the context of science publications the peer reviewer would be the judge and the question
“who judges the judges?” would be the journal editor
but in practice this doesnt really happen and even if it does the question can then be taken to the next level.

if you want to see some of the indider dealings relating to the peer review proccess then the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia make interesting reading

Now I was under the impression that Ben wrote somewhere that Cochrane had shown glucosamine was no better than placebo, and (as the Cochrane website has been down for maintenance for a number of months) had dutifully altered my recommendations to (veterinary) clients accordingly.

When the website came back up I checked the abstract and figured “well, not all bad, but definitely dubious”.

Then tonight I located the full text of that metanalysis – if anything, rather biased against glucosamine at this point by the fact that I was a dauntless crusader against fuzzy thinking colleagues and naughty drugs reps. But there appear to be plenty of studies which do say there is a benefit to glucosamine over placebo (about 20%), and overall to get a “no difference” result you have to exclude all the studies which use Rotta glucosamine – which seems somewhat heavy handed (even if those studies were all sponsored by Rotta).

The four studies which compare glucosamine to NSAIDs suggest that they are of equivalent benefit (with much less risk of toxicity).

So now I’m more confused than ever – and this is before you start adding in MSM, perna canaliculus, chondroitin and ground unicorn. Ben, you’ve obviously given this sort of thing a lot of thought – what do you tell your clients when they ask about glucosamine?

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”

Peer review.

Delphinium natare doces.

And no we still don’t think you understand what Ben said in his clip. Your espousal of the “danish study” demonstrates that; show us where this statistically flawed study has been incorporated uncritically into a systematic review and we’ll reconsider the view that you’re talking crap.
Until then you have all the credibility of an alternative health practitioner.

the best contempory example of how this type of thing doesnt work is the IPCC (climate change expert body) wouldnt you say?

do you think i didnt understand what you said in your clip?
don’t you see the point I am making?