I think one should know these correlations when hearing about study results, especially those that conventional doctors refer to in justification for treatment proposals:

"Scientists are under considerable pressure to publish in order to secure their academic position and funding for their projects. Therefore, there is a legitimate concern that they may deliberately suppress "unfavorable" results and focus on results that increase their chances of publication. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly clear that many researchers have not mastered even the simplest methods that could be used to limit errors in the interpretation of medical test series."

This paragraph is taken from an article in the NZZ entitled "Embellished, slopped, lied.“

In the following, we want to shed light on why the most important "sponsor" of cancer studies , namely the pharmaceutical industry, often does not even become visible as such.

Back in 2009, the University of Michigan's Department of Health had conducted a meta-study where they looked at how transparent they were with disclosing student funding. The title of this meta-study is: "29 percent of cancer studies report serious conflicts of interest.“

Summary of findings:

Nearly one-third of cancer research publications in peer-reviewed journals revealed a conflict of interest, say researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The most common type of conflict was industry funding of the study, seen in 17 percent of the publications. Twelve percent of the publications had a study author who was in an employment relationship with the sponsor. Randomized trials with reported conflicts of interest were more likely to have positive results.

In other words, they were glossed over.

So is a large part of the medical studies bought?

„We need to think about how we can better separate cancer research and the interests of the pharmaceutical industry in the future" says study author Reshma Jagsi, M.D., D.Phil. assistant professor of radiation oncology at U-M Medical School.

The researchers examined 1,534 cancer research studies published in reputable journals. Results of this latest study appear online in the journal Cancer.

„We have reason to believe that individuals with conflicts of interest are either consciously or unconsciously biased in their analyses. As researchers, we have a duty to treat data objectively and without bias. This can only be achieved if there is no close relationship between the client and the researcher" says Jagsi.

For example, scientists might design studies funded by the pharmaceutical industry to be more likely to produce favorable results. They may also be more likely to publish positive results than negative ones, which again is a bias because adverse effects of a therapy are simply not illuminated.

„In light of these findings, we as a society should perhaps rethink how we want our research to be funded and managed in the future. Especially in recent years, it has been very difficult to obtain research funding from independent sources. So it was natural for scientists to turn to industry. If we want to minimize the risk of bias, we need to expand other sources of support. Medical research is ultimately a collective endeavor that should benefit society as a whole, not individual companies." says Jagsi.

For the meta-study regarding bias of the performing investigators, all cancer clinical trials published in 2006 in five top oncology journals and three top general medicine journals were examined. The journals included were the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Lancet Oncology, Clinical Cancer Research and Cancer.

Articles were analyzed to identify declared sources of funding and conflicts of interest. A conflict of interest was identified if it was either explicitly declared by the authors, an author was an employee of industry at the time of publication, or the study was sponsored by industry.

Source: 

A much more recent 2018 publication concludes that things are getting further out of hand.

It is titled:

„Lack of financial disclosure in the publication of clinical studies„
(Oregon Health & Science University August 30, 2018)

Here is the summary of this paper:

A significant portion of pharmaceutical industry payments to authors of clinical oncology studies published in major scientific journals remain obscure.

This is especially true for clinical trials testing new cancer drugs!

The new findings are published as a research letter in the journal JAMA Oncology.

The authors of the research letter examined the so-called Open Payments Database to determine grants from industry to oncologists conducting research.... They then checked whether the authors properly disclosed the funding. The result: About half of the study budget remained in the dark!

„It is a quandary" said co-author Erick Turner, MD, associate professor of psychiatry at the OHSU School of Medicine. "While journals require authors to disclose funding, they have no recourse if this is ignored."

Payments from pharmaceutical companies have been shown to influence physicians' prescribing practices, he said, the researchers noted.
Author's note: It can be assumed that this does not happen to the detriment of the companies acting as sponsors. 

„We know that pharmaceutical companies sponsor drug trials. That is no surprise" says lead author Cole Wayant, DO, Ph.D., a researcher at Oklahoma State University. "But what is concerning is that this funding is not transparently disclosed when clinical trials are published. After all, these form the basis of FDA approvals and clinical practice guidelines..“

And those who think pharmaceutical company grants are limited to expense reimbursements and honoraria may be in for the next surprise. Between Jan. 1, 2016, and Aug. 31, 2017, alone, the 344 oncology authors received a total of $216 million in four categories:
- Lecture fees and other general payments;
- Study Coordination Research;
- Research fellowships and
- Ownership through share payments

The authors then compared financial conflict of interest disclosures in clinical trials published in six influential scientific journals: The result: nearly one-third of oncology authors (110 in all) did not fully disclose payments, the study found.

To this, the author of this article comes to mind: "Is there any clear evidence at all that the modern medical establishment is focused on healing and not monetary purposes?"

Finally, a quote from the NZZ article mentioned above:

"A team of researchers led by An-Wen Chan of the Centre for Statistics in Medicine, Oxford, scrutinized original data from more than 100 published clinical trial reports. The team looked for evidence that "unfavorable" negative results were omitted from the published articles to increase the chances of publication. In more than half of the trial series reviewed, the statisticians found significant discrepancies between the study's original aims and the reported results, reinforcing the suspicion that researchers were simply combing through their data for publishable material."

On the other hand, the selective choice of statistically significant results is causing more and more reports to be published, for example, reporting the discovery of genes allegedly linked to cancer or other diseases. In most cases, however, these "findings" do not stand up to independent investigation.

About the completely misunderstood genetics will be discussed in this article.

In this article the Nocebo effect illuminated.