Dear Editor
It seems that the scientific method no longer applies to medical research. We say this because for most scientific disciplines it is possible to obtain the raw data used by the paper’s authors in-order to re-run the analysis and check any areas of concern or doubt.
In medicine obtaining data is now very difficult. It appears ‘Patient confidentiality’, even for completely anonymised data, trumps all else, and corresponding authors feel able to simply ignore requests for the data they used.
In the last two years we have twice requested the original data from the corresponding author of papers published in the BMJ. On the first occasion the corresponding author directed us to the UK Biobank. This proved unhelpful, as even though we were only asking for the same data set used by the original authors, we were unable to obtain the data. On the more recent occasion we have twice emailed the corresponding author and received no reply at all.
In both cases we thought there may be a flaw in the analysis, particularly so in the most recent of the two papers.
As two retired doctors, we have both the time and the interest to run further analysis on data from papers which we think may have either a flaw in the analysis, or which may have further information in the data which has not been brought out.
Perhaps it is time for a re-evaluation of the balance between ‘patient confidentiality’ and the expected rigour in the scientific method of evaluating what is published?
Does the scientific method no longer apply to medicine?