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Science must be responsible to society, not to politics.
Recent high-impact collisions between health research and politics include a US Senate vote to disregard updated US Preventive Services Task Force guidelines for breast cancer screening, and the UK Home Secretary's dismissal of drug abuse advisor Prof. David Nutt. Considering the prospects for unbiased comparative effectiveness research in light of such events, the PLoS Medicine Editors argue that "evidence-based medicine deserves better than a push out of the frying pan of partisan politics into the fire of vested interests," and urge politicians to remember that "society encompasses not only the corporate engines of economic growth and decline, but also individuals whose lives depend on the quality of health care data."
Image Credit: Chris Pichado
Citation: (2010) PLoS Medicine Issue Image | Vol. 7(1) January 2010. PLoS Med 7(1): ev07.i01. https://doi.org/10.1371/image.pmed.v07.i01
Published: January 26, 2010
Copyright: © 2010 Chris Pichado. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Recent high-impact collisions between health research and politics include a US Senate vote to disregard updated US Preventive Services Task Force guidelines for breast cancer screening, and the UK Home Secretary's dismissal of drug abuse advisor Prof. David Nutt. Considering the prospects for unbiased comparative effectiveness research in light of such events, the PLoS Medicine Editors argue that "evidence-based medicine deserves better than a push out of the frying pan of partisan politics into the fire of vested interests," and urge politicians to remember that "society encompasses not only the corporate engines of economic growth and decline, but also individuals whose lives depend on the quality of health care data."
Image Credit: Chris Pichado