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Primary sources

I'm proposing to change this paragraph (lets reach consensus):

"ll Misplaced Pages articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources. Reliable primary sources may occasionally be used with care as an adjunct to the secondary literature, but there remains potential for misuse. For that reason, edits that rely on primary sources should only describe the conclusions of the source, and should describe these findings clearly so the edit can be checked by editors with no specialist knowledge. In particular, this description should follow closely to the interpretation of the data given by the authors or by other reliable secondary sources. Primary sources should not be cited in support of a conclusion that is not clearly made by the authors or by reliable secondary sources, as defined above (see: Misplaced Pages:No original research). When citing primary sources, particular care must be taken to adhere to Misplaced Pages's undue weight policy. Secondary sources should be used to determine due weight."

To:

"ll Misplaced Pages articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources. Reliable primary sources may be used with care. Edits that rely on primary sources should only describe the conclusions of the source, and should describe these findings clearly so the edit can be checked by editors with no specialist knowledge. Primary sources should not be cited in support of a conclusion that is not clearly made by the authors, (see: Misplaced Pages:No original research). When citing primary sources, particular care must be taken to adhere to Misplaced Pages's undue weight policy. "

Ryanspir (talk) 09:53, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

Strike throughs added by me for clarity. -- Brangifer (talk) 22:49, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

• Completely Disagree: it leaves too much space to cite primary sources at the discretion of editors. I believe it is a change to the worse. I am fully comfortable with what we have right now.--Garrondo (talk) 15:15, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose There are lot of secondary sources that still need summarizing. The use of primary sources on Misplaced Pages generally represents an attempt to push something beyond its due weight. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 16:36, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

• Strong oppose. We have enough trouble trying to explain why primary studies are usually inappropriate, this will just make things worse. Yobol (talk) 17:08, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

• Strong oppose The "conclusion" of a primary research paper is nearly always a plea meaning "We've found something interesting/useful please continue to fund our research in this area / please sign the FDA documents that all allow us to sell it". They aren't neutral assessments at all. Colin° 19:19, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

• Strong oppose this actually cuts the heart out of MEDRS as a stronger statement of WP:PSTS and comes very close to violating WP:PSTS. The words "may be used as an adjunct to the secondary literature" are absolutely crucial and are far too often ignored. But thank you for crystallizing the issue with this clear statement.Jytdog (talk) 20:21, 7 April 2013 (UTC

• Oppose We rely on independent expert reviews, textbooks, and other secondary sources to evaluate and contextualise primary research. We don't do that ourselves. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 21:03, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

I only ever use a primary source if it has first been put into context by a reviewer with the relevant expertise in a reliable independent secondary source. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 17:30, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose This section of WP:MEDRS as it currently stands is the proper application of Misplaced Pages sourcing policy to medical topics, the proposed change would disimprove the guideline. Zad68 22:05, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

• Strong oppose. This proposal guts the guideline of important content. It goes way too far. -- Brangifer (talk) 22:49, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
• Strong oppose. Current wording is better.Desoto10 (talk) 01:18, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose Current wording is better. But MEDRS needs to address the occasional case where a primary source is such a whale of a study that it wags all meta-analysis down the road. Examples: Women's Health Initiative and Million Women Study. These studies have their own WP articles, so we can hardly refuse to use their primary sources, er... primarily. Secondary sources just requote the primary conclusions of whale studies. We are left in the same position as when we get data from a big study with the Hubble Space Telescope or Large Hadron Collider which isn't likely to be repeated soon. You just have to bite your tongue and quote it, noting that it's a single LARGE study that hasn't been confirmed and probably won't be, for some time. That sucks, but meanwhile what can you do? SBHarris 02:38, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Agree that this is the exception. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 02:42, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Agree. This is the type of situation the guideline allows for. Maybe it needs to be made explicit, with these as examples? -- Brangifer (talk) 03:21, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

(Sbharris) The primary-study / secondary source debate for sourcing wikipedia really has nothing to do with the power of the study. That science may want to repeat small or surprising studies to prove they weren't a one-off, or not want to repeat large conclusive studies or studies that there simply isn't enough money/interest to repeat, is a matter for our secondary sources and the academic/scientific community to decide. I don't see these as an exception to our rules. I'm sure both the studies you mentioned were covered rapidly by secondary sources of various kinds. Colin° 07:04, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

It usually does not take long before these major studies are parts of reviews. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 05:21, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Of course, but I'm not sure it improves them. If there's just one big study of something, any "review" that uses it (cites it) is forced to conflate it with a lot of stuff that is only semi-confirmatory, since the extra stuff used to compare it with, won't be the same thing. For example, a big giant prospective study, the only one of its kind, might be conflated with some other really big cohort-controlled prospective epidemiological study. And that's actually exactly what happened with the two studies above, that I cited. They aren't the same-- in one study the groups are split at random, and in the other, the groups choose themselves and (of course) therefore aren't the same. So what do you do when the findings from these studies turn out the same, or when the data conflict? Which they do at many points (sometimes they agree and other times they don't). We simply end up playing off one review against another, and in that case, one would need a review of reviews, or a review of the quality of previous reviews. But suppose there's only ONE of those? How do we know it's not biased? Of course it's biased. There is no getting away from the problem that one must cut off the generalization at some level, and sometimes a lower level is appropriate is there's only one event or one big study that is relevent. In that case, the most appropriate reviewers of a set of data, are the people who generated it. Everybody else down the line is simply using data they got from somebody else and doing extra induction and comparison with similar studies, that the primary authors chose not to do.

At the most ridiculous level, we have a gigantic multicenter study that appears in the New England Journal of Medicine, peer reviewed by the best in the field, and we can't use it until somebody in the Iowa Journal of Family Practice Reviews notices the thing. Then we cite THEM. Meanwhile, why doesn't all the reviewing that contributing to getting it into the NEJM in the first place, count? It's all very arbitrary, seems to me.

Often it takes time and effort, and you must survive more scrutiny, to get some data into an exclusive high-quality primary journal, than it takes to get it they same paper into a third-tier primary one AND then reviewed by several others.SBHarris 03:10, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

We don't require a meta-analysis or some other combination with other studies. A narrative review that says little more than "This awesome study clearly proves that the foo is bar baz during full moons" is good enough for our purposes. What we're looking for is essentially an expert endorsement of someone else's work, rather than Misplaced Pages editors deciding which experiments were well done. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:35, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

The whole idea of peer review is that some (bunch of) experts have to endorse a study as well-done and belieable. . Anything the NEJM publishes (for example) will be picked up by secondary review journals, authomatically. And I mean automatically. It's not that some expert decides it's a great study. That's considered a given. if it even appears in the NEJM in the first place. So John Q. Editor at WP can do that as well as anybody. The secondary review journal doing that, doesn't add a thing to the credibility of the paper.

For example, today's NEJM has an article addressing a previous NEJM report of the antibiotic azithromycin causing heart deaths, based on data from Tennessee. This study had been picked up many secondary sources, including newspapers, and even caused the FDA to issue a boxed warning. Alas, none of these were any better than the first study, though they did cause the problem to make it into the Misplaced Pages article on the drug: . Today's new study finds the supposed safety problem is not seen in a slightly different population from Denmark. So it wasn't rotten in Denmark. Now we dither, and even the FDA dithers on prescribing: to warn, or not to warn, that is the question. But no medical journals have picked up the recent finding, yet. Why should we wait till they do? They won't be doing it on the basis of anything we don't already know. They will be automatic. When they quote the new NEJM, as they inevitably will, they don't add anything by doing so. So why are we waiting for them? It's the NEJM. We don't need somebody else to read it to us. We didn't need it the first time. SBHarris 03:33, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

I disagree with your "whole idea of peer review" opinion and certainly with your view that anything the NEJM publishes can be used directly by wikipedians as though it is God's own truth. I don't think you really appreciate the WP:WEIGHT issues of new research and perhaps have got Misplaced Pages confused with a newspaper in terms of WP:RECENTISM. As far as Misplaced Pages is concerned the writers of the "Iowa Journal of Family Practice Reviews" are way ahead of Sbharris or any other Wikipedian when it comes to assessing the primary research literature. There will always be editors who think they can review the primary research literature better than the review and textbook authors we are supposed to rely on. If you feel that way, write a blog or get yourself properly published, because that isn't your role as a Wikipedian. Colin° 15:11, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

I agree with Colin above. Sbharris, there is a really important reason that both 1) the fundamental policy WP:OR and its section on primary/secondary/tertiary sources WP:PSTS, and 2) MEDRS (which is completely within PSTS), each warn very strongly away from basing content on primary sources, and that is due to the dangers of cherry-picking, SYN, and WEIGHT. As Colin said we editors need outside experts to publish a review that discusses the great NEJM study, putting it in its proper context. We need that 2ndary source to get the content in, and to defend it against people who would take the content out. While you may believe yourself to be educated/experienced enough to provide that context yourself, you could not defend the content providing the context on your own authority as an editor and editors cannot make those kind of judgements (think of the disasters that would happen if the policy were not this way, and people who thought they knew what they were talking about, but didn't, were making these kind of judgements throughout wikipedia). I realize that you find the secondary source policy frustrating and too slow and maybe too stupid, but it is a good and robust policy that is essential for Misplaced Pages to be the wide-open encylopedia that it is. Happily, landmark clinical studies are often accompanied by a comment letter by the editors of the journal or some thought-leader, which provides context and describes the importance of the study -- that comment letter can serve as the 2ndary source to get the Important Study into wikipedia. Jytdog (talk) 15:43, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Letters to the editor, comments, editorials, and other opinion pieces are never peer-reviewed and are treated as primary sources on Misplaced Pages. They consequently aren't capable of getting the Important Study into Misplaced Pages. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:25, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

That is interesting, and a good point. Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 18:22, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

I would like to point out that the devil is not as scary as he looks :). That's a Russian proverb, not sure if it makes sense in English though.

In my proposal I have indicated that:

1. "Misplaced Pages articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources"

2. That only *reliable* primary sources can be used and when so is done, it should be done with care.

3. "Primary sources should not be cited in support of a conclusion that is not clearly made by the authors, (see: Misplaced Pages:No original research)." - I have left it as it is.

4. "When citing primary sources, particular care must be taken to adhere to Misplaced Pages's undue weight policy." - I have left this limitation as well in my proposal.

5. Regarding primary sources that are being adjunct to secondary sources, there is no need IMHO, as we have already mentioned that primary source should be used with care and put provided two limitations on its use. In any case, it's the consensus on every article that will be the deciding factor in case any discussion will arise if any editor has used a primary source "with care" and it will be disagreed by another editor. I repeat again, my version is more clear, shorter and more straight forward than the original and it gives just *slight ly* more air for inclusion of primary sources while including the limitations. Ryanspir (talk) 14:44, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose - This is a move in the wrong direction. If anything, we need to tighten the loophole to ensure that primary sources are not treated as reliable unless secondary sources have first cited them in a way that shows them to be credible (i.e. the citation is not just to make a criticism, update, or retraction), significant (i.e. the secondary source uses the main findings from the primary source), and independent (i.e. no tie between the authors of the primary and of the secondary source). At that point, the utility of the primary source is simply to fill in some blanks that the secondary source omits. LeadSongDog come howl! 15:12, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

• Are you assuming that editors must be "enforced" and saying "use with care" is not adequate? Ryanspir (talk) 15:56, 11 April 2013 (UTC)
• This would simplify things enormously but it would overly constrain us when a study appears addressing a rarely-reviewed uncontroversial topic - I gather quite a bit of biology is slow to be independently reviewed. Though, in those very, very rare instances in health-related topics I'd prefer to see editors simply reporting the results and all the caveats but none of the usual evaluation, contextualisation, speculation or puffery found in the "conclusions" section, and making it clear somehow that the results have not been independently reviewed yet. ("In a recent placebo-controlled trial, blah blah, though these results are yet to be subjected to independent scholarly review" or something of the sort.) --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 01:44, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

I agree with the position of Anthonyhcole. The example of the way how the attribution should be made in such cases can be given in WP:MEDRS. Ryanspir (talk) 13:03, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

I think the present wording of the guideline is clear enough. Just to emphasise: I've never, to my knowledge, added a health-related assertion to an article based on an un-reviewed report. And I've only seen it done appropriately a handful of times over the last five years. In most other cases the editor either doesn't understand the principle that Misplaced Pages simply reflects significant expert views, they disagree with that principle, or they're pushing a discredited or fringe view. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 03:48, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

Due to a strong consensus, may I kindly propose to remove primary sources "LA article" and "Quackwatch" on the article Medical uses of silver? Calling a substance "quack" implies that the substance is not effective for the conditions mentioned, and calling the substance "quack" in general implies that it is not effective for any conditions. Per the strong consensus in this section such determination by a primary source should have an adjunct reliable secondary source in order to comply with WP:MEDRS guidelines. Thank you. Ryanspir (talk) 09:13, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

This is so far from prior statements on this topic that it's hard to understand why you'd try this again. -- Scray (talk) 14:25, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

No. Zad68 14:30, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

No: Quack is a social term with a broader meaning that simple effectiveness. Quack is not even a medical term and proof is that search for quack in pubmed gives few results (almost all from authors with that name). In this sense it implies that there is some consensus outside the medical field to consider a treatment and its commercialization a fraud. Such consensus may be right or wrong and to indicate that we should provide secondary sources on efficacy, but if a reliable social source (such as NYT) says something is quack that clearly merits inclusion in an article since it implies that society in general does not consider the claims reliable (independently of truth). Importance is in its social aspects and that is why no secondary source is needed, since it is not a medical claim. --Garrondo (talk) 14:54, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

Ryan has a long history of making edits that conflate the substance of colloidal silver itself with the "quack" uses of it, and also of making edits confusing primary and secondary sources. Zad68 14:58, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

May I kindly bring your attention to: "Quackwatch states that colloidal silver dietary supplements have not been found safe or effective for the treatment of any condition." It clearly says "not been found effective" "for the treatment of any condition". Such statement should in my opinion have adjunct reliable secondary source. It is a medical claim, right? Ryanspir (talk) 20:27, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Quackwatch is reporting on what the FDA has said. The FDA has stated that cs dietary supplements have not been found to be safe or effective.Desoto10 (talk) 00:28, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

FDA is not listed in WP:MEDRS as an option to which a primary source can be adjunct to. Only secondary sources are listed. Thank you. Ryanspir (talk) 01:56, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Just a suggestion: sometimes the best way to deal with WP:IDHT is to WP:SHUN the problem. Yobol (talk) 00:54, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

I'm acting in good faith and what I'm asking is to impartially implement the strong consensus we have reached here towards primary sources. I don't think your WP:SHUN is warranted, as I'm being very reasonable and listening to everyone's opinion. Ryanspir (talk) 10:05, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

• Support proposal. I said the same thing myself before. But note that you're up against a powerful lobby here, funded via Wiki Med Inc., so this is a waste of time. Wnt (talk) 18:18, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

Now I understand: there's a well-financed conspiracy, and all these people advocating secondary sourcing are making money from it? You're way ahead of me on this. -- Scray (talk) 00:11, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

• Comment - I am fine with this part staying as it is, however I do notice that it gets misinterpreted. "In particular, this description should follow closely to the interpretation of the data given by the authors or by other reliable secondary sources." This point is covered completely in the sentence after it, and it only adds confusion. Primary sources should stay true to their own interpretation and not be dependent on another source to interpret it, that part is highly susceptible to misinterpretation. The last sentence also gets misinterpreted, "due weight".While a secondary source can critique/review/opinionate (interpret in these senses of the word) a primary source, in no way should a second source even by omission tell a primary source what it meant to say. Those two sentences are very unclear, messy, and open to misinterpretation.

I did notice the edit made by user:Wnt in the guideline article, and I agree with that part. Primary sources are important especially when they are up to date, reliable, and offer vast amounts of knowledge. Editors shouldn't be so quick to discount primary sources, when they are allowed. Strict usage of primary sources is acceptable, but it is not acceptable to discount them. Sidelight12 20:11, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Review of Monsanto's Roundup herbicide

Hi there, I'm hoping this is the right place to ask for an opinion. My work at the Monsanto page was reverted here with the edit summary: this source fails MEDRS - health-related content cannot be based on it. Also there are much better and more comprehensive reviews on Glyphosate toxicity, if this were the place for it. which it is not.

The reason I placed this information at the Monsanto article: the secondary source I referenced was entitled Heavy use of herbicide Roundup linked to health dangers. Monsanto makes Roundup; the Monsanto article covers this product, and to my knowledge there is no other article where Roundup is covered. In my opinion, this information belongs at the Monsanto page as well as the more specific article about the chemical in Roundup, glyphosate.

The sources used were: a Reuters, and a primary study from Entropy.

Do these sources meet MEDRS, or is this possibly "a public-interest issue, not strictly a MEDRS one" as SlimVirgin suggested when I sought advice? Thank you for your time, petrarchan47tc 00:23, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

First, medical claims should be sourced to medical writing, not newspaper accounts of them. Second, we should not report primary but use secondary sources that explain the significance they have. It is a MEDRS issue, because it implies there is a medical issue, "Roundup linked to health dangers". TFD (talk) 00:52, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

We avoid individual studies because it's so easy to pick out only the studies that happen to agree with our personal opinions.

You need a secondary source, which for toxicology usually means a review or a reference work, so go to http://www.pubmed.gov and type glyphosate toxicity into the search box. On the left side of the screen, click 'reviews' under "Article types". You'll find about ten that were published during the last ten years. PMID 22683395 says there's no particular relationship to cancer, and PMID 21798302 says that any relationship to non-cancer problems like Parkinson's is weak at best. If you're interested in food contamination, then PMID 21541850 looks interesting, but there are no links to the full paper. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:51, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

I was the one who reverted the addition of that information. Here is what I have written about the Entropy article: "The key idea of MEDRS is that health-related content needs to be based on very secure foundations, the best we have, that expresses the consensus of the medical community. In this case, the journal is not a biomedical journal or textbook. The authors are not part of the medical community. What they present in this article, is not the medical consensus, nor even primary biomedical experimental research, but instead they present novel hypotheses they have generated based on their review of primary and secondary biomedical literature. This is not a secondary source --a review -- in the standard way we think about them -- it is really a primary source, presenting what I would call "theoretical biomedical research" (there are actually a few journals now for theoretical biology). But you can see here that on all three levels -- journal, authors, and content, the source fails MEDRS. This is not a reliable source, presenting the consensus of the medical community, so no content based on the Entropy article has any place in Wikpedia. " And I really believe this is true -- this journal and this article is not a valid source under MEDRS for health related content. Same goes for news reports about this article. Jytdog (talk) 02:11, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

I am a bit wary though of the use of MEDRS here, certainly the paper can by no means be used to claim anything as established or even as a medical consensus, but that doesn't necessarily it cannot be used at all as it depends how you phrase and attribute its claims in WP. The actual phrase in policy is : "Speculative proposals and early-stage research should not be cited in ways that suggest wide acceptance. " (see also the paragraph it belongs to).--Kmhkmh (talk) 06:27, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

If you have sources for your claims about the journal, then Entropy (journal) definitely needs to be expanded. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:37, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Not sure what you mean! It is a journal of "entropy and information studies" - not a biomedical journal. Jytdog (talk) 03:45, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

btw, here is what one of the authors says about Entropy and the work she has published there. Sounds pretty fringey to me: "Note: Entropy is an Open Access journal that is willing to publish novel hypotheses regarding biochemical and biophysical phenomena, which can help the community break out of its current straitjacketed research paradigm. The papers below, many of which were published in Entropy's Special Issue on Biosemiotic Entropy: Disorder, Disease, and Mortality, cover several topics relating environmental toxins to disease, as well as the revolutionary concept that endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) synthesizes sulfate as well as nitric oxide. The papers were subjected to rigorous review by experts who were not beholden to industry influence. These papers collectively explain how widespread cholesterol sulfate deficiency throughout the body is behind most modern diseases and conditions." from here: http://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/ which I got from here: http://ksj.mit.edu/tracker/2013/04/discover-blogger-keith-kloor-stumbles-ne This just points up what I am saying, that this article is far far from the medical consensus. And please note that this is an open access, fee for publishing journal like those discussed above. To be fair, it is not currently on the list referenced above. Jytdog (talk) 04:39, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

There was already a preliminary discussion about the reliability of the source and the red flags it raises at the Monsanto article (see Talk:Monsanto#entropy_study/bad_science?. Personally I think the paper is at first glance "formally reliable" reliable as it is was published in a peer reviewed academic/scientific journal. But is raises various red flags, such as its weeping claims without any new experimental evidence and the fact that is was published outside the main domain it primarily belongs too, that is a journal in the field of chemistry, biology, medicine or agrarian and environmental sciences. The same issue with the who is an established scientists but in computer science rather than in those domains.

However aside from personally assessing the paper's potential problems by WP editors, WP should if possible mainly rely on external source if available. Unfortunately I haven't seen scientific review of the paper yet, however there are a view journalistic reviews available that could be consulted. I copied the material from the Monsanto discussion, feel free to extend it, so that everybody discussing here has on overview about what external sources say about the paper:

• Samsel/Seneff: Glyphosate’s Suppression of Cytochrome P450 Enzymes and Amino Acid Biosynthesis by the Gut Microbiome: Pathways to Modern Diseases. Entropy, 2013-4-18 (the original paper)
• Roundup, An Herbicide, Could Be Linked To Parkinson's, Cancer And Other Health Issues, Study Shows. HuffPo/Reuters, 2013-4-25
• Tamar HaspeL: Condemning Monsanto With Bad Science Is Dumb. HuffPo, 2013-4-26
• Keith Kloor: When Media Uncritically Cover Pseudoscience. Discover, 2013-4-26
• Paul Raeburn: Discover blogger Keith Kloor stumbles into nest of questionable studies and reporting on GMOs and multiple ailments.. Knight Science Journalios, MIT, 2013-4-26
• Monsanto reply Another Bogus “Study” 25 April 2013

--Kmhkmh (talk) 05:13, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

• Derek Lowe (chemist): Is Glyphosate Poisoning Everyone?. Corante, April 30, 2013 "After spending some time reading this paper over, and looking through the literature, I've come to a conclusion: it is, unfortunately, a load of crap." Mmangan333 (talk) 14:40, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

P.S.: On a site note, while I see this paper rather skeptical, it might be worth to look at the articles it cites. Though there are probably not so many well researched scientific publications aboutissues of Glyphosate, one has to keep in mind that this is highly politicized field with (almost) all research funded by parties with a high financial stakes in Glyphosate, i.e. there is one hand a lack of really neutral high quality research, but on the other hand there is still a lot of journalistic/"anectdotical" evidence (local health issues popping up in areas with large scale glyphosate use in the Latin America and Asia in particular). This evidence is nowhere near a scientific result/knowledge, but it is well known enough to warrant mentioning in the concerned articles on glyphosate or monsanto.--Kmhkmh (talk) 05:27, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

A note about the articles above: I am shocked that a discussion about MEDRS is pointing us to two bloggers - Tamar HaspeL for the Huffington Post, and "Discover blogger Keith Kloor". I don't understand how bloggers could have any place in this conversation. petrarchan47tc 05:49, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

As I said already there are only some journalistic reviews available yet. "Blog" is describing the technical format/software, which has little meaning. To formally judge the merit of a "blog", you would need to assess the reputation of the authors and whether the "blog" has a particular reputation or is associated with publisher with a certain reputation."Blogs/Bloggers" as unusable/unreliable for WP refers primarily to private blogs by private citizens without a particular reputation (that is your average blog on wordpress & co). This is similar to websites, (average) private websites are normally unreliable, but that doesn't mean any website as such is unreliable. Note strictly speaking any online content is a "website" of some sort. Keeping that in mind both "bloggers" are associated with regular publications (Huffpo and Discover magazine) and can probably considered to be journalists and their publication as a journalistic review of the Samsel/Seneff paper. Not more not less, i.e. they provide some input/inside but certainly no authoritative opinion on the paper, a bit more authoritative assessment however might come from the knights journalism at MIT publication which however essentially criticizes the same points. Also note, that at the current stage the only intended usage of all of them is to help assessing the Samsel/Seneff paper, we are not discussing about sourcing anything with them.--Kmhkmh (talk) 06:20, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

But these particular bloggers' reputations have not been established here, yet we are referring to them for opinion on sources. Baffling. petrarchan47tc 18:47, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Petrarchan, it's actually much simpler than that, the journal Entropy is not MEDLINE indexed, see here. If the journal is not even MEDLINE indexed it fails to meet even the minimum entry requirements for a WP:MEDRS-compliant reliable source for biomedical information, and we do not even have to consider what bloggers might have to say about it. Beyond that we have multiple recent review articles in MEDLINE-indexed journals covering the topic of the safety of glyphosate in humans, see the several PMIDs brought up by myself and Whatamidoing elsewhere in this section, there is no need to even consider looking at Entropy for this information. Zad68 19:05, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Bloggers shouldn't have been a part of any serious conversation, unless they are shown to meet WP:RS. (I have to admit, I'm fascinated to hear that wide-use of a herbicide is completely safe for humans.) I must admit, it is confusing that no reputable source has taken issue with the study, and that it fell on the shoulders of bloggers and Monsanto to write up refutations. I continue to be baffled. Thanks for your time, though. petrarchan47tc 19:34, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Again, you confuse the use of sources with the assessment of sources. As far as glyphosate is concerned I don't recall anybody here claiming it to be safe, but just that the sweeping speculation of the entropy paper have no place in WP.--Kmhkmh (talk) 02:36, 1 May 2013 (UTC)The discussion here is not about merits or dangers of glyphosate but about the merits of the entropy paper and whether it is an acceptable source for WP or not.--Kmhkmh (talk) 02:36, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Oh, you are right, my apologies. I misread Zad's comment. petrarchan47tc 20:17, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

You're welcome, hope you found this conversation useful. Whether it's really true or not that glyphosate is completely safe for humans isn't actually something Misplaced Pages worries about; we only repeat what reliable sources say. I would guess that the reason no really reputable independent source has taken up issue with the Entropy article is that the article carries so little authority that nobody cares enough about it to reply. The article really doesn't carry much more weight than a self-published eBook. Zad68 19:47, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

In the category of chemicals used for weed control and their safety in humans, I understand that they're using dihydrogen monoxide to kill weeds these days. The suppliers keep saying it's safe, even though that's been linked strongly to fatal outcomes, especially in young children. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:07, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

What's even crazier is that homeopaths have found that it's even more potent in microscopically tiny doses... if you give weeds just a few molecules of it (and allow them no more) they'll die as well. It's obviously potent stuff! And I'd love to laugh at "The suppliers keep saying it's safe..." but I've started hanging out at Talk:Water fluoridation so now my brow only furrows with worry... Zad68 20:27, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

SlimVirgin's advice that "this is a public-interest issue, not strictly a MEDRS one, so I would allow it, though I might write it differently." is dreadful. The writing and the source break our core policies, never mind the specifics that MEDRS might add. As others have said, this paper is original-thought published in a journal with zero reputation for the field of toxicity and where one of the authors appears to be a computer scientist. Fails WP:V straight away. It seems to regard RoundUp as potentially liable for all modern human ills. How many WP:REDFLAGs are needed? Per WP:WEIGHT is this appropriate to the article Monsanto? Or even the glyphosate article? As a primary source, we need secondary sources to give this viewpoint any weight. The Reuter's article is not such a secondary source. Reuters is a agency that (among other activities) uncritically packages up press-releases into "articles" that appear to be proper journalism and can be copy/pasted into newspapers for a fee. Such articles tell us nothing about what experts in the field have to say, or about what influential thinkers have to say, or the public thinks.... The issue of whether Monsanto's products cause some of our modern ills is a "public-interest" one, but it takes more than a regurgitated press-release to establish what commentators (scientist, environmentalist, politician or journalist) have to say on the issue. Colin° 12:44, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Though I agree on your assessment of this particular source and the red flags, I disagree somewhat on Slim Virgin's advice being dreadful, because imho she has a point there. That is we may need to cover material for which no peer reviewed medical resources are available yet, but for which other "reliable" sources and media coverage does exist. We can of course not give claims in such sources a "factual" status, that they don't have, but we can't completely ignore them either In particular in the case of Round-up/Glyphosate isuues there is independent (not reurgitated) "quality" journalism available, the Reuters article is just not a part of that. Such independet journalistic material is for instance a recent AJE documentary "Bad Seeds" or the french Documentary "World according to Monsanto".--Kmhkmh (talk) 13:09, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Re-read what she said. The reason she would allow the reverted text was that she felt this issue wasn't covered by MEDRS. Totally ignoring all the other policy pages which make it quite clear this source and the text drawn from it should not appear on the Monsanto article. Now there may well be solid reliable non-medical-journal/textbook sources that discuss the Roundup Makes People Unhealthy issue from various angles but neither the source(s) given nor the text drawn from them is acceptable. petrarchan47tc asked SlimVirgin for her take on the "sources and content" with the angle that the "same excuse" (i.e., MEDRS) was being used to remove this. petrarchan47tc did not ask SlimVirgin if she was aware of better sources or for her view on the subject itself. So SlimVirgin basically agreed that because she felt there was a "public-interest" angle to the issue, all other critical faculties necessary for judging ones sources and facts become irrelevant. That's "Daily Mail" writing and doesn't belong here. Colin° 13:30, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

We are talking besides each other it seems. I don't support SlimVirgin's argument applied on this particular source, but I do support that line of argument in general. That doesn't mean the general criteria on sources can be lifted but just the specifications/extensions by MEDRS may be lifted in a particular context due to the subject in question having a "public interest" angle or more generally a non purely medical aspect to it.--Kmhkmh (talk) 13:44, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

"I do support that line of argument in general" - what line of argument is that? Because SlimVirgin didn't advocate any argument beyond her claim that MEDRS didn't apply. It does apply in that a health/medical claim is being made (X "could cause" disease Y). Once we step outside the medical aspect, we can consider this speculation in the same way as we consider any original thought on any subject. Is it notable? Is it mentioned by sources writing about the article topic? Are our sources reliable? Etc. I think you are reading the "public-interest issues might draw on a variety of sources" aspect into what SV wrote. She didn't say that at all. Colin° 14:37, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Kmhkmh, Colin is right. MEDRS is clear that it applies only to health content in a given article. And I don't see how you can say there is any non-health related content that could be sourced from the Entropy article. With regard to any supposed "public interest exception" to MEDRS - there is none, and this is the opposite of what should hold. The more public interest there is in a health related issue the more important it is that MEDRS apply. So... I don't get your point. Jytdog (talk) 13:57, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

I'm not arguing to source anything with the entropy article, due to the red flags it should be used in WP at all. Nor should the Reuters article be used to spource anything. However other "quality Journalism" pieces may be usuable and so might be some of the sources cited in the entropy article. In short if somebody wants to source suspected/potential medical issues og glyphosate in the glyphosate article he (and probably should) do that, but without using the Samsell/Seneff paper or the Reuters article. You might read that as an advice to Petrarchan47. There are other acceptable sources out there describing various health issue with Glyphosate (with less sweeping claims though), so there is no need for him to rely on this particular questionable paper.--Kmhkmh (talk) 14:12, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

We have 20 recent review articles on the stuff. Why the need for primary sources? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 14:03, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Reviews on what exactly? And could you point out those reviews explicitly please.--Kmhkmh (talk) 14:14, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

jmh, the "why" is that the Entropy article is recent and got some buzz in environmental circles, so several editors who are not usually involved in the Monsanto and glyphosate articles wanted to add content based on it, to those two articles. I've been trying to make clear that this source fails MEDRS and that is how the conversation got started here, when one of the editors I reverted brought it here for discussion. You are right that there is no need at all for this source. It is just being driven by WP:RECENTISM Jytdog (talk) 14:17, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Kmhkmh, if you look above, whatamidoing gave instructions for finding recent reviews of glyphosate toxicity. Jytdog (talk) 14:17, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Glyphosate targets a metabaolic pathway that exists only in plants and not in animals so there would be no initial expectation that it would have a harmful effect on humans. Not saying these are all the best quality (haven't really checked) but for starters take a look at:

• PMID 22683395 "no consistent pattern of positive associations indicating a causal relationship between total cancer (in adults or children) or any site-specific cancer and exposure to glyphosate"
• PMID 22202229 "the available literature shows no solid evidence linking glyphosate exposure to adverse developmental or reproductive effects at environmentally realistic exposure concentrations"
• PMID 21798302 "no evidence of a consistent pattern of positive associations indicating a causal relationship between any disease and exposure to glyphosate"

Per WP:EXTRAORDINARY you'd have to come up with extremely solid sourcing to have the article state there's been found to be a health risk to humans, and the Entropy article and popular-press items do not rate. Maybe SlimVirgin meant "although there's no scientifc consensus of a health risk to humans, there's a popular perception that there is, and this article might be used to describe that" but I don't want to put words in SV's mouth. Zad68 14:36, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

I think it is probably time to separate the discussion of those 2 particular sources (Entropy & Reuters articles) from glyphosate related issues and other sources for it. The latter should be discussed on the glyphosate talk page and if another controvery about a particular source arises, we can discuss that here. But we shouldn't the general glyphosate discussion here.--Kmhkmh (talk) 14:42, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Sorry if I'm missing it, but is there anything left to discuss here? I think there's a solid consensus that Jytdog's revert per WP:MEDRS was correct. I don't think anybody is arguing WP:MEDRS applies to sources such as popular press for non-biomedical information about general discussion of a subject, such as the possibly incorrect popular perception of something being unsafe when medical consensus is that it is safe. Anything I'm missing? Zad68 16:30, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Seems to me that we are done, too. There are some off-topic discussions running but the main question of whether the article in Entropy passes MEDRS is resolved I believe. Thanks for summarizing, zad. Jytdog (talk) 18:51, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

I believe this information should be in the Monsanto article. It could look something like how the Washington Post covered it yesterday:

Roundup is tied to infertility and cancer; herbicide’s maker calls it safe

Heavy use of the world’s most popular herbicide, Roundup, may be linked to a range of health problems and diseases, including Parkinson’s, infertility and cancers, according to a new study.

The report, published this month in the online journal Entropy, said evidence indicates that residues of glyphosate, the chief ingredient in Roundup and other weedkillers, has been found in food.

Monsanto and other leading industry experts have said for years that glyphosate is proven safe and has a less damaging impact on the environment than other commonly used chemicals. petrarchan47tc 19:34, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

I agree that these sources don't meet WEDRS. (But feel it should be mentioned, perhaps in a "Monsanto controversy" section.) petrarchan47tc 19:37, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

I don't see how any content based on the Entropy article can come into wikipedia. Jytdog (talk) 19:49, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

You could only justify mentioning the Entropy article in a controversies section if you had an independent reliable secondary source that provided a general overview of Monsanto controversies, and it highlighted that Entropy article as a noteworthy enough topic within Monsanto controversies to justify including it. Per the above discussion I do not get the impression it would be noteworthy enough to include. You can make a list of many, many things that can be said regarding controversies concerning Monsanto, but I don't think that particular article is in that list's top 10 items. Zad68 19:55, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Essentially any editor that stated an opinion here to answer your question has declined the use of the Entropy article as an acceptable source, so that issue seems settled and the discussion can be closed here. The Washington Post entry btw. is just a copy that equally unable Reuters piece. If want to point out health issues of Glyphosate there are other sources you could (and would need to) resort to and the article on glyphosate covers quite a variety of them already anyhow. However an extended discussion on that belongs on the talk page of glyphosate and not here.--Kmhkmh (talk) 20:42, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

The Entropy article is peer-reviewed and thus sufficient to support its conclusions being present in the article about Monsanto. I was shocked to find that there was absolutely no mention of genetically modified organism (GMO) in the article; an amazing lapse. Professor Daniel W. Schneider of the University of Wisconsin at Madison ties together the parts of this issue, telling his readers in Hybrid Nature: Sewage Treatment and the Contradictions of the Industrial Ecosystem (2011, MIT Press) that Monsanto invented the business strategy of selling both glyphosate pesticides (Roundup) and glyphosate-resistant GMO crops, the strategy being immensely successful. Schneider discusses how the GMO crops may be harmful to humans and the environment because of how much glyphosate is poured on them during the growing season. The Entropy study is not the only indicator of the total problem. As well, the Schneider book ties the problem firmly to Monsanto, which means we should be not to be ghetto-izing the controversy at the glyphosate article—the issue should absolutely be raised at the Monsanto page. Binksternet (talk) 00:23, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Binkster this is the Talk page for the MEDRS guideline. Not about Monsanto or Glyphosate, and the question that was put, is "is the Entropy article acceptable under MEDRS". Nothing you wrote is relevant to MEDRS. Please read it and the discussion above. And you cannot use a book published in 2011 to back up an article published in 2013. The Entropy article is not acceptable for health content in wikipedia. Please let it go. Jytdog (talk) 01:29, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

What's amazing to me is the number of people who see the words "peer-reviewed" and somehow believe this is a magic incantation making that source reliable. There are a number of red flags with this particular source, and it should not be used for any medical information on Misplaced Pages. Yobol (talk) 01:34, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

(e/c) Binks, sorry, it simply isn't true that just because something is "peer-reviewed", that by itself makes it qualified for inclusion. The WP:MEDRS guideline basically says for journal articles, being "peer reviewed" is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

Regarding "no mention of GMOs", I left a message for you at SV's page - the article covers specific subtypes of GMOs like GM seeds and GM crops, with appropriate Wikilinks. The article's coverage of the GM topic may not be ideal but it's incorrect to say there's a complete "lapse" of such coverage in the article. (Disclosure: I have never edited that article or its Talk page and really haven't had any interest in doing so.) This and the Schneider source you bring should probably be discussed at Talk:Monsanto and not here at WT:MEDRS. Zad68 01:38, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Except MEDRS actually says no such thing. Peer reviewed is neither necessary nor sufficient per se. It is however the highest for "formal" requirement we have, but it nevertheless may not always be sufficient. The entropy paper is such a case, it is peer reviewed, but due its lack of reputation of the publisher & peer review process as far as domain knowledge (biomedical, biochemistry) is concerned it is not sufficient.--Kmhkmh (talk) 02:50, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Kmh, we're in agreement on the Entropy paper. It's peer-reviewed but the other factors concerning it make us conclude it is not sufficiently reliable to source biomedical information. If it were not even peer-reviewed, the conversation regarding its fitness would have been much shorter, right? ("It's not even peer-reviewed, not usable as proposed per WP:SELFPUBLISHed.")

WP:MEDRS does mention the value of peer review many, many times, and includes: "Every rigorous scientific journal is peer reviewed. Be careful of material published in a journal that lacks peer review or that reports material in a different field." In practical terms, a non-peer reviewed journal article is a non-starter to source biomedical information. I guess it's possible for something we would consider to be a reliable, authoritative source for biomedical information (on par with the top of WP:MEDASSESS) could be published in a journal without a peer review, but that would be exceptional and for my own education I'd like to see such a case... and even if there were such a case, wouldn't there be peer-reviewed articles we could use instead? WP:V, the underlying policy, directs us to look for "a reputation for fact-checking" and in the academic world, and in the biomedical sciences in particular, that means peer review. Zad68 03:21, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

There is a no disagreement about the importance of peer reviewed for MEDRS (or RS), but you were talking about necessary and sufficient conditions (if I understood you correctly), in particular claiming peer reviewed being a necessary condition and MEDRS simply doesn't state that (see Necessity and sufficiency).--Kmhkmh (talk) 03:40, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Yup you understood me correctly, and it is true WP:MEDRS does not state it explicitly, but in practice, that's how we edit when we refer to WP:MEDRS. I qualified my statement as "The WP:MEDRS guideline basically says..." and by "basically says" I mean "that's the bottom line of how we interpret it". This is the same sort of thing regarding primary sources: technically WP:MEDRS doesn't forbid them, but in the practical reality of day-to-day editing, that's how we apply it (with some rare exceptions). I'm a very practical person, WP:MEDRS says what it says, but all that really matters is what kinds of edits we end up making or supporting or not supporting when we refer to it. Zad68 03:49, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

MEDRS doesn't require peer review, and it shouldn't. The requirements depend on the statement that you're making. If the statement is moderate in its scope, like "antibiotics do not kill viruses" or "the most common cancers in children are leukemias and brain tumors", then we'd accept a plain old magazine article or even a page from a charity website. The source needs to be strong enough to support the claim. A moderate claim needs only a moderate source (although you are free to use a stronger one). An extraordinary claim (e.g., that one chemical causes a dozen unrelated diseases) requires an extraordinary source.

Also, the opposite of peer-reviewed is not "self-published". Newspaper articles are not peer-reviewed, but they are not self-published, either. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:32, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

WAID, I understand what you're saying here. My comments were targeted to the context of the conversation we'd been having: citing a journal article to source non-obvious biomedical claims (or at least biomedical claims that have been challenged, as they have been here). Although honestly I would not support sourcing "the most common cancers in children are leukemias and brain tumors" to a cancer charity website. If the charity sourced that information to a reliable source, OK, but then I'd use that source instead.

We were talking about journals... I understand newspapers are not "peer-reviewed" but they have fact-checkers who (are supposed to) verify the information published. Both types of publishing have their own models for doing the same thing. Anyway, WP:MEDRS advises not to use newspapers to source biomedical information of the kind being discussed in this thread - I'm pretty sure you'd agree with that, yes?

In the case of the particular journal article we've been talking about here: Entropy is an open access (pay for publish) journal. It is peer-reviewed, but if it were not, the only thing that would have stopped the glyphosate article from getting published would have been the discretion of the editorial board taking the money from the article's authors, recording studio owner Samsel and computer scientist Seneff, and with few repercussions for the journal's reputation if the article weren't all that great (Entropy is not MEDLINE indexed, and doesn't even advertise itself as publishing in the biomedical domain). Maybe my "WP:SELFPUBLISH" comment was a bit sharp, but I think my point is on target. Zad68 19:04, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Like I said, you are free to use a stronger source than is required. (You must actually read that stronger source; it's never okay to cite the website's source when you only read the website.) But using a stronger source than necessary is never required.

Source selection is a means to an end. We aren't here to create impressive-sounding bibliographies. We're here to write a reasonably accurate and reasonably comprehensive encyclopedia. Source selection helps us with the "reasonably accurate" part. If a paper-only medical text, a free online magazine article, and an expensive journal article all give the same basic facts, then you are free to cite whichever one(s) you want. We only require the strongest sources for heavy claims. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:19, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

I did say "If the charity sourced that information to a reliable source", and "using a stronger source than necessary is never required" is of course tautologically true... But I think we're starting to talk past each other a bit and I don't want us to get lost in the weeds of this side conversation here. We're both in agreement that the Entropy article was an insufficient source for the article content it was proposed to support, and we both offered articles like PMID 22683395 and PMID 21798302 to cover the topic of the safety of glyphosate instead. I think that's the important thing regarding the original question. Zad68 02:09, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Our sources are never required to list their sources. It's in the FAQ. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:27, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

There are ongoing efforts at the Monsanto article and the Glyphosate article to include content based on the Entropy article by new people who pop in and are not minding the ongoing discussion. Maybe it will die out soon but I would very much appreciate folks here watching those pages and helping deal with it so I don't run afoul of 3RR. Thanks! (The tox section of Glyphosate could also use some MEDRS love if anybody is interested.) Jytdog (talk) 13:08, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Yes indeed... watchlisted both. Zad68 14:35, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

thanks! Jytdog (talk) 15:09, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

health review of effects of wine, in American Journal of Enology and Viticulture

An editor just added the following source to the article Health effects of wine. OK source under MEDRS, or not, what do you think? If it is, it would be the most recent acceptable review on the topic. Guilford J and Pezzuto J (2011) Wine and Health: A Review Am. J. Enol. Vitic. 62:4 (that would be American Journal of Enology and Viticulture) Jytdog (talk) 04:07, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

Red flags: Not MEDLINE indexed, health effects would appear to be outside the scope of the journal, stated as "enology and viticulture, including wine chemistry, sensory science, process engineering, wine quality assessments, microbiology, methods development, plant pathogenesis, diseases and pests of grape, rootstock and clonal evaluation, effect of field practices, and grape genetics and breeding". The area of effects of alcohol on health is not an area where research is so scarce we need to be reaching for suboptimal sources to use. I personally would avoid its use, though look through its citations for more appropriate sources to use. Yobol (talk) 12:27, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

I agree with this. I actually reverted the addition as being no good under MEDRS, but threw away the edit before I saved it because I was not certain myself and was very unsure if there would be consensus to keep this out of the article. Jytdog (talk) 14:38, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

Caprylidene / Axona... promotion?

I have twice deleted a large expansion of the Caprylidene article because it appeared to be based on poor sources such as the Axona brand drug maker's own guide to prescribing the drug, and because the initial author's username was clearly pushing Axona as a treatment for Alzheimer's. An IP editor quickly restored the material.

I am not very familiar with the ins and outs of MEDRS, so I would appreciate more eyes on the situation. Let me know if the sources are being used properly. Binksternet (talk) 00:42, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Binks, thanks for bringing this. You very correctly identified the editor who added that, User:AxonaForAD, as having problematic promotional username. I saw you left a note on the User Talk page but it really should go to WP:UAA if the editor comes back.

As for the content of the large addition itself, there were many problems with it, but also some of it was really very useful. Only some of the content was actually sourced to the drug information sheet, the rest was sourced to some recent review articles (good), and a very old primary study (probably bad) in decent-looking journals. There was heavy use of this primary but it was a good-looking primary study, and the content used it appropriately. I don't know if there's a review article available that incorporates this study.

It seems really suspicious that this whole thing appeared as the editor's fist edits with no previous history, and it had a good general idea of what sourced Misplaced Pages article should look like. It was clearly written by someone with some clue. It needs to be Wikified and heavily copyedited to comply with WP:MEDMOS but it should not be thrown away. It would be a nice and worthwhile bit of work to take the content in that edit and bring it into Misplaced Pages standards. IMHO anyway. Zad68 02:44, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

At User talk:AxonaForAD I expressed my concern that the editor is being paid to improve the reputation of Axona, that the PR company brandkarma.org is at work on the article. I am not in favor of editors being paid to fluff articles, so I will leave the notional improvements to others. Binksternet (talk) 20:24, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

On the original inquiry, interesting question about what kind of source a drug label (what binkster calls the "prescribing information) is. I would be tempted to call it a secondary source, since a) it gathers information from many different studies and synthesizes them; b) it undergoes intensive review by the FDA before it is approved and published (probably more rigorous than peer review). And therefore, a drug label could be considered a solid secondary source under MEDRS. We don't want to copy/paste the thing of course, especially not all the prescribing information. I am curious what others think about what kind of source a drug label is. Correction, this stuff is medical food, not a drug. The label is not reviewed by the FDA like a drug label. I would say the label cannot be used except to quote it, like a primary source. And we should use the label as little as possible. Jytdog (talk) 21:29, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

(On the interesting question of how to classify a prescriber's insert, I think that there is a plausible case to be made for considering most of it to be a non-independent secondary source.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:42, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

WAID if we could get consensus on that characterization, it would be really useful info to add to WP:MEDRS. Zad68 01:50, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

On closer look, the content provided by User:AxonaForAD stinks, Binks was 100% right and I won't make this mistake again. Zad68 03:27, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

It didn't all stink! 1) there is a lot of legit work going on, pursuing metabolic dysfunction in AD brain and AxonaForAD did a good job of citing it. 2) Accera markets it as a medical food, not a drug. Not many people understand what "medical food" is and people make the mistake of treating it like a dietary supplement or a drug, when it is neither. However, in the "resurrection" of content I did, I did leave too much of the clean causal chain that Accera tries to draw, and I should not have reported the clinical trial results. Bad on me. Fixed both. Also added criticisms that zad found. Do let me know what you all think now. Jytdog (talk) 04:24, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Article sounds great now. Really balanced. Great work. Have you ever red WP:BOOMERANG?--Garrondo (talk) 07:17, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

I have finally copied all the original content on glucose consumption (without mentioning axona) into Biochemistry of Alzheimer's disease, sincer content seemed valid, although it was used to make a POV in the axona article.--Garrondo (talk) 08:54, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Glad you like it, garrondo. not sure why you reference boomerang - there was no ugly dispute. I think we worked together collegially to fix a bad article quickly, and zad made a great save there. Jytdog (talk) 12:04, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

I was referring to what can occur when you pay somebody to promote your company, and then this leads at the end to the addition by regular editors of content that may be negative for the company... which I feel it is what occurred here. Bests--Garrondo (talk) 13:36, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Like Good result from a questionable start. Zad68 13:45, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Much better now Jyt. I was mostly embarrassed for myself for not catching the hugely COI study and wanted to be sure the article didn't hang out for too long with that study featured so much, but you jumped right on it and fixed it. Zad68 13:47, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Glad you are OK with it zad, thanks again. And I hear you garrondo - thx for explaining! Jytdog (talk) 14:38, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Neuroaid

is marketed as a stroke treatment. I have cleaned-up the article which seem to have a lot of poorly-sourced content - but medicine is not my core area so this could probably do with some wise eyes. Is this the right place to ask for help like this? Or is there a MEDRS noticeboard or the like? Alexbrn 18:03, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

WT:MED is the most effective place to request help for problems like this. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:35, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Reliability of position statements from nationally or internationally recognised expert bodies

1) Sodium:

"Although the advice to restrict sodium to 1,500 milligrams a day has been enshrined in dietary guidelines, it never came from research on health outcomes, Dr. Strom said."

2) Vitamin D:

"Because of the British experience with idiopathic infantile hypercalcemia attributed to hypervitaminosis D, an inaccurate association occurred that had a profound effect on the potential of vitamin D supplementation, not only during infancy but also during pregnancy. In 1963, Black and Bonham-Carter (65) recognized that elfin facies observed in patients with severe idiopathic infantile hypercalcemia resembled the peculiar facies observed in patients with supravalvular aortic stenosis syndrome. By 1966 vitamin D was viewed by the medical community as the cause of SAS syndrome. (66,67) With the advent of molecular genetics, the children with SAS Syndrome were discovered to have Williams Syndrome, an example of unipaternal disomy, with abnormal vitamin D metabolism. (68–75)

The perception that vitamin D can inflict harm during pregnancy still lives on today as many obstetrical specialists are afraid to undertake vitamin D repletion during this period. Research efforts in this area were further hampered when in 1997, the Institute of Medicine issued guidelines that defined the adequate intake (AI) for vitamin D during pregnancy to be 200 IU/d with intakes greater than 2000 IU/d causing potential harm. (40) Recently, the IOM issued new guidelines with respect to pregnant women that define the estimated average requirement (EAR) and recommended dietary allowance (RDA) to be 400 and 600 IU/day, respectively. They also increased the tolerable upper intake limit (UL) to 4000 IU/day. (62)These new guidelines, with the exception of the UL, are based on old data since limited new data exist. The result of prior and current guidelines is that most prenatal vitamins only contain 400 IU of vitamin D. In our experience, many of today’s practicing obstetricians are unaware of the vitamin D content in prenatal vitamins or have a fear of administering additional vitamin D supplements to the pregnant women."

3) Radiation:

"In 1958, using data largely drawn from these bomb studies, scientists came up with an answer. It was called the Linear No Threshold (LNT) model and suggested all radiation, no matter how small, was dangerous.

It became the internationally recognised basis for assessing radiation risk. Yet there has always been a problem with it. The data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were for very high levels of radiation exposure, often in the range of thousands of millisieverts. There were no significant data for lower exposures, particularly below 200 millisieverts.

The model was based on high doses and we just didn't know what was going on at lower doses of between one and 200 millisieverts," says Dr Repacholi.

Scientists simply guessed that if high-level radiation was dangerous then lower levels would also be hazardous. They made "an assumption", observes Dr Repacholi.

Chernobyl, where most people received radiation doses below 200 millisieverts, has been the first large-scale opportunity to test whether this assumption is true. The evidence from the Chernobyl Forum suggests it is not.

"Low doses of radiation are a poor carcinogen," says Professor Brooks, who has spent 30 years studying the link between radiation and cancer."

"Professor Ron Chesser, of Texas Tech University, US, has spent 10 years studying animals living within the 30km exclusion zone surrounding Chernobyl.

He has found that, far from the effects of low-level radiation being carcinogenic, it appears to boost those genes that protect us against cancer.

"One of the thoughts that comes out of this is that prior exposure to low levels of radiation actually may have a beneficial effect," Professor Chesser says."

"In April, the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) published a report that used the latest LNT-based radiation risk projection models to update the estimated cancer deaths from Chernobyl.

It concluded that about 16,000 people across Europe could die as a result of the accident."

Count Iblis (talk) 18:21, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry; I've read the above, but I'm not sure what your point is. Do you mean to illustrate that scientists and expert bodies are fallible and sometimes proven wrong with the passing of time? Or that they are sometimes forced to extrapolate and make educated guesses where evidence is lacking? Or that individual scientists sometimes disagree with the views of expert bodies? Help me out. MastCell  18:43, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

It seems to me somewhere along the chain of primary resesearch, secondary reviews etc., all the way up to the highest authoritative expert bodies, unscientific arguments gets injected in a way that is not typical in other sciences. Of course, unlike in other sciences, in medicine expert bodies may need to make a judgement calls when the evidence is not clear, but it seems to me that such a judgement call will persist long after the science has become clear. So, in case of 2) pregnant women are still not getting the vitamin D supplementation they need, even though decades have passed since the original worry has been clarified. Count Iblis (talk) 18:59, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Is this a suggestion to expand our content at Vitamin D? I peeked at that article and it does say that Vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy is harmful and that women often do not get enough, although it also says that supplementation is of unknown value. I do not see the source you provided in use at that article. Maybe make those edits?

Like MastCell I'm not sure what the larger point is here. Yes sometimes expert bodies get things wrong and it's hard to change entrenched positions. Still using secondary sources from expert bodies is MUCH more likely to be providing good information than using the latest individual primary sources, whatever they happen to say and of whatever quality they happen to be, or was that even the underlying point? Is there a change to WP:MEDRS being proposed? Sorry still not seeing what we're getting at here at WT:MEDRS. Zad68 19:42, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

I'm raising a point about this policy text which is written from the assumption that the highest medical expert bodies stick to science in the same was similar expert bodies in other sciences. This is not the case because these expert bodies have a dual role. They don't just review the science, they also have to come up with guidelines for doctors and patients. They need to weigh up the scientific results as published in secondary review articles based on an appropriate precautionary principle. The conclusions they reach are then not going to be conssistent with what you would get if you were to completely neutrally weigh up the scientific results. This can lead to problems that I cited above, but in general in the absense of these problems, there will still be an issue to be addressed.

A good example is vitamin D. Good review articles on toxicity are this one that considers mainly the measured effects and this one that considers it from the POV of the fundamental biological processes. But what we do in the Wiki articles is take more serious the IoM report which puts a lot of weight on a single primary reseach result which wasn't all that statistically significant, where it was found that elderly patients in some elderly care home fell more often if they were given vitamin D supplements at levels. What the IoM does here is quite obvious, in the absense of very strong evidence of health benefits (other than for bone health), you need to rule out with almost 100% certainty that there could be problems with vitamin D supplementation. So, even questionable research results hinting at problems have to be taken serious, while for evidence purporting to show benefits you would demand a very rigorous level of proof.

The problem for Misplaced Pages is then that with the current policy text, you can't address this issue of improper weight. E.g. in the literature you can find discussions about why these elderly people would fall more often (e.g. there is quite strong evidence that vitamin D improves neuro-muscular function, the people in non-placebo group will get out of their chairs more often and therefore be at a greater risk of falling), but these are secondary review articles and are given less weight than the IoM report, despite having a more fundamentally scientific focus on this issue. Count Iblis (talk) 14:01, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

We are not, in fact, assuming that the highest medical expert bodies stick to science. We are instead assuming that practice guidelines contain significant material about what the mainstream expert opinion is and what the actual practices are, both of which are relevant, important, and must receive significant weight to create a neutral article.

You may be confusing "neutral" with "correct". For better or worse, Misplaced Pages does not aim to write scientifically ideal articles. It instead aims to write encyclopedia articles that adequately and accurately reflect the current mainstream expert opinion, along with any significant minority viewpoints. If, as does happen, the experts are wrong (or divided), then it is the English Misplaced Pages's official policy that we, too, will be exactly as wrong (or divided) as they are. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:42, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

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