Halloween is a frightening time of the year, although it does not normally send university students to counseling.

The University of Florida said in a statement last week that it will be offering counseling students to students who are offended by Halloween costumes.

“Some Halloween costumes reinforce stereotypes of particular races, genders, cultures, or religions,” the statement says. “Regardless of intent, these costumes can perpetuate negative stereotypes, causing harm and offense to groups of people.”

The school then provided contact information for different resources around campus. One of the resources, the U Matter, We Care program, describes itself as “UF’s umbrella program for UF’s caring culture and provides students in distress with support and coordination of the wide variety of appropriate resources,” according to its website.

Additionally, students have access to a 24/7 counselor reachable by phone and a service to mediate situations of bias. According to the statement, “the Bias Education and Response Team at the University of Florida is able to respond to any reported incidents of bias, to educate those that were involved, and to provide support by connecting those that were impacted to the appropriate services and resources.”

Over the past few years, Halloween costumes have become a large issue on college campuses, with many people feeling as though costumes appropriate their culture or reinforce negative stereotypes.

This year, costumes such as the “Kim the Hostage” costume and another depicting a gorilla holding a plastic baby, have come under intense scrutiny, as they reference graphic events.

They made a Kim K hostage costume …………… pic.twitter.com/arLpoiV6uS

— Nathaniel (@swallowship56) October 13, 2016

Some people, however, voiced their concerns over the services the university is providing.

Our country is doomed. “The school is offering counseling to those who may be offended by costumes this season.”https://t.co/h6It6mTjx3

— Matt Lewis (@Mac_Tampa) October 15, 2016

University of Florida is offering counseling to anyone upset by a halloween costume. In other news, the 4th Horseman just saddled up

— Andy Lambert (@AndyLambertAndy) October 15, 2016

The university encouraged students to be aware of the costumes that they choose to wear on Halloween, adding, “Thank you for being mindful of these values, and have a fun and safe Halloween.”

Julia Bryant

Julia Bryant is an Editorial Senior Fellow at Law Street from Howard County, Maryland. She is a junior at the University of Maryland, College Park, pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Economics. You can contact Julia at JBryant@LawStreetMedia.com.

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With 1 million confirmed cases, Russia is experiencing an HIV/AIDS epidemic, and it seems like no one knows how to handle it. The response from the Russian government is conservative and prejudiced, and puts blame on the affected people for lacking morals.

Rising Epidemic

According to a UNAIDS report from July 2016, Eastern Europe and central Asia make up the only region in the world where AIDS continues to rise rapidly. More than 80 percent of new cases in that region were in Russia. Even though the majority of cases affect key populations, such as drug users and gay men, it also spreads quickly through the rest of the population, especially heterosexual women, because condoms are somewhat difficult to come by.

“Condoms have practically been banned because they lead to people having sex, and sex is risky,” said Dr. Orlova-Morozova, head of Moscow Regional Hospital’s AIDS department, to ABC. The hospital currently has 38,000 patients with HIV or AIDS. He said that there is not enough money for medicine, so they have to choose who to treat and turn away many.

Rejected by Society

This view on HIV/AIDS is so conservative and biased it is hard to believe. A poster on the hospital wall where Dr. Orlova-Morozova works says: “The majority of cases of HIV/AIDS are due to the weaknesses and improper behavior on behalf of the infected person.” People who are HIV positive often lose their jobs, their friends, and are pushed out from society.

Under President Putin’s rule, life in Russia has shifted back toward a moral standard that was commonplace during the Soviet Union era, and religious leaders have a lot of influence. The approach commonly adopted is ‘Family, fidelity and faith.’ According to LaSky, an outreach organization for gay men in Moscow, there was a “scientific” paper at a recent AIDS convention that was called “How prayer can cure HIV.”

The government has banned sex education in schools and it is punishable by law to even mention sex or AIDS to children under 15 years of age if you’re a teacher. It is estimated that over half of the HIV cases in Russia are spread via intravenous drug use. But despite the fact that methadone treatment is the most successful way of treating drug addiction according to WHO, methadone therapy has been illegal since Putin came to power. There is also no way to hand out sterile needles.

Distrust of the Government

The hospitals can’t even help everyone they would want to–people with foreign citizenships living in Russia are not entitled to free medical help. A man that ABC talked to, called Sasha, was born in Uzbekistan but lived in Moscow when he discovered he was HIV positive. To get free care he would have to go back home, where homosexuality is illegal. He can’t even work to make his own money for treatment, since he would have to prove he’s HIV-free to get a job in Russia.

Social worker Maksim Malyshev thinks it is the government’s attitude that is the problem.

In my view, the problem of HIV infection in Russia exists because the people whose job it is to find ways of preventing HIV in Russia are doing a crap job. They are living in some kind of fantasy world of their own, and they have no desire to listen about science-based methods and to the specialists who are working on this problem.

Evgeny Sorokoumov, project manager for LaSky, agrees, saying, “Putin wants to show the world that our country is strong. No one needs us. We can just die.”

The UNAIDS report concludes by stating that changes in behavior, comprehensive sex education, and distribution of condoms are important measures to prevent any further spread of HIV. But in Russia’s case, it seems to be the will that is lacking, not just the way.

Emma Von Zeipel

Emma Von Zeipel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. She is originally from one of the islands of Stockholm, Sweden. After working for Democratic Voice of Burma in Thailand, she ended up in New York City. She has a BA in journalism from Stockholm University and is passionate about human rights, good books, horses, and European chocolate. Contact Emma at EVonZeipel@LawStreetMedia.com.

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As high-profile police shootings continue to hold the nation’s attention, a new study on the extent of racial bias in police officers’ use of force is making some big waves. In fact, this research comes to a particularly surprising conclusion: the police are actually less likely to shoot black civilians. But there are some important details to work through before we jump to any conclusions.

The study, conducted by renowned Harvard economist Roland Fryer, did identify some significant bias in the way police officers use force. This is a bias that exists at nearly all levels–like putting hands on a civilian, pushing a person up against a wall, using handcuffs on someone without arresting them, and even using pepper spray or a baton–but when it comes to lethal force, the most severe of all, police may actually be slightly less likely to kill black civilians.

But before we jump to conclusions or even accept that conclusion on its face, it’s important to sort through a large number of methodological nuance to understand what we can take away from this research. Fair warning, if you came here looking for a clear-cut conclusion, you’ll have to read the rest of this article to get the full picture.

Some Background

First, it’s important to point out that Roland Fryer’s study involved a significant undertaking by a team of researchers. And Fryer himself certainly wasn’t expecting the final conclusion. “It is the most surprising result of my career,” Fryer told the New York Times. The research is also still a working paper, which means that it hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed and published in a formal journal. It was put out by the National Bureau of Economic Research for experts in the field to look at and discuss its findings prior to a more formal release.

The debate about police shootings is one that has notoriously had a lack of hard data to discuss. We simply don’t have good statistics on the number and characteristics of incidents when police officers used lethal force. Independent counts have started to fill this gap–of note are the Washington Post’s database of police shootings and the Guardian’s “The Counted” project–but there is little national data with the depth necessary to identify bias. With this research, Fryer and his team provide some important analysis to a discussion that has few statistics to draw from.

A look at the methods

So let’s take a closer look at the data and how it was used. To measure racial bias when it comes to all levels of force the researchers looked at statistics provided by several police departments, notably New York City’s “stop, question and frisk” program, as well as nationally representative survey data that measures interactions with the police. To look at the use of lethal force–officer-involved shootings–the researchers had to assemble their own dataset from 10 police departments in three states. The researchers managed to get a particularly interesting dataset from the Houston police department, which provided a large number of reports on interactions between police and civilians.

Of that Houston dataset, the researchers took a random sample of files with “arrests codes in which lethal force is more likely to be justified: attempted capital murder of a public safety officer, aggravated assault on a public safety officer, resisting arrest, evading arrest, and interfering in arrest.” However, this data was unique to the Houston police department. The other police departments could only give details for instances when lethal force was used, but we would need data about when officers decided not to use force in order to properly identify the effects of bias.

The conclusions and what they mean

First, it’s important to note that the researchers only look at actual interactions between officers and civilians. This means that the study does not engage with one important racial bias in policing–that officers are more likely to stop and interact with black civilians than white civilians.

That caveat aside, when it comes to the lethal use of force, here’s how Fryer summarizes his findings:

Using data from Houston, Texas–where we have both officer-involved shootings and a randomly chosen set of potential interactions with police where lethal force may have been justified–we find, in the raw data, that blacks are 23.8 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to whites.

The researchers used the raw data referenced in the quote and then controlled for a range of factors–civilian behavior, possession of a weapon, the situational context, and much more–but still found no presence of bias in the use of lethal force by the Houston police department.

Importantly, this is only based on the Houston data, so while we may be able to conclude that officer-involved shootings in Houston are not subject to racial bias, we cannot really take that to mean that the same holds true nationally or for any other police department. Even then, this conclusion rests on the researchers’ ability to control for several important variables like behavior and context.

It is also important to note that this data came from police officer summaries of their interactions with civilians. While we cannot cast doubt on an entire police department, there have been several cases where the story provided by police officers has been refuted with video evidence.

Police officers’ bias in nonlethal force

Looking beyond lethal force, Fryer and his team found persistent racial bias at all other levels of force. Using the New York City Police Department’s data on its stop and frisk program between 2003 and 2013, the researchers found a notable relationship between race and the use of force. After controlling for as many variables as possible, the researchers note that black civilians are 17 percent more likely to be subject to the use of force than white civilians. For Hispanics, the rate was 12 percent higher than for white people.

Interestingly, this pattern largely remained consistent at a range of different levels. The lowest level of force measured–officers laying their hands on a subject–occurred much more frequently than the highest–using pepper spray or a baton. But the rate at which minority civilians incur the use of force largely remained consistent at all levels short of lethal force. As Fryer puts it, “The use of high levels of force in these data are rare. Yet, it is consistently rarer for whites relative to blacks.” What’s particularly interesting about this is that the researchers managed to find bias in data collected and provided by the NYPD itself.

The researchers also looked at a nationally representative survey to identify the extent to which racial bias exists in these interactions. Using data from the Police-Public Contact Survey conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, they found even larger differences in the use of force by race. While the researchers note that the rate at which officers used force was considerably lower in the survey data–about 15 percent of white civilians experienced the use of force in the stop and frisk data while only 1 percent reported experiencing force in the survey data–a pattern of bias remains for different racial groups. They conclude:

Differences in quantitative magnitudes aside, the PPCS paints a similar portrait–large racial differences in police use of force that cannot be explained using a large and varied set of controls.

After looking over his research, Fryer argues that police may act according to perceived costs. He suggests that there may not be racial bias in the use of lethal force because doing so is particularly costly–there is often internal reviews and the decision to shoot someone can have profound life consequences for the police officer as well as the victim. However, the same costs may not exist when using nonlethal force. Fryer argues that if we wish to reduce racial bias for lower levels of force, we should increase the costs associated with using them. Put simply, if we want to reduce this bias, police need to feel that they will be held accountable for unnecessarily using force.

Kevin Rizzo

Kevin Rizzo is the Crime in America Editor at Law Street Media. An Ohio Native, the George Washington University graduate is a founding member of the company. Contact Kevin at krizzo@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Recent surveys have shown that a disproportionate number of Americans believe there is a problem in our country with fairness of the judicial system. Of course, there are various was that this comes to light, but one of the most prolific is judicial bias. From juvenile courts all the way up, it has been a problem for years.

But what indicates judicial bias, what can judges actually do if they feel themselves being biased, and what can citizens do about the issue?  Looking back historically, you can see areas where the problem may have existed, which is a good indication of where it will pop up again.

So the question remains, does judicial bias exist, or is it something that we are making up, and if it exists, what can we do?

Judicial Bias

In his book “Mediating Dangerously – The Frontiers of Conflict Resolution,” Kenneth Cloke wrote about the idea of judicial bias:

[T]here is no such thing as genuine neutrality when it comes to conflict. Everyone has had conflict experiences that have shifted his or her perceptions, attitudes, and expectations, and it is precisely these experiences that give us the ability to empathize with the experiences of others. Nor are there any genuine neutrals in courts, including judges, CEO’s, managers, and human resources representatives, all of whom have biases and points of view, including the bias of wanting to protect the organization from being disrupted by conflict. Judges have the most intractable bias of all: the bias of believing they are without bias.

With a few life-changing court hearings coming up in the Supreme Court and around the world, there have been many think pieces and questions posed by the media. One of those questions is whether or not the personal beliefs of Supreme Court justices will come into play. The right to a fair and speedy trial is promised to us in the Constitution, after all, so that should certainly extend to the top.

Judicial bias occurs when a judge has a bias when making a ruling in a hearing in which he or she has a specific feeling or attitude toward a party that will hinder them from acting fairly. In this case, the judge is actually hindering the right to a fair trial. Typically, a judge will recuse him or herself if a bias occurs.

Can we prove judicial bias?

The problem is that we often cannot prove that judicial bias exists. Now, many legislatures and jurisdictions have allowed parties to seek disqualifications if it appears that there was judicial bias. One example is Title 28 U.S.C. § 455, which has provisions for when a federal judge is biased against a party, as well as when a reasonable, disinterested party would think he has a bias. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that this is an easy thing to do. There are many cases where a judge might be biased, but that doesn’t mean that the “reasonable” person would think so.

There is another problem to consider as well: the duty to sit doctrine. Many judges, especially those who are “old school,” tend to follow this. They are basically obligated to stay on a case that they have been assigned to handle unless they are forced to step away.

Sensitive Subjects

In many careers we are instructed to go with our feelings and think with our hearts in order to reach the best possible choices. However, that isn’t something that people would tell judges to do. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, however.

New research has shown that judges, especially Supreme Court justices, will actively pick out the cases with which they identify. In their report, Lee Epstein of the University of Southern California and two colleagues examined nearly 5,000 decisions in 516 Supreme Court free-speech cases that spanned the decades between 1953 to 2010 to determine whether there was any bias. When the Economist looked at the paper, they explained the political bias in a funny way:

For example, if the speaker seeking first amendment solace is a pro-lifer rankled by restrictions on protests near abortion clinics, his rights are very likely to be recognised by Justice Clarence Thomas, a conservative, but not by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal (see Hill v Colorado). And if the speaker is a high-school kid holding up a banner reading “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” on a school trip, you can expect Justice Thomas to harumph while Justice Ginsburg rises to defend the student’s free-speech rights (see Morse v Frederick). Right-wing justices tend to uphold conservative speakers’ rights and rule against liberal litigants; liberal justices smile on their ideological friends and frown at their foes, too.

While it is funny to think about it in those terms, it has many people thinking about some of the other places that judges could have bias and if it has ever happened before. Many of these include cases where the jury is included in the bias.

Religion

Many of the cases that judges and juries hear go back to morality and our personal beliefs. Many of us are exposed to religion from an early age, and it would be foolish to think that judges would be able to separate, at least completely, their deeply ingrained beliefs from the law. Certainly, there might even be a place for it. In an article from the Journal of Law and Religion, a quote from a former judge puts it into perspective:

It’s funny. . .I think it [religion] has influenced me. I think it’s given me a set of values. . .you know, every once in a while a reading from the New or Old Testament kind of strikes you and you just wouldn’t hear it–or I wouldn’t–or read it if it weren’t for that. It causes you to pause a little bit and do a little self-examination. I think that’s healthy. So I think that does influence my perspective.

There have been several cases in the last few years in which lawyers claimed religious bias against their clients. In Tennessee, a judge found himself in hot water after forcing a man to change his baby’s name from Messiah to Martin after he determined that “The word ‘messiah’ is a title, and it’s a title that has only been earned by one person, and that one person is Jesus Christ.” The child’s parents were there to settle a few different issues, including the baby’s last name.

While not in court, a Texas judge, Carter Tinsley Schildknecht, was issued a public admonition because  of some comments she made, including “describing District Attorney Munk as a ‘New York Jew’ and by criticizing a prosecutor’s beard because it made him look like a ‘Muslim’.”

Gender

One of the biggest sources of bias may be gender. In many of the cases where gender bias was found, it results in decisions that are based upon preconceived notions of sexual roles rather than on fair and impartial appraisals of individual situations. However, many people don’t see this bias because they are operating on those same preconceived notions.

In fact, New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Alan B. Handler wrote “[N]ot everyone has a nose for discrimination, especially in its most subtle forms. We are coming to realize that people are products of cultural conditioning which frequently obscures recognition of social wrongs…Discrimination frequently goes uncorrected because it is undetected.”

So what can we do?

Unfortunately, the idea that we can take away bias is misguided, as it is almost always going to be there. Just like in any other profession, bad judges do exist, but as they are in a power position, it can be hard to find a lawyer willing to expose that. The National Center for State Courts suggests that one of the biggest things we can do is reduce the wear and tear on judges by shortening their hours, provide more feedback on their performances, and encourage the courts to stay vigilant.

Even more so, we need to provide bias training to judges, and maybe even encourage them to do some research into the facts if a case involves someone’s religion, for instance. Diversity training has gotten a bit of a bad name, but it really does serve a purpose, and the courtroom may be the next place that needs it.

Conclusion

Bias is a part of life, unfortunately. Truly, we can never really let go of our bias, but judges have a responsibility to acknowledge it and try to make a fair judgement despite it. Juries have a similar responsibility, especially when they are still in the selection process.

Resources

Primary

U.S. Government Publishing Office: 28 U.S.C. 455 – Disqualification of Justice, Judge, or Magistrate Judge

Justia: Castellano v. Linden Board of Education

Additional

Douglas Ginsburg: Originalism and Economic Analysis: Two Case Studies of Consistency and Coherence in Supreme Court Decision Making

Journal of Law and Religion: Beneath the Robe: The Role of Personal Values in Judicial Ethics

Kenneth Cloke: Mediating Dangerously – The Frontiers of Conflict Resolution

Economist: Playing Favorites

Religion Clause: Texas Judge Disciplined For Religious-Cultural Bias

Reuters: Tennessee Judge Cited For Ordering Baby’s Name Changed From Messiah

University of Southern California: Do Justices Defend the Speech They Hate? In-Group Bias, Opportunism, and the First Amendment

Women Law: Operating a Task Force on Gender Bias in the Courts

American Bar Association: Overcoming Judicial Bias

American Psychology Association: Can Jurors’ Religious Biases Affect Verdicts in Criminal Trials?

NCSC: Strategies to Reduce the Influence of Implicit Bias

William S. Boyd School of Law: Chief William ‘s Ghost: The Problematic Persistence of the Duty to Sit Doctrine

Noel Diem

Law Street contributor Noel Diem is an editor and aspiring author based in Reading, Pennsylvania. She is an alum of Albright College where she studied English and Secondary Education. In her spare time she enjoys traveling, theater, fashion, and literature. Contact Noel at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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You just sunk every penny you have into opening a restaurant. After spending years perfecting every detail from menus to music, you forgot one major element: an advertising budget. How will you make sure people experience your culinary genius? Fueled by passion, you do something you know you probably shouldn’t. You write a glowing review of your restaurant on Yelp.

Is the review a lie just because it came from the owner? Not necessarily. Just because a biased party tells you something is good doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not; their recommendation just holds less value than one from a disinterested party.

But, bias fueled by passion and economic interest happens in medical research all the time. Like you and your restaurant review, medical study funders often promote the information best for their cause. They finesse study designs and findings to make results seem more favorable for their product or service. A manufacturer of a new blood pressure drug might play up one specific benefit of their product in a way that makes you believe the drug beats others overall. It’s not fraud or misconduct, it’s just spinning results in a positive way–something any human with a vested interest in an outcome tends to do. Furthermore, data from a study means nothing by itself to most people, so invested parties can play with it as much as they want to tell a good story.

In discussing the interpretation of statistics in Made to Stick, authors Chip and Dan Heath put it this way:

Ethically challenged people with lots of analytical smarts can, with enough contortions, make almost any case from a given set of statistics.

Keep reading for more on funding bias and what you can do about it.

How is scientific research funded?

When you read a juicy new bit of research about something that might kill you or change the world as we know it, the study’s funding probably escapes your interest. But any study you read, whether it’s about drugs, medical treatments, nutrition, or even sleep, costs money. Where does the money come from? It can come from government grants, nonprofits, independent companies, and even you. When you buy dish soap, some of that profit might go to funding a Procter & Gamble study on a new cleaning chemical. Some portion of your taxes might trickle down to a government grant and end up in a laboratory. And of course, if you donate to a charity, that money might fund studies supporting that cause.

Money Talks

Since money fuels science, science itself can be shackled by economic interests, and interests of any kind can lead to bias. Even without fabricating results, funders have tools they can use to sway study results.

In a paper titled “Tobacco industry manipulation of research,” Dr. Lisa A. Bero calls out some reasons why research findings might not be as concrete as they seem:

• Any study has a context that can be skewed by framing the study, defining the problem, and sculpting that language of study questions and results.
• Data doesn’t present itself. It’s up to the funders and researchers to deliver it to the world, and this delivery can be nuanced to serve a given purpose.

That covers underlying reasons why bias happens, but how does it happen? The World Health Organization analyzed thousands of books, articles, and other materials to see how bias can occur in drug studies and promotions. Its paper, “Drug Promotion – What We Know, What We Have Yet to Learn,” outlined several ways researchers can skew results:

• Publishing results in multiple journals and with multiple authors. Different researchers can write papers on the same exact study. The multiplication of evidence revealing the same findings makes the results look more credible and can lead to a general overestimation of the studied drug’s treatment power.
• Leaving out unfavorable conclusions. Industry-funded studies left out negative results more often than their nonprofit counterparts.
• Using retrospective design, which looks backward to prove a determined outcome. With a known outcome, it’s easier to manipulate study designs to show X might cause Y.
• Putting focus on some features and leaving out others. Industry-funded studies tend to focus on acute benefits of drugs and stray away from ranking the drug’s benefits overall.
• Publishing only favorable results. If a study doesn’t achieve the desired outcomes, the industry funder can simply choose not to publish it, like a lie of omission.

Now let’s look at some real-world examples. In practice, a common method of skewing public scientific opinion involves funding counter blows to combat damaging research.

Bias in Practice

So we know bias happens, we know how it happens in theory, and in the real world the skewing attempts get even scrappier. In these examples, the industries used their funding prowess to spin the science of others.

Sugar

This NPR article relays the story of Dr. Christin Kearns, a dentist who was shocked when a handout of government advice about diabetes didn’t mention sugar. Detecting the scent of industry involvement, she began digging for evidence of similar foul play in the dental community.

After months of research and scouring through internal beet and cane sugar documents dating back to the 1950s, Kearns found that the industry does in fact push policy, especially when it concerns potentially damaging research. When the sugar industry caught wind of dental professionals’ intentions to tackle sugar consumption, they launched a counterattack to help people combat tooth decay while eating as much sugar as they wanted. They looked into enzymes that busted up plaque and other ways to fight tooth decay.

Tobacco

No surprise here: the tobacco industry’s efforts to combat damaging research have been fodder for many public health case studies. Tobacco companies specialized in contending with the findings of detrimental studies. Their philosophy read something like this: The longer you argue, the longer it takes to make decisions. And the longer it takes to make decisions, the more time we have to continue business as usual before we’re hampered with new policies. The tobacco industry used this philosophy to fight regulations for decades.

The 1950s and 60s saw tobacco companies fighting claims that smoking was bad for you. After that, they gracefully transitioned to denying the harms of secondhand smoke.

Here’s a commercial for Camel cigarettes showing doctors smoking and enjoying cigarettes and even recommending the Camel brand. Their decision to use a doctor as the main character sends a strong message to the public: If smoking was so bad, would a doctor do it?

In the 1990s, tobacco companies moved to using PR campaigns focusing on “junk science” to criticize reports on the risks of tobacco smoke, even from the government.

In 1998, big tobacco and the United States reached an agreement about how tobacco could be marketed and advertised. This Master Settlement Agreement surfaced documents outlining tobacco’s science-fighting strategy that confirmed what many had already suspected. When it came to steering science dialogue, tobacco’s policy was to:

• Pay for, publish, and promote research supporting their goals; and ,
• Suppress and criticize research going against their goals.

Tobacco’s efforts mark some of the first concerted and funded campaigns against science in history. Their efforts demonstrate the power of manipulating public opinion. Luckily, physician opinion is much harder to shape.

Does funding bias influence practice?

Good news: doctors know how to evaluate medical studies.

In a randomized study of physicians’ interpretations of funding disclosures published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers found a majority of physicians were fully capable of evaluating research based on academic rigor and were not fooled by common manipulations. In fact, the knowledge that a study was funded by industry caused their evaluation of the study’s rigor and likelihood of prescribing the studied drug to decrease.

What You Can Do

We can’t ignore oodles of research just because it might be biased. Luckily, there are safeguards in place. Title VIII of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Amendments Act of 2007 (FDAAA) made researchers start registering and submitting results to clinicaltrials.gov where you can check them out at any time. Individual journals also have publishing regulations protecting us from misleading science. For example, the New England Journal of Medicine publishes information on funding, protocols, and the funding organization’s involvement in the study with all of their articles.

But if you’re feeling less than trusting, you can develop your own methods of evaluating the research you read. When you see something new, check for other studies on the same subject to see if they coincide and take an extra careful look at the study’s design.

This graphic from Compound Interest ranks study methods on a descending scale. Keep this in mind when you’re evaluating research.

Even if it’s just something you see in a magazine, you can look up the original study to investigate the design for yourself and form your own opinion. We have access to more science than ever before. With that comes great power, but also great responsibility. Science can be biased but it’s still up to you whether or not to buy into the bias.

Resources

Primary

World Health Organization: Drug Promotion: What We Know, What We Have Yet to Learn

Additional

Washington Post: As Drug Industry’s Influence Over Research Grows, So Does the Potential For Bias

NPR: Documents Detail Sugar Industry Efforts to Direct Medical Research

Heath, Chip and Dan: Made to Stick

Plos Medicine: Sugar Industry Influence on the Scientific Agenda of the National Institute of Dental Research’s 1971 National Caries Program: A Historical Analysis of Internal Documents

Journal of the American Medical Association: Association of Funding and Conclusions in Randomized Drug Trials: A Reflection of Treatment Effect or Adverse Events?

University of California Museum of Paleontology: Who Pays For Science?

Public Health Chronicles: Tobacco Industry Manipulation of Research

Scientific American: Can the Source of Funding For Medical Research Affect the Results?

New England Journal of Medicine: A Randomized Study of How Physicians Interpret Research Funding Disclosures

New England Journal of Medicine: The Proposed Rule For U.S. Clinical Trial Registration and Results Submission

Ashley Bell

Ashley Bell communicates about health and wellness every day as a non-profit Program Manager. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Business and Economics from the College of William and Mary, and loves to investigate what changes in healthy policy and research might mean for the future. Contact Ashley at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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