As a group of patient safety advocates we are staggered at the amount of cheating in science, so we enjoyed reading the latest article by a political science professor who has likened it to pooping on the carpet when nobody is looking.

Ever year new healthcare treatments are launched underpinned by flawed, mischievous, flimsy and fraudulent scientific evidence – also known as cheating.

Cheating certainly helped push surgical mesh implants as ‘gold standard’.

As a result we have almost 10,000 in our support group (2023) suffering from surgical mesh used to treat hernia, pelvic organ prolapse, incontinence, rectal prolapse and even after some mastectomies.

Sadly, we’ve learnt that much scientific evidence is not worth the paper it’s written on – other than to push profits before patient safety.

What are some of the cheats?

• ·       Studies written by paid industry consultants
• ·       Questionnaires that don’t log complications
• ·       Short term trials of six weeks to three months that don’t capture long term harm
• ·       P-hacking. A scientific term for cheating

So, we enjoyed reading this latest article called  How Academic Fraudsters Get Away With It by Andrew Gelman, Professor of Statistics and Political Science at Columbia University.

Here he deals a giant dose of down to earth reality.

“Cheating in science is like if someone poops on the carpet when nobody’s looking,” he writes. “When some other people smell the poop and point out the problem, the owners of the carpet insist that nothing has happened at all and refuse to allow anyone to come and clean up the mess.

“Sometimes they start shouting at the people who smelled the poop and call them “terrorists” or “thugs.” Meanwhile, other scientists walk gingerly around that portion of the carpet; they smell something, but they don’t want to look at it too closely.

“A lot of business and politics is like this too. But we expect this sort of thing to happen in business and politics. Science is supposed to be different.”

Our experience as patient advocates shows that scientific cheating is rife.

Mesh cheats

Take the esteemed professor who published a paper saying a type of incontinence mesh, known as a TVTO, did not cause thigh pain. This obturator mesh sling is actually the most deadly type of pelvic mesh and causes hideous thigh and groin pain and left thousands of women globally disabled in wheelchairs or using mobility aids to walk.

A whistleblower revealed this professor took £100K in payments from the makers of the mesh he was trialling. A huge conflict of interest and a life changing disaster for the women whose lives were ruined.

Or take the Nilsson study that trialled mesh in 90 older women. A quarter of them dropped out, leaving just 70 patients at the end of the 17-year trial. This small cohort study was led by a consultant paid by Ethicon, a division of J&J, one of the biggest global manufacturers of pelvic mesh. Unsurprisingly, this scientific paper overstated the benefits and downplayed the risks of mesh. Yet this evidence was used as “proof” by surgeons around the world that mesh slings had a high satisfaction rate with no serious long-term complications. This ultimately led to thousands of women being harmed.

Incontinence mesh slings were suspended in the UK in 2018 owing to the irreversible life changing complications. But its use continues in the rest of Europe, America, Africa, India, China, Japan to name just a few countries.

Passive corruption

Gelman writes of cheating science that: “It’s certainly not a great sign that so many cheaters have attained such high positions and reaped such prestigious awards. It does make you wonder if some of the subfields that celebrate this bad work suffer from systematic problems.

“Then there’s the problem of “passive corruption” — not the people who directly cheat, but those who know about cheating but don’t do anything about it. I suspect this is the result of some mixture of the following motivations: Scholars don’t want to waste time or attention on bad work; they fear the social or professional consequences of confronting cheaters; they are concerned that a general air of skepticism will spread to their own research.”

Whatever the reason – here at Sling The Mesh we are at the daily coal face of the patient safety tsunami of flawed scientific evidence.

A team of exhausted mesh-injured volunteers who witness the devastating harm caused by bad science.