HWN Suggests

Institutional Corruption in the Cochrane Collaboration

The Cochrane Collaboration is one of the most important charities in the world that aims to help people make informed decisions about healthcare interventions. A good decision may mean the difference between life and death, or, in psychiatry, the difference between being permanently disabled by drugs and living a normal life. It is therefore of utmost importance that evaluations of diagnostic methods and treatments are as impartial as possible, both when the original research is made and when it is summarised in systematic reviews like Cochrane reviews.

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  Cochrane

Cochrane is for anyone interested in using high-quality information to make health decisions. Whether you are a clinician, patient or carer, researcher, or policy-maker, Cochrane evidence provides a powerful tool to enhance your healthcare knowledge and decision-making.

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An example of a Cochrane SR which lost its way is this one, purportedly showing that intensive blood pressure (BP) lowering in patients with cardiovascular (CV) disease has no benefit.

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Conflict of interest in Campbell and Cochrane reviews: threat or opportunity?

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COVID Misinformation Blunder: Instagram Censors Widely Respected Cochrane Collaboration

Instagram recently censored the Cochrane Collaboration, a highly respected nonprofit group made up of medical experts, for allegedly sharing "false content" about COVID-19. This is an inevitable consequence of the growing push for social media censorship.

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More and more papers are published in medical journals every day, so how do you decide which ones to read and, having read a paper, how do you decide whether to change your practice as a result of what you have read? Perhaps the paper was atypical in some way. What does the other research on the topic say?

More than a collaboration—What sort of organization should Cochrane be? Using organizational metaphors to explore the work of Cochrane

Rather than explore the nature of the dispute, this paper reflects more widely on the opportunities and challenges faced by Cochrane as one of the key global organizations producing evidence-informed advice on health care policy and practice through insights from organizational theory.

Stop Googling your health questions. Use these sites instead

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Systematic Differences between Cochrane and Non-Cochrane Meta-Analyses on the Same Topic: A Matched Pair Analysis

Meta-analyses conducted via the Cochrane Collaboration adhere to strict methodological and reporting standards aiming to minimize bias, maximize transparency/reproducibility, and improve the accuracy of summarized data. Whether this results in differences in the results reported by meta-analyses on the same topic conducted outside the Cochrane Collaboration is an open question.

The Cochrane Collaboration: A Valuable Knowledge Translation Resource

The Cochrane Collaboration has become the premier source worldwide of high-quality systematic reviews in health care. Cochrane’s importance has even been compared to that of the Human Genome Project (Naylor, 1995). The Cochrane Collaboration’s focus on health care applies in many ways to disability and rehabilitation, particularly in the health and function domain.

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