Dr. Irwig’s Propecia study, was it funded by attorneys suing Merck?

[SoothSayer]

Dr. Irwig did not receive any funding for publishing the study and the costs were conducted out of pocket. His first study was released a substantial amount of time before any lawsuits were filed, to the best of my knowledge. The media gets facts wrong all the time and this apparently is no exception.

Think about this for a brief moment - would a professional who earns a doctors salary really bother to spend hundreds of hours researching a clinical problem in addition to the time required to write-up the analysis and get it published for a mere sum of LESS than $10,000. A successful doctor could make that salary in a single week, it really doesn't make sense he would months to earn such a pitiful sum.

[PayDay]

Originally Posted by SoothSayer

Dr. Irwig did not receive any funding for publishing the study and the costs were conducted out of pocket. His first study was released a substantial amount of time before any lawsuits were filed, to the best of my knowledge. The media gets facts wrong all the time and this apparently is no exception.

Think about this for a brief moment - would a professional who earns a doctors salary really bother to spend hundreds of hours researching a clinical problem in addition to the time required to write-up the analysis and get it published for a mere sum of LESS than $10,000. A successful doctor could make that salary in a single week, it really doesn't make sense he would months to earn such a pitiful sum.

In today’s world unless you are a brain surgeon or a plastic surgeon the average physician earns less than $200k per year. You never know what a persons expenses are. Add in student loans etc.,and that $10k might look very tempting. The reporter made a point to state that he received the money from the attorneys suing Merck and I think you are wrong about the timeline of the first lawsuits anyway. She would not have said it if it were not true. Its not like she misquoted a statistic, she made a point to state that fact and said the Iriwg said that this was the case. This does not make the study irrelevant, just a lot less legitimate.

[SoothSayer]

I can tell you for a fact that he funded the study for himself. Dr. Irwig opened the study in March 2010 and the first US lawsuits were filed more than a year later in 2011. The media makes mistakes all the time so I'm not sure why you assume it is true because it was aired on CNN. Just a few weeks ago CNN falsely reported that the US Supreme Court ruled the health care reform act to be unconstitutional before revising it, which is an error far more significant than the one for this single study.

Any way, here is an article with a direct quote from Dr. Irwig in which he claims his interest in studying the topic came from his personal practice and that his study was not funded by any third-parties.

http://www.examiner.com/article/doct...ion-and-cancer

As noted above, in the end of his first article it is written Conflict of Interest: None. If there was any external funding, it would be required to be disclosed in his article or the potential consequences of his actions would far outweigh a few thousand dollars as was the case for Andrew Wakefield in the UK who lost his medical license.

[PayDay]

You do know that the Examiner is nothing more than a glorified blog right? I mean you have to know that. It is easy to find out if irwig took the money and if he did it does not mean that the study was necessarily tainted, but it does certainly question the motives behind the study and kind of clues us into why most participants were from propeciahelp. It’s not good.

[SoothSayer]

Using the same reasoning you could say that the mainstream media is really comprised of glorified blogs. The Examiner has a smaller circulation and does not have as strong a name brand as CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC etc but they do the same exact job. That being said I do not personally use the Examiner as a regular source of news but it has done a more thorough job covering the finasteride controversy which has been neglected by media sources that target a much wider audience.

I'm telling you that the study was funded from Dr. Irwig's own finances as I have spoken with him directly. You would be understandably skeptical of what I am telling you so I referred you to another article that represents the same facts I have conveyed to you.

If you research Andrew Wakefield's autism-vaccine controversy, you'll find he took more than 400,000 GBP which was probably about $800k dollars at the time. A figure that is much more believable than vaguely 'less than $10,000'.

I can tell you that many patients came from PropeciaHelp because it is the largest and more centralized source of information on post-finasteride-syndrome, for better or worse. It is difficult to find patients via word of mouth because they are not super common. It is just an easy way to establish a starting population before filtering out the not-ideal candidates.

[gmonasco]

Originally Posted by SoothSayer

Using the same reasoning you could say that the mainstream media is really comprised of glorified blogs. The Examiner has a smaller circulation and does not have as strong a name brand as CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC etc but they do the same exact job.

Writer Admits She Spun Crazy-Ass Nonsense for Examiner.com -- And Didn't Get Caught Until Lawyers' Letters Showed Up

Writer L.J. Williamson admitted she began intentionally spinning bigger and bigger bullshit stories in hopes of generating profit while deriving joy from publishing truly ridiculous content on the Net -- and her Examiner.com editors never bothered reading the material.

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/...un_crazy-a.php

[SoothSayer]

You'll see these kind of controversies about any newspaper. Here is one about CNN from a couple years ago.

http://gawker.com/5304469/twitter+ad...ts-as-a-source

And of course I imagine you heard about Rupert Murdoch's wire-tapping scandal this past year. I'm not saying the Examiner is a candidate for Pulitzer prize reporting but the article presents a written quote from Dr. Irwig that is displayed in his article verbatim. He would be putting himself at risk for libel if he is falsely attributing quotes to interviewees.

[gmonasco]

Originally Posted by SoothSayer

You'll see these kind of controversies about any newspaper. Here is one about CNN from a couple years ago. And of course I imagine you heard about Rupert Murdoch's wire-tapping scandal this past year.

Neither of those "controversies" compares in the least to deliberately making stuff up and passing it off as news.

[PayDay]

The bottom line is if Irwig took the money a lot of questions should be raised about the motivation behind his study. That’s all I’m saying. I am not saying that his study is worthless.