Template:Did you know nominations/Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics

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The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Cwmhiraeth (talk) 05:12, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics[edit]

  • ... that a 1980 letter to the editor in The New England Journal of Medicine was misrepresented by Purdue Pharma to claim that less than 1% of patients who take opioids became addicted? Source: "Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin, starting using the letter’s data to say that less than one percent of patients treated with opioids became addicted." [1]
    • ALT1: ... that Hershel Jick, the author of a frequently cited 1980 letter to the editor in The New England Journal of Medicine, has said that the letter has been misrepresented? Source: "When we reached recently retired Dr. Hershel Jick, author of the oft-quoted "1% letter," he was quick to point out that his statistic was misrepresented. It was intended to represent only patients prescribed opioids in the hospital who were carefully monitored. He told us he never anticipated the remarkable impact a one-paragraph letter would have in the decades to follow. [2] "

Created by Everymorning (talk). Self-nominated at 13:06, 25 June 2017 (UTC).

  • Comment: The hook makes it sound like it is true that opiods carry a low risk of addiction. Don't you need more like
... that a 1980 letter to the editor has been cited more than 430 times to erroneously argue that opioids carry a low risk of addiction? 70.67.222.124 (talk) 22:45, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
  • You're right, and I have reworded the original hook to address this point. Now it's not about it being generally misrepresented but specifically about how Purdue (the makers of OxyContin) misrepresented it to claim that <1% of patients became addicted. Everymorning (talk) 00:10, 27 June 2017 (UTC)
  • Article new enough, long enough, meets policy, QPQ done, hook is short enough. My only concern is that the first hook sounds like it implies Purdue purposely misrepresented, which I suspect is unproven, and the second doesn't seem interesting enough because sources get misrepresented all the time. Below is a proposed ALT2. Onceinawhile (talk) 13:16, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
    • ALT2: * ... that consistent misrepresentation of a frequently cited 1980 letter to the editor in The New England Journal of Medicine has been blamed for contributing to the U.S. opioid epidemic? Source: "A one-paragraph blurb helped cause the opioid crisis. That’s just the start of science’s citation woes... One can see this happening in the references to Porter and Jick. Their original paragraph hasn’t just been cited in misleading ways. It’s been cited in consistently misleading ways, as if the distorting glosses on their research had been carbon-copied." [3] "
  • New reviewer needed to check ALT2, since it was proposed by the original reviewer. I have struck the previous hooks. BlueMoonset (talk) 15:49, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
  • ALT2 looks good: well-written and the cite checks out. DYK is good to go (@Onceinawhile: this nom is all yours for a QPQ, I just swooped in to check your proposal).
  • @Everymorning: By the way, one minor question about the methodological flaws section. Are those actually methodological flaws with the letter, or were they simply issues outside the scope of what the letter was addressing? --Usernameunique (talk) 01:32, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Well, they were certainly methodological limitations to the letter, but they were also outside the scope of what it was addressing. I think there's a case to be made that the section should be retitled and rewritten to say that they are limitations rather than methodological flaws. Everymorning (talk) 03:10, 1 August 2017 (UTC)