User talk:Edith Sirius Lee/About Rfc NoticeBoard

Notice Board and Rfc

Some outside contributions were attempting to reconsider the job of secondary sources. Here is an example:

Personally I do have serious issues with any health related meta-analysis which does not exclude (or at least controls for) studies without a decent control condition or any other control for the placebo effect; which is often shown to be huge.

The outside contribution are not there to evaluate the content of secondary sources. In some special cases, we might refer to the content of a source as an evidence that it is not reliable, but the quality assessment criteria used in a meta-analysis is much too complicated and subtle to be used in this way. If two meta-analyses, both published in respectable independent peer-reviewed journals, used different quality assessment criteria, it does not mean that one of the journal is less reliable. Therefore, I see no reason why we would put more weight to AHRQ or Cochrane than to any other respectable peer-reviewed journal. In particular, the fact that the TM POV can be pushed in the research community is not a valid reason. Obviously, there are a lot of financial interests at sake here and there can be pushing in both directions. Unless one provides evidence that the journal or the referees were corrupted, the argument is not valid.

By the way, in the above contribution, it was wrongly suggested that some meta-analyses (which are currently excluded from the Intro) did not consider control for placebo in their quality assessment. This is incorrect. Even the 1989 meta-analysis on meditation and anxiety considered the importance of control for placebo. This illustrates what happens when we start to use subtle aspects in the content of secondary sources to evaluate their reliability.

To sum up, we should use outside contributions to enrich our discussion. We should not use them as simple support statements for the different POVs or as evaluations of complicated content in secondary sources in an attempt to lower or reduce their weight. Edith Sirius Lee (talk) 19:26, 4 August 2010 (UTC)