Yay! Miners

In keeping with today's theme that data isn't always real enough for some people, we get an admission that pharma isn't above lowering the level.

Basically, whenever a trial fails, there's almost always a group of patients — left-handed Peruvian men who hate the taste of basil, say — in whom it works. Drawing conclusions from such analyses is statistically fraught, to say the least, so why do scientists so often do so?

"One answer — unpleasant but real — is that pharmaceutical companies want to put a positive spin on their drugs, even when the trials fail to show benefit," writes Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, who has personal experience in the subject.