Clearly Stockwell and his crowd know their position is tenuous because they are wasting time attacking their critics with insinuation and ad hominem perspectives and making it sound like reasoned analysis. The ISFAR researchers are respectable academics from diverse backgrounds and many of them are retired and therefore gain nothing from their work. they are one of the few groups of researchers who also have nothing to lose from such critiques. I have colleagues who are afraid to make criticisms of the neo temperance work because they are worried about being blacklisted in public health funding circles.
This is in contrast to the neo temperance researchers whose work banging the neo temperance drum has reaped benefits by increased funding from governmental and other "health" oriented agencies. Publications like this, and uptake by governments, is known in our business as "knowledge translation" and adds to their ability to earn grants and other funding. So undermining critics that might complicate their narrative is a useful strategy for long time financial stability.
You (and maybe even I) should be ready for the ad hominem attacks, Chris.
Christopher, with all due respect, it appears you didn't read the paper. You state "Even if it were true that ISFAR is more critical of studies that ‘minimise health benefits’, it would not necessarily be evidence of bias, let alone of bias caused by conflicts of interest. It could simply be that those studies are of lower quality, as they probably are."
The study clearly states "No association was found between ISFAR sentiment and study quality as independently assessed by AMSTAR-2 and ROBIS (BF01 = 6.13-6.21)." In other words, ISFAR criticizes certain studies irrespective of their quality.
Those tools are box-ticking exercises for systematic reviews and meta-analyses which only make up 13% of the studies critiqued by ISFAR. They offer no guarantee of quality. Even the ridiculous Zhou et al. (2023) gets a moderate rating with AMSTAR
I find it funny to talk about quality of these studies when the CCSA "guidance" on low risk drinking that some of this lot wrote was based upon studies (including some of their own) that were ranked as "low quality" or "very low quality"! The trick was that they just decided to reclassify them as higher quality to fit their modelling. Quality is subjective and modifying it to fit your agenda is strategic.
Clearly Stockwell and his crowd know their position is tenuous because they are wasting time attacking their critics with insinuation and ad hominem perspectives and making it sound like reasoned analysis. The ISFAR researchers are respectable academics from diverse backgrounds and many of them are retired and therefore gain nothing from their work. they are one of the few groups of researchers who also have nothing to lose from such critiques. I have colleagues who are afraid to make criticisms of the neo temperance work because they are worried about being blacklisted in public health funding circles.
This is in contrast to the neo temperance researchers whose work banging the neo temperance drum has reaped benefits by increased funding from governmental and other "health" oriented agencies. Publications like this, and uptake by governments, is known in our business as "knowledge translation" and adds to their ability to earn grants and other funding. So undermining critics that might complicate their narrative is a useful strategy for long time financial stability.
You (and maybe even I) should be ready for the ad hominem attacks, Chris.
When a credentialed career comes up against common sense, the latter inevitably gets dispensed with.
Christopher, with all due respect, it appears you didn't read the paper. You state "Even if it were true that ISFAR is more critical of studies that ‘minimise health benefits’, it would not necessarily be evidence of bias, let alone of bias caused by conflicts of interest. It could simply be that those studies are of lower quality, as they probably are."
The study clearly states "No association was found between ISFAR sentiment and study quality as independently assessed by AMSTAR-2 and ROBIS (BF01 = 6.13-6.21)." In other words, ISFAR criticizes certain studies irrespective of their quality.
I am doubtful that ISFAR is "open minded" when their conflict of interest statement might as well be a novel - see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38095176/
It's nearly impossible to be unbiased with that many conflicts of interest.
Those tools are box-ticking exercises for systematic reviews and meta-analyses which only make up 13% of the studies critiqued by ISFAR. They offer no guarantee of quality. Even the ridiculous Zhou et al. (2023) gets a moderate rating with AMSTAR
There are dozens of studies supporting these tools as objective quality metrics. What’s your source for them being unreliable?
I find it funny to talk about quality of these studies when the CCSA "guidance" on low risk drinking that some of this lot wrote was based upon studies (including some of their own) that were ranked as "low quality" or "very low quality"! The trick was that they just decided to reclassify them as higher quality to fit their modelling. Quality is subjective and modifying it to fit your agenda is strategic.
Dan - where did you read that these studies were of low quality? Or is this your opinion?