"A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional."
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"A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional."
Retraction Watch broke this story, I think....I've seen a few other places pick it up.
Bizarro land in a pediatrics journals...
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T #medicine shared this topic on
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"A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional."
Retraction Watch broke this story, I think....I've seen a few other places pick it up.
Bizarro land in a pediatrics journals...
This article (by my friend Kate Travis) quotes George Lundberg, who has long been an influential figure in the world of medical journals. (I was surprised he's still around...he's in his 90s.) He was fired from JAMA in 1999 for publishing an article about college students' attitudes towards...blow jobs. The context was Bill Clinton & Monica Lewinsky. I got hired at JAMA shortly thereafter and a lot of the editorial staff were POed that he was shitcanned for that.
Ah...quainter times.
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"A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional."
Retraction Watch broke this story, I think....I've seen a few other places pick it up.
Bizarro land in a pediatrics journals...
Wowowow, the REASON for the retraction is even more 🤯
'The corrections come following a January article in New Yorker magazine that mentioned one of the reports — “Baby boy blue,” a case published in 2010 describing an infant who showed signs of opioid exposure via breast milk while his mother was taking acetaminophen with codeine. The New Yorker article made public an admission by one of the coauthors that the case was made up.'
'David Juurlink, professor of medicine and pediatrics at the University of Toronto, who has spent over a decade looking into the claim that infants can receive a meaningful or even lethal dose of opioids via breast milk when their mothers take acetaminophen with codeine. The first such case, published in the Lancet in 2006... now bears an expression of concern
'Follow-up work by Juurlink and others has found the doses claimed in the Lancet report — as well as in two other articles, both now retracted, Koren and colleagues wrote about the case — to be pharmacologically unlikely. As the New Yorker reported, a review of the autopsy data and other evidence points to the baby having been given the pain medication directly rather than having been exposed to the drug through breast milk.
'The Baby boy blue case is “the only such case study, aside from the Lancet case report and the two now-retracted descriptions of the same case in Canadian Family Physician and Canadian Pharmacists Journal,” Juurlink said. “It is the most compelling published description of neonatal opioid toxicity from breastfeeding. And it is wrong.”
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Wowowow, the REASON for the retraction is even more 🤯
'The corrections come following a January article in New Yorker magazine that mentioned one of the reports — “Baby boy blue,” a case published in 2010 describing an infant who showed signs of opioid exposure via breast milk while his mother was taking acetaminophen with codeine. The New Yorker article made public an admission by one of the coauthors that the case was made up.'
'David Juurlink, professor of medicine and pediatrics at the University of Toronto, who has spent over a decade looking into the claim that infants can receive a meaningful or even lethal dose of opioids via breast milk when their mothers take acetaminophen with codeine. The first such case, published in the Lancet in 2006... now bears an expression of concern
'Follow-up work by Juurlink and others has found the doses claimed in the Lancet report — as well as in two other articles, both now retracted, Koren and colleagues wrote about the case — to be pharmacologically unlikely. As the New Yorker reported, a review of the autopsy data and other evidence points to the baby having been given the pain medication directly rather than having been exposed to the drug through breast milk.
'The Baby boy blue case is “the only such case study, aside from the Lancet case report and the two now-retracted descriptions of the same case in Canadian Family Physician and Canadian Pharmacists Journal,” Juurlink said. “It is the most compelling published description of neonatal opioid toxicity from breastfeeding. And it is wrong.”
How do we get retraction watch here on Mastodon?
I'm'a need @ai6yr or somebody to make a bot, please
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How do we get retraction watch here on Mastodon?
I'm'a need @ai6yr or somebody to make a bot, please
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How do we get retraction watch here on Mastodon?
I'm'a need @ai6yr or somebody to make a bot, please
@NilaJones @ai6yr I've asked. They're looking into it.
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@NilaJones @ai6yr I've asked. They're looking into it.
Hooray! You can tell them your constituents are pestering you for it
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"A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional."
Retraction Watch broke this story, I think....I've seen a few other places pick it up.
Bizarro land in a pediatrics journals...
@brianvastag being in the US and having done work for medical practices my assumption would be that patient privacy concerns would require that any such articles would *have to be* modified so far they'd be considered fictional. Explicitly stating it might be a good idea, but the assumption for anyone consuming them should be *at most* "based on real events."
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@brianvastag being in the US and having done work for medical practices my assumption would be that patient privacy concerns would require that any such articles would *have to be* modified so far they'd be considered fictional. Explicitly stating it might be a good idea, but the assumption for anyone consuming them should be *at most* "based on real events."
@fencepost I've been the subject of case studies published in medical journals and this is not the case. I gave consent and the articles included details like age and gender but not enough info for anyone other than someone close to me to ID me. Medical details need to be accurate or else a case study is either pointless or misleading.
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"A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional."
Retraction Watch broke this story, I think....I've seen a few other places pick it up.
Bizarro land in a pediatrics journals...
So these retractions were triggered by an investigation by Ben Taubs of The New Yorker, who presents compelling evidence that the notion that breast milk can convey fatal doses of opiates to newborns to be the product of scientific fraud.
The case he lays out is very compelling.
Did a Celebrated Researcher Obscure a Baby’s Poisoning? | The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/02/did-a-celebrated-researcher-obscure-a-fatal-poisoning
(Yes The New Yorker is paywalled. I access through my public library.)
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