Twenty physicians who care for people with autoimmune disease X are given approval to test whether drug Z—a medication that has previously been authorized as safe and effective for treating a different disease—can help their patients, too. Each of these doctors treats half of their patients with the drug and the other half with a placebo. Most are disappointed to find no significant difference in symptoms between the two groups. However, Doctor Jones finds that considerably more of his drug-treated patients improve than do his patients treated with a placebo; in fact, a statistical analysis shows that his result would be obtained by chance only one in twenty times.
Excited by this result, Doctor Jones quickly publishes his results in a peer-reviewed journal; the 19 studies that found no effect are never published.
As a result of Doctor Jones’s findings, many thousands of patients with disease X are subsequently treated with drug Z. Ten years later, a research group receives government funding to treat a thousand patients across the nation in a randomized, controlled trial that demonstrates that drug Z has no effect on disease X.
Which of the following would NOT have prevented such a large waste of resources?
A. Funding a randomized controlled trial immediately after Doctor Jones’s finding were published.
B. Requiring that all 20 of the physicians who were given approval to test drug Z for disease X publish their results.
C. Requiring that all 20 of the physicians who were given approval to test drug Z for disease X pool their results before considering publishing them.
D. Taking patients off the placebo, so that twice as many could be treated with drug Z.
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