The IOM study...

You might be surprised to hear that I am not really a big fan of the IOM and a great portion of the scientific and medical community isn’t either. This organization of MDs dances precariously on the fence between the three ring circus that is “Alt/CAM/Integrative” medicine and “western reductionist allopathic” (AKA scientific proven to be efficacious) medicine. I am not sure how any MD can ethically and perhaps even legally provide treatments based on the best possible evidence available when using an Alt/Cam/IM nostrum or treatment. How does a provider properly give informed consent with treatments that abysmally lack scientific evidence? With increasing evidence that many Alt/CAM/IM modalities rely heavily on the placebo effect, it is it dishonest to deceive the patient or should this be explained as a part of informed consent? This appears never to be any dilemma for the Alt/CAM/IM practitioners!

However, the IOM's recent vaccine safety meta-analysis has generated a certain buzz in the scientific and medical blogosphere and this is a part of the all important peer review process. But it is not the editorial style ad holmium misinformation fueled attacks as seen in naturalnews. The comments focus on the need to evaluate the quality and validity of the actual analysis and whether or not the data compiled supports the conclusions. Most have commended the worthy objective of gathering a very large compendium of independent studies related to vaccination risks AND benefits. From the biostatistician’s view, the causal conclusion algorithm is, admittedly, a little “soft” (i.e. overly subjective) and I don’t see that enough biostatistical number crunching actually went into the analysis to support all the conclusions.

The meta-analysis method of study evaluation has never been a favorite of mine as you are faced with many apples and oranges differences. While they do carry the sheer weight of a large block of related studies, they are often muddied by apples and oranges differences with only loosely associated hypotheses, varied expertise of the authorship, disparate research methodologies, inconsistent data collection & analysis objectives, etc. All of these factors tend to be confounding and diluting factors in this kind of analytical endeavor and usually a meta-analysis can only effectively produce veracity in very broad strokes. To effectively analyze whether the data supports conclusions for 1000 loosely associated studies is, indeed, a daunting task. I am glad I have never been called upon for such a large task!

Only the clarifying process of Science will tell if this study has any long standing validity and replication of this study and many of the 1000 analyzed are sure to follow. Most in the scientific community wisely take conclusions of a meta-analysis with a certain grain of salt and then take a “wait and see” stance. And yet here at the curezone many have chosen to bugle only the IOM committee’s conclusions about adverse effects, all extremely rare, not previously unreported or unexpected and never denied by government or medical organizations.

An ignored but important conclusion of the study:

“However, for the majority of cases … the evidence was inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship.”

The only CONTENT I see here is "IOM is a bad, bad, bad puppy - But we'll take just what we like out of the study and then trash the rest."