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American Journal of Evaluation
DOI: 10.1177/1098214008322640
2008; 29; 416 originally published online Sep 5, 2008;
American Journal of Evaluation
Ernest R. House
Blowback: Consequences of Evaluation for Evaluation
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416
Author’s Note:
Presented at the American Evaluation Association, Portland, OR, November 4, 2006. The author
thanks Gene Glass, Steve Lapan, Bill Madura, Bob Stake, Kevin Wellner, and Bob Williams for useful comments on
drafts of this article. Ernest R. House, University of Colorado, Campus Box 249, Boulder, CA 80309; e-mail:
ernie.house@colorado.edu.
Blowback
Consequences of Evaluation for Evaluation
Ernest R. House
University of Colorado Boulder
Drug studies are often cited as the best exemplars of evaluation design. However, many of these
studies are seriously biased in favor of positive findings for the drugs evaluated, even to the point
where dangerous effects are hidden. In spite of using randomized designs and double blinding,
drug companies have found ways of producing the results they want, including manipulation of
treatment, selection of sample, control of data, and calculated publication. Regulatory agencies
have been neutralized. We have entered an era when evaluations are controlled by sponsors to
produce the findings they want. Evaluations have become too important to be left to the evalua-
tors. Such deceptive practices threaten the integrity of the evaluation field, perhaps its existence.
There is no doubt these practices will spread into educational and social evaluation.
Keywords:
drug evaluation; bias; politics; randomized trials
I
n July 2001, totally unexpectedly, I found myself having bypass surgery. The heart surgery
was surreal; could this be happening? A few days after surgery, I was in intensive care when
the head resident arrived with three assistants. He read numbers aloud off the chart—cell
counts, blood pressures, pulses, six things I didn’t recognize. He said to one young assistant,
“He’s anemic, low pulse, low blood pressure, etc. What should we do?” The assistant said,
“Give him a unit of blood, and increase the heart beat to 70.” The head resident said, “No, no!
This man’s an athlete. He’s been swimming for 30 years. That’s why his pulse is so low.
Haven’t you read his history? He doesn’t even need this pacemaker!” With that he walked
over to me and ripped off the external pacemaker attached to wires protruding from my chest.
I thought to myself, “I hope to hell this guy knows what he’s talking about.”
He did. I recovered. What impressed me throughout the ordeal was that the quantitative
indicators the MDs based decisions on actually meant something—unlike the world of edu-
cational and social research. The experience was fascinating, though I can’t say I recommend
it for entertainment.
Since then I have been taking five prescription drugs, plus aspirin. I hope these drugs have
been rigorously evaluated. Unfortunately, there is reason to be concerned. Although some
regard randomized drug trials as the ideal for all evaluations, drug studies are among the most
biased evaluations being conducted. What’s happening could be a precursor for what happens
elsewhere in evaluation.
Drug Evaluations as Symptomatic
Let me declare my vested interests. I take two drugs for cholesterol and three for blood
pressure. I am dependent on these drugs. Furthermore, I have a significant financial interest
American Journal of
Evaluation
Volume 29 Number 4
December 2008 416-426
© 2008 American Evaluation
Association
10.1177/1098214008322640
http://aje.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Articles
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House / Blowback 417
in the pharmaceutical firms that profit from selling drugs. I have an interest in how these stud-
ies are done both as a patient and an investor.
Until the 1980s, drug researchers were pretty much independent of drug companies, but
now the companies are involved in every aspect of drug evaluation. The former editor of the
New England Journal of Medicine
writes, “Researchers don’t control clinical trials anymore;
sponsors do” (Angell, 2004, p. 100). Drug evaluations have become increasingly biased,
though they are randomized studies. Here’s how bias enters.
Choice of placebo as comparator
. Drug companies insist on using placebos against which
to compare new drugs. In other words, the comparison of a new drug is against no treatment,
not against other treatment drugs in use. Because 77% of new drugs are slight variations of
those already on the market, many new drugs would not look more effective than the old
drugs in head-to-head trials.
Selection of subjects
. One way of preventing side effects from showing up in clinical tri-
als is to use younger rather than older subjects. Young people suffer fewer side effects gener-
ally. For example, in trials of nonsteroidal, anti-inflammatory drugs, only 2% of the subjects
were aged more than 65 years, though these drugs are targeted explicitly at people aged 65
years or more (Bodenheimer, 2000).
Manipulation of dosages
. If a company does wish to show that its drug is more effective
than a competitor, it may compare the two by using lower dosages of the competitor drug and
higher dosages of the new drug. For example, when AstraZeneca’s heartburn drug Prilosec
went off patent, the company took a new patent out on the active ingredient and called it
Nexium (Angell, 2004). In four clinical trials, the company compared higher doses of Nexium
to Prilosec. Nexium looked like an improvement though it was the same drug. Or in a review
of clinical trials of nonsteroidal, anti-inflammatory drugs, 48% of the trials used higher
doses of the sponsoring company’s drug. Or in trials comparing two statins, Pfizer compared
80 mg of Lipitor to 40 mg of Pravachol, a competitor drug.
Method of drug administration
. Sometimes the competitor drug will be administered in
such a way as to make it less effective, such as by giving it orally rather than by injection
(Bodenheimer, 2000).
Manipulation of timescales
. Drugs are tested for a short time, even when used for much
longer periods. Blood pressure drugs are tested for a few months though taken for a lifetime.
Timescale lies at the heart of the Vioxx controversy (Pollack & Abelson, 2006). Merck did
not count those subjects who dropped out of the treatment group because Vioxx was making
them ill if these people didn’t have heart attacks or strokes within 14 days after dropping out,
even when they went on to have coronary events soon after.
Selective publishing
. Pfizer published favorable findings for 6-month trials of Celebrex, an
arthritis drug, even though the company had findings in hand for 12 months showing no
effect. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires only two positive trials for drug
approval, no matter how many trials are conducted, and the agency has no control over what
the company publishes. Companies must submit all clinical results to the FDA, but they can
publish only favorable ones if they choose (Mathews, 2005).
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418 American Journal of Evaluation / December 2008
Suppression of negative results
. One review of 122 articles in the
Journal of the American
Medical Association
found that 65% of harmful effects were not completely reported. Also,
in 62% of clinical trials, the primary outcome was changed. Authors cherry-picked results
(Mathews, 2005). Researchers are subject to binding contracts that allow companies to deter-
mine what can be revealed from the study, and companies have repeatedly denied permission
for reporting of negative information (Armstrong, 2006; Harris, 2006; Mathews, 2005;
Zimmerman & Tomsho, 2005).
Opportunistic data analysis
. Companies retain control over data analyses by collecting
data from several sites and providing only partial data to cooperating researchers. As one drug
executive said, “We are reluctant to provide the data tape because some investigators want to
take the data beyond where the data should go” (Bodenheimer, 2000, p. 1541).
Control of authorship
. Drug companies employ ghost writers to write reports and circulate
drafts to investigators who will be listed as authors. Reports are written to show the product
in the most favorable light. How much listed authors can change the draft depends on how
much they want to argue with the company (Bodenheimer, 2000).
The high-profile Vioxx study displays several sources of bias: timescale manipulation,
concealment of data, suspect statistical analysis, and deceptive publication (Berenson, 2006a,
2006b; Pollack & Abelson, 2006). Furthermore, 20 million people took Vioxx over a period
of 5 years before it was withdrawn. It may have caused 100,000 heart attacks. There are
11,500 lawsuits pending.
You may think such evaluations are the exception, but they are not. Marcia Angell, former
editor of the
New England Journal of Medicine
, writes, “Bias is now rampant in drug trials”
(Angell, 2004, p. 106). Reviews of clinical trials substantiate her judgment (Als-Nielsen,
Chen, Gluud, & Kjaergard, 2003; Lexchin, Bero, Djulbegovic, & Clark, 2003). Danish
researchers analyzed 370 randomized drug trials chosen from a sample of 167 meta-analyses
in the Cochrane Library (Als-Nielsen et al., 2003). They found that the studies recommended
the experimental drug as the “treatment of choice” in 51% of trials sponsored by for-profit
organizations compared to 16% sponsored by nonprofits. The predictors of conclusions were
source of funding, treatment effect, and double blinding. If researchers are connected to the
company whose drug is evaluated, the findings are 4 times more likely to be favorable to the
product than when researchers have no connections (Angell, 2004).
Swedish researchers compared full clinical trial data to what was actually published
(Melander, Ahlqvist-Rastad, Meijer, & Beermann, 2003). They found that the same clinical
trials were included in several publications without any indication of prior publication.
Sometimes authors’ names had been changed. Favorable results were 3 times more likely to
be reported. What this means is that meta-analyses would unknowingly include the same tri-
als repeatedly as if they were separate instances, thus inflating the apparent effectiveness of
the drug in the meta-analyses. The Swedish researchers concluded that without access to
all clinical trial data, not just published studies, one cannot make valid evidence-based
recommendations.
How can these things happen in scientific research? Drug companies have become involved
in funding, designing, collecting data, analyzing data, interpreting results, authoring, disseminat-
ing findings, and controlling publication. In 1990, 80% of drug studies were conducted by acad-
emic institutions. In 2000, 40% of studies were done by academics. Drug companies now hire
special for-profit contract research organizations (CROs) to implement the evaluation designs of
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the companies. These contract organizations are heavily dependent for funding on the drug firms.
Some universities—at risk of losing hundreds of millions of dollars by losing the clinical trials—
have agreed to cooperate with the companies. Academics are bound by detailed contracts with
sponsors that limit independence in every way. More than 70% of funding for clinical trials now
comes from the companies.
Where is the government in all this? In the early 1990s, drug companies began providing
money to the FDA for drug trials, accounting for 53% of the FDA drug review budget in 2005.
This allows companies to negotiate with the FDA over drug reviews. David Kessler, who
began the practice as FDA commissioner under Clinton, is troubled. He says there is no doubt
the practice gives industry leverage over the agency. According to the
Wall Street Journal
,
regulators usually don’t negotiate their activities with industries they regulate (Mathews,
2006). In fact, many of those negotiating for the drug industry are former FDA officials.
Congress does oversee the agency, but many key members of Congress accept high-paying
jobs as drug lobbyists when they leave office. In 2002, the industry employed 675 Washington
lobbyists and makes large political contributions.
To complicate matters further, National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the FDA have
allowed their scientists to accept consultant fees and stock options from companies without
having to report them (Angell, 2004). Many independent academics who sit on panels that
approve drugs for the FDA receive large sums of consultant money from the companies.
Often these financial interests are not revealed. I think it is safe to say that government over-
sight of the industry has been severely weakened. I am also sure many inside the agencies
lament what is happening. Internal dissent has reached the media (Committee on the
Assessment of the U.S. Drug Safety System, 2006; Pear, 2004).
For their part, drug companies say that academics take too long to do studies. It costs
between US$300 and US$600 million to develop a new drug, and each day of delay costs the
company a million dollars. It is a big, expensive, and profitable business. In 2002, the combined
profits of the 10 drug companies listed in the
Fortune
500 were more than the combined profits
for all the other 490 corporations put together, US$35.9 billion versus US$33.7 billion (Angell,
2004). And 1992 legislation requires the FDA to report to Congress whether it is meeting the
short timelines for approving new drugs, shortening the time for reviewing the drugs.
A few observations are as follows:
First, these drugs and companies provide enormous benefits. I can say with conviction that
they are a matter of good or bad health, even life and death, for many.
Second, bias has become a serious problem in drug evaluations, enough to threaten the
great good these drugs do.
Third, government agencies (and universities) are losing control to the companies.
Fourth, our conception of bias control is inadequate to deal with the situation.
Fifth, drug evaluation has been transformed as a consequence of what evaluators do—provide
honest assessments—because the findings mean so much, not because they mean so little.
Something similar is possible—I would say likely—in other areas of evaluation. Indeed, drug
studies provide a template for how to bias evaluation studies, even when these studies are ran-
domized and double blinded.
Threats to the Health of the Evaluation Community
Why is this happening? In my book
Professional Evaluation
(House, 1993), which discusses
the rise of the field of evaluation, I employed a framework from the great French historian
House / Blowback 419
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420 American Journal of Evaluation / December 2008
Fernand Braudel, founder of the
Annales
school of history. His work
Civilization and Capitalism
traces the evolution of capitalism as an institution from the 15th through the 18th centuries
(Braudel, 1981, 1982, 1984). Capitalism started from simple village markets and evolved over
centuries into powerful financial institutions—banks, corporations, stock exchanges. Braudel’s
focus is on institutions developing over long time periods as a result of complex interactions with
the environment and other institutions.
As capitalism progresses, it erodes traditional social structures. Markets are no respecters
of tradition. People lose their jobs, move to find better jobs, and live away from their families,
their communities, even their countries. They are adrift, far from familiar customs and beliefs.
Capitalism transforms what it touches. One political economist wrote, “ . . . everything has a
price, and . . . its value is its price. As a consequence, markets have a profound and destabi-
lizing impact on society because they dissolve traditional structures and social relations”
(Gilpin, 1987, p. 20).
As capitalism erodes tradition, governing becomes more difficult. Historically, govern-
ments depended on traditional social structures for support. They justified their actions
through precedent and custom, appeals to religion, and legitimating myths and symbols. But
in advanced capitalist society, authority is demystified, and governments have difficulty main-
taining legitimacy through traditional means. Increasingly, they justify their actions through
nontraditional means, such as increasing material well-being, image management, and even
scientific authority.
Since World War II, the use of science to legitimate government actions has grown enor-
mously, and evaluation partakes of scientific authority when it passes judgment on programs.
It is no accident that evaluation as a professional practice emerged first in the most capitalist
country, the United States, where decisions about what to eat and how to live are based in part
on scientific findings. Evaluation serves to legitimate government actions. Hence, the rise of
professional evaluation.
As capitalism advances even further, key functions, like economic activities, move beyond
government control. The United States may have reached the point where so much capacity
has been drained from government that it cannot perform, or has difficulty performing, tasks
considered essential to the public welfare. This erosion of capacity has resulted from trans-
ferring resources, decisions, authority, and legitimacy from public to private control. Private
control of resources is asserted to be more efficient, a tenet of Chicago economics. Ronald
Reagan said, “The government is not the solution to our problems; the government is the
problem.” Put more simply by the man from Crawford, Texas, “It’s the people’s money the
government collects, and the government should give it back.”
We see how drug evaluation has been transformed. Congress did not provide enough
money for clinical trials and drug reviews. The FDA turned to industry for funds, and indus-
try responded—for a price. It negotiates with the agency over its priorities. Furthermore, the
companies took control of clinical trials by funding for-profit organizations dependent on the
companies. Funds, decisions, and control moved from public to private hands.
In general, government has become seriously underresourced and is constrained from aug-
menting its resource base. It is besieged by demands for services, but cannot meet those
demands. Put bluntly, government cannot control major events, nor sometimes even mitigate
the effects of events, contrary to expectations. Much has been written about the erosion of
trust in government. People don’t trust the government for good reason. The government has
lost the capacity to perform its duties.
Consider. Can the government provide national security? It was not capable of defending
against the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and is not capable of winning the war in Iraq or maintaining
stability in Afghanistan. Can the government defend the country’s borders? It is helpless against
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House / Blowback 421
millions of illegal immigrants streaming in, to the point where vigilantes patrol the borders. Can
it protect citizens from natural disasters? Not only did the government fail to protect the citizens
of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina, it failed to assist them during and right after. New
Orleans remains a disaster zone, to the incredulity of people all over the world, who perceive the
United States to be acting like a helpless, third world country. National security, public health,
and border control are key government functions, even by conservative standards.
Yes, I know the Bush administration is incompetent, perhaps the most incompetent gov-
ernment in American history. I have written about the neofundamentalist mentality that grips
the administration, a rigid mindset that cannot accept or allow information counter to its
beliefs. And when government tries to do something big, as in Iraq or New Orleans, it hires
private contractors over whom it can exercise neither control nor accountability (Wolfe,
2006). But something even more basic is happening. The government has been stripped of
resources to the point where it cannot perform basic tasks. If the next administration is com-
petent or liberal, it will be unable to reverse the trends that have eroded capacity.
What has this to do with evaluation? If government cannot control events, it can control
information about events. Or try to. It needs to control information to mask its ineffectiveness
and declining legitimacy. If the purpose of evaluation is to honestly determine the value of
programs, the consequences of doing so when government actions are successful is different
from the consequences when the actions are ineffective. Instead of legitimating government
action, honest evaluation will delegitimate a struggling government.
Indeed, the Bush administration already controls information to an unprecedented degree,
even in science. In 2004, a group of 60 prominent scientists, including 20 Nobel Prize win-
ners, asserted that the administration had misrepresented scientific knowledge and misled the
public about the implications of its policies (Glanz, 2004). The administration censored and
suppressed reports, stacked advisory committees, disbanded panels that gave unwanted
advice, and refused to seek independent expertise. The abuse of science has been deliberate
and systematic on environmental, health, biomedical, and weaponry issues. And you see how
information control played out in drug evaluations. Unhappy with impartial results, the com-
panies devised their own system of evaluation.
I expect something similar in other areas. Here is how the process might work in educa-
tion. The Bush administration is a strong supporter of private schools and charter schools,
which involve transferring resources, decisions, and capacity from public to private hands.
The U.S. Department of Education has sponsored two studies, both of which show that pri-
vate and charter schools do not raise test scores any more than public schools do. The
Department of Education suppressed the first study and disputed the findings of the second.
The next step might be studies conducted by advocates of charter schools designed to
obtain favorable results. Such an analysis might obtain findings favorable to charter schools
by eliminating covariates like surrogate measures of low income that are normal in such stud-
ies. Eventually, as charter schools gain resources, they may sponsor studies of themselves that
show their programs favorably—just like drug companies. We are early in the transformation
of educational and social evaluation, but that’s how sponsor control might work, very similar
to the drug company behavior. They provide a model of bad behavior.
Remedies
Clearly, we have a problem, maybe the biggest threat to evaluation since its inception.
What remedies are available for salvaging honest evaluation? We can begin by looking at
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422 American Journal of Evaluation / December 2008
what medical researchers propose for drug trials. First, the comparator drugs in these trials
should be drugs already used for treating the condition, not placebos. Marcia Angell says that
if she could choose only one reform, this would be it (Angell, 2004). If there is concern about
the effectiveness of the old drug or side effects, the clinical trials could compare the new drug,
old drug, and a placebo.
A second reform would be to strengthen the FDA. The FDA is far too dependent on the
drug industry and has lost capacity to perform its regulatory mission. I am sure many inside
the agency would welcome support from Congress to eliminate its dependence. FDA advi-
sory committees should not include members with financial ties to industry (Angell, 2004).
Some scientists say that these financial ties do not affect their judgment. Right. Perhaps we
should allow judges to take money from defendants whose trials they oversee.
Third, drug companies should not control clinical testing of their own drugs. Imagine that
General Motors controlled the evaluation of its cars. Is there any doubt its products would
appear excellent? One idea is to establish an institute for drug trials within NIH that would
ensure that clinical trials were properly designed and conducted before FDA approval
(Angell, 2004). The institute could contract with independent researchers to conduct the tri-
als, and data would be controlled by NIH and the evaluators. Drug companies are supposed
to publish such data on government Web sites, except they don’t name the drugs in the onsite
data, which makes a mockery of the requirement (Zimmerman & Tomsho, 2005).
Fourth, those who conduct drug trials should be free from financial conflicts. How big a
problem is financial conflict for researchers? At the Stanford medical center, 700 faculty
members listed 299 potential conflicts of interest in the conduct of their research (Pollack,
2006). Stanford recently prohibited the acceptance of gifts from industry, a step already taken
by the University of California, San Francisco (Moynihan, 2003a). Unfortunately, merely
revealing financial ties does not prevent those ties from influencing the research.
Transparency is necessary, but not sufficient. The conflict of interest is too deep.
How likely are these reforms? Not very likely. The reforms run counter to privatization and
the government losing capacity. These changes would increase government control. Reform
seems unlikely until we have a catastrophe in which huge numbers of people die because a
drug was inadequately tested. Congress must see the problem starkly, not easy to do when
surrounded by hundreds of lobbyists. Unfortunately, such a tragedy is highly likely. CEOs of
companies have very short time frames. Beat Wall Street profit estimates for a few quarters
and leave. They will be long gone before trouble erupts. Economists call this moral hazard,
not being accountable for what you cause.
A few days after I finished this article, the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on the
Assessment of the U.S. Drug Safety System, part of the National Academy of Sciences,
released a 265-page report on drug safety. The report does not address how studies are con-
ducted, but focuses instead on the FDA. It says the FDA is in serious disarray because of inad-
equate resources and too much industry influence. The agency is under extreme time pressure
to review massive amounts of material. Drug safety is neglected because safety depends on
tracking drugs once they reach the general population. Drugs in use are administered to a far
more diverse population than in clinical trials, and it is here that many side effects appear.
Clinical trials do not and cannot guarantee drug safety. Last year, there were 450,000 reports
of adverse drug reactions. The FDA does not have the resources nor authority to follow up.
Resources are concentrated on approving new drugs. The report recommends extensive
changes to the FDA and to how companies market drugs.
Some reforms can be accomplished without government. The journals are a first line of
defense. A few years ago, Jeffrey Drazen, current editor of the
New England Journal of Medicine
,
thought clinical trials were not a problem, realized they were a big problem, but not his, and now
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House / Blowback 423
says, “We have to do something” (Armstrong, 2006; Mathews, 2005; Zimmerman & Tomsho,
2005). A dozen journal editors have proposed new standards for publication, like full data dis-
closure from clinical trials, transparency about financial interests, submission of original designs
so reviewers can see how the study has been modified, and signed statements from authors that
they have written the report.
Professional medical associations have proposed codes of ethics that include restrictions
on gifts and financial ties, and some universities have issued rules about authorship and drug
company ties (Mayor, 2003). As usual, student groups have been strongest in advocating eth-
ical behavior (Moynihan, 2003b). One recommendation is that sponsors not be allowed to
overrule researchers when it comes to publishing negative findings (Garattini, Bertele, &
Bassi, 2003). Of course, drug companies are resistant to such changes (Moynihan, 2003b).
Finally, our conception of rigor in evaluation studies is far too weak to contend with these
potent threats to impartiality. In reviewing the drug literature, I encountered several comments
that the clinical trials were highly biased but that the methodologies were good. Here’s one
statement: “A recent systematic review of the impact of financial conflicts on biomedical
research found that studies financed by industry, although as rigorous as other studies, always
found outcomes favourable to the sponsoring company” (Lexchin et al., 2003, p. 1167). How
can you have a rigorous methodology that yields biased results?
Apparently, the researchers mean that the study is randomized, has hidden allocation, and
is double blinded. No doubt these are important. But they do little to handle deliberate biases
that arise from opportunistic choice of comparator, dosage, administration, time frame, selec-
tion of surrogate endpoints, cherry-picking data analyses, selective reporting, sponsorship,
and financial ties. Our notion of rigor and good method seems to be based on a narrow, almost
formulaic conception. The companies are deliberately designing studies to take on the trap-
pings of rigor and biasing the study by other means. In other words, they are gaming our con-
ceptions of validity and bias control and the FDA approval process.
When evaluation started as a professional practice, it was natural that evaluators would
conceive biases in field studies as resulting from the same sources that social psychologists
encountered in lab experiments. In Campbell and Stanley’s (1963) seminal work on experi-
mental design, the sources of invalidity are maturation, mortality, instrumentation, selection,
repeated testing, and so on, all of which are important. However, such a list is inadequate for
what we face in a less innocent time.
Lab studies occur in contexts not heavily infused with politics; evaluations occur in set-
tings with powerful political forces. Drug evaluation is riddled with politics, and those poli-
tics profoundly affect the findings. We need conceptions of bias control that address these
sources of bias. We need to acknowledge vested interests in evaluations and quit pretending
that they don’t affect findings. Otherwise, we look foolish or complicit.
Why should we bother? There have always been those who say we should conduct studies
the way those who pay for them want. I find that course unacceptable for professional, ethi-
cal, and personal reasons. I believe the profession is at serious risk here. The world doesn’t
need evaluators who have no credibility any more than it needs auditors who have none.
R.I.P., Arthur Anderson. As for ethics, what about those 100,000 people who had heart attacks
and strokes because the Vioxx evaluation was handled improperly? Surely, we must have eth-
ical concern for the welfare of patients.
Recently, Alan Ryan (2004) introduced me at the Canadian Evaluation Society by saying that
over the years I have reminded evaluators of their moral responsibility and alerted them to the
dangers of being seduced by the agendas of those in power (Ryan, 2004). Those are some of the
kindest things anyone has said about me. Others say I am just a pain in the ass—a dull one at that.
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