A journalist who has been a frequent critic of statins has been publicly accused of scientific misconduct involving image manipulation in an earlier research paper.
Maryanne Demasi is an Australian journalist who has a PhD in Rheumatology from the Royal Adelaide Hospital in South Australia. She has been a frequent critic of statins, a proponent of low carb diets and gluten-free diets, and has added fuel to the firestorm linking mobile phones to brain cancer.
The current controversy exploded on Twitter in response to a recent paper by Demasi published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Statin wars: have we been misled about the evidence? A narrative review.” Darrel Francis, the British cardiologist behind the ORBITA trial, led a tweetorial which refuted large portions of the paper, including the preposterous statement that statins will have total sales of $1 trillion dollars by 2020. A reader then alerted Francis to a Retraction Watch article about a 2003 paper by Demasi in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, based on her PhD dissertation, for which an expression of concern had been issued last year. Francis then posted images from the paper showing inappropriate manipulation and duplication of images.
Oooooh! pic.twitter.com/4PltWfPWOC
— Prof Darrel Francis ☺ Help Cardiology Think Again (@ProfDFrancis) February 8, 2018
Francis explained to me the reason for his attack on Demasi: “The anti-statin movement is driven by general discontent at being made to take medication when one feels well, whipped up by demagogues who catalyse negative beliefs. Maryanne has been a particularly potent one because she writes fluidly and skillfully. I always notes the disconnect between her writing skill and her surprising inability to grasp even simple arithmetic.”
On Twitter Demasi accused Francis of “character assassination.” She went on to say “we are confident of complete vindication in relation to this matter which we view as vexatious and misconceived. There is a confidential process for adjudication that needs to be respected therefore, I shall not comment further on this matter.”
In its story last year Retraction Watch reported that Demasi “came under heavy fire in 2016, after a controversial segment suggesting Wifi could cause health effects. As Michael Slezak wrote in The Guardian:
Catalyst committed many journalistic transgressions. And all of them would be blunders in any field of journalism. They didn’t declare that interviewees had serious conflicts of interest, for example. They conflated different categories – high-risk and low-risk patients, different types of radio frequency radiation, and so on – and allowed viewers to assume that what was true of one, was true of the other. And most of all, they simply failed at showing good judgment.
Bugger me ! Francis s really digging to the bottom of the barrel to make this attack on Dr Marianne Demassi. If he has doubts about something she presented in her work in 2003,( 15 tears ago ) then he should approach the authorities who accepted her work for publication at the time.
I wonder does this make this supposed scholarly medical researcher a “Twitterist”.
She is a fraud, like most anti-statin activists. Francis has a long history of catching fraud in research.
Really ? But in labeling her a “fraud’ are you not being a slanderer and libeller ?
Francis has a straight forward way of making a complaint about DeMassi without twittering about it. That he has done so makes him a outright twit in my opinion.
I watched Catalyst on the ABC every week for years. In my informed opinion she is a very competent,clear , straight speaking science journalist. who did her research well.
She upset vested interests as a result. Good journalism does that often.
Also I am not impressed by the way you Larry Huston, has let this derogatory comment stand here in your blog.
Alas Bill, I must agree. Maryanne was pilloried for her efforts but the message is getting out there.
I know of one GP who has weaned his FH patients off statins in the last year. None have infarcted, and the one I know well is looking healthier than he ever has for the last 20 years.
– And mentally sharper / ‘balanced’
Lots of emotive word-useage, hints at the probable root cause of such vitriol
I suspect the “preposterous” $$$ figure is already closer if one takes cheaper generics into account.
Then there is the Elephant in The Room, “cholesterol” as the ’cause’ of heart disease… How many reputations are founded on THAT hypothesis !
Of course it is only co-incidence that the low-carb diet is cardio-protective to a greater extent than statins and is supported by this heretical woman…
“I am not impressed by the way you Larry Huston, has let this derogatory comment stand here in your blog”: I disagree. Just as it’s fair game to accuse so many statineers of being knaves or fools, because that’s the way the evidence points, it’s fair of Mr Husten to mention the accusation that Dr Demasi has feet of clay.
It means that if the charge is refuted, we’ll know what to think of Dr Francis.
Not sure to which derogatory comment you are referring. In general I publish all comments, unless they are clearly libelous or my patience has been exhausted.