> I would be absolutely ballistic if they would be libelling my work like that.

Genuine question, could they sue for this? It seems like a pretty good case.

It looks like they labelled all of them fiction based on a single instance of one of the authors fabricating their case, a gross overcorrection. I wonder if they flinched at the prospect of actually assessing the validity of all of them and decided it was safer to just disclaim them.

Yeah, they seem to have been quite sloppy with these vignettes.

Thought note that in the situation of the mislabeled real case, the formal solution is could be a retraction of the entire highlight article since it is against the (poorly implemented) policy to have a real case study.

Don't know how patient consent for being used in a case study works, did this author get a perpetual license, did they just copy something from another article they wrote, or from an article someone else wrote?

In vet med, case studies are still pretty important, but that's because vet med is in its infancy compared to human medicine. At least one case study, usually two, are required to be eligible to take boards. Future board renewals, I think for most boards, are "published one original piece of research or two case studies" among a slew of other requirements.

I don't see anything wrong with that by itself; with the amount of patients doctors see there should be one once in a while that is worth reporting. Or are such cases so rare that the doctor is incentivized to lie?

Since it was for teaching I expect the case studies were always showing typical features of real cases, so there's nothing in the case vignette itself to give it away unless the author picks a funny name or something like that.

Rather it would be the entire form of these short highlight articles that would make you keep searching for a proper citation, unless you're lazy or pressed for time.

Wouldn't citing actual cases be a HIPAA violation? I can see why they would invent example cases, based on real ones, especially if they are fairly pedestrian cases.

I mean. Except if your pedestrian example does not reflect reality, then that is bad.

The "growing distrust" is due to a concerted disinformation campaign which is independent of the facts.

There was indeed much negative information that the public was not aware of, and they should perhaps have held more skepticism than they did. But the gleeful acceptance of outright anti-science lies implies that they were never really in a position to make a sound judgment one way or the other.

In those circumstances I'll settle for people reaching the correct action: that practically all accepted medicine is correct and they should follow their doctor's advice. If they choose to over-inflate the importance of things that do indeed go wrong, then they are the ones failing to reach valid conclusions.

It’s all an hallucination.

The article is about case reports, not about empirical studies. Putting a fake case report on GitHub wouldn't make it any less fake.

And then there be large amounts of fake data for the next generation of AIs to learn from.

What is stopping anyone from faking the data they use in their research papers?

Sure it might be verifiable but if the data was made to give the desired results, i.e. faked to be what is required for the paper.

out of context that makes sense...but in the context of a case report how do you implement that? The patients have privacy rights and the authors/doctors have a responsibliity to protect them. That doesn't justify this but it does force a conversation about what 'every single data point' means. Does it mean the patient's real name and social security number? their complete medical chart?

Case reports are descriptive not determinative and should be treated as such by other scholars. They are 'I saw this' not 'this is generalizably true'. They can (and often are) replicated or countered but they are not per se research as you are thinking about it. Whether it is fictitious or not, other scholars should be cautious in citing them as proof/evidence in papers that fit into the 'research' mold.

Thank you, this really adds the missing context to this update about fictional case studies. The original read was compelling and also alarming.

Doesn't sound like these works were "full" articles, but rather something more like short review articles.

There is not good evidence that peer review improves quality and there is perhaps some to the contrary (many predatory journals are peer reviewed). The arxiv (unreviewed) is among the most reliable sources available.

I think it's a bit different considering the goal was a teaching tool of well recognised conditions

>all or almost all were cases of very well recognized conditions [...] where a single case report would not generate any interest or ever be cited.

That is an ironic proviso given that the article clearly states

"The peer-reviewed articles don’t state anywhere the cases described are fictional."

Peer review by peers who are trained by non-replicable science is not helpful...

Independently replicated. Reviewed says pretty much nothing.