A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional. Paediatrics & Child Health, the journal…
This is kind of misleading, because the “journal” was specifically requesting fictionalized case studies for teaching purposes. This was made clear to authors, but perhaps not always to readers. This is pretty common and well known in medical literature, as a way to protect patient privacy, and is usually separated from more “hard case studies,” though it seems that this is not always clear in some contexts.
The issue here is that one of the stories was actually just entirely misinformation (about opiates and breastfeeding) rather than a fictionalized version of a real case. So the “fictionalized” case study journal is publishing clarification that the stories are embellished. The bigger note is that they didn’t actually do a full retraction of that actually bad paper, but seem to be “reminding” people that their case studies are fictionalized as a CYA move.
This is kind of misleading, because the “journal” was specifically requesting fictionalized case studies for teaching purposes. This was made clear to authors, but perhaps not always to readers. This is pretty common and well known in medical literature, as a way to protect patient privacy, and is usually separated from more “hard case studies,” though it seems that this is not always clear in some contexts.
The issue here is that one of the stories was actually just entirely misinformation (about opiates and breastfeeding) rather than a fictionalized version of a real case. So the “fictionalized” case study journal is publishing clarification that the stories are embellished. The bigger note is that they didn’t actually do a full retraction of that actually bad paper, but seem to be “reminding” people that their case studies are fictionalized as a CYA move.
These reports are published in places like pubmed with no indication they are fiction, and many have been cited as fact.
Kind of misleading??
You even admit they don’t make clear to readers these are fictionalized case studies, and the one study was outright misinformation.
So where do you draw the line?
Smh