Porter and Jick appeared in that bible of scholarly and journalistic rectitude, the New England Journal of Medicine. Medical professionals assumed everyone else had read it. But only in 2010 did the NEJM put all its archives online; before that, the archives only went back to 1993. To actually look up Porter and Jick, to discover that it was a one-paragraph letter to the editor, and not a scientific study, required going to a medical school library and digging up the actual issue, which took time most doctors didn’t have. Instead, primary care docs took the word of pain specialists, who
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