Prof Dr Michael Frass has released a statement in response to a request from the public media journal Spiegelconcerning his study published in The Oncologist in 2020. This study is the one assessed by the Austrian Association for Scientific Integrity and is not retracted.
Frass M, Lechleitner P, Gründling C, Pirker C, Grasmuk-Siegl E, Domayer J, Hochmair M, Gaertner K, Duscheck C, Muchitsch I, Marosi C, Schumacher M, Zöchbauer-Müller S, Manchanda RK, Schrott A, Burghuber O. Homeopathic Treatment as an Add-On Therapy May Improve Quality of Life and Prolong Survival in Patients with Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer: A Prospective, Randomized, Placebo-Controlled, Double-Blind, Three-Arm, Multicenter Study. The Oncologist2020;25:e1930-e1955. doi: 10.1002/onco.13548. Epub 2020 Nov 7.)
This is a brief summary followed by a more detailed comment of the most important points, which is why the work is so exceptionally robust and valid. Any falsification, fabrication or manipulation of the data can therefore be ruled out:
1. The study was accompanied and monitored by the planning statistician with the help of the computer-aided randomization program Randomizer of the Medical University of Graz. This program automatically writes a protocol (= audit trail), so that every inclusion or exclusion process was recorded. Subsequent exclusion (‘post-hoc exclusion’) is therefore not possible, as every step has been monitored.
2. The authors, most of whom are not interested in homeopathy, had control of and access to the study data at all times.
3. The study was analysed in a four-stage procedure, which is unusual for an academic study: the data were entered into the tamper-proof Research, Documentation and Analysis (RDA) platform of the Medical University of Vienna, then forwarded by the planning statistician to the analysing statistician by means of an elaborate clearing process at the University. This quadruple evaluation check proves the extraordinary quality of the results.
We therefore confirm the reliability, veracity and accuracy of the data presented in our article published in The Oncologist.
Link to the study: https://doi.org/10.1002/onco.13548
More detailed comment available here
