More on Pendery 1982

Pendery 1982 is a study which saw that, over the long term, alcoholics who try moderate drinking only have a 5% success rate. People who want to moderately drink again, of course, want to invalidate the results of this study. One attempt at doing this is to complain that Pendery 1982 only looked at the 20 alcoholics who tried moderate drinking in the 1970s Sobell study, and did not look at the alcoholics in the abstinence only control group. For example, “Pendery reinterviewed the controlled drinking group to dispute a previous study but didn't make contact with the abstinence group at all [...] If you are inspecting purported results of a study why not investigate all study participants. Why is it OK to investigate only one side” (note that I normally no longer link directly to self-published rants made by an anti-AA pro-drinking proponent, but since they have subsequently deleted their account, I can do so without making the discussion personal).

This is a red herring. If there was a real methodological problem with Pendery 1982, why did Science (one of the most prestigious journals out there) publish it? The abstinent “control” group was not studied because they were not relevant; if a follow-up study can invalidate the experimental condition (as Pendery 1982 did), there is no need to see what happened with the control condition.

Philip Abelson, the editor of Science when Pendery 1982 was studied, had this to say about the process of making that report:

The report that we published in our 9 July issue [Pendery et aI., 1982] was very carefully edited. It was extensively reviewed, including evaluation by an expert statistician. [...] We required that assertions made about patients' histories be documented by court records, police records, hospital records, or affidavits. The final draft was checked repeatedly, sentence by sentence, to ensure that supporting evidence was available. In crucial instances, two or more independent documents corroborated statements made.

Now, let me describe Philip Abelson in more detail: He helped in the research which won the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He won the National Medal of Science in 1987. He was part of the Manhattan Project. He was a key researcher in the design of the nuclear submarine. He did a lot of important paleobiology research. He had over 40 years of experience in the scientific technique when he allowed Pendery 1982 to be published. If there was a real problem with the science behind Pendery 1982, he would had found it.