The Cochrane Collaboration-A Wolf in Sheeps Clothing?

The Cochrane Collaboration is a philanthropically funded group of scientists that reviews existing literature to provide "The reliable source of evidence in health care". Now these are generally well intended people, but there is a flaw in their approach that actually ends up creating obstacles to the advancement of medicine. Because they do not do any new research themselves; they just review existing research, the studies product they turn out is only as good as the materials they have to work with. By this I mean that if they are reviewing poorly done studies, or biased studies then their work is going to reflect that. Take alternative medicine for example, prior to the 90's there was very little funding for alternative medicine because there was no potential profit for large corporations in alternative medicine. Most of our university medical research is private sector funded. This means that most alternative medicine research is poor in quality due to a lack of funding and most pharmaceutical research is of a gold standard because there was adequate funding. In some cases there is a convincing research p-value for a pharmaceutical application that is preposterous like Prozac for Menopause or PMS that will take years to be unwound and even longer for the Cochrane Collaboration to correct because it will have to wait for studies that refute the original work. A great example of this is Hormone Replacement Therapy for women. For years there was a huge preponderance of medical research evidence supporting the use of high does estradiol. Then almost 25 years later we finally have the real story. I like the Cochrane Collaboration but they need to rethink their mission to help science and the advancement of medicine. People who have a vested interest in Big corporate medicine frequently use the Cochrane Collaboration's findings to control their financial interests.