A New Conflict of Interest

David Rind, a primary care physician and blogger-extraordinaire, has written a nice post titled Rooting for Results describing the bias that can sneak into one's interpretation of a study's results if you have a pre-specified opinion of the study or are rooting for certain results. David said it best: "Conflicts of interest come in many shapes and sizes. But even without such conflicts influencing the interpretation of results, the desire to have been right in the past...causes important, and perhaps overriding, biases in experts as they confront and interpret new evidence." I think this is another type of bias influencing the MRSA ADI debate. Anyway, Dr. Rind does an excellent job of recognizing this bias in himself; something I hope I will be able to do the next time I read a paper where I have strong preexisting opinions.