
A journal is warning contributors that they should avoid using a controversial scale for assessing adherence to medication regimens or they might wind up wearing an omelette on their faces.
The chicken here, of course, is the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale. The instrument was developed by a UCLA professor named Donald Morisky, who with a colleague named Steve Trubow threatens to sue anyone who they believe misuses the tool after failing to obtain a license.
As we have detailed on this blog and in Science, many researchers report that Morisky and Trubow seem to set traps for them, ignoring their requests for a license then hammering them with demands for citations, money — often tens of thousands of dollars or more — or both once their work has been published. Failure to comply, the pair assert, could lead to a lawsuit. (Morisky sometimes fails to note his own financial conflict here, as he did in this 2017 paper in PLOS One touting the accuracy of his tool.) Continue reading Legal threats once again force corrections over a scale measuring medication usage