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The Happy Warrior
Joined: 10 Feb 2010
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 Posted: Mon Oct 18, 2010 10:13 am Post subject: Lies, Damned Lies, and Science |
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This is about medical science, but it could just as well be about any science softer than physics.
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Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to unclog heart arteries.
Perhaps only a minority of researchers were succumbing to this bias, but their distorted findings were having an outsize effect on published research. To get funding and tenured positions, and often merely to stay afloat, researchers have to get their work published in well-regarded journals, where rejection rates can climb above 90 percent. Not surprisingly, the studies that tend to make the grade are those with eye-catching findings. But while coming up with eye-catching theories is relatively easy, getting reality to bear them out is another matter. The great majority collapse under the weight of contradictory data when studied rigorously. Imagine, though, that five different research teams test an interesting theory that�s making the rounds, and four of the groups correctly prove the idea false, while the one less cautious group incorrectly �proves� it true through some combination of error, fluke, and clever selection of data. Guess whose findings your doctor ends up reading about in the journal, and you end up hearing about on the evening news?
We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it�s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. �At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,� says Ioannidis. �There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.� |
Its time to take the scientific method off the modern altar of rationalism. There are human elements at work spoiling the objectivity. Ambition and politics. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Mon Oct 18, 2010 1:11 pm Post subject: |
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| I've accepted for a while now that the purpose of peer review isn't to eliminate weak science but to enforce orthodoxy. This orthodoxy can come from government or business (or both). I lost faith in peer-review and the alter of science due to global warming and the disgusting inflation of hiv/aids numbers in Africa (and beyond). The Atlantic piece is quite good. Good topic. |
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JMO
Joined: 18 Jul 2006
Location: Daegu
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| Posted: Mon Oct 18, 2010 2:58 pm Post subject: |
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| He chose to publish one paper, fittingly, in the online journal PLoS Medicine, which is committed to running any methodologically sound article without regard to how �interesting� the results may be. In the paper, Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time. Simply put, if you�re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you�re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you�ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right. His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials. The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process�in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish�to suppress opposing views. �You can question some of the details of John�s calculations, but it�s hard to argue that the essential ideas aren�t absolutely correct,� says Doug Altman, an Oxford University researcher who directs the Centre for Statistics in Medicine. |
I'll take those numbers although obviously it would be nice for them to go down. Right now its the best we have however.
Stanzi seems to be doing great work but I thought the writer of this article
might have missed the point somewhat. Surely he isn't objecting to studies being contradicted by later studies but the methodology used in studies and the inherent bias.
My takeaway from this. Scientific method is flawed(because of all too human biases) but largely works. Could be improved. Hopefully Stanzi can effect change. |
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akcrono
Joined: 11 Mar 2010
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| Posted: Mon Oct 18, 2010 9:00 pm Post subject: |
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| Peer reviewed studies are still more reliable than any other method of discerning information. |
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The Happy Warrior
Joined: 10 Feb 2010
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| Posted: Tue Oct 19, 2010 7:43 pm Post subject: |
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| akcrono wrote: |
| Peer reviewed studies are still more reliable than any other method of discerning information. |
Its a cultural problem. We need to recognize that science is a lot like law. The laws of nature don't just reveal themselves, men need to construct them. And in both fields sometimes men are tripped up by politics and ambition. |
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guava
Joined: 02 Sep 2009
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| Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 6:18 am Post subject: |
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Placebo fraud rocks the very foundation of modern medical science; thousands of clinical trials invalidated
by Mike Adams
http://www.naturalnews.com/030209_placebo_medical_fraud.html
You know all those thousands of clinical trials conducted over the last few decades comparing pharmaceuticals to placebo pills? Well, it turns out all those studies must now be completely thrown out as utterly non-scientific. And why? Because the placebos used in the studies weren't really placebos at all, rendering the studies scientifically invalid.
This is the conclusion from researchers at the University of California who published their findings in the October issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine. They reviewed 167 placebo-controlled trials published in peer-reviewed medical journals in 2008 and 2009 and found that 92 percent of those trials never even described the ingredients of their placebo pills.
Why is this important? Because placebo pills are supposed to be inert. But nothing is inert, it turns out. Even so-called "sugar pills" contain sugar, obviously. And sugar isn't inert. If you're running a clinical trial on diabetics, testing the effectiveness of a diabetes drug versus a placebo then obviously your clinical trial is going to make the diabetes drug look better than placebo if you use sugar pills as your placebo.
Some placebo pills use olive oil which may actually improve heart health. Other placebo pills use partially-hydrogenated oils which harm heart health. Yet only 8 percent of clinical trials bothered to list the placebo ingredients at all!
Stay with me on this placebo issue... because it gets even more bizarre..
There are no FDA rules regarding placebos in clinical trials,,,
We already know that clinical trials are rife with fraud. Most of the clinical trials used by pharmaceutical companies to win FDA approval of their drugs, for example, are funded by pharmaceutical companies. And it is a verifiable fact that most clinical trials tend to find results that favor the financial interests of whatever organization paid for them. So what's to stop Big Pharma from scheming up the perfect placebo that would harm patients just enough to make their own drugs look good by comparison?
Fact: Placebos are usually provided by the very same company funding the clinical trial! Do you detect any room for fraud in this equation?
How drug companies can fake clinical trials with selected placebo pills
Placebo performance strongly influences whether drugs are approved by the FDA, by the way. As the key piece of information on its regulatory approval decisions, the FDA wants to know whether a drug works better than placebo. That's the primary requirement! If they work even 5% better than placebo, they are said to be "efficacious" (meaning they "work"). This is true even if the placebo was selected and used specifically to make the drug look good by comparison.
You see, if there are no regulations or rules regarding placebo, then none of the placebo-controlled clinical trials are scientifically valid.,,
,,,And this brings me to the really interesting "how-to" part of this article...
How to make your own placebo just like clinical researchers do
Are you wondering how to make your own FDA-approved, scientifically validated placebo? It's easier than you think.
Step 1 - Find something shaped like a pill. It could be a pill full of olive oil, white sugar, palm oil, fluoridated water, chalk dust, synthetic chemicals or just about anything you can imagine.
Step 2 - Close your eyes and get ready to concentrate.
Step 3 - This is the important part - Repeat out loud five times while turning counter-clockwise, "I am a scientific researcher practicing evidence-based medicine!" You must say this until you really, truly believe it. If you don't believe it strongly enough, the placebo effect will be ruined.
Step 4 - Thrust your palm in the direction of the placebo pills and shout, at the top of your voice, "You are now placebo!" You may feel a shiver of energy coursing through your body. That's the power of placebo reaching out to the pills.
The process is now complete. You may now use these placebo pills in any clinical trial and expect full approval of such use by your colleagues, famous medical journals and FDA regulators. (This is not a joke. This is the state of the art today in conventional medicine.)
Hope also has a huge role to place in all this. The more you hope your placebos are really placebos, the better results you'll get. In fact, in reporting on this whole fiasco, the lead researcher of the study uncovering all this, Dr Beatric Golomb, said, "We can only hope that this hasn't seriously systematically affected medical treatment."
But of course it has. (And by the way, no disrespect toward Dr Golomb. She deserves kudos for being willing to tackle this subject which will no doubt make her very unpopular among the cult of Scientism as practiced by conventional medical researchers today.),,, |
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