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Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

blogs.bmj.com

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Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#131

Post by mcguire »

rohanphadte wrote: post #8

Some highlights to show how health research is published: > Mol, like Roberts, has conducted systematic reviews only to realise that most of the trials included either were zombie trials that were fatally flawed or were untrustworthy. > But the anaesthetist John Carlisle analysed 526 trials submitted to Anaesthesia and found that 73 (14%) had false data, and 43 (8%) he categorised as zombie. When he was able to exami…

You missed a sentence.

"Many of the trials came from the same countries (Egypt, China, India, Iran, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey), and when John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University, examined individual patient data from trials submitted from those countries to Anaesthesia during a year he found that many were false: 100% (7/7) in Egypt; 75% (3/ 4) in Iran; 54% (7/13) in India; 46% (22/48) in China; 40% (2/5) in Turkey; 25% (5/20) in South Korea; and 18% (2/11) in Japan."

I find it particularly sad, since actively promoting academic integrity would do more for those countries than anything else, bang-for-your-buck-wise. Instead, many seem to be seeking the appearance of academic success.

(OTOH, I suppose Japan and South Korea may be on that list due to some kind intense pressure to succeed.)

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#132

Post by FeteCommuniste »

mcguire wrote: post #113

" ...Ian Roberts, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, began to have doubts about the honest reporting of trials after a colleague asked if he knew that his systematic review showing the mannitol halved death from head injury was based on trials that had never happened. He didn’t, but he set about investigating the trials and confirmed that they hadn’t ever happened. They all…

Meta-analysis normally tries to exclude "low-quality" studies but if the standard of honesty in a field or sub-field is truly abysmal, I guess it's GIGO.

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#133

Post by AnimalMuppet »

adolph wrote: post #110
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But "all of medecine" is not in the set "vaccines for a specific illness".

Affirming the consequent, sometimes called converse error, fallacy of the converse, or confusion of necessity and sufficiency, is a formal fallacy of taking a true conditional statement (e.g., "If the lamp were broken, then the room would be dark,") and invalidly inferring its converse ("The room is dark, so the lamp is broken,") even though the converse may not be true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_co…

You are trying to take a very general statement and make it a statement only about one very specific subset. That does not mean that someone pointing out your logical flaws is falling into the converse fallacy.

It's like someone writes an article about drought in the west, and you're saying that they must really be talking about El Centro, California. Yes, it probably includes El Centro, but it's also talking about Phoenix, and LA, and Salt Lake City, because it's really talking about the west as a whole. Trying to make it be "about" El Centro is missing the point.

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#134

Post by OriginalNebula »

injidup wrote: post #126
OriginalNebula wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to contact the other two. You can reach Peter Kolba here https://www.verbraucherschutzverein.at/Kontakt/ or on Twitter even https://twitter.com/KolbaPeter . He won the case against Volkswagen so if anyone can help you then him. The University of Salzburg also has a "Ethikkommission" https://www.plus.ac.at/service/uni-administration/gesamtuniv... and "Kommission zur Sicherung guter wissenschaftlicher Praxis" https…

Thankyou for the tip. I'Ll look into it tomorrow.

No, thank you!

Austria has a weird thing with pseudoscience scams [0][1][2] and it needs to be dealt with.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belebtes_Wasser

[1] The current Minister of Economy was working as an "energizer" https://www.diepresse.com/5395317/wirtschaftsministerin-schr...

[2] During the construction of a hospital in Vienna, an "energetic" ring was built around the construction site for 95000 Euro. https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000076199184/krankenhaus-w...

among others

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#135

Post by janekm »

injidup wrote: post #54
uhhyeahdude wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. What a load of infomercial buzzword nonsense. The last part about some “further research and experience” showing even better results if the product is worn all the time is especially galling.

But one should look into Darsch Scientific if you want to get deeper into how this is all organised. https://www.dartsch-scientific.com/en/ they have produced papers for powerinsole and are used by other companies in the magnetic magic industry to provide a veneer of scientific credibility. For example https://waveguard.com/en/studies/

Kind of hilarious how they submitted what looks like a passive coil for FCC certification ;)

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#136

Post by CrazyStat »

native_samples wrote: post #51
function_seven wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My naive understanding is that "smaller p-value" == "more likely result is true". I know there's always more nuance in statistical reasoning, but the first number is vastly smaller than the second one, right? Is it just that both are hilariously tiny and not credible? Or is there no additional value after you get into the one-in-billions territory?

Yeah I'm also mystified by that comment. You are correct that smaller P is better. Those near physics level P-values are not totally unheard of for genetics either, because they have very large databanks with hundreds of thousands of data points in them and the ability to do large analyses over them, so they can obtain a lot of statistical power.

Precision in p-values that small is more or less meaningless in almost all cases, because any violation of model assumptions will result in p-value imprecision far greater than 10^-10. p-values are (almost always) approximations based on an approximate model, and the variation between the model and reality is probably more than 10^-10.

Some tiny aspect of the real process that your model falls to capture might mean that that 10^-10 is actually 0.001, and 10^-40 is also 0.001. In complex biological fields it's fair to assume that there are always such tiny aspects.

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#137

Post by beebeepka »

dpifke wrote: post #106
dqpb wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you be sued for asking questions?

You can be sued by anyone, for anything, at any time. Whether or not that lawsuit has any merit is irrelevant. With certain exceptions based on subject matter (e.g. SLAPP) or jurisdiction, it still costs money to hire a lawyer to defend against the suit.

I don't think that's how things work in most European countries. Yes, there are costs but they will be covered by the loser. No way this person loses against these particular fraudsters

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#138

Post by giantrobot »

ethanbond wrote: post #28
ta988 wrote: post #22

When you want to do a proper work, your grants and papers get rejected because they are not innovatove enough or don't go far enough. So it is not a surprise that people that lied in their applications about what they can realistically do also lie when it comes to reporting results. Unfortunately there is no way out. I stopped counting how many reviewers of my grants disagreed on what was proposed, one saying that it…

Yep. The incentives in science are all wrong. To maximize your chances of publication (i.e. keeping your job), you have to make the most outlandish claims you can possibly maybe defend. Additionally, the complexity of data/analysis is increasing every day while also the esoteric domain knowledge required to make any progress is deeper and more specialized.

> To maximize your chances of publication (i.e. keeping your job), you have to make the most outlandish claims you can possibly maybe defend.

This is compounded by publishing negative/null results being disincentivized. Knowing what doesn't work can be as important as knowing what works.

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#139

Post by pjc50 »

WalterBright wrote: post #67
ta988 wrote: post #22

When you want to do a proper work, your grants and papers get rejected because they are not innovatove enough or don't go far enough. So it is not a surprise that people that lied in their applications about what they can realistically do also lie when it comes to reporting results. Unfortunately there is no way out. I stopped counting how many reviewers of my grants disagreed on what was proposed, one saying that it…

I'm sadly amused by all this. The complaint I hear about privately done research is it's all tainted by the profit motive, and so research should be funded by the government, as then it'll be pure and untainted by selfish motives. Of course, government funded motives are just as tainted by selfish motives, if not more. Even worse, the people who make the funding decisions aren't spending their own money, so they have…

> At least with privately funded research, the people providing the money aren't going to fund bullshit fake research

They absolutely are if it helps them promote something. Cigarettes and asbestos industries helped produce plenty of fake safety studies.

The problem is that research has been marketized; you have to "sell" your proposal to get funding, so naturally you big it up as much as possible. And thus the incentive to fake results.

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#140

Post by [deleted] »

injidup wrote: post #126
OriginalNebula wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to contact the other two. You can reach Peter Kolba here https://www.verbraucherschutzverein.at/Kontakt/ or on Twitter even https://twitter.com/KolbaPeter . He won the case against Volkswagen so if anyone can help you then him. The University of Salzburg also has a "Ethikkommission" https://www.plus.ac.at/service/uni-administration/gesamtuniv... and "Kommission zur Sicherung guter wissenschaftlicher Praxis" https…

Thankyou for the tip. I'Ll look into it tomorrow.

[deleted]
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