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

Surely the point of the OP's post is that the reader can't evaluate these studies on their own. At least not without undertaking the kind of review and background research that is not reasonable for even the expert reader.

Not to mention the irony of accusing the GP of cherry-picking when the site you linked is a cherry-picked list of trials curated by anonymous alleged HCWs.

Scientists themselves have a hard time "following the science". Add to it the observation that when an issue is getting lots of attention outside of academia, then there are usually some really strong incentives (profit, prestige) associated with doing the science and applying it (e.g., epidemiological science during a global pandemic).

The question seems not to be about how can normal people "follow the science" but rather, why should normal people trust at all that any touted science is anything more than bullshit spouted by highly-motivated sophists?

This is definitely not true, recipients of grants are heavily restricted on what kind of things they can spend that money on. I can't even fly a non-domestic carrier using grant money without proving no other alternatives exist.

Do research projects sometimes fail to deliver? Yeah. But that's just the reality of doing research. The problem I see is people expect research to be closer to development, with specific ROIs and known deliverables years ahead of time. Sometimes in the course of research you realize what you said you were going to do is impossible, and that's a good result we need to embrace, instead of attaching an expected profit to everything.

> Bell Labs, DeepMind, Google Research

I don't know so much about all the labs you listed, but just taking these three, they certainly don't have a good feeling for what their research is worth either. Do you think Bell Labs fully comprehended the worth of the transistor? For all the research Google does, ad money still accounts for 80% of their revenue. DeepMind is a pretty ironic choice because Google has dropped billions into them and it's still not clear where the profit is going to come from. So it's not clear anyone, even those with a profit motive, have any way to judge what any piece of research is actually worth.

But that's not to say there's anything wrong with that... that's just how research works. You don't know how things are going to turn out, and sometimes it takes a very long time to figure that out, and it. This is why massive corporations like AT&T, Intel, Google, Xerox, MS etc. are able to run such labs.

> The first thing that happens when the corporate labs get interested in an area is that universities are immediately emptied out because they refuse to pay competitive wages

I've seen this happen first hand. In my experience these researchers usually go on to spend their time figuring our how to get us to click on more ads or to engage with a platform more. In one instance, I remember one of my lab mates being hired out of his PhD to use his research to figure out which relative ordering and styling of ads on a front page optimized ad revenue for Google. They paid him quite a lot of money to do that, and I guess it made Google some profit. But is the world better off?

I have read a lot of papers. I generally think science can be a force for good. I understand analytic methods developed by or used in papers from my field of interest. I generally believe that those methods are capable of answering important and interesting questions.

In my view, the problem is that you can't know if an article is good or bullshit until you sit with it for, say, at least 2 or 3 hours (some papers even more). And that is for someone with my background. I tried to do this same thing when I had an undergraduate level of education and it (a) took me a lot longer (at least 10x), and (b) I missed a lot of the mistakes/scams/lies that I would not miss now. (I'm sure I am not able to detect some bullshit even still.)

We should follow the good science. We should not follow the bullshit science. This sounds hard because science, being more technical, is harder to vet. But upon further reflection, it seems that society hasn't figured out how to deal with much simpler lies, either.