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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?

#441

Post by AlbertCory »

Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #376
AlbertCory wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sympathize, and good for you for not doing it! If I can suggest something to look into (i.e. not recommend!): I use NeilMed sinus rinse which is just saline and bicarbonate (so pH balanced). Use distilled water to mix it. You can buy it at most drugstores. This is not sterile unless you sterilize everything, but at least there are no funky chemicals.

Thanks. I’m sure regular table salt and googling the concentration would have done the trick, but there’s something to be said for those 30 ml plastic vials you break off a ribbon that you know have the right stuff and is sterile and stays that way until you use it. I don’t want to take risks with things I don’t have enough knowledge to make them calculated risks. But it worries me when some of the people we defer to…

Yeah. My vet gave me Prednisone for MY dog's itching, and I refused to give it to him. Major side effects on that drug.

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

#442

Post by sharot4 »

nabla9 wrote: post #195
tarere wrote: post #191

I will address the elephant in the room on this one. 168 comments so far, I did a research for word "vaccine" in the page, not a single result. So I assume this has not been discussed despite the current situation we are living right now. I've just read 2 articles about Moderna in general and Bancel in particular : https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-14/moderna-m... And Vanity Fair, unfortunatly in french…

No results because vaccines are not accepted based on publications and peer review on scientific papers. They go trough completely different and extremely rigorous testing process where everything is documented carefully, documents are examined and double checked. It's great to see 168 comments before first anti-vaxxer comment.

It's not great to go about name-calling like a schoolchild if someone brings up misgivings about a topic you seem to have decided has no room for discussion.

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

#443

Post by boxslof »

All this sounds rather unsettelling. I am left with many questions. I'll reduce them to two:

1. are there people here who (especially medical field) do have the feeling the current system of research does its job (on average)?

2. Applied to very hot topic of vaccine safety assessment for the new covid vaccines, how sure can we be there is/will be enough room to critically assess this? (sorry i had ask, but just read https://www.wired.com/story/the-cdc-owes-parents-better-mess... so yea...)

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

#444

Post by bserge »

hellbannedguy wrote: post #311
bluGill wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with the sentiment, anyone on long term medication needs regular monitors by a doctor anyway. If you are only 25 this won't make sense, but by the time you get to 50 you need regular checkups for lots of things that are best caught early. I've lost enough family to colon cancer (spouse of a second cousin - can I even claim him as family?), and several others are only alive now because their cancer was c…

I'm not arguing against physicals. Right now American law states you need to see a doctor once a year in order to procure medications. We all know how many times patients are brought in just to get that script. They (MD's) love the six week interval. It pays for the lifestyle. I'm lucky if my blood pressure is checked. And the Colon scan is something they might be mentioned while walking out the door. My point is if…

On the other side of the ocean, one can wait up to 3 months for a levothyroxine renewal.

Now, that's in extreme cases, 2-6 weeks is the average, but levothyroxine!

A basic medication for lifelong illness with no addictive or stimulant properties.

But hey, it's free-ish. If you ignore the "potentially being without it for a few weeks" part, which can be debilitating.

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

#445

Post by necovek »

WalterBright wrote: post #202
version_five wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are two separate versions of "private research" that people below are responding to. In one, a company has a problem and they pay researchers to work on it. The key metric is solving the problem or making progress on in depending on the time scale- good orgs have different scales (usually from 3 months to 5 years at most) that they are investing in. In this case, there is little room for fraud or decept…

Good points, but there's another wrinkle. If a company pays a research institution to do a fraudulent study, the research institution risks losing their status as a reputable research outfit, and thereby loses a multiple of that as other companies avoid funding them. A prestigious reputation is like glass - easy to break, very hard to put back together. You'd think this would work with government funding, too. But it…

Cites are supposed to be more analogous to how many times a programmers' library has been used.

Unless gamed, it _is_ a useful measure.

But if your programming ability was measured by how much are your libraries used (eg. in hiring, determining salary, seniority...), there would be every incentive to aim for your library to be used as much as possible even when it is superflouous.

That is what has happened in academia, basically.

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

#446

Post by tshaddox »

sjwalter wrote: post #439
tshaddox wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are remembering incorrectly.

This kind of gaslighting is why nobody trusts authority any more. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/protests-and-trump-r... Just one of MANY stories why BLM protests are so much less risky than, e.g., Trump rallies. When it was widely rebuked as hypocritical bullshit, they even came up with a crazy way of explaining it away: Now racism was a "public health crisis", all of a sudden. See the google trends: https:…

Those are factual claims about the protests being less risky than the rallies. They’re either true or false. There’s nothing hypocritical here where anyone is saying it’s okay to attend one event and not the other because of the purpose of the event. It’s literally claiming that one event is outdoors and attendees tend to follow health guidelines, while the other event is indoors and attendees tend to not follow health guidelines. Is the claim false? Perhaps, and anyone is free to argue that. But this is nothing close to an example of the situation previously described.

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

#447

Post by necovek »

version_five wrote: post #190
WalterBright wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think there are two separate versions of "private research" that people below are responding to. In one, a company has a problem and they pay researchers to work on it. The key metric is solving the problem or making progress on in depending on the time scale- good orgs have different scales (usually from 3 months to 5 years at most) that they are investing in. In this case, there is little room for fraud or decept…

I think the timescale point is an important one. For long timescales (and how long is long has changed over the years), government might be more likely to invest: eg. imagine the project of sending people to Moon: at the time, no private investor in the world could rival what Soviet Union or USA could dedicate to those projects — the price has gone down in a sense (or we've got richer individuals/companies), so you do see private investors in the field today, but there are always projects of the similar scale that might never happen if business returns are too far off.

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

#449

Post by zepto »

tshaddox wrote: post #446
sjwalter wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of gaslighting is why nobody trusts authority any more. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/protests-and-trump-r... Just one of MANY stories why BLM protests are so much less risky than, e.g., Trump rallies. When it was widely rebuked as hypocritical bullshit, they even came up with a crazy way of explaining it away: Now racism was a "public health crisis", all of a sudden. See the google trends: https:…

Those are factual claims about the protests being less risky than the rallies. They’re either true or false. There’s nothing hypocritical here where anyone is saying it’s okay to attend one event and not the other because of the purpose of the event. It’s literally claiming that one event is outdoors and attendees tend to follow health guidelines, while the other event is indoors and attendees tend to not follow heal…

> It’s literally claiming that one event is outdoors and attendees tend to follow health guidelines

Yes - and it’s not true - there is plenty of footage of protesters not following health guidelines, and indeed plenty of discussion of how the protests may have precipitated a covid spike.

The fact that other similar events were not permitted proves the hypocrisy in the public health guidance regardless of the outcome.

If you don’t think there is any political bias in public health policy, that’s fine, but it seems like we are in disagreement about that.

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

#450

Post by wolverine876 »

supperburg wrote: post #323
wolverine876 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is an emerging cultural mechanism to deal with this in the growing “epidemiology is bullshit” sentiment There is an emerging cultural mechanism - more a rampaging mob - that says 'X is bullshit' as a simple way of denying facts or issues that are inconvenient or difficult. It's used for the news media, academia, non-partisan government agencies (e.g., the CDC), etc., etc. and for everyone who disagrees. I say…

If it isn’t a randomized interventional study, and apparently now even those are subject to fraud, it doesn’t prove anything. They shouldn’t be discussed except in cases where a real study is impossible (global warming) or when trying to reason about which hypothesis should be tested next. It’s definitely a vein of ripe shit in our society, the misuse of epidemiology.

Says who? Where is your randomized interventional study that we should be listening to you?

The only information the world can utilize is from randomized interventional studies? Almost everything is going to have to shut down.

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