I can't wait for it to get to the next level of meta.
"How many medical studies of medical studies are faked or flawed? A meta report on meta studies."
How many medical studies are faked or flawed?
31–40 of 257 posts
Re: How many medical studies are faked or flawed?
#32Those are two wildly different things. Most things are flawed. Deliberately fabricating results is anathema to advancing science.
How do you discern between a study that is flawed and one that is faked? For instance, you could use some methodology that you know to be flawed, and allow that flawed methodology to bias your result in a pre-determined direction. If you're ever caught, you just claim it was an honest error, but it functions exactly the same as if you generated the data wholesale.
Re: How many medical studies are faked or flawed?
#33Pretty sure most studies about the effects of coffee and red wine are flawed.
What!? Everyone knows a glass of wine once a day is good for your heart, but also even a single glass a year is way too much and causes irreversible damage ;) The old adage applies: "everything nice is either illegal or bad for your health". Or both, I would add.
I'm nice so your point doesn't stand. Or does it ? I'm not illegal at least.
Re: How many medical studies are faked or flawed?
#34I often chuckle that same people who vehemently defend vaccine safety studies also decry studies that show processed seed oils, glyphosate, aspartame, and hundreds of other molecules or compounds are unsafe over time. That's the beauty of medical studies! Whether they're good or bad, your own biases mean you can simply ignore the ones that don't align with your opinions. Oh, before I forget! Red meat and saturated fa…
Hmm -- in usual fashion I haven't read the original post here, but I'm guessing it didn't find that RCT trials that big pharma do are quite as useless as most 'medical studies' generally. Do you think well-funded RCTs (like those that support vaccine safety) are just as weak as any old observational study?
I've now read it.
But my question to the person saying it's problematic to defend vaccine studies and attack food results is: isn't it possible that you feel the research procedures used in one are superior to those used in another?
For example: vaccine safety study looks at 200,000 people and randomly assigns them to use or not use the vaccine. Coffee/red wine study looks at 30 people and surveys them about how they felt last week after drinking coffee/red wine. Looking at these two, I think it's fair to put more trust in the vaccine study.
Re: How many medical studies are faked or flawed?
#35While we're on the subject, how many studies period are faked or flawed to the point of being useless? It seems to me that the scientific community's reaction to the replication crisis has been to ignore it.
PIs may not be able to raise money for replication studies. Some of this is a consequence of guidelines for federal funds to prevent waste on duplication of effort.
This goes far beyond there not being enough replication studies, the problem is that when replication studies are done the results don't reproduce because the results were bogus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Re: How many medical studies are faked or flawed?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both of those are substances that should be harmful based on the effects of the major ingredients: e.g. caffeine is addictive and when I am deprived of it my schizotypy flares up and I have paranoid episodes (I yell at my wife “why the hell are you always standing where I want to go next?”) I have had two doctors tell me three other reasons why I should quit. Look in the medical literature and it seems outright spamm…
Furan content in coffee too. Very low amount but still. Coffee prevents headaches for me so I'll always drink it. And no it's not related to physical dependence although at this point the withdrawal will guarantee a headache.
Interesting. I was at one point diagnosed with "tension headaches" and prescribed a medication called Fioricet which is a combination of caffeine, acetaminophen, and a barbituate called butalbital. Incredibly effective. I'm sure the harm profile of coffee alone is lower so if it's totally eliminating headaches as a problem for you it's perhaps a better solution, but thought i'd throw that out there as it could be worth seeing a neurologist if the problem becomes unmanageable for you
Re: How many medical studies are faked or flawed?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need "big pharma" for this. Researchers at universities also do these kinds of things because it helps them advance their careers.
>helps them advance their careers ... into the multi-billion dollar companies GP is talking about.
A lot who stay purely in Academia do it as well, presumably for the prestige.
Re: How many medical studies are faked or flawed?
#38I often chuckle that same people who vehemently defend vaccine safety studies also decry studies that show processed seed oils, glyphosate, aspartame, and hundreds of other molecules or compounds are unsafe over time. That's the beauty of medical studies! Whether they're good or bad, your own biases mean you can simply ignore the ones that don't align with your opinions. Oh, before I forget! Red meat and saturated fa…
The central thesis of this comment is “all medical studies are equal”. They are not.
Re: How many medical studies are faked or flawed?
#39We all know it is super-easy to cheat in science, but not much can be done about it. Short of requiring replication for every result published which isn't feasible if the study was costly to produce. And the problem isn't confined to medicine either. How many studies in hpc of the type "we setup this benchmark and our novel algorithm/implementation won!" aren't also faked or flawed?
If the study is costly to produce, then it's even more important to replicate it, otherwise you'd wasting a large amount of money on a study with no real sense of whether it is flawed or not.
Re: How many medical studies are faked or flawed?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
PIs may not be able to raise money for replication studies. Some of this is a consequence of guidelines for federal funds to prevent waste on duplication of effort.
This goes far beyond there not being enough replication studies, the problem is that when replication studies are done the results don't reproduce because the results were bogus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
If the replication studies were done at a reasonable rate there would be no incentive to produce bogus results because you'd be caught before you could go through an entire career as a "successful scientist."