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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?

#411

Post by tarere »

nabla9 wrote: post #357
logicalmonster wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They go trough completely different and extremely rigorous testing process where everything is documented carefully, documents are examined and double checked. Rigorous testing is all well and good, but we do know how many errors crop up in scientific papers, right? A lot. The gold standard of testing is double-blind, randomized, placebo controlled studies and this is only done sometimes for vaccines, as far as I a…

Covid vaccines did go trough double-blind, randomized, placebo controlled studies with population size that normal scientific studies can only dream of. As I said, vaccine testing is is exteremely rigorous.

Yes sure, you can test all that you want, even on billions on people and write thousands of studies. That's what they are doing right now. But you can't buy time for your studies, do you understand that ? If the average period for studying long term effect is 5 to 10 years for a vaccine, how do you do that with a 6 month old vaccine ? People are losing their mind, even rational educated people are throwing away any critical thinking to embrace the rainbow rhetoric, this is a collective hysteria crisis.

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

#412

Post by injidup »

kaba0 wrote: post #362
yarcob wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What ridiculous regulations are there with regard to ibuprofen and paracetamol? Are you talking about the fact that medicines are not allowed to be sold in supermarkets? I think it's a good thing, since it's a pretty good guarantee that you actually get what you buy. You can get ibuprofen and paracetamol at any pharmacy in Austria for a few euros without a prescription. And in every district there's always a pharmacy…

And pharmacists can actually give proper medical advice on the products!

they can and do give proper medical advice on the medical products they are selling but at the same time they are selling homeopathic products and other magic pills, powders and devices from the same counter. This seems conflict of interest / ethics. I am not sure why pharmacies are not regulated but that is the way it is in Austria.

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

#413

Post by ta988 »

WalterBright wrote: post #166
pjc50 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 incen…

If you are personally funding Professor X to do some research say, on making a better LCD display, and Professor X comes up with nothing but personal aggrandizement passed off as "research", are you personally likely to fund him some more? I seriously doubt it. Any more than you'd continue taking your car to an auto shop that took your money but didn't fix it.

It doesnt work like that. You have a proposal that you send. A group of people (never the same ususally) come and review your work with half of the people that have not heard from you. They look at your story, and your metrics (papers, patents...) and put a bunch of scores (such as societal interest, innovation, approach, personel...) then the jury convene discuss a bit and change their scores if they want. The head of the jury then takes. all of that, combine and make a report. So in practice I've seen big abuses at every stage. Friends that help other friends get grants. Enemies that destroy theor enemies grants. Thieves that destroy the grant and then develop the work themselves after (that one we reported two times for two events to the funding agency that just removed that person from jury panels, nothing else). In the end, no one cares if they failed to achieve what they promised because nobody sees the grant (not public unless you submit a FOIA request) or remembers it 5 years later.

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

#414

Post by ta988 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #255
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 keep getting more convinced that Science needs to be rebooted. How do we start over in some sane way?

You don't if you do that the ones with power will immediately seize even more and remove the last barriers. A bit of why you can't reboot a country, people who abuse the system are the ones that have the money, properties etc. Communists tried to break some of that, but almost if not all of its applications failed because of power abuse.

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

#415

Post by blagie »

injidup wrote: post #20

I recently had the privilege of trying to do the right thing when I identified fraudulent research carried out by an institution in Austria. The initial response of the institution was positive but when I pressed for further details on how such things could happen suddenly nobody anymore would take my call. The research was paid for by a private company to pimp a nonsense product. The research was never published in…

MIT response (at least if PI is well-connected): Intimidation, NDA, non-disparage. Plenty of fraudulent information comes out of MIT.

I'm pretty sure that's common to many of the elites. You don't get to be elite by being honest. Schools one tier down (e.g. large state schools) tend to be a lot better, but they're declining too.

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

#416

Post by ta988 »

derbOac wrote: post #82
ModernMech wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Not being innovative enough isn't the root cause though. The real issue is there isn't enough funding to go around, and so the bar is higher than it needs to be. Available research funding in the US is a paltry sum considering the aggregate ROI of discoveries and technologies that or…

I get the sense from colleagues and visiting different universities that this varies across the US, Canada, the UK, and the EU, but grants are now the bread and butter at most US universities. It's not really enough to publish 100s of articles, or have a high h index, it's to bring in money even if it's not strictly necessary for your research. Part of the reason we have the problem you're mentioning is not that ther…

It is pretty common for universities to impose a 50-59.9% indirect cost (that they take in addition to the requested funding by the researchers). I've had grants where the university refused to offer a few thousands dollars of free equipment use as support in the grant (which is something required for funding) on a multi million grant. That's because universities are badly managed, they bleed money with tuition to compete with other universities, pay indecent salaries to administratives (and sometimes researchers) many universities pay millions to their basketball coach. And then you have to pay for all those renovations that are requires to get a good ranking in the annual US news or whatever other performance metric. And you are right for grad students ponzi scheme saw that firsthand.

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

#417

Post by wizzwizz4 »

adolph wrote: post #287
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are recommending something over nothing despite not being confident in the data about your recommendation? (Not OP but) Yes. Reasoning despite uncertainty is entirely possible; if you want a mathematical formalism, look into Bayesian statistics.

I don’t think Laplace would call reasoning without data (the commenter’s avowed position) Bayesian.

Zero data of the effects after three years. Plenty of data about the effects after one. It's not “reasoning without data”; it's reasoning without as much data as one would have liked.

Are you doing this on purpose?

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

#418

Post by h0l0cube »

zentiggr wrote: post #408
h0l0cube wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just need a 'Yelp for research institutions'. Perhaps there already exists a global register tracking reputation like this? If so it needs to be visible (particularly to the press) and be properly vetted to have real consequence

Wow... pick an already known to be basically unethical organization as a possible solution to unethical behavior. Not that there's any way in our current culture to assemble a truly impartial reputation tracker, but surely we can do better than Yelp.

I was being a bit facetious, but it didn't translate :)

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

#419

Post by rob_c »

injidup wrote: post #394
rob_c wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get you wouldn't want to name the institute, but that is shocking.

It's all on the public record anyway so. https://shop.powerinsole.com/en/blogs/news/doppelblindstudie... https://uni-salzburg.elsevierpure.com/de/projects/der-einflu...

Ouch. OK I'll start by saying I don't know the full details of the study. But those results and plots scream of PR to someone who works with data analysis for a living

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

#420

Post by garfieldnate »

Is it naive to suggest that we try something similar to 3rd party security audits? If a journal or institution submits itself to multiple 3rd party audits, which are allowed to test a variety of nasty tactics to get bunk science approved or published by them, it could potentially be a good way to keep them honest. Unless, of course, they collude and become rubber stamps (like certain food labels in the US).
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