Sadly true.
And especially government agencies and non-profits related to health.
Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?
71–80 of 491 posts
Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?
#72When 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…
Actually, companies pay universities to conduct fake research that "shows" that their products work.
Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?
#73[deleted]
Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?
#74I think just as importantly is reining in the misapplication of studies. Too often I see some news/blog/politician/other say some policy or fact is proven by a study only to find that the study doesn't mean what they are claiming.
This can be stuff like using animal studies not supported by further human studies and claiming the effect is true for humans. Or confusing correlation for causation. Or viewing the speculated application of the study found in the conclusion to be absolute truth when many times the authors themselves claim additional studies would be needed to evaluate other aspects or confirm their findings.
A classic example was gender wage gap misrepresentation about 6-8 years ago. Many news groups and even the president were misinterpreting (and spreading that misinformation about) the BLS study to mean that a man and a woman in the same job with all else equal, the woman would only make $.80 on the dollar, when in fact the issue is an aggregate level issue mostly due to structural issues (and require different remedies than proposed). At least it seems many places have since realized their mistake, yet the misinformation persists in the general public.
Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?
#75why just health research? all science is already based on that very principle. In fact, a stronger one: you cannot ever prove that some research is "true", only that no inconsistency has yet been observed.
Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?
#76This just in : Scientists are just as human as everyone else.
Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? How do you figure that? Some person points out actual instances of poor quality research and you imply he is anti-vaccine? I can find no record of this person discouraging vaccination.
Ok, maybe its just a coincidence that it was published right when the current dangers of misinformation are so high and so many are failing to believe science.
Well of course I'm not going to believe blatantly fraudulent "science". That has nothing to do whether or not I would take a COVID vaccine (I have). Trying to suppress the truth that there is shoddy or false research to keep up appearances is ridiculous. There's something between ignoring scientific evidence you dislike and credulously taking everything a scientist says as fact.
And the "dangers of misinformation" have been high for a long time now (perhaps since antiquity). Modern climate change denial has its roots in the 90s, and modern vaccine skepticism is similarly old.
Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?
#78No, just a statistical reality of multiple hypothesis testing.
Just like you wait a few blocks for a confirmation on a blockchain, you have more and more confidence with confirmation of health research by independent papers.
See statistical analysis in Ioannidis' "Why most research findings are false": https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?
#79As shown both in the article and in the comments, scientific establishment seems content to tolerate fraud. But when research goes against big money interests, suddenly standards become very strict. See how Andrew Wakefield was treated. https://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c7452
There's the famous story of the doctor who figured out, in the 1980s, how to cure stomach ulcers.[1] Stomach ulcers are usually a bacterial disease, and antibiotics work.
The microbiologists in Brussels loved it, and by March of 1983 I was incredibly confident. During that year Robin and I wrote the full paper. But everything was rejected. Whenever we presented our stuff to gastroenterologists, we got the same campaign of negativism. I had this discovery that could undermine a $3 billion industry, not just the drugs but the entire field of endoscopy. Every gastroenterologist was doing 20 or 30 patients a week who might have ulcers, and 25 percent of them would. Because it was a recurring disease that you could never cure, the patients kept coming back. And here I was handing it on a platter to the infectious-disease guys.
In 2005, he got a Nobel Prize.
[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank...
Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?
#80I knew there were issues with various kinds of research. Things like p-hacking, "touching up" data, and so on. But the lead example is pretty wild:
> As he described in a webinar last week, 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 had a lead author who purported to come from an institution that didn’t exist and who killed himself a few years later. The trials were all published in prestigious neurosurgery journals and had multiple co-authors. None of the co-authors had contributed patients to the trials, and some didn’t know that they were co-authors until after the trials were published.