Get over it. Most medicine is empiricism first and sciencelast. In the face of all that we havefashions promoted under the guise of science or at least justified with aspatina of science. The profession itselfgoes through a training program that is about developing knowledge and skilland not developing a scientific attitude. No one wants a doctor running experiments on his hapless patients, yetwe pretend they have scientific skills.
New protocols come and go and thesuccessful ones hang around. The suspectones also hang around long past their due date often because we have specialistinertia.
Just think. Here we discover that eighty percent offashionable results are ultimately proven wrong. Just as concerning, we can assume that eightypercent of negative reports are also likely wrong and simply fail to befollowed up on.
None of this is good and explainsthe emergence of a burgeoning alternative medicine regime. Far too many are discovering thatprofessional solutions are just awful and real relief is to be found elsewhere. The early criticism against all that was alack of scientific work, now long since remedied and so called naturalsolutions are stronger that ever.
Doctor pursues career exposing lies, quackery and fraud in"medical science"
Wednesday, April 06, 2011 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer
NaturalNews) Greek doctor John Ioannidis has based his career on exposing theuntrustworthy nature of medical research, and it has made him one of the mostcelebrated medical scientists in the world. Indeed, Ioannidis worries that themedical research system is so broken that it cannot ever be fixed.
Ioannidis first became aware of the problems in medical science as a youngresearcher, when he realized that even for well-researched diseases, doctorstended to make their treatment decisions based on intuition and basicguidelines rather than solid research. He became involved in the"evidence-based medicine" movement, searching for reliable data tohelp doctors make these decisions -- and discovered that there isn't any.
Medical scientists ask the wrong research questions, set up studies to delivercertain results, recruit the wrong research populations, take the wrongmeasurements, analyze their data poorly and present their results inaccurately,he concluded. Researchers want to achieve specific results, Ioannidis says, andeither consciously or unconsciously, they make sure to get them.
"At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way tomake a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded," saysIoannidis. "There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressuresresearchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get themfunded."
In part, Ioannidis blames a system that makes researchers dependent onpublishing studies in influential journals in order to receive and keep tenuredpositions. Such journals are more likely to publish sensational researchfindings, even if those findings are less accurate.
To prove his point, Ioannidis published two highly influential papers in 2005.In the first, he used a mathematical proof to show that with only small levelsof researcher bias, less than ideal research methods, and a tendency to focuson exciting rather than likely theories, as many as 80 percent ofnon-randomized studies, 25 percent of randomized studies and 10 percent ofnon-randomized studies will be wrong. And indeed, these figures match the ratesat which studies are later disproven. In his second paper, Ioannidis showedthat of the 49 most influential studies of the last 30 years that were laterretested, 41 percent were eventually proven wrong.
These papers included the one that led to hormone replacement therapy as atreatment for menopause symptoms, and the one that led doctors to recommendthat patients take an aspirin pill daily to prevent heart attacks.
Learn more:
http://www.naturalnews.com/031975_quackery_medical_science.html#ixzz1IlDBDx7w
No comments:
Post a Comment