Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...-science/8269/

[2010 Nov] Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science He's what's known as a
meta-researcher, and he's become one of the world's foremost experts on the
credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and
again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers
conclude in published studies-conclusions that doctors keep in mind when
they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise
us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for
heart disease or back pain-is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out
wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical
information that doctors rely on is flawed......he worries that the field of
medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of
interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change-or even to
publicly admitting that there's a problem.
.......His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of
wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were
later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the
most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly
gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the
platinum-standard large randomized trials. The article spelled out his
belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing
career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the
peer-review process-in which journals ask researchers to help decide which
studies to publish-to suppress opposing views.
.......Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective
interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of
these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or
significantly exaggerated. If between a third and a half of the most
acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and
impact of the problem were undeniable.