Posted on 11/29/2019 9:55:57 AM PST by Kaslin
I have repeatedly questioned the validity of medical journal claims in regards to politically charged issues like air pollution and climate change, as well as global warming here at AT. More recently, I showed how a major medical journal violates basic rules on scientific inquiry.
There is another important problem with medical research as reported in medical journals and then often expanded by the lay press as big news: that medical journal articles are often proven wrong for unreliable results or promotion of treatments that are not beneficial or not any more efficacious than treatments they propose to replace.
I was reminded recently of this problem by an article in Emergency Medicine News, a medical specialty newspaper, that reported on a study by Dr. Vinay Prasad, a comprehensive review of randomized clinical trials in the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine identifying 396 medical reversals. Reversals are cases where medical journal articles are found to be faulty, misleading and just plain wrong.
When high-flying medical researchers on environmental issues use bad methods and report false results, it is motivated by political agendas usually, but when medical researchers report what end up being unreliable results in other areas, it is often due to biases and fallacious thinking and lack of effort to assiduously test their results and repeat them to assure that the hypothesis is valid and reliable and the results are testable and verified.
Some "rules" turned out to be wrong, for example tight blood sugar control, mechanical chest compressions, protocols for treatment of sepsis (infections with severe complications). The unreliability problem is troublesome, since the study shows that many recommended treatments and strategies are not efficacious.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
No, eggs, coffee, bacon and alcohol.
At least Pravda had its uses. Maybe Trump should collude with the Russians to get old printings to clean up after what the snews enemamedia spews.
Not if endorsed by the AMA.
No. They refuse to publish anything that contradicts liberal dogma.
I’m a Pediatrician. How Transgender Ideology Has Infiltrated My Field and Produced Large-Scale Child Abuse.
https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/im-pediatrician-how-transgender-ideology-has-infiltrated-my-field-and-produced-large-scale
The same is true of the social sciences.
We Tried to Publish a Replication of a Science Paper in Science. The Journal Refused.
Our research suggests that the theory that conservatives and liberals respond differently to threats isn’t actually true.
https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/science-replication-conservatives-liberals-reacting-to-threats.html
The politicization of the social sciences is partially due to the deliberate purging of even moderates in the profession. And it is driven by administrators in colleges who openly admit to discriminating against conservatives and Christians.
A Confession of Liberal Intolerance
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confession-of-liberal-intolerance.html
The big review paper on the lack of political diversity in social psychology
http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-political-diversity/
Survey shocker: Liberal profs admit they’d discriminate against conservatives in hiring, advancement
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/1/liberal-majority-on-campus-yes-were-biased/
Short answer——no. Long detailed answer-——NO.
It depends on what you mean by “trust”.
In my first week in medical school, I had a lecturer who said (quite accurately), “half of what’s in the literature is wrong. The problem is, we don’t know which half”.
The medical literature, like a stethoscope, has its uses.
With a stethoscope, the ears of the listener are very important.
With the literature, the clinical experience and native ability of the reader is very important. Unfortunately, in our day, the insurance companies, the “quality” industry, and the courts have become very intolerant of the uncertainty which pervades medicine.
They have made “the literature” the gold standard of performance assessment, which is a burden it was never meant to bear.
The issue remains, as it did 2400 years ago when Hippocrates first said it:
Life is Short, but the Art, long
The Occasion Fleeting
Experiment Dangerous
And Decision Difficult
The literature can help, sometimes, with line #4.
No. All the reporting on vaping being deadly when the real culprit is street sold marijuana e liquid that uses vitamin E oil.
Much too much of this stuff.
The same would apply to ‘the press’ - easily equally biased.
https://heterodoxacademy.org/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-political-diversity/
from link:
(1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years.
(2) This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike.
(3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority’s thinking.
(4) The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology.
Everyone seems to already have a system for this.
If they say something you hate or don’t use is bad, OK to ignore.
If they say something you like is bad, also OK to ignore because, so far so good.
Many if not most medical studies are poorly designed meaning the statistical design, power, and sampling plans are not practical, realistic, or relevant to the scientific questions of interest.
Often the statistics are odious to a Master or PhD in Statistics. They may see hundreds of such poor designs and declare “not for me!” even though they are peppered by researchers to “Please help me! Please review/write/endorse my sh*tty statistical plan for my grant proposal!”.
Government agencies require statistical data sampling and analysis plans before signing off on grant funds but the government official involved is usually not qualified to understand what they are reading and the person writing the research proposal is not well-versed in statistics .
So it’s often a blind-leading-the-blind situation.
But hey, throw in an equation or two and it looks good!
There are very good scientists in government but there are not enough.
There are very good scientists in academia but not enough.
There are very good scientists in the Corporate world but they are usually treated at arm’s length having a conflict of interest. The best ones are those that develop trust with a government/academic counterpart over time.
Old school MDs are the best if you can find one. They are the ones that know how to treat for example your bursitis with thumb pressure to an area at the side of your knee. But there’s no technology, no mathematical equations, no marketing in such remedies, so it’s just not sexy enough to promote.
Try to find an old school MD and if you do, tie them up and tell ‘em “you’re mine!”.
I believe that one of the biggest problems with any journal publications is that outlier results are the easiest to get published because they are unique, and go against current thinking.
However, in almost any experiment, or investigation of a phenomenon, some observations of reality end up out in the tail of the distribution, to one end or the other, just by statistical chance.
So you do a study and come up with a new result. In reality, you just happened to pick from a sample that came from one tail or the other of the distribution. That is bound to happen, although infrequently. But it’s “news” and tends to get published.
And, sadly, scientists doesn’t spend enough time and money confirming (replicating) past “discoveries.” If they did, those anomalous results would quickly be revealed. Instead, they become current thinking.
One good indicator for BAD medical advice or news is when the researchers show a results data curve shaped like a hockey stick...
Those in the medical profession appear to be mired in the past.
“Short answer——no. Long detailed answer-——NO.”
BUMP!
Funny how many people buy in when some organization like the ama or aarp or tripleA sign on to something. When I see those, I instantly steer clear. Pretty sure I read somewhere along the line that not that many MDs belong to the ama. Anyone recall?
Follow the Money....Who pays for the studies?
NIH funds most studies but they don’t have real involvement. They leave it to prominent individuals and groups that have long tenure to maintain standards.
The problem germinates in the deliverables scheduling which drive publication schedules, and journals focus their schedules around that.
So in a monthly journal, the intake of manuscripts submitted for review form a pool of reports to consider for the next publication cycle. Each month the pool grows or shrinks depending on activity. Within those pools are some really good reports and some not so good.
The general public can understand it with a baseball analogy:
If you make the Major Leagues, you are an amazing player already in the broad view but when judged against all Pros you may or may not be a great player.
So it is with scientists. Some are just .200 hitters and fair with the glove. Others are solid or great hitters, some are amazing with the glove in comparison with all Pro players.
But the Journals have their cycles and if they get some great manuscripts, great! But if there’s a dearth of good reports, well, they got to print something. Their editorial staffs can put a manuscript on the back burner while waiting for something more substantial but sometimes they have to hold their noses.
Within the world of journals, there is a ranking from prestigious to midland. The prestigious ones always get the cream of the crop. All the great scientists are invited or expected to compete to publish in the prestigious journals.
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