Doctor John Ioannides Confronts Medical Science
Get over it. Most medicine is empiricism first and science
last. In the face of all that we have
fashions promoted under the guise of science or at least justified with as
patina of science. The profession itself
goes through a training program that is about developing knowledge and skill
and not developing a scientific attitude.
No one wants a order cialis running experiments on his hapless patients, yet
we pretend they have scientific skills.
New protocols come and go and the
successful ones hang around. The suspect
ones also hang around long past their due date often because we have specialist
inertia.
Just think. Here we discover that eighty percent of
fashionable results are ultimately proven wrong. Just as concerning, we can assume that eighty
percent of negative reports are also likely wrong and simply fail to be
followed up on.
None of this is good and explains
the emergence of a burgeoning alternative medicine regime. Far too many are discovering that
professional solutions are just awful and real relief is to be found elsewhere. The early criticism against all that was a
lack of scientific work, now long since remedied and so called natural
solutions are stronger that ever.
Doctor pursues career exposing lies, quackery and fraud in
"medical science"
Wednesday, April 06, 2011 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer
http://www.naturalnews.com/031975_quackery_medical_science.html
NaturalNews) Greek cialis John Ioannidis has based his career on exposing the
untrustworthy nature of medical research, and it has made him one of the most
celebrated medical scientists in the world. Indeed, Ioannidis worries that the
medical research system is so broken that it cannot ever be fixed.
Ioannidis first became aware of the problems in medical science as a young
researcher, when he realized that even for well-researched diseases, doctors
tended to make their treatment decisions based on intuition and basic
guidelines rather than solid research. He became involved in the
"evidence-based medicine" movement, searching for reliable data to
help doctors make these decisions -- and discovered that there isn't any.
Medical scientists ask the wrong research questions, set up studies to deliver
certain results, recruit the wrong research populations, take the wrong
measurements, analyze their data poorly and present their results inaccurately,
he concluded. Researchers want to achieve specific results, Ioannidis says, and
either consciously or unconsciously, they make sure to get them.
"At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to
make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded," says
Ioannidis. "There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures
researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them
funded."
In part, Ioannidis blames a system that makes researchers dependent on
publishing studies in influential journals in order to receive and keep tenured
positions. Such journals are more likely to publish sensational research
findings, 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 levels
of researcher bias, less than ideal research methods, and a tendency to focus
on exciting rather than likely theories, as many as 80 percent of
non-randomized studies, 25 percent of randomized studies and 10 percent of
non-randomized studies will be wrong. And indeed, these figures match the rates
at which studies are later disproven. In his second paper, Ioannidis showed
that of the 49 most influential studies of the last 30 years that were later
retested, 41 percent were eventually proven wrong.
These papers included the one that led to hormone replacement therapy as a
treatment for menopause symptoms, and the one that led doctors to recommend
that patients take an aspirin pill daily to prevent heart attacks.
Sources for this story include: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...
Learn more:
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