Beware the Greek geek if you're a fiddling quack!

Fascinating profile in The Atlantic this month of an extraordinary Greek doctor/mathematician/medical researcher called Dr. John Ionnidis (pronounced yo-NEE-dees) who has confirmed over and over again what, ahem, I could have told him from a lifetime's experience, that the vast majority of so-called medical research is crap!  I base my knowledge on the fact that I have lived long enough to hear doom-laden pronouncements from very emminent quacks that this, that or the other will pop your clogs quicker than you can say 'goodbye', only for yet another set of quacks to announce, several years later, that, no, actually, it ain't so!  However, Ionnidis noticed that later refutations had hardly any effect on the general medical population who went on and on pumping out the same old crap that had been proven incorrect:

In poring over medical journals, he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings. Of course, medical-science “never minds” are hardly secret. And they sometimes make headlines, as when in recent years large studies or growing consensuses of researchers concluded that mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful cancer-detection tools than we had been told; or when widely prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil were revealed to be no more effective than a placebo for most cases of depression; or when we learned that staying out of the sun entirely can actually increase cancer risks; or when we were told that the advice to drink lots of water during intense exercise was potentially fatal; or when, last April, we were informed that taking fish oil, exercising, and doing puzzles doesn’t really help fend off Alzheimer’s disease, as long claimed. Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to unclog heart arteries.

The holy golden mantra of 'peer review' is shown to be more or less worthless.  Ionnidis warns that where you have enthusiastic research scientists convinced they are on the right track - and anxious to aquire further funding - they will, either consciously or unconsciously - lean on the results - ya know what I mean!  None of this will be a surprise to anyone familiar with global warming so-called-science.  Anyway, if there is a Nobel prize for medicine I reckon Dr. Ionnidis should be top of the list.

 

Comments

[GD]

I've always tended to regard doctors rather like Superman; but with the trolleys worn on the inside.

[David Duff]

Big mistake, GD, I always think of them as plumbers. Take any 10 plumbers and two of them will be absolutely brilliant, the next six will do a more or less adequate job on a good day, and the last two should have been bricklayers because they'll never understand plumbing as long as they live! Of course, you never get to choose because you never know - until it's too late!

[dearieme]

"The holy golden mantra of 'peer review'": this mantra is rather recent. I didn't see much public fussing about "peer review" until the Climate Science drivel started to become noticeable. Anyone who thinks that "peer review" is holy or golden can't have much experience of it. (I've been lucky recently - some anonymous peer reviewers have made some distinctly helpful comments on my papers.)

[David Duff]

Yes, DM, surely 'back in the day' scientists simply followed their curiosity and when a conclusion had been reached they just published, along with all their background material, and let everyone else check it out. This peer review business seems to me to be a con designed to bolster the second-rate.

[dearieme]

I doubt it was "a con designed to bolster the second-rate": it was probably designed to defend the purpose and standards of a journal. What it has become is another matter entirely.