Scientific Research Is Unreliable, Unreliable Scientists Report

[naut]

Climate science is a joke compared to medical research

You are aware that medical research is one of the best examples of evidence suppression and distortion?

I'm sure that everyone understands the concept of trial against placebo. Yet in the pharmaceutical industry trial against placebo is often almost worthless. Because in most instances we already possess some treatment that is in some measure effective. So what a doctor, and by proxy society, really wants and needs to know is not, is this drug better than nothing but rather is this drug better than our current best treatment.

There is also the practice of rigging data, either by dosing the competing drug in either too high or low a dose during the trial. Too high and you've created the illusion of the side-effects of the current treatment being worse than they are. Too low and you've understated the value of the current or competing treatment. One of the best examples of this are the antipsychotic drugs Thioridazine vs. Haloperidol. In the trial process they dosed Haloperidol at 20mg, a drug which is prescribed and effective in the range of 0.5mg to 5mg. It's entirely predictable that if you dose a drug at 400% its recommended level that you'll observe more side-effects and the normally dosed Thioridazine will look better by comparison.

Medical research is also the poster child for publication bias, in this case where negative data is withheld resulting in misleadingly positive or significant findings. US law requires all FDA approved research be published and submitted to its ClinicalTrials.gov database. This is only the case 50% of the time, half either go unpublished or are delayed in publishing (by which time a drug may already be on the market).^t How can a doctor make an educated decision on the true efficacy of a drug if half of the trials are unavailable?

t Riveros, C. et al. PLoS Med. 10, e1001566 (2013).