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Well put.

Number of people killed by homeopathy: zero.

Number of people killed by the medical system. Well, that's awkward, the medical system itself if the third leading cause of death in the United States today.

Examining the actual evidence on all sides is appropriate at this juncture.

The medical system third-leading cause of death in the United States.
Starfield B (July 2000). "Is US health really the best in the world?". JAMA 284 (4): 483–5. doi:10.1001/jama.284.4.483. PMID 10904513.

Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
http://journals.plos.org/plosm...

What is medicine's 5 sigma? - Richard Hortonemail - DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S014... http://www.thelancet.com/journ...

Pharmecutical companies write their own "clinical reports", then bribe doctors to put their names on them.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/soci...

Such "ghostwriting" is not uncommon at all.
Lacasse JR, Leo J (2010) Ghostwriting at Elite Academic Medical Centers in the United States. PLoS Med 7(2): e1000230. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000230
http://www.plosmedicine.org/ar...

Evidence based medicine is commonly wrong because the evidence is interpreted incorrectly.

Around the 1600s, cedar leaf tae saved Jacques Cartier's crew from scurvy, 25 died the rest were save and when he got back to France was told there as no evidence this worked.

Prior to that Vasco de Gamma nearly diet near the Cape of Good Horn but his crew found eating citrus fixed it.

Hundreds of years later, evidence showed citrus prevented scurvy and it became institutionalized. Later it was boiled on copper kettles (which neutralize the C) and nobody noticed it didn't work any more as diets had improved, until sailors and polar explorers began dying. Similarly at around the same time the new process of warming babies milk to kill bacteria also killed the vitamin C and a new disease of the rich emerged: infantile scurvy. By 1933 vitamin C had be found and scurvy became much less widespread.

The point is scurvy has been around for 20 million years, it' s in recorded history for 5500 years but as of the Scott Antarctic expedition people were still dying of it despite cures being known since Egyptian times ("bitter herbs" all have ascorbate). It's not that the evidence is lacking, it's that there's a disruptive influence from commerce and industrialization. Some unintentional, some because of vested interest. History records that "the evidence was contradictory" and while this is true it never stopped being true that two fresh citrus a day prevented and even cured scurvy, of course more was better, ascorbate does not take up into the body in hours it takes days. so any time i the past 500 years it's been true people have been saying "look I know if I eat fresh fruit I won't get sick" while the medical community insisted, no, it' something else we disproved that. During Scott's antarctic mission the medically accepted ce for scurvy was a brew called "vitriol" containing sulphuric acid. That where evidence based medicine got you and this is one of the reason it's a UN right that you can deterring your own course of treatment to any illness. Science is just a sure it's right the nit's wrong as it is when it's right and it's been worn as recently as elat year, the recent fats ans cholesterol deacle as well as finding out sugar is the cause of cholesterol is proof at least to me that the conventional wisdom is neither.

It cannot be said this does not exist today. I'm not a TV guy and have only a very casual knowledge of the claims he made. ome I know are wrong and know why there are right and I know why but are rejected by industry. Given the near complete control by industry of antu to do with pharmaceuticals they are not the best ones to adjudicate this. The belief that if it's in our pharmacopoeia it's good and anything that isn't is bad it fatally flawed in many many ways.

I don't think they'll pursue this very far. All it's going to take is one thing Oz says that works that they say doesn't but actually does and now everything else they say is in question.

If you have unwavering faith in the pharmaceutical industry to be acting only out of the best interests of your health in an ethical manner at all times then you must not have seen these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://projects.propublica.org...
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/soci...
http://www.plosmedicine.org/ar...
http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

I hold a faculty position in statistics (that's for the AC above who called me a "passer-by sitting at home in their boxers munching on Hot Pockets", so I guess I have to pull credentials, though in his defense my post sounded more dismissive than what I'd wanted).

Yes, the p-value threshold of 0.05 is considered "standard" in many applied sciences, in particular medicine. It is convenient for many of reasons that were outlined by other posters (cost, number or persons required for an experiment, ethics). It does not mean that it is intellectually satisfactory. The joke among statisticians is that this value was introduced about 100 years ago by the R.A. Fisher (one of the founding fathers of statistics) who once wrote something akin to "if we decide on a value of alpha such that the probability of falsely claiming a discovery when the null hypothesis holds seems reasonably low, say for instance, alpha=5%...", and this has somehow been engraved as gospel ever since.

The truth is, this threshold value of 5% is now considered very lax by modern statisticians, essentially because of the very large numbers of published papers reporting significant values as compared to Fisher's times. The posts of penguinoid and ras above explained it very professionally, one can also refer to "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" (Note: this was published in PLOS medicine, hardly an obscure journal)

In conclusion, my post was certainly not a defense of soda pop (there is already sufficient evidence that it is extremely damaging for your health for very clearly identified reasons), but a reminder that the specific results of this study (the effect on telomeres), though certainly not to be dismissed, should not be considered as established truth at this point, but rather pointing in a direction which should be investigated further for confirmation. That, by the way, is the actual meaning of "being skeptical", unfortunately this tends to be conflated with "being in obtuse denial" nowadays.

If Americans don't trust scientists, then who do they trust? Politicians? Celebrities? Talk-radio hosts? One of the reasons people don't like science is that it often tells them things they don't like. Reality is harsh, and most people would much rather believe comforting lies than unpleasant truths. Clearly, More Research is Needed.

Notice: it was science that led to finding out they were wrong and the retraction.

Yes, but it was also common sense. The journal published something that was demonstrably false. A newspaper that was given bad information from a source doesn't need "science" or some sort of formal scientific review to publish a retraction saying the source was wrong.

People make mistakes, that why the normal scientific process is to check it.

Actually, not really. Sure, in an ideal world this is true, but not necessarily in the "normal scientific process" as practiced.

Research grants are awarded, publications are selected, tenure is granted, etc. mostly on the basis of NEW research, not on checking up on other people's results (which is generally not considered notable unless previous results were wrong, hard to get grant money for, and hard to publish).

We have a systemic bias against replicating research in the way a lot of modern science operates. It would be better if what you said was true more often. But paper retractions are exceedingly rare, even if much (if not most) published research has serious flaws.

There are some relatively recent serious efforts to fix this, though. But it's a misrepresentation to say that checking research is part of the "normal scientific process" -- it only tends to happen in high-profile articles or ones that make extraordinary claims. For most run-of-the-mill research, it's definitely not as common as it probably should be.

Unfortunately for the premise of this study, Dr Ioannidis' well-known findings suggest that most scientific papers are also inaccurate. So we can't draw reliable conclusions as to the accuracy of Wikipedia articles. Indeed, it is possible - though admittedly quite unlikely - that the Wikipedia articles are correct in each case, and the scientific papers incorrect.

See http://www.plosmedicine.org/ar...

Oh this is rich. The AC calling the scientists ignorant about how the peer review process works. Nice try AC, but GP is right, peer reviewers systematically try to tear pretty much anything that comes their way to shreds.

Really depends on the discipline. Seriously -- I took a course as a graduate student in an obscure interdisciplinary subject, and we basically spent the entire class picking apart all the giant flaws in the core professional literature of this entire subdiscipline. It was pretty much all founded on BS. And yes, it was (supposedly) in the "sciences" (albeit the "soft" ones). But when you're working in a small area where only a few labs around the world do the same thing, and particularly if you're bridging multiple fields where people are often completely ignorant of one or more of the component fields, it's quite possible for much of the professional literature to become mired in accepted dogma that makes little sense and hasn't really been proven (and when it has been, proven in a vacuous way that makes it almost meaningless or completely insignificant).

And how one "tears a paper to shreds" may or may not actually get at some real underlying problems that have to do with fundamental issues in research methodologies or assumptions for an entire discipline. Or it can also be possible to "tear a paper to shreds" for minutiae within some small area, while never questioning statistical procedures that are poorly understood by many scientists in many fields.

If peer review really always (or even most of the time) worked the way you say, there would no need for articles like this one, and the many related discussions out there about flaws in the scientific research process.

"All scientific journals are reviewed by skeptics.

That's because all scientists are skeptics."

Yeah... no.

http://www.plosmedicine.org/ar...

But thanks for demonstrating a perfect example of an ideologue.

Thank you for your comment. Please note that in a former career I was an astrophysicist publishing papers. When I was an Honours students I knew some of the best students faked their data for research reports (sure, the stakes were low, but it showed me that even some very good people do not possess the same ethics that you and I share - where it is unthinkable to be anything other than brutally honest).

Medical science is no stranger to fraud:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
I might add that much of political "science" and social "science" are naught but obfuscation and fraud (I jest - kind of).

The claim that they're faking things to keep the grants coming is not credible

Really? I find your dismissal not credible. Working on acquiring and renewing grants takes up a significant part of any working researchers time. Missing out on too many grants means yourself and associates can miss many opportunities to continue your research (which is the thing you actually care about). Therefore, if you have to place emphasis some interpretation that sounds good to a grant committee then you'll do it.

Most scientists are more ethical than the average Joe. However, science has its fair share of charlatans, and a great deal more who don't intend to mislead but simply have an incorrect interpretation they they will defend *despite* the presence of contrary facts.

The site I referenced points out some of those scientists that selectively remove some data points. Without the data points you get Global Warming. Leave the data points in and you get normal variability. I'm not asking you to take my word for it (basing arguments solely on presumed authority should be avoided) - I suggest you review the evidence presented at that linked site, specifically the articles that show the data sets before and after James Hansen and Michael Mann adjusted them. Then you can make up your own mind as to whether the editing was 'creative' to reinforce a theory, or legitimate to remove outliers (always a dodgy thing to do without evidence of instrument or system malfunction; most of the time outliers should be left in an a robust fitting method used instead, such as 'least sum of squares' rather than the usual 'least squares' that has no robustness [is always skewed by outliers]).

I stand by my statement as a former research scientist. Science is not about consensus, it is about finding theories that match the observed facts (*all* the observations, not just the 'convenient' ones).

JFC! You linked to two different articles about THE SAME BLOODY STUDY... the same SINGULAR study.

Wanna read it? Here it is: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050029

Worse... you didn't consider the applicability of the study.

As Izzy mentions below... the US is a bit different, not just in terms of obesity rates, but also we are a far more diverse & heterogeneous population compared to the Netherlands.

Now, if you want to cite a study or three from here in the states where some of these factors have been taken into account... I'd love to take a read, but what you provided is in an interesting tidbit but has not been conclusively reproduced elsewhere (you know, part of the scientific method).

Either you signed up for /. while you were still in the womb... or are a 12 year old who purchased your /. account on eBay... as they are the only two possible answers I can think of to how moronic your arguments here are.

Movie ticket: $10, 2 hours entertainment –$5 per hour.
Pub: $20, 4 hours entertainment – $5 per hour.
Typical AAA game: $40, 30 hours entertainment –$1.33 per hour.
GTA: $60, 100 hours entertaiment – $0.60 per hour.

Getting out and spending time with other people face to face: priceless.

"Until age 56 annual health expenditure was highest for obese people. At older ages, smokers incurred higher costs. Because of differences in life expectancy, however, lifetime health expenditure was highest among healthy-living people and lowest for smokers. Obese individuals held an intermediate position."

As mentioned by the authors, there are studies that have reached opposite conclusions, as there are assumptions which can dramatically change the conclusions. In the comments section of the paper, there are reader comments which point out some very important problems with this particular paper (most of which seem to revolve around Ecological Fallacy-type assumptions):

Thomas Mittendorf: "It seems that the study has a major flaw in the inclusion of cost. The authors incorporated average health care costs in the model. These costs of course are higher the older the individual gets. But, as they are taking a prospective incidence orientated approach analyzing what happens to 20 year olds in the rest of their individual life it is not correct to use average costs. The average cost figures have to be differentiated between those costs that are incurred by persons that die and those who survive in the respective year. This has to be done for all cohorts. If the healthy people get older healthy and die five years later than the rest, dying gets cheaper. On the other hand dying is more expensive in younger cohorts."

David Strip: "Much in line with the response by Mittendorf, the validity of the results lies very strongly on key assumptions that are not demonstrated. The analysis assumes that the cost of an incidence of the 22 key diseases is independent of the risk factors being tested. Likewise, remaining health care costs, which account for 85% of health-care spending in the Netherlands , are assumed to be uncorrelated to risk factors. Given that this latter class of spending dwarfs the former, the importance of demonstrating the lack of correlation is particularly important. The incidence of numerous co-morbidities with obesity argues, in fact, that one might reasonably expect to find that the annual health costs are higher in the obese and that the cost of treatment in the last months preceding death may be quite different from the non-obese."

"Until age 56 annual health expenditure was highest for obese people. At older ages, smokers incurred higher costs. Because of differences in life expectancy, however, lifetime health expenditure was highest among healthy-living people and lowest for smokers. Obese individuals held an intermediate position."

As mentioned by the authors, there are studies that have reached opposite conclusions, as there are assumptions which can dramatically change the conclusions. In the comments section of the paper, there are reader comments which point out some very important problems with this particular paper (most of which seem to revolve around Ecological Fallacy-type assumptions):

Thomas Mittendorf: "It seems that the study has a major flaw in the inclusion of cost. The authors incorporated average health care costs in the model. These costs of course are higher the older the individual gets. But, as they are taking a prospective incidence orientated approach analyzing what happens to 20 year olds in the rest of their individual life it is not correct to use average costs. The average cost figures have to be differentiated between those costs that are incurred by persons that die and those who survive in the respective year. This has to be done for all cohorts. If the healthy people get older healthy and die five years later than the rest, dying gets cheaper. On the other hand dying is more expensive in younger cohorts."

David Strip: "Much in line with the response by Mittendorf, the validity of the results lies very strongly on key assumptions that are not demonstrated. The analysis assumes that the cost of an incidence of the 22 key diseases is independent of the risk factors being tested. Likewise, remaining health care costs, which account for 85% of health-care spending in the Netherlands , are assumed to be uncorrelated to risk factors. Given that this latter class of spending dwarfs the former, the importance of demonstrating the lack of correlation is particularly important. The incidence of numerous co-morbidities with obesity argues, in fact, that one might reasonably expect to find that the annual health costs are higher in the obese and that the cost of treatment in the last months preceding death may be quite different from the non-obese."

i decided i could spare 20 seconds for the cause of convincing you and found this at the top of the pile.

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020212

let me give you the section that is most important to the scientific position on this...

This encouraging summation of work in progress masks a critical issueâ"the lack or consistent replication for the same markers and haplotypes across studies. The literature supports the contention that genetic variation in these genes is associated with schizophrenia, but it lacks impressive consistency in the precise genetic regions and alleles implicated. In contrast, association studies of other complex human genetic diseases have produced unambiguous, consistent, and clear-cut (âoehardâ) replication.

please let me know if you have any problems understanding any part of this fairly unambiguous statement. or else can i offer a nice fresh cup of stfu.

You're assuming that the alternative to patents is no kind of financing at all. This assumption is ridiculous. There's a 20x spread in the distribution of academic estimates of average drug development costs; the US government is already paying a fair bit more in medicare/medicaid drug reimbursement than the total cost of developing drugs using the highest estimates (and ridiculously more if we use the lower or median estimates).

So - the money is already being spent by the government to cover all of the research. It is being wasted by the extremely high marketing costs (according to Wikipedia) and extreme profits (17% of revenue, top industry in the US). Marketing costs seems to be somewhere between 2x the cost of research ( "The Cost of Pushing Pills: A New Estimate of Pharmaceutical Promotion Expenditures in the United States") to 19x research (Wikipedia claiming 1.3% vs 25% of revenue).

There are high production costs as well - quoting the above study paraphrasing a Candian study (in French):

For example, in an accounting study based on the annual reports of ten of the largest global pharmaceutical firms, Lauzon and Hasbani showed that between 1996 and 2005, these firms globally spent a total of US$739 billion on “marketing and administration.” In comparison, these same firms spent US$699 billion in manufacturing costs, US$288 billion in R&D, and had a net investment in property and equipment of US$43 billion, while receiving US$558 billion in profits [9].

This gives the following division:

739 31% Marketing and administration

699 30% Manufacturing costs

288 12% Research and Development

43 1% Net investment in property and equipment

558 23% Profits

The relevant production costs are likely also include excessive profits for other layers in the chain of patent holders and sub-manufacturers, so the net result is at least a 3x-5x blowup of price compared to an efficient system.

But wait, there's more.

There's also a societal loss in that the research goes into researching the wrong drugs (me-too drugs, and minimal improvements to existing drugs because there is a winner-takes-most situation), and that people end up being ill that could have used drugs for treatment, because the drugs are expensive because the incentive structure is wrong.

I'll use the case of a road to illustrate, and connect back: When you're evaluating whether to build a public road, you want to evaluate the net value of the road, compared to doing other things with the money that it costs to build the road - more formally, that the net present value of the total utility value of people using the road is higher than the net present value of the investment needed to build it plus the maintenance costs. This means that, on average, the utility value for the person using the road in the future has to be higher than their fraction of investment + interest + maintenance costs.

However, when you *have* built the public road, the equation changes. At this point, you want to make sure that each individual use the road as long as the utility of their using it is higher than the additional maintenance costs and loss utility for other users imposed by their use. This can include a lot of users who have a relatively low utility from the road; certainly less than the cost of building + interest + general maintenance + use-specific maintenance. However, their utility still counts towards the total sum of utility provided by the road.

If you instead develop the road privately, and charge per use, each individual use of the road has to provide high enough utility that it covers it's fraction of building + interest + general maintenance + use-specific maintenance + transaction costs - and because you cut off anything that's lower utility than that, the number of uses you can divide this between bets much lower. This means that there are lo

talking about how modern medical science is wrong about anti-depressants and the like

A broken clock is right twice a day, and crazy ass Tom Cruise is right about this too. A 2008 meta analysis of all studies, published and unpublished, on SSRI antidepressants found that the effects are clinically insignificant in the great majority of patients. Only those ranked as very severely depressed experience any significant benefit over placebo.

It's been 6 years since that study, and none have overturned its conclusions. Yet SSRIs are prescribed to the moderately depressed every day. I've asked psychiatrists how they can justify this in light of the data, they've responded with their own confirmation biases. I don't see any way to interpret this but to conclude that psychiatry for depression is almost entirely a scam.

If you look here, you'll see that males are affected more by lead than females. I don't know if boys just ingest more lead, or they have more difficulty eliminating it, or maybe they're just exposed to it more (more likely to eat lead paint chips?). Regardless, there is a disproportionate effect.

Of course, nobody's saying that lead turns people into murderers. The hypothesis is that the exposure to lead causes people to be impulsive and make poor decisions. Men who make poor impulsive decisions are more likely to do something violent, like murder somebody. Women who make poor impulsive decisions are more likely to do something like get pregnant.

dom

Yes it's Americans; Americans who rely on pills to solve their problems, and live in denial about their egregious side effects:

http://medicalwhistleblower.blogspot.com/2011/09/mass-violence-caused-by-anti.html
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030372
https://www.google.com/search?q=ssri+violence

The core of American society now centers around pills, violence as entertainment, and disintegrating families ("the kids are good with it") - oh - and denial. It's not a wonder there is so much apparent confusion about the cause of such an event. The scientific evidence is available, Americans only have to accept it and deal with the reality that drugs are drugs, whether it comes in the form of a prescription or in a bag in a back alley, and personal accountability is at an all-time low.

Medication doesn't actually work for most people. A 2008 meta-analysis of all clinical trials involving SSRIs, including trials the author had to file FOIA requests to get, shows that SSRIs provide no clinically significant benefit to those with a Hamilton Rating below 23.

A good place to start would be to find a doctor who prescribes the right medication for the right symptoms. SSRI's are quite effective when it comes to fighting anxiety. For depression, try something like Wellbutrin, which is a dopamine/norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor.

What you actually meant to write:

I'm pretty sure he actually meant this: "Studies evaluated in this systematic review do not support the claim that the private sector is usually more efficient, accountable, or medically effective than the public sector; however, the public sector appears frequently to lack timeliness and hospitality towards patients." (low and middle income countries)

Or this: "Despite having the most costly health system in the world, the United States consistently underperforms on most dimensions of performance, relative to other countries. This reportâ"an update to two earlier editionsâ"includes data from surveys of patients, as well as information from primary care physicians about their medical practices and views of their countries' health systems. Compared with five other nationsâ"Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdomâ"the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives. The U.S. is the only country in the study without universal health insurance coverage, partly accounting for its poor performance on access, equity, and health outcomes."

But do please continue to spout ideology-addled "corrections" that contradict reality. It amuses the hell out of the rest of us to watch you do it. And keep on losing those elections while you're at it!

Ontario found almost the opposite. After they starting offering flu vaccinations universally, they got a substantial reduction in flu-related mortality, hospitalizations, ER visits, and doctor visits.

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0050211

Hey, AC - go get help, get medicated

Medication doesn't actually work for most people. A 2008 meta-analysis of all clinical trials involving SSRIs, including trials the author had to file FOIA requests to get, shows that SSRIs provide no clinically significant benefit to those with a Hamilton Rating below 23. That's "very severe" depression. Side effects of course occur no matter how depressed you are.

That was 4 years ago, no one has since refuted these findings. I've actually sought treatment for depression in the past couple years. I was given a score of 15 and was offered SSRIs. I asked the psychiatrist how she could ethically offer an addictive drug with many side effects when the best science available showed them to be no more effective than harmless glucose. She had no answer, except to say that in her experience they were effective. As if there was no reason to do blinded, placebo controlled studies.

The only conclusion I can reach from this is that psychiatric treatment for depression in all but the most severe cases is a con. If you can still feed yourself, get your ass to work, and sleep at night there's nothing psychiatry can do for you. You might as well rub a crystal on your forehead.

Exactly. This paper hasn't been retracted. If there are real problems with the paper, there will be corrections or retractions published in peer reviewed journals. Don't take some blowhard from the NYT's word for it.

Not that we can expect people to actually pay attention to the science. People prefer their own confirmation bias to reality. e.g. a similar metaanalysis was done on the effectivness of SSRIs in 2008. It found that SSRIs were only clinically significant in the most severely depressed patients. Yet here we are 4 years later, and SSRIs are still handed out like candy.

Nobody is interested in what's real and what's not. They're only interested in what makes them feel good and what gets them money.

..except that I dont want my tax dollars going to cure tropical disease that very few americans get. I am wondering what kind of bastard you would have to be to see a problem with people willingly paying for things that they benefit from, while simultaneously thinking its OK for people to be forced into unwillingly pay for things that they will never take advantage of.

In the case of ant-depressants, they have been on the market for fifty years. The new ones do not introduce dramatic improvements, but because the patent is still in force they charge 4-5x what a generic with essentially the same active ingredient costs. Those people would still have obtained treatment. They receive the new drug because drug companies spend more on marketing to physicians, than they do on R&D ( http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050001?imageURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050001.t001 ), so this is a pure effort to extract billions of dollars from people for no other reason than profit. Profit is perfectly legitimate, but what kind of sick bastard thinks that buying mercs and bimmers for advertising & pharma execs is a higher societal goal than preventing millions of deaths in the the rest of the world?

This isn't some socialist pipe dream, it is straight-forward reality that those poor people eventually figure out our priorities, and the result is the riots we have seen in recent weeks across the muslim world. It is far cheaper to help people, rather than bomb them first, and then "re-construct"...

People are very vocal about horror stories, but success stories don't get as much attention.

Both are anecdotes, and not data. Therefore neither deserves attention.

Please don't condemn yourself to another 15 years of depression because of a pop science book.

Unfortunately, it's not pop-sci, but real peer reviewed science that shows that SSRIs are no better than placebo for patients with mild to severe depression, and barely significant effects on severe patients.

SSRIs are garbage pushed on desperate people by a corrupt pharmaceutical industry with no regard for anything but profits. They're addictive, they increase the chances of suicide, and even when they work they just make you complacent.

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/05/publish-perish-peer-review-science

Sorry, what were you saying about being "right" more often than wrong? Peer review is a system, and systems can be corrupted or overwhelmed. That is exactly what has happened throughout the field. Tiny, closed off sub specialties are especially vulnerable to this effect.

A single paper? Try most of them.

"Lifetime Medical Costs of Obesity: Prevention No Cure for Increasing Health Expenditure" by van Baal, et al.

A recent PLOS article (free to view!) analyses modern research, coming to the conclusion that most research findings are false.
TLDR: Because of the nature of the statistics used and the fact that only positive results are reported.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Many thanks for those links.

You're welcome :)
Here is another article you might like, which I inadvertently omitted. It was supposed to be linked to the "medical fields" text, but I somehow left it out... And that's not even getting into the widespread misuse of the 95% confidence level (the linked page misuses it, even in criticizing its misuse by others, how about that for irony).

200,000+ civilians dead, far worse carnage than Saddam caused for the majority of people.

Of which, only 11,516 were killed by coalition forces (a distastefully large number, to be sure, but that's what happens when combatants hide amongst civilians). It was a powder keg, not an "annihilation" or extermination of civilians by the US.

Not to mention that marketing (in pharma) drives up profitability but drops long term value. Actually, that link is probably a must read for anyone who makes claims based on the marketing is double R&D claim. (Actually, reading that link will likely tone down the quote based off of a snippet summary of a news article about this paper).

Nahdude812 makes some excellent points about marketing. Marketing pays for itself, and then it pays for other things (such as more R&D). If marketing is a net negative the company is being run so poorly that it won't be around long enough to make the third batch after approval.

The problem is that in the social 'sciences', this is often treated as a 'everybody is right' instead of the approach of the physical sciences: "I'm right, and if you don't believe me, go do the experiment yourself".

That's a monumental difference that a lot of people just fail to grasp, even in serious fields of study. Just read this essay by Richard Feynman where he explains what it means to be properly scientific.

Nonetheless, students questioning their professors is not seen as a problem even in the physical sciences. For example, I had a very vocal disagreement with one of my Physics professors once. I simply refused to believe that what he was saying was possible. He was so impressed that he offered me a research position based on that one interaction.

Of course, this comes with a huge caveat -- I didn't 'just' disagree.

What had happened was that we were studying solid-state lasers, like the type you get in your DVD player or a laser pointer. They are made from crystals of semiconductors, like silicon, germanium, arsenic, etc... He was specifically discussing silicon lasers emitting light at about 650nm. I sat straight up and thought that's crazy -- I've held pure silicon in my hand before, and it looks like metal. Sure, it's a bit dark, but I just couldn't imagine how light that's "just barely infra-red" could go straight through the thing with nearly 0% loss, which is what a laser requires to operate. I argued with him -- surely it's very heavily doped and it's actually a compound of silicon that transmits the light? No. Maybe it's just a very thin surface layer, like transparent gold leaf? No.

The day after that, I was in the lab, and there was a piece of silicon there -- scrap from the chip lab. I took an incandescent lamp that I knew put out most of it's heat energy in the right infra-red range, put my hand in front of it, and then I waved the silicon wafer back and forth between my hand and the light. It's like it wasn't even there -- it blocked none of the IR light. There was no visible light going through, but I could feel the heat on my hand. I compared it to glass and various thicknesses of paper and plastic sheets. Only silicon transmitted all of the IR heat energy. It was like it was made of smoke. Sure, it was a primitive experiment, but very convincing in a I-can-feel-it-with-my-own-hands kind of way.

The next day, we were back in the lecture hall, continuing the topic of silicon lasers, and the lecturer jokingly asked me if I still had problems believing that silicon was transparent to infra-red light. I said no, I tried passing IR light through a piece of silicon in the lab. It doesn't look like it should, but it does.

That change in my position is the very essence of science -- not that disagreeing is bad, but there ought to be a method by which we can all become convinced of the truth and agree on it.

Sadly, the scientific method is not followed rigorously in many fields. Psychology and some areas of medicine come to mind. Just read: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False for an idea of just how far it's possible to stray from the truth because of only small errors in the application of the scientific method.

something that the market could have found much quicker and without this added cost

Given the existence of the placebo effect, in what way do you suppose that the market -- consisting of individuals who operate on limited information -- will be able to tell the difference in efficacy between a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory and acupuncture? Especially given that so-called "alternative medicines" such as Zicam can effectively compete against science-based medicine even with FDA regulations in place? Do you propose we go back to the patent medicine era?

The reason we have the regulations we have by the FDA is because we tried working without them and, unsurprisingly, people died and a lot of unscrupulous hucksters made a lot of money. We have the same thing going on now with homeopathic medicine. What we need are good, functional, and smarter regulations, not merely fewer or more regulations.

Oh, and for what it's worth, FDA trial costs aren't even remotely the largest cost of a drug. Check out this study and its references. Marketing, in fact, is the largest cost of releasing a drug. Trials are considered R&D costs, which marketing dwarfs -- and bear in mind that according to this study and its sources, 13.2% of those R&D costs are in marketing-related trials. Please check your facts before posting; this took me all of a minute with a search engine to find in PLoS.

While I would certainly love to believe that story, I know too many studies that could not be replicated. And this study hasn't even been published. Since it will be published next month, it has hopefully at least passed peer-review. Well, I really hope this isn't just hot air... For a good text about study quality please read e.g. here: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Disclaimer: I have not read the original paper.

This is really not a big surprise. The researcher has probably run many, many experiments. Many of them doubtless turned up nothing. But, by chance alone, an experiment has a 5% chance of showing an effect with 95% confidence -- that's what p < .05 means. It's like rolling a natural 20. If he's run, say, 100 experiments over the years, he should have something around 5 rather convincing results to show for his efforts.

Next, hundreds of other researchers request his materials and run the same experiments and... shock! A bunch of them show the exact same effect! Now, not only has one research lab demonstrated evidence for ESP, but the study has been successfully replicated by researchers around the world!

All of this, of course, is just by chance.

And really, you see this all the time in other fields (at least, in the fields I work in). It's just very vey very very very easy to convince yourself that the reason your earlier experiments didn't work out was that you made a mistake, and the reason this one did was that you did everything perfectly.

A few years ago, there was an excellent essay in PLOS One Why Most Published Research Findings Are False about these (and more insidious) effects. Should be required reading for scientists.

although more research money may be spent on clinical trials rather than basic research, you are aware that far more money is spent on marketing the drugs than on researching them?

If you are not already aware of the massive amounts spent on marketing you might consider http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050001

It is a huge problem, and practically everyone does that in the field of biology, even in published papers.

Aha, finally found what I was looking for when I constructed this sentence:

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

Let me first say that this is great news - if it turns out to be true however following the addage of most published research is false. It's worth keeping in mind that this has 20 controls, 20 ASD and 19 ADHD - according to the article they could distinguish the ASD diagnoses from the controls and the ADHD but considering that according to the DSM IV autism can have close to 100 unique presentations. I wonder how much this actually demonstrates.

This is an extreme example, of course, but it shows a real problem: if enough people believe even relatively mild conspiracy theories about flu vaccines, then they'll refuse to get vaccinated and public health -- something it's the government's job to promote and maintain -- will suffer.

This has already happened, with polio vaccination in Nigeria.

Fat people costing the health care system more is a myth. PLos Medicine: Does Preventing Obesity Lead to Reduced Health-Care Costs?

...and demanding that people who have health problems have to go through more hoops just to follow their needed diet is an asshole solution. In fact, most of these food "solutions" are based on studies of 50 year old fat men with cholesterol problems and pop crap made up "science". NOT EVERYONE IS THE FUCKING SAME. You are obviously a self-righteous shitheaded fucktard who just spouts out idiotic "solutions" without thinking.

In fact, I have kidney failure and have to follow the renal diet. Watch phosphorus and potassium among other things. Cake and candy and red meat are better for me than "heathy" food such as lots of fruits and vegetables. What a given person should be eating depends on many factors.

Genetics, condition of their internal organs, how much muscle mass and fat they have, how much of various chemicals are in their bloodstream (vitamins, minerals, cholesterol, etc), their current metabolic rate. You can't just say this one magic food is good for everyone all the time or that food is bad, because everyone is different and their condition is always changing. Nor can you say by how much they eat they are going to be fat/unhealthy. It just doesn't work that way.

This is why there is so much information on the side of food boxes: to help you decide if a given food will be helpful or harmful to you. Even too many vitamins, just as too few, can be bad for you. Over 2000 mg of Vitamin C in a day causes diarrhea. What, do you think it should just have a thumbs up or thumbs down on it?

Really, you are just the stupid self-righteous American which makes this country a fucking shitty place to live in.

Sorry, maybe I did overstate things. This is just a very emotional subject for me as you can probably understand. However, if you read this and other articles like it, can we agree the Prozac fad of the 1990's was overblown?

Source please?

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050001

I too can take the distribution of age at death, cut it in half and argue that the lower part's age expectancy is dramatically lower than the upper half.

No, you are missing the point, which is that the gulf is getting wider: "There was a steady increase in mortality inequality across the US counties between 1983 and 1999, resulting from stagnation or increase in mortality among the worst-off segment of the population."

People doing these studies are quite often bozos which start from the answer (we need socialism and redistribution) and work backward.

Which facts argue in favor of capitalist health care? You haven't cited any. Costs are lower and life expectancy is higher in countries with socialist health care. Can you dispute that, or do you simply feel the ideological considerations are more important?

So, IRTFOPMA (I Read The Fine Original PLoS Med Article), and it seems the problem is going to solve itself. According to this graph, we'll run out of Republicans if health reform doesn't get passed.

It seems scientific misconduct is perfectly acceptable, in fact, condoned, when it comes to tobacco control. In PLoS Medicine, I attempted to get Stanton Glantz to declare his competing interests. He has received 1.5 million dollars in grants and UCSF has received 36 million dollars from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. There aren't many who don't know who the RJWF is but for those who do not, they were created by the founder of Johnson & Johnson. RWJF owns tens of millions of shares of J&J stock. Who sells the NRT products? J&J. In fact, RWJF paid, just through 2005, 446 million dollars in tobacco control grants. Some grants to ACS had Medicare pay for NRT. An RWJF national program director was involved in writing the federal guidelines that tells doctors they have to push the drugs, that the patient should NOT try to quit cold turkey. NRT has a 98.4% failure rate for quitting 1 year or longer. The former CEO of RWJF heads a 10 million dollar grant at UCSF, Center for Smoking Cessation Leadership Center (compliments of RWJF). Glantz and UCSF stand to gain a ton more grant money from RWJF and should have to declare competing interests. http://www.plosmedicine.org/annotation/getCommentary.action?target=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0050178 Then you have the University of Minnesota and Elizabeth Klein from Ohio State University passing a recent tobacco control study off. The abstract states that exemptions from smoking bans for standalone bars have been considered to ease the economic burden for bars...so she collects employment data for bars...AND RESTAURANTS. She figures nothing in for lack of compliance to the law (in Ohio, year 2 after the ban there were over 7,000 complaints and investigations-HIGH compliance?). She does not say how many businesses were bars. In Minnesota, bars are outnumbered by restaurants 3 to 1. ClearWay Minnesota paid for this study and in the grant prosal it states "We believe that this research will provide public health officials and tobacco control advocates with information that can help shape adoption and implementation of CIA policies, and prevent their repeal." and "The proposed study ⦠will contribute to MPAAT's (now ClearWay) overall mission by providing information that enables adoption and successful implementation of policies to protect employees and the general public from secondhand smoke exposure." Think this study has no bias or stated outcomes desired? IT'S IN THE GRANT PROPOSAL!! And her article proclaiming no harm to bars and restaurants has been published everywhere with TV and the radio picking it up. This study has so many holes in it that if it were the Titanic, it wouldn't have made it out of the harbor. So...we issued a press release. http://news.prnewswire.com/DisplayReleaseContent.aspx?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/05-29-2009/0005034690&EDATE The problem is when "science" is bastardized to fit a social engineering scheme, science will never be trusted when it will need to be trusted. I'm disgusted with dung being passed off as valid. It has to stop.