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Thursday 27 January 2011

Medical Research mostly flawed

Dr John Ioannidis, who Natural News describe as the foremost expert in assessing the credibility of medical research, has stated that up to 90% of published medical information is either misleading, exaggerated, or quite often just wrong!

Well you only need to look at the fact that generations of pharmaceutical drugs to know that medical science has been, and continues to get it wrong. The evidence base for conventional medicine is just about non-existent! His paper shows that that

               "... both theoretically and empirically that 80% of non-randomized studies (the most common type), 25% of the "gold-standard" randomized trials, and nearly 10 percent of the "platinum-standard" large randomized trials were incorrectly executed.

He found that even 49 of the most highly regarded and cited research papers published in the past 13 years, 41% had later been disproved, and 24% hadn't been retested! Even studies that had overturned the original findings were ignored, with scientists more likely to refer to the original, inaccurate study.

What did be think the reason for this has been?

               "Economics appears to be an underlying cause of the research inaccuracies. A successful scientific career depends upon your research being funded and published. This intellectual conflict of interest motivates scientists to pursue and produce results that will be funded. Scientific journals are naturally biased towards publishing new, exciting research; they rely upon a vetted peer review process that is frequently commandeered by scientists in pursuit of career advancement. Worst of all are drug studies, funded by pharmaceutical companies and commonly corrupted by a much stronger financial conflict of interest.

The Natural News article cites several drugs that have been marketed under these circumstances, including Vioxx, Zelnorm, and Baycol, all removed from the market for safety concerns, and anti-depressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil which are now known to be no more effective than placebos.

So much for 'evidence based medicine'. There is increasing confirmation coming to light that conventional medicine is a sham, and money-making concern that has little or nothing to do with our health.

Original article