The staggering death toll of scientific lies

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/368350/scientific-research-fraud-crime-jail-time

by rntn • 2 years ago

142 118 2 years ago

roenxi• 2 years ago

People might not want to hear it but it is going to keep being an issue - we shouldn't force people to "follow the science" when it comes to medicine. Scientists - and science as a whole - do not have the moral standing that their opinions justify authoritarianism. People should make their own decisions about whether they trust the remedies involved.

giraffe_lady• 2 years ago

People should make their own decisions about highly technical aspects of their own surgeries? And then also I presume bear the full responsibility for the outcome?

No, surgeons should make decisions informed by their own experience and, yes, recommendations from medical researchers. How we're doing it is how it should be, the fraud remains the problem here.

msandford• 2 years ago

Recommendations are optional. There is no enforcement. I might not be able to find a doctor to give me a surgery I want. But rarely does a surgeon force upon someone a surgery they don't want.

An obvious counter example is electroshock therapy or a lobotomy. Typically there's some due process there before a doctor just does something against patient wishes.

People don't like the vaccine debate for many, many reasons. Sadly a lot of the discussion is people talking past each other and refusing to acknowledge that the other side does have a point about assumptions that are damaging to their own position.

alnwlsn• 2 years ago

Ok, but that's supposed to be the reason we have scientific institutions in the first place. If I want to prove the earth is a globe and measure its diameter, all I need are a couple sticks and a tape measure. If I want to know if a drug or vaccine is effective, there is really no mechanism for me to determine this myself, and I am forced to base my opinion on someone else's opinion.

d4mi3n• 2 years ago

You could say the same thing about your drinking water or the food you buy.

Modern society is complex, and even simpler historical societies were dependent on cooperation before we got anywhere near the level of complexity and specialization we deal with today.

At the end of the day it’s a trust issue. Studies, be they medical, scientific, or observational, are one way to build trust. There are many others, but I’m not sure how well they scale with the size of a society compared to the systems we have in place today.

exe34• 2 years ago

only if they can self-insure for the damage they cause and the cost of fixing the damage.

jtxt• 2 years ago

Follow the money? What financial (or power) incentives are there for faked science?

tensor4• 2 years ago

You already have the freedom to make your own decisions. What you don't have is the freedom to endanger others. That's when we make laws, and those laws may be informed by science but they are not created or enforced by scientists. They are created and enforced by government agencies.

SV_BubbleTime3• 2 years ago

You already have the freedom to make your own decisions.

It’s not like there have ever been consequences like “if I don’t do this I’ll lose my job” or “I can’t travel here”, or “I can attend this school, even online”, right?

That would all be public policy that would never fly by the law. Am I correctly reading your post?

kbolino• 2 years ago

Viewed skeptically rather than apologetically, it seems like the fundamental concepts of society (like "freedom" and its limits) are nebulous and mutable, and the fundamental processes of society (like how ideas become law) are inscrutable and unaccountable.

stvltvs• 2 years ago

Medicine is not entirely based on science, so I wouldn't equate MDs to scientists. Lots of treatments are based on clinical experience which is more anecdotal and traditional than scientific. So much so that "science-based medicine" is a thing.

Don't get me wrong: I trust medicine a lot and it has literally saved my life, but doctors aren't primarily scientists.

mikrl• 2 years ago

It happened to agriculture in Stalin’s USSR

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

wakawaka28• 2 years ago

Such a good piece of history. I'm surprised I wasn't taught this in school.

Der_Einzige2• 2 years ago

Part of this is because the modern academy holds thinkers who are just as fraudulent in high regard today, and they are unwilling to hold them accountable.

exhibit A (by far the worst): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan

exhibit B: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deleuze_and_Guattari

exhibit C: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek

exhibit D: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung

exhibit E: All Chiropractors

Most of the academy holds Freud, and most of his followers in very high regard despite zero of his analysis being reproducible, falsifiable, replicatable, or coherent.

Modern social sciences are infected with a modern version of Lysenkoism.

Joel_Mckay• 2 years ago

It was a scandalous story of the first seed bank operators literally starving to death around food to protect their peoples future post war, American attempts to help with corn crops failing (the two politically were already distrustful), and an insane farmer favored politically.... literally putting his critics in front of firing squads.

Science makes "mistakes" most of the time, but documents the process to improve the accuracy of models that represent reality.

It is notable many westerners recognize the first seed bank scientists, and in particular Nikolay Vavilov.

The legal process can't enforce research ethics, but on rare occasion people are stripped of their credentials for egregious behavior.

Despotism is ugly, and it is arrogant to think any one is immune to the phenomena:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaWSqboZr1w

Have a great day, and have faith the smarter Russians will again figure out a path to peace eventually. =3

darth_avocado4• 2 years ago

I would say, a better approach would be to have better checks and balances in play. Maybe he falsified research, why was it recommended as a standard procedure by European Medical Guidelines without proper evaluation? I would hold them criminally liable before I hold the researchers liable.

jessriedel• 2 years ago

Why? Like, from the practical standpoint I understand why we need procedures that are robust to individual evil actors. But, from a moral standpoint, if you prove unambiguous fraud by a very brilliant person who has been entrusted with incredible resources and freedom by the public, why shouldn’t that person go to jail?

Civil engineers understand the seriousness of their job, and medical researchers should too. (And of course, many do understand, and very few commit unambiguous fraud.)

SV_BubbleTime3• 2 years ago

Agree but…

What if it isn’t a person you can point to, but rather a company? And what if you can’t jail a company, but you can fine them. And what if the fine ends up just being the “cost of doing business” to the company?

Which company received the largest criminal fine ever handed out? Hint, it’s a pharmaceutical company.

hodgesrm• 2 years ago

That seems like prosecuting the police for a crime committed by someone else. How does that change incentives in a productive way?

darth_avocado4• 2 years ago

But it is not like that. The research was a fraud. It didn’t kill anyone. Once it was recommended by European Medical Guidelines, it started killing people. I would argue negligence on their part.

It’s like this: If a factory somewhere knowingly provides subpar nuts and bolts. And then Boeing puts them in all their planes without proper testing. If a plane crashes, who is liable? There’s definitely wrongdoing on the factory’s part, but who would you as a victim sue first?

bluGill6• 2 years ago

If someone legitimately discovers something better how long do you wait - killing people in the process - to ensure it really is better? Mostly we assume researchers are honest (which is probably true).

darth_avocado4• 2 years ago

But that’s true for all medical trials. If someone discovered a new drug that works, why wait for multiple rounds of human trials and then approvals from the proper authorities?

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

Mostly we assume researchers are honest (which is probably true).

I'd guess the average researcher is as honest and as fallible as the average human. They aren't gods, certainly they can have personal or political motiviations, become blinded by ambition, or succumb to pressure from others, or from potential personal financial or power gains.

fnord77• 2 years ago

A big problem in today's political climate is if you question certain scientific findings, at best you get shouted down and at worst you get branded a far right fascist and have your career put at risk.

asdasdsddd• 2 years ago

The nice thing about running bad studies and cooking the p is that you can usually reap the rewards immediately and for a long time because reproducing studies is lame and no one wants to do it.

VSerge• 2 years ago

A scientist that causes, through willful fraud, the death of people seems to be guilty of something like manslaughter. Using fake data is a pretty clear-cut example of willful fraud, and a reasearcher fudging data over such a life and death question should 100% be held accountable.

Scientists making errors in good faith should on the other hand be insulated from any kind of liability.

auggierose8• 2 years ago

You cannot insulate scientists making errors in good faith from any kind of liability, if you make the wilful frauds liable. Because there is no 100% way of distinguishing the two.

zug_zug• 2 years ago

There are cases where people have doctored images in their research data, or completely fabricated data to meet a significance threshhold.

There may be ambigious cases but there are non-ambiguous cases too.

tines4• 2 years ago

Not that I'm in favor of the proposed measure, but saying because we can't identify wilful frauds 100% of the time then we can't protect the non-fraudsters, is just a bit silly, no? You have this kind of problem detecting any kind of fraud.

One test is, is there written communication between people about committing the fraud? If so, there you go.

bluGill6• 2 years ago

You don't need to be 100%. We assume innocent until proven guilty in other contexts. At least some criminals are known to go free because we cannot prove beyond a shadow of a doubt they really did it. However we get a lot of them. It isn't perfect, but it is a standard.

oneshtein• 2 years ago

In science, 3 independent scientific organisations must reproduce the effect. Otherwise, it's not a science at all. It's just authority.

jl62• 2 years ago

One crucial question he studied: Should you give patients a beta blocker, which lowers blood pressure, before certain heart surgeries? Poldermans’s research said yes. European medical guidelines (and to a lesser extent US guidelines) recommended it accordingly.

What the guy did was clearly wrong but it’s a slightly tenuous causal chain between that and 800,000 deaths. Questions may be asked, for example, about whether the medical guidelines should have been based on studies that seemingly had a single point of failure (this one corrupt guy).

There’s an extremely toxic (and ironically very anti-scientific) culture of “study says it so it’s true” that permeates medical and scientific fields and the reporting thereof. Caveats and weaknesses in the primary research get ignored in favor of abstracts and headlines, with each layer of indirection discarding more of the nuance and adding more weight of certainty to a result that should in truth remain tentative.

Prosecuting one type of bad actor might not make a lot of difference and might distract from the much larger systemic issues facing our current model of scientific enquiry.

renewiltord• 2 years ago

There’s an extremely toxic (and ironically very anti-scientific) culture of “study says it so it’s true” that permeates medical and scientific fields and the reporting thereof.

Source? Where’s the proof of this? Some online blogpost is not peer-reviewed evidence. We need to back up our claims with science.

Spooky23• 2 years ago

Outside of a national cancer center, liability management is priority 1. Thinking creates liability.

marcuskane2• 2 years ago

There’s an extremely toxic (and ironically very anti-scientific) culture of “study says it so it’s true” that permeates medical and scientific fields

I have never witnessed this in real life. Every actual PhD and MD I've ever interacted with are cautious about over-reliance on a single study and particularly if a result is surprising will view it with extreme skepticism if the study has any flaws.

and the reporting thereof

Sure. 99% of journalists don't know any science beyond their C in high school basic science, and they're rewarded for views and engagement, not accuracy, so they'll hype up any study. Especially ones that are provocative or engaging for general audiences.

There is a huge, huge, huge difference between the editors at Nature and the talking heads at CNN. Or between research scientists and twitter commenters.

jl62• 2 years ago

I have never witnessed this in real life.

It is extremely common in the practice of citations. What you see written in a paper is:

“Intervention X can help patients with condition Y (Smith, 2012)”

But when you actually read Smith the result is couched in limitations, or maybe only holds under some circumstances, or maybe uses a weak methodology that would have been fine for Smith but isn’t appropriate for the current paper.

There just isn’t room in that sentence to reflect the full complexity, and the simplified version is all too easy to slip through peer review. Sometimes papers form chains and networks of oversimplification with each citation compounding unwarranted certainty.

QuantumGood• 2 years ago

Sufficient reproducibility should be required, but the "cautiousness" when it IS there often remains. Examples of this more emotional resistance from MDs and PhDs that come to mind include:

• Helicobacter pylori and Peptic Ulcers

• The Eply Maneuver

• Handwashing for Infection Control

cauch4• 2 years ago

First, I'm not sure that the 800,000 deaths are due to the medical guidelines themselves. If these guidelines were saying "we don't know, doctors still have to choose themselves", then the practitioners would have looked it up themselves and found Poldermans study and said "ok, no time to look into details, I have to choose, I have 0 study that says it's bad and 1 study that says it's good. I guess the best choice is to assume it's good". So, it feels like Poldermans' study would still have created a lot of problem.

I'm not sure what these guidelines are. Is it a proper organism, or is it just a "state of the practice"? Is it that the guidelines create the usage or the guidelines summarize the common practice? A bit like a dictionary will end up adding a definition because a word is used in a certain way, and these guidelines are just adding "more and more practitioners are considering this practice as the best one".

A second reflection that your interesting point made me think of is that "not making a decision" is also a "decision".

When a practitioner needs to make a choice, they have to make a choice, and "waiting for more study" is also a choice. In this context, they have to choose: I have one study that say it's good, I have 0 study that say it's bad, the one study that says it's good may be incorrect, but if the probability that it is correct is >50%, then the scientific best choice is still to do what the study says.

In other words: how many deaths would exist if someone would have waited for more data instead of following a study _that turns out to be correct_?

At the end, when you have one study, all you do is to bet on the probability that the study is incorrect (due to fraud or due to error) AND that the conclusion is incorrect (Poldermans could have been dishonest and faked his results to say that this procedure is good while in reality, this procedure is good). If this probability is still >50%, choosing to follow the conclusion is still scientifically better than not following the conclusion.

IIAOPSW• 2 years ago

You are right in that the establishment has failed in its duty of due skepticism for one bad actor to get this far, but wrong in that prosecuting one type of bad actor doesn't make a difference, because part of the establishments error has been a failure to deter bad actors with prominent examples of prosecution.

pfdietz2• 2 years ago

One solution would be bonding. If you publish a scientific result, put up some money with a bonding firm, perhaps for a specified period of time. If someone successfully identifies fraud, they get the money. The more money you put up, the more confident you are. This also provides an incentive for fraud finders.

fao_• 2 years ago

Over time you'd see a socially dictated (or even regulation dictated) amount of money go up for bonding if this became regular practice. I don't think adding more of a worry around "can we afford this" would create a positive impact in a world where a) scientists and academics routinely spend more time filling out requests for money (grants/funding/etc.) and justifying their use of said money than they spend actually doing research, and b) there is already a paucity of replication.

KK7NIL2• 2 years ago

Yes, we really need to make scientific publishing even more expensive and bureaucratic./s

I appreciate your creativity but the real solution is to fund replication studies and improve statistics education in the sciences.

pfdietz2• 2 years ago

We actually need less scientific publication. Bonding would encourage a smaller number of higher quality publications.

pvaldes3• 2 years ago

And a disincentive to do science for the majority of the researchers that didn't born rich. And less money available for doing science.

photochemsyn• 2 years ago

Fundamentally scientific rigor and accuracy is often misaligned with larger societal norms and values - a pharmaceutical corporation with a profit-making pill doesn't want to hear about the 1% of users who suffer catastrophic medical conditions as a result of using their product (e.g. Vioxx with 88,000 heart attacks and 38,000 deaths out of 107,000,000 prescriptions from 1999-2004). Similarly the Soviet Union's Lysenko tailored his research results to align with Stalinist ideology on adaptability, thereby securing his position in the academic structure - behavior that was remarkably similar to that of Anthony Fauci regarding the origins of Sars-CoV2 and the efficacy of the various treatments and vaccines that were so highly profitable to the corporate pharmaceutical sector. Reckless virology research that he supported caused a global pandemic that cost at least $10 trillion in economic damage and took millions of lives - but admitting that opens the door to liability, so no.

I've worked with both ends of the spectrum - fraudulent tenured PIs at leading research universities are not that rare, but highly skilled and reliable PIs are more common. The fundamental difference always seems to be record-keeping - frauds aren't interested in keeping detailed records of their activities that can be used by others to replicate their work (since their work is non-replicable). In contrast, the reputable researcher will want such detailed records for various reasons, including defense against false claims of fraud or incompetence, which is quite common if the research results are not aligned with corporate profit motives in areas like pharmaceuticals, fossil fuels and climate, environmental pollutants, etc.

If the powers that be really wanted to reduce research fraud, the easiest way is to make detailed record-keeping a requirement of federally-funded research, with regular audits of lab notebooks and comparisons to published work. This matters, because the problem is set to get worse with the spread of AI tools that make it possible to generate hard-to-detect fake datasets and images. In the past a great many frauds were caught because their fake data generation was so obvious, often just a copy and paste effort.

hn_throwaway_99• 2 years ago

This article sort of just glosses over any reasons why existing laws aren't enough. It states that existing scientific fraud is rarely prosecuted (e.g. under fraud statutes), so it seems to me the right course of action should be to prosecute it!

In the US at least, it's nearly impossible to commit this kind of malfeasance without committing federal wire fraud - faked research would nearly always be part of a grant application, at least eventually, for example.

Plus, I'm surprised some enterprising lawyers haven't at least tried some massive class action lawsuits. The actual researcher may not have much to go after, but surely their institutions would. If you can get huge class action payouts for the dubious connection of talc in baby powder to cancer, why can't you get a payout here where (a) the malfeasance was intentional from the get go and (b) the harms are unambiguously clear from follow-up meta-analysis studies.

I guess I would like to understand if there is some fundamental reason that existing statutes aren't enough before adding laws.

reillys• 2 years ago

IANAL... The reason you can get a huge settlement in the talc case but not in this case is because people are purchasing the talc and so it is a product liability issue.

In the research case people are basing their care and procedures off another person's research. There is no direct payment from the person receiving the care to the researcher and so it is difficult to draw a direct line from Person A says X to Person B gets injured.

jltsiren• 2 years ago

I think it rarely prosecuted because prosecuting is risky and expensive. You have a complex technical issue few people truly understand, you are probably not 100% sure there was actual fraud, and there is always a real risk that the court makes the wrong decision. And unless the situation was completely clear, you know that the prosecution will discourage honest researchers from studying topics that could be controversial or have a significant real-world impact.

As for class action lawsuits, the researcher who published the fraudulent result is the wrong target. The responsible engineer is not the person who designed the product but the person who approved the design, and the responsible scientist is not the person who published the result but the person who made decisions based on it.

bunderbunder2• 2 years ago

Independent replication is the cornerstone of Karl Popper's formulation of the scientific method. If we were really holding to philosophical basis for how science is supposed to work, then we'd be careful to consider results that have only been demonstrated by one laboratory to be tentative at best, and be cautious about making policy decisions based on it until there has been truly independent replication.

Physicists seem to be really good about this, and many other aspects of implementing the scientific method too.

I wish the other sciences would get on board. It would eliminate almost all the chronic problems that plague biological and social sciences: falsification, p-hacking, failing to notice honest methodological mistakes, outright fraud, etc.

I fear that the problem is, we can't get there from here for social reasons. The people at the top of these fields - the ones who drive culture in academic institutions, set publication standards for journals, influence where grant money is allocated, etc. - all got there by using sloppy methods and getting lucky. I think that, on some level, many of them know it, and know that fixing the rotten core of their field inevitably involves subjecting their own work - and, by extension, reputations - to a level of scrutiny that it is unlikely to survive.

stonethrowaway• 2 years ago

I wish the other sciences would get on board

It’s not about science it’s about politics and corruption and power plays. At the expense of being accused of posting lazily, you really have to follow the money.

2 more weeks to flatten the curve while the oligarchs pillage the economy some more.

fastball• 2 years ago

It's definitely not just politics. Popper was not just a champion of reproducibility but also a champion of falsifiability. This is something many a scientist also loses sight of. People will formulate their hypothesis and then try to prove it, rather than trying to disprove it, which is often the much more effective strategy for avoiding bias and other issues. You see this most often with the "soft" sciences, but it crops up in the harder ones as well.

Focusing on reproducibility and falsifiability would go a long way to improving the current state of science, regardless of the political games happening at the same time.

matthewdgreen• 2 years ago

Physicists seem to be really good about this

Consider the possibility that what you're observing is not so much different cultures, but different levels of resources being provided. Experimental physics receives vast amounts of funding from scientific agencies. Much of this goes to support expensive equipment like particle accelerators and neutrino detectors. However the funding of this infrastructure doesn't occur in a vacuum: the operating budget for these systems also requires the resources to perform careful data collection and analysis. You cannot justify running a quick low-budget experiment with the LHC, simply because it costs too much.

It's worth pointing out that most of the boogeyman results people hold up in the "replication crisis" literature are in the fields of the social sciences, where funding is vastly less available. Here you get weaker techniques, fewer resources for replication, and many people who are struggling just to fund any small studies at all. What you immediately diagnose as malicious behavior is much more adequately explained by lack of resources.

It is very human to think that the problem is bad humans. But in the real world, the biggest factor is almost always resources. Everything else is downstream of that.

jackcosgrove• 2 years ago

The social sciences also have a much more limited ability to perform controlled experiments because of ethical reasons, which cannot be resolved with more money.

So much of the studies published in these fields are observational rather than controlled experiments. Physics (and chemistry, to a lesser extent biology, and medicine lesser still) has an advantage in that it's exploring the parts of the universe where controlled experiments are possible.

I don't think it's all about resources, and I think the social sciences are less resourced in part because grant-making bodies know that these fields suffer from these intrinsic limitations.

nonameiguess• 2 years ago

It's not even that. Physicists can generate quadrillions of elementary particles per nanosecond and observe whatever interactions they're looking for faster than they can type up the paper. Human subject research requires recruitment, consent, IRB approval, waiting possibly decades for effects to show up. Hacker News seems to think physicists are just uniquely better scientists for some reason. They're not. Some research questions are inherently harder to answer. There is no particle collider analog that can spawn a few million humans out of thin air, give them heart disease, perform a surgery, and tell you what happens in a matter of minutes, no matter how much funding you sink into it.

cauch4• 2 years ago

But "not giving beta blockers" is also a decision.

In that context, there is no "we can freeze time for the rest of the world while scientists add new studies", you have to choose.

Imagine a parallel universe where beta blockers are a good solution and where Poldermans' study was fraudulent and said that beta blockers are bad. According to you, doctors should have not trusted Poldermans' study and, therefore, should have continued to give beta blockers. So, in this parallel universe, your definition of "not trusting the study" = "doing exactly the opposite of what not trusting the study means in the first universe".

Then there are also parallel universes where Poldermans' study was not fraudulent. What about there? Is adopting the opposite of the conclusion the correct things to do while waiting for new studies? Or are we rather saying "well, I know there is not much there, but the probability that the study is crap is lower than the probability that it is not, so in the meanwhile, let's follow its conclusions, it's the best bet in the meanwhile"

mikeiz4042• 2 years ago

You make good points.

I think in order to make a good decision in all these possible scenarios (since you don't know which one a specific study might be in) is to make sure you have a good understanding of what the likelihoods are any single study is in one of these scenarios (ex: fraudulent). Right now it would appear the perception and the reality of the likelihood a study is trustworthy is in disagreement.

Hopefully new incentives coupled with public statistics can help fix this.

casey22• 2 years ago

but the probability that the study is crap is lower than the probability that it is not

BASED ON WHAT!!!!?!?!?!

Der_Einzige2• 2 years ago

That's why you reject Karl Popper's epistemology and embrace the the epistemological anarchism of Feyerabend. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method

Ferret7446• 2 years ago

Physicists seem to be really good about this, and many other aspects of implementing the scientific method too.

That's because physics is relatively immune from politics. Other fields are on the other side of the "practice vs theory" spectrum and thus attract a lot of politics/interests which influence the science.

https://xkcd.com/435/

odyssey7• 2 years ago

Why is it that so many of the PhDs and MDs out there are unable to tell when someone's lying to them about their very own areas of expertise?

Either they're not that smart or the processes aren't very good -- though no single researcher is responsible for their field's poor processes. Either way, we shouldn't assume that any one PhD or MD recipient is an expert until something changes. Degrees, on their own, don't signify expertise or credibility.

tboyd47• 2 years ago

This is an excellent question, and your corollary is sound.

beryilma• 2 years ago

Why is it that so many of the PhDs and MDs out there are unable to tell when someone's lying to them about their very own areas of expertise?

I'd wager that they can actually tell. They just choose to accept it, or, at least, not to do anything about it.

I see it in my own field (software engineering). Sometimes pushing against lies and stupidity is just too hard and tiring.

PaulKeeble• 2 years ago

The standard of evidence in medicine research generally is really poor. Most of the papers have serious problems and reach to conclusions they can not defend. Worse is huge areas of medical research are full of fraudulent research, almost all of Psychology and Psychiatry is atrociously low quality studies and they rarely replicate even then. There is widespread corruption around the sale and adoption of treatments and the entire system of peer review and journal acceptance is almost exclusively based on the authority of the main author and not on the value of the paper.

In short medical research is nothing like Physics or other science papers and endeavours its evidence base for most of what it already does is often severely lacking.

tmaly• 2 years ago

This seems more like an institutional failure more than anything.

I recall there was a discussion on HN a few years back about the Alzheimer plaque connection being established on fake data.

glitchc• 2 years ago

Scientific fraud or medical fraud? Are we tarring all of science because of fraud in one sub-field (medicione)? How about social science fraud, where poor economic policies can cause millions to starve?

Before I get pilloried for whataboutism, all I'm trying to illustrate is that the title is a hyberbole. Fraud in medical research is definitely a problem leading to serious consequences for patients everywhere. Let's just call it what it is.

g42gregory• 2 years ago

Have anybody thought about asking the same questions about COVID-19 prevention and treatment research?

leoc• 2 years ago

Compare the 2011-14 L'Aquila earthquake trials, when Nature magazine and most of the I-love-science claque rallied behind the scientists who gave incorrect reassurances to L'Aquila residents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_L%27Aquila_earthquake#Pro... . Is it that the facts are very different in this case, or it more that attitudes have shifted since then?

jbandela1• 2 years ago

What is really interesting is looking at the meta analysis cited in the Vox article:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3932762/

This reaches the conclusion that beta blockers are harmful. However, if you look at the meat analysis, specifically figure 2, you find that the conclusion is mainly driven by a single trial - the 2008 POISE trial.

If you go to the POISE trial: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

You find that they discovered fraud in at least some of the hospitals:

" Concern was raised during central data consistency checks about 752 participants at six hospitals in Iran coordinated by one centre and 195 participants associated with one research assistant in three of 11 hospitals in Colombia. On-site auditing of these hospitals and cases indicated that fraudulent activity had occurred. Before the trial was concluded, the operations committee—blinded to the trial results at these hospitals and overall—decided to exclude these data (webappendix 1). "

We have an important question - should pre-op patients be given beta blockers - and the largest, most definitive trials to answer that question have at least some taint of fraud.

casey22• 2 years ago

Yes the people setting guidelines based on non-reproducible or unreproduced studies should be held accountable. But they are part of the same power structure that makes laws, so don't hold your breath.

Literally anybody can write bullshit and anybody with some cash or connections can get it published, deciding to make it a medical guideline because the text and it's metadata looks a certain way is basically as competent as just using ChatGPT.

BrandoElFollito• 2 years ago

A close friend of mine was doing her PhD in nutrition (in Germany). She asked me to have a look at the math (statistics) and it was a monstrosity.

I told her that I cannot read that further because she either won't get her PhD or I will be morally wounded.

She asked me for some examples of errors and to each of them she was saying, with evidence, that this is what "everyone does".

This was nutrition, something that is at least to some extend innate so there won't be disasters (I hope). The same thing with pharma is a disaster hanging by a thread.

just_some_guy_2• 2 years ago

Suggestions:

1) Any research institutions that receive government funding are required to spent 10% (or 15% or 20% or whatever) of their total budget on replication. If they don't, they stop receiving any government funding.

2) When citing a paper scientists are required to include any replication studies, both successful and not successful.

This would hopefully lead to more replication studies being done, even if it doesn't answer the question of what to do with a study until it's been replicated sufficiently.

The second part would help us guess the validity of a paper. Papers that base their central premise on studies with multiple independent replication would probably be a bit more trustful than papers based on unverified studies.

fungiblecog• 2 years ago

This is a drop in the bucket. The real crime is rich corporations using “science” to enrich themselves. Examples: denying that smoking causes cancer. Demonising fat while promoting excess sugar in processed food, and look at how many organisations are denying man-made climate change…

The staggering death toll of scientific lies

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