We have been writing about
defects in academic research
as long as we can remember and now we can add generally flawed medical
research to our list, as reported by Joan O'Connor Hamilton in the
newest issue of
Stanford Magazine - May/June 2012.
O'Connor discusses inter alia the findings of the Chief of the
Stanford Prevention Research Center, epidemiologist John P.A. Ioannidis,
who says that one of the great contributors to excessively high
healthcare costs are treatments which doctors prescribe that are based
on flawed medical research.
Ioannidis has specialized in trying to reproduce past research
results by others and has found that "
for most designs and settings, it
is more likely for a research claim to be false than true.... Many
standards of care are never tested."
His result confirms what we have found to be true in the
mainstream theories of many of the humanities, which are conducted
according to schools of thought that are demonstrably false in many of
their basic assertions, and that rely on faulty research and faulty
conclusions drawn on less than probative evidence about the subjects
under study.
If medical research, for which billions are spent, is this
flawed, just imagine what the situation is like in the "soft sciences".