Evidence: Flawed Medical Research Has Led to False Treatments that Contribute to High Health Care Costs Says Chief of Stanford Prevention Research Center in Stanford Magazine : Imagine Then What it is Like in the Soft Sciences!

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".