3 replies to this topic

[littlePawn]

My once great enthusiasm with modern science has diminished ever since noticing a predictable pattern in almost all biological research. Substance X shows promising preliminary findings, a multitude of further studies support substance X, some studies don't support it. A meta-analysis then examines the materials & methods and concludes most trials were poorly conducted. Further investigation concludes research into substance X was funded indirectly via companies (which will often not appear in Conflicts of Interest sections), and 10 years later, Substance X has lost the hype in place of Substance Y, which will repeat the process.

 

It got me questioning, with so many meta-analyses and review studies demonstrating that the majority of published journal articles in reputable journals are not replicable, and the findings made are often incorrect, are there any studies to see if scientists can even get the basic methodology itself right?

 

What I mean is, a triple blind, cross-over, placebo controlled study, but this time instead of a new drug to compare the placebo pill to, we have the identical placebo pill itself in a different colour. The researchers are told that it's an active ingredient when it's not. This study will tell us which scientists can even get the basic methodology right before we should take their future research seriously.

 

Do any such studies exist? If not, why not? This surely seems to be a pertinent issue given the poor methodology and lack of replication that is apparent in most research.

[niner]

I've never heard of such a study being done.  That's probably because it would be very expensive for an experiment that was sure to not produce something that could some day make a profit.   It would have to be staffed with people who had no particular interest in the outcome, unless you wanted to introduce a bias by telling them that if the results are good, they could make a ton of money.  I guess that would be a lot like most drug trials... hmm.  OTOH, some very large trials are run after drugs are on the market, and they are run by academic clinicians who usually don't have a major conflict of interest.  These are the large multi-center trials usually aimed at figuring out if a particular therapeutic regime actually does any good.

 

You sound pretty pessimistic about science in general.  It's not all rotten.  A lot of good work does get done.  A large part of the problem here is that medicine is just messy as hell.  It's really hard to get it right.

 

Edited by niner, 29 September 2015 - 03:05 AM.

[littlePawn]

That sounds right and I've noticed that. Whilst scientists most likely won't fabricate results, some will be more inclined to leave out negatives and investigate the positives if they will receive future funding for a positive result. Then when a large independent organization conducts its reviews the bias is found. Actually I wanted to get a degree in biology and into research with no career aspects, just a genuine pursuit of contributing to an aging cure at personal expense, but noticed the hidden bias funding could introduce and questioned how much real research could be done. The funny thing is any of us, if we had the capital, could launch a company and recruit career scientists and it would be a ticket to any new lucrative supplement with evidence to support it, and we could profit from it. Even if it didn't contain anything useful.

 

Actually you're right I do sound pessimistic, but it's more a search for reality than anything. I'm secretly hoping someone can rip me apart and show how wrong and uniformed I am, no matter what my counter-arguments would be, so that I can learn from that and proceed forward with finding ways we can extend our lifespan. But so far my view of reality is as above, a lot of special interests and biased research tainting a discovery of truth, creating false-hope and cashing in on it. If anything it's made me realize how much money can be had from it with the right business plan, but ethics enters into it as well.

 

Medicine is definitely messy as hell, no doubt most of it is great and essential, especially emergency care, but a lot of long-term treatment I'm not so sure about. Outside of that such as in physics, math, chemistry, the problem seems less endemic but I'm not familiar with those topics so much so don't know. So how do we fix the problem and move forward? Well if this view of reality is indeed correct, perhaps a donation could be set up for a fund to create a website/foundation where scientists are ranked based upon their lifelong career in accuracy. Say a scientist publishes a paper in a new, innovative field of research and a few years later it's confirmed with larger-scale replicated findings. Such a scientist could receive something akin to "Page Rank" in Google and appear at the top of his/her peers, receive crowd-sourced and charitable funding, to conduct further research, rather than relying on the current labrynth of references and news articles picking apart the good from the less effective.

 

Edited by littlePawn, 29 September 2015 - 05:04 AM.

[Adamzski]

Old thread but I am really interested in placebos these days.

 

This documentary has a few triple blind studies https://ihavenotv.co...ature-of-things

 

They even did a (from memory) arthritis operation where the knee is opened and scraped, 1/3 real procedure, 1/3 opened and washed and 1/3 sedated cut and shown a video on the monitor of the procedure. Identical results for all groups.