Comments on: Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

By: WereTaco

WereTaco — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 20:02:41 +0000

I’m not sure why this is surprising information, just about any entity ( an organization, a complex collection of cells that is you, etc ) STRIVES for survival. Any information that will help is greatly reveled in, any information that will hinder is looked down upon. Bring your boss some information that will hinder the company you work for and see what happens.

This is why the larger an organization gets, the more important it becomes to be skeptical about the veracity of claims that it makes

By: roz

roz — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 15:16:47 +0000

damn skippy. even a dozen studies cant prove everything.

so what’s the answer? keep studying, i guess…

and have a merrie samhain!

By: NTS

NTS — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 09:59:49 +0000

What drug companies are doing, which is often ignored, is spending billions of dollars surpressing ‘non-pharamaceutical’ evidence. Acupuncture for example could hapily replace a lot of first line analgesics and be as efficacious. The same is true for hypertension. I’m not an acupuncturtist but keep a keen analytical eye on the evidence. A simple search of sciencedirect will lead you in the right direction.

By: Graham Bidhop

Graham Bidhop — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 09:49:24 +0000

For the best visualisation and interactive tool exploring how proven and poular different health giving (or nit as thevdase often is) substances are go to
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snake-oil-supplements/ and click on SnakeOil
Utter genius.
It now sites all the medical reports used to comp lie it too.
Graham Bishop

By: Paul Crowley

Paul Crowley — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 09:15:44 +0000

WARNING: THIS DOES NOT SUPPORT YOUR PET THEORY!

Ioannidis’s work shows that any particular novel result in only one paper tends to be wrong. His work is not really about well-established, well replicated results, such as that vaccines don’t cause autism. These results show that there are many problems with the way that science is conducted, but scientific consensus is still by and large your best guide to the truth, not because it’s perfect but because every other method has worse problems.

There are lots of good blog entries on scienceblogs.com that help to put this work in context. See in particular http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/09/the_cranks_pile_on_john_ioannidis_work_o.php