Around 70 percent of all medical science trials are faked.
As he described in a webinar last week, Ian Roberts, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, began to have doubts about the honest reporting of trials after a colleague asked if he knew that his systematic review showing the mannitol halved death from head injury was based on trials that had never happened. He didn’t, but he set about investigating the trials and confirmed that they hadn’t ever happened. They all had a lead author who purported to come from an institution that didn’t exist and who killed himself a few years later. The trials were all published in prestigious neurosurgery journals and had multiple co-authors. None of the co-authors had contributed patients to the trials, and some didn’t know that they were co-authors until after the trials were published. When Roberts contacted one of the journals the editor responded that “I wouldn’t trust the data.” Why, Roberts wondered, did he publish the trial? None of the trials have been retracted.
Later Roberts, who headed one of the Cochrane groups, did a systematic review of colloids versus crystalloids only to discover again that many of the trials that were included in the review could not be trusted…
Mol, like Roberts, has conducted systematic reviews only to realise that most of the trials included either were zombie trials that were fatally flawed or were untrustworthy. What, he asked, is the scale of the problem? Although retractions are increasing, only about 0.04% of biomedical studies have been retracted, suggesting the problem is small. But the anaesthetist John Carlisle analysed 526 trials submitted to Anaesthesia and found that 73 (14%) had false data, and 43 (8%) he categorised as zombie. When he was able to examine individual patient data in 153 studies, 67 (44%) had untrustworthy data and 40 (26%) were zombie trials.
So much for the “studies show” rhetoric. Karl Denninger is, as you might expect, taking a calm and measured approach to the news.
Our government has run a scam shop for the last couple of decades. Everyone seems to consider this is just a “cost of doing business” and that somehow, this is a monetary thing mostly or even only. No its not — not even in the main. Oh sure, you get screwed out of thousands per-person every year in the medical field through their monopolistic and other price-fixing practices, all of which under 15 USC Chapter 1 are felonies, but the monetary harm to your wallet is trivial in comparison to years of life lost or even your immediate disability or death.
Should we consider all medical advice and “studies” to be frauds until proved otherwise?
Yes.
We should have decades ago.
The convergence of science and medicine is rending both completely unfit for purpose and unable to perform their primary functions.
