Medical Researchers, Historians, and Getting it Wrong

by Liberty and Power

It looks like the track record of medical researchers is little better than historians:

New research highlights a frustrating fact about science: What was good for you yesterday frequently will turn out to be not so great tomorrow.
The sobering conclusion came in a review of major studies published in three influential medical journals between 1990 and 2003, including 45 highly publicized studies that initially claimed a drug or other treatment worked.
Subsequent research contradicted results of seven studies -- 16 percent -- and reported weaker results for seven others, an additional 16 percent.
That means nearly one-third of the original results did not hold up, according to the report in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

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Max Swing - 7/16/2005

I don't wanna argue that spezialisation has no use (since I study mechanical engineering, it'd be stupid ;)), but high specialisation has a trend towards such problems as if a report is scientific. If different scientists have no knowledge (or limited knowledge) about any other scientific topic except their own, they tend to crowed together. The scientific process of cross-examination and debate is cut short, because the few who work in these areas are ivory tower groups that would claim no other group can review their work, because they lack the science.
Thereby we have several hives that nurture themselves and only by accident or due to studies that suddenly come to a contradictory result (perhaps from a closely related field) prove that some of the research is not so scientifically sound.
However, this will be disputed by the mastermind of the specialised field, because only they can know the truth due to their education and expertise.

A recent example is the debate about the hockey-stick. It is not waged seriously, because the critic is not a climate scientist but a economic mathematic. He is disregarded, because he comes from a different field that has nothing to do with the chemistry or biology behind the climate science. Instead, Mr McKitrik and McIntyre did criticize the algorhythms that power the computer models (something those economists understand).

I think this is the kind of openess that the scientific community has lost, perhaps a bit due to specialisation and the emphasis on this.

Sheldon Richman - 7/15/2005

My hunch is that the cholesterol myth will fall before long. The official stats are not persuasive.