An excellent reminder by Dr Malcolm Kendrick of the bias and statistical failings in medical research
A blog written 28th June 2021 – for full text click on the link below.
Or copy this link: https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2021/06/28/covid19-the-final-nail-in-coffin-of-medical-research/
“The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”
Edward Grey
Several years ago, I wrote a book called Doctoring Data. It was my attempt to help people navigate their way through medical headlines and medical data.
One of the main reasons I was stimulated to write it, is because I had become deeply concerned that science, especially medical science, had been almost fully taken over by commercial interests. With the end result that much of the data we were getting bombarded with was enormously biased, and thus corrupted. I wanted to show how some of this bias gets built in.
I was not alone in my concerns. As far back as 2005, John Ioannidis wrote the very highly cited paper ‘Why most Published Research Findings are False’. It has been downloaded and read by many, many, thousands of researchers over the years, so they can’t say they don’t know:
‘Moreover for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.’1
For continuation of Dr Kendrick’s article, click on this link below:
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2021/06/28/covid19-the-final-nail-in-coffin-of-medical-research/
BMJ: “The Illusion of Evidence Based Medicine”
The online British Medical Journal has just published a piece, as titled above, which follows along similar lines to Dr Kendrick’s article. Below is a quote fro the start, and the PDF can be ready in the window following, and downloadable.
Evidence based medicine has been corrupted by corporate interests, failed regulation, and commercialisation of academia, argue these authors.
The advent of evidence based medicine was a paradigm shift intended to provide a solid scientific foundation for medicine. The validity of this new paradigm, however, depends on reliable data from clinical trials, most of which are conducted by the pharmaceutical industry and reported in the names of senior academics. The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented.1234 Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion…