Questioning the Results of Medical Research

By TARA PARKER-POPE, October 18, 2010, 12:21 pm

This week The Atlantic wonders if we should all be more skeptical of medical research. The magazine focuses on Dr. John Ioannidis, a Greek researcher who has spent his career “challenging his peers by exposing their bad science.”

He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies — conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain — is misleading, exaggerated and often flat-out wrong.

He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change — or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.

Read the full article, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/questioning-the-results-of-medical-research/

http://bionutritionalresearch.olhblogspace.com/

http://back2basicnutrition.com/