Scientific Research Emphasis: Short-Term Crises Or Long-Term Epidemics?

"It is counter-productive and short-sighted to be chasing and funding each new disease whenever fear strikes society, without regard to the bigger picture. We need a way to allocate research funding for health based on the importance of the disease."

We need a more scientific approach to funding scientific research.

How To Interpret The Results Of Animal Studies

“When people do studies in animals, you pay attention to them, but you don’t make any policy or any other conclusions related to that until you do good epidemiological observation in the human system.”

Don’t Make Policy Based on Animal Studies 

Drug Industry And Regulators Do Need To Do Better

"Drug companies have only to show that their medication has a statistically significant advantage when compared to placebo. The FDA and EMA don’t require that the med achieve what is ever so much more important- clinically relevant improvement as evidenced by patients actually also feeling and doing better when taking the drug. Small statistical blips are all it takes to get a drug approved."

Many Commonly Used Drugs Are Useless

Testing The Limits Of Research Ethics

"If you are concerned about CRISPR—the gene-editing tool currently being used to treat cancer and augment a variety of organisms—then you are going to love the government's decision to lift a ban on experiments to create animal embryos with human stem cells, making them partly human."

Feds to Approve Research With Part-Human, Part-Animal Embryos

Problems Within Social Sciences

"If we want social science to matter, we need to be much more thoughtful about the questions we ask, the infrastructures we build, and the incentives that we accept and promote. In essence, we need to be accountable for the privilege we have to pursue knowledge. And with that privilege, we need to stop lamenting how the public doesn’t understand or respect our work and start using our social-scientific knowledge to truly understand and appreciate why."

Why Social Science Risks Irrelevance

Removing Fraud From Scientific Research

"For science, the challenge is to acknowledge the problem of fraud, understand the profiles and motives of the people who engage in it, take assertive steps to discourage it, and take active measures to reinstitute a culture of scholarly integrity."

When scientists lie

Basic Science And Research

"Basic science often provides the fertile substrate from which technological breakthroughs sprout, and seemingly unrelated and obscure research areas may intersect and synergize unexpectedly. That is why it is so vital to continue to support well-designed basic research, even in the absence of obvious benefits to society."

The Kismet of Basic Science

More Problems With Scientific Research

"We hold an idealized view that science is rarely fallible, particularly biology and medicine. Yet many fields are filled with publications of low-powered studies with perhaps the majority being wrong."

Let’s Talk About The Bad Science Being Funded

Science Is Under The Same Pressures As Many Other Disciplines

"Many scientists have had enough. They want to break this cycle of perverse incentives and rewards. They are going through a period of introspection, hopeful that the end result will yield stronger scientific institutions. In our survey and interviews, they offered a wide variety of ideas for improving the scientific process and bringing it closer to its ideal form."

The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists 

Vaping And Its Effect On Smoking Statistics

The relationship between smoking and vaping statistics may not be what you thought.

This Caused Smoking to Drop 10% in a Year; Why Isn’t the CDC Cheering?

Beware Of Psychological Studies

Psychology is a social science.  Social Science is a "soft" science, as research studies are more difficult to conduct.  Here is an example of the problem.

Does Power Really Corrupt?

The Latest Survey Will Be Misused By The Alternatives To Medicine Folks

"Any use of treatments and products that are not based on reasonable scientific evidence and plausibility is a complete waste of money, most of which is out of pocket. These treatments can also distract from actually effective treatments, or use up limited resources so that patients do not have the money for effective treatments. There is real harm to relying on nonsense for health care.

An Example Of The WHO Not Doing Its Job Well

"The World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) says it doesn’t know if coffee causes cancer or not, a switch from 1991 when the agency said it did.

Why Companies That Do Science Must Play By The Rules

"A search of the scientific literature to see how this technology works revealed a surprise: no articles could be located. This led to a Viewpoint in JAMA in February 2015 in which Theranos was used as an example to question the appropriateness of “stealth research” in biomedicine."

In a spiraling sequence, multiple authorities questioned the work of the company. 

Diet Research

Research studies in nutrition tend to make unwarranted causal conclusions from the association of two factors.

Spuds Blamed for High Blood Pressure — Really!

Polling On Use Of Alternatives To Medicine

"This Harris poll on “alternative medicine” is so terrible it is practically a pro-alternative medicine push poll. They do not define their key terms, use loaded language and false dichotomies, and use vague categories."

The biggest weakness of the poll is that it makes no attempt to define “alternative.” Does this include exercise, taking vitamins, prayer, getting a massage, or relaxation?

Tylenol And Empathy

I wonder if it was the Tylenol or would the results be the same for any pain-reliever.

When you take acetaminophen to reduce your pain, you may also be decreasing your empathy for both the physical and social aches that other people experience, a new study suggests.

Are Deaths From Medical Errors Really As Common As Recently Reported?

David Gorski looks into the research from which recent news reports were based, for example “Medical Errors Are No. 3 Cause Of U.S Deaths, Researchers Say

The counterpoint

John Oliver And Scientific Studies

The popular media needs a truckload of John Olivers.  What a bright light in the dark sea of media garbage.  This is must-viewing for all.

John Oliver discusses how and why media outlets so often report untrue or incomplete information as science.

There Is A Sucker Born - - -

"This one is so useless that it makes a Chia Pet seem like a defibrillator on a crash cart."

Chia Pet Is No Longer the World’s Dumbest Product