Medicine is plagued by untrustworthy clinical trials. How many studies are faked or flawed?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w



Investigations suggest that, in some fields, at least one-quarter of clinical trials might be problematic or even entirely made up, warn some researchers. They urge stronger scrutiny.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1681322369389056000

 

One quarter? More like 90% at least.

 

That's one of the things where AIs will be revolutionary. They will be able to analyze the entire evidence. All of it. Every paper and trial ever published, assess their reliability, find the duds, the frauds, the errors, the duplicates, and so on. In seconds. It will take more time for humans to review and digest the conclusions than it will take to do the full analysis.

Want to change some of the parameters of analysis, say how you "GRADE" the trials? Already done. Are you sure that open label trials with subjective outcomes are OK and their conclusions should be taken at face value? Because homeopathy looks convincing with those criteria, and so does a bunch of other nonsense. It won't be possible to get what is scientifically valid correctly and keep the nonsense in.

I predict that it will be absolutely brutal to "evidence-based medicine" in general, and even more so for the psychosomatic fringes that have ruined our lives. It will basically mark the entire field of biopsychosocial research as a bunch of crap that should never receive a single cent of funding again, maybe even call out our BPS overlords as basically frauds who keep doing the same stuff over and over again. Obviously with more diplomatic language.

I am very much looking forward to it. In general it will cause a lot of controversy with people unable to process that such a smart thing can be so wrong about something they are absolutely convinced of. Conspiracy theorists and people who espouse various ideologies in general. This includes psychosomatic ideologues, it will be very hard for many doctors to process this, this very same puzzlement as to why this smart thing is so wrong about something that is obviously true to them. It's not a coincidence that Internet trolls and conspiracy theorists LOVE everything about this "lol, it's just anxiety, bro"/"they're just faking it for the attention, damn malingerers get a job" stuff.

 

Merged
I noticed this piece in Nature last week which to me is yet another layer of problems, however I dithered about posting since I wondered if it was useful/helpful. Then I realised other views I always find helpful, so here goes…..https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w

 

If anyone is interested in listening to this article, it was recently Nature's "audio long read":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QLvzCr6nz4