Science has lost its way, at a big cost to humanity

[bemildred]

Edit: Xposted in Good Reads.

In today's world, brimful as it is with opinion and falsehoods masquerading as facts, you'd think the one place you can depend on for verifiable facts is science.

You'd be wrong. Many billions of dollars' worth of wrong.

A few years ago, scientists at the Thousand Oaks biotech firm Amgen set out to double-check the results of 53 landmark papers in their fields of cancer research and blood biology.

The idea was to make sure that research on which Amgen was spending millions of development dollars still held up. They figured that a few of the studies would fail the test — that the original results couldn't be reproduced because the findings were especially novel or described fresh therapeutic approaches.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20131027,0,1228881.column

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Interesting this is almost entirely medically-relevant research ...

many in the hard sciences regard medicine to be akin to witchcraft, as regards the firmness of its foundations. And of course, medicine = big $$$, which distorts motives.

I don't see any similar crisis brewing in the physical sciences, or mathematics.

[bemildred]

2. It is everywhere except the physical sciences, and they make mistakes too.

I mean: I don't want to single out health care, by any means, they are relatively sincere, for one thing, and generally really do want to help, for another, and sometimes do know what they are talking about for a third. You can't say that about a lot of other parties this is quite relevant to.

[intaglio]

3. What is interesting is that it is a study of the data submitted with the papers

not re-doing the experiments.

What is supposed to happen is that other researchers carry out similar, better designed experiments and verify in that manner. One famous experiment was Millikan's measurement of the charge on the electron (the oil drop experiment) where Millikan discarded large numbers of results for no good reason. But other experimentalists were able to carry out other tests. As it happened Millikan happened to be correct but, by the test used by Amigen, then this foundational paper would be too flawed.

[bemildred]

4. This was a lot cheaper to do though I'd guess.

You point about the different ways in which one can not know what one is talking about is well taken. Data fudging is quite common. You can't throw out a good smooth curve fit just because of a few "outliers", you must be basically right ...

I remember when I was working in software, and I had some nitwit manager talking about "software anomalies" (bugs) as though they were strange aberrations. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

[HuckleB]

5. An interesting piece, still I wonder how much context it lacks.

Pilot studies are almost always "wrong." That's nothing new. It doesn't mean they're not valuable.

Are Most Medical Studies Wrong?
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/are-most-medical-studies-wrong/

Reporting Preliminary Findings
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/reporting-preliminary-findings/

Further, there is a growing movement to push for the publication of negative studies. (THANK GOODNESS!)

Negative results in medical research and clinical trials – an interview with Ben Goldacre - See more at: http://blog.f1000research.com/2013/06/10/negative-results-in-medical-research-and-clinical-trials-an-interview-with-ben-goldacre/#sthash.YvlIcx8i.dpuf

[bemildred]

6. Skepticism is good, I think that's the point of the OP.

I'm sure the NSA barn in Utah would have plenty of room to store every honest study we ever do in perpetuity, and that would be my first approximation for what is wanted.


You are likely better qualified than I to address what ought or ought not be saved in biomedical research. Certainly all negative studies ought not be thrown out, negative results are just as significant as positive ones, it is correctness that matters.

[HuckleB]

7. To a point.

I think the article in the OP ignores far too much, however.

[bemildred]

8. People do disagree.

That why I like empiricism. It's less subjective.

[HuckleB]

10. Yes, and I'd certainly disagree about your claim here.

[bemildred]

11. I know you do. nt

[bemildred]

9. To be clear:

1.) I think there is a real and egregious problem here. And it's not just medicine, by any means.
2.) I think the OP is just trying to point it out in a way that will get people to pay attention to it.

[hedgehog]

12. I've often thought that a lot of research is flawed due to poorly designed experiments.

For example, IIRC, it wasn't until dosages of Vitamin D were raised from 400IU to 2000IU that significant results were found. The level of 400IU was sufficient to prevent rickets, but at 2000IU dozens of other healthful benefits were observed. So any research based on a dosage of 400 IU would have found no benefit from Vitamin D for that particular factor.

Again, there is a study commonly used to prove that glucosamine is not effective for joint pain from osteoarthritis

http://www.arthritistoday.org/news/glucosamine-chondroitin-ineffective.php


But, if you read the actual results, there are hints that glucosomine is effective for people with higher pain levels.

http://nccam.nih.gov/research/results/gait

It's possible that glucosmine is effective, but not in the dosages used in the NIH studies.

Offhand, I can't recall any specific study, but I have seen studies that clearly failed to take into account specific variables- stuff along the lines of some people with condition A have low levels of hormone Z, so let's see what happens when people with condition A receive supplements of Hormone Z. The problem is, while everyone in the study meets criteria for condition A, no measurements are made to determine how many in the study, if any, have a deficit of hormone Z. All that is reported is that each person was given so much Hormone Z, and the results were variable!

[bemildred]

13. That is a different can of worms, to me anyway, but yeah.

It's hard to see outside the box when you live in the box, and the box is all the things you think you know, some of which are no doubt ludicrous, no matter who you are.

Hypotheses are easy to make up, common as dirt, plausible is a much bigger set than true. Good hypotheses look like nothing at first, but they grow on you when you think about them. Aha!

In fairness WRT the OP, it appears there we are dealing with situations where there is little or nothing to go on, where they just trying things. And again to be fair, it appears to me we are still very much in the data gathering stage of the development of our understanding of our biology, that we really lack the information still to truly understand how things work in much detail, so that sort of procedure is not an unreasonable way to proceed.

And I quite agree with saving all the data and results, it costs little and can pay off big. And a lot more public funding for research would fix some of this too.

[truedelphi]

15. Fifty years ago, public funding would have helped. But now a days, the

Ubiquitous revolving door between industry and government means that public funds would be utilized by those approved of by the government officials who were selected by Big Corporations to do the approving.

[bemildred]

17. Yeah, it's like the normal career path now.

Aristocrats circulating back and forth between their fiefdoms and the Royal Court.

[AtheistCrusader]

43. Major issue there.

And it's lot limited to food/agra/medicine either. This is how MMS stood back and watched Deepwater Horizon crap up the Gulf. It was a revolving door, rather than a watchdog.

Hopefully the re-formation of it under a new department will help. At least for a time...

[truedelphi]

14. Thank you for posting this.

Few Americans realize that the US concept of science doesn't even promote the necessity of following international protocols in terms of how to do a study, select date, or any of the rest of it.

Scientists in other nations laugh themselves silly when they hear that we Americans are assured by our government as to the safety of this or that.

It is nice to know that Amgen wanted to take a second look at their researchers' findings.

[bemildred]

16. Thank you. As I said, it's a pet peeve of mine.

Yeah, actually, I give them credit for that too.

[truedelphi]

18. What I think about quite often:

Back in the nineteen seventies, we still had real scientists performing real science.

Now we have a ubiquitous revolving door between industry, university and governmental positions. Rarely do American researchers use the International Protocols that define science for researchers in other nations. (If we used those protocols, things would not be so economically rosy for industries like the vaccine industry, or for pesticide manufacturers, or for our pharmaceutical firms.)

When it is announced in the US Mainstream media, that such and such is safe, scientists in foreign countries laugh themselves silly. Is Gm food or Gm seed safe? Why yes, because Mike Taylor proclaimed it to be so! (Circa Clinton era.) Not since the Holy Roman Catholic Church existed to rule medieval Europe have we watched a whole segment of human beings fall into a dark age of "proclamations" making up what passes for and is accepted as, science.

When a "new study" concerning vaccinations came out, and substituted the toxin known as formaldehyde for the toxin known as mercury, it was found that children still became autistic. So how was the result of this study announced, so as to spin it for the best possible result for Big Pharma? Why, the headlines read: Mercury PROVEN "not connected or involved" in being the source of children's autism.

When the massive radiation from Fukushima impacted the Western shores of the USA, how did our government respond under science-enthusiast Obama? He shut down the EPA monitoring stations. Later on, when the same radiation blanketed our food supply, the EPA raised the levels of radiation deemed to be dangerous for public consumption. That way, the radiation-contaminated foods could still be purchased and ingested.

After all, we are number one. WE ARE NUMBER ONE! Yeah! USA!

We rank Number One especially in how many people per capita are incarcerated, and how much money we spend on the military. In fact, we spend more on the military than the next 126 nations in the world combined! And remember, every dollar spent on the military is a dollar less available for classrooms, where people would be learning about statistics, scientific protocols, and about how to determine if the headlines really mean what they say...

[reACTIONary]

20. Question: what International Protocols?

I'm not a scientist, but I work in a scientific environment, though not related to health. I've never heard of international protocols specific to science. I did a few google searches but didn't come up with anything. I'm wondering what these international protocols are. Do you have a reference link or an explanation? I'd appreciate it.

[truedelphi]

44. Okay,

First, the Protocol is hard to locate on Google because we use English and the Protocols tend to be replicated over the internet in the language of whatever country the scientist is in. So in France, maybe the term to look for would be "Protocole International," etc.

One of the main provisions of the International Protocol happens to be that the
"ludicrous" factor is not allowed. My "mercury replaced by formaldehyde" study I keep referring to in this forum is one example. A study done overseas has to be logically meaningful. If the parameters are nonsensical, the study is not allowed.

The cherry picking of data, so pervasive inside US research labs, is not allowed. So we have these big American companies that are doing studies to prove their pesticide is "safe" and they simply toss out data that would cause some amount of concern over the product's safety. That is not just frowned on overseas - it ends up costing a company found guilty of doing this some huge fines.

The American companies don't even abide by the terms of US Code rules and coda regarding ethics and data participants. Remember a few years back (maybe ten years ago?) when Sen Barbara Boxer went on a full scale attack as she had found out that a company in Florida was offering video cam recorders to families willing to have their living quarters sprayed with their "safe" products. Then all the people had to do wa to record the health of their children over a two year time period. Since chem components found in insecticides are often carcinogenic, and such chems don't cause the cancer for many years, the company doing this thought they'd get away with it, and perhaps they would have, but anti-pesticide activists called the Senator's office and she got the practice to stop.

One last comment: in most foreign countries, when a product is to be evaluated by the government, it is actual governmental researchers that evaluate the product. It is not possible for Monsanto to tell some governmental agency in another country what is or isn't in the product. The nation's alb does a gas spectrometry evaluation of the product and doesn't allow the company to make up what it wants to tell the government.

[bemildred]

46. +1. nt

[AtheistCrusader]

21. Some of that is ok, but the mercury in vaccines still isn't linked to Autism.

Autism rates still rise even though mercury has been removed from some of them entirely.

[bemildred]

23. I will comment.

The problem is not what we don't know, the problem is what we think we know that is wrong or simpliifed too much.

I have long since lost track of the things I have been told I must do for my health which I have not done and was later told I do not have to do after all. And my health is excellent (for my age). To balance that I can think of two occasions when I have been more dilatory than was wise about seeking medical help. (As an aside, on one of those occasions, my wife talked me into seeing a chinese herbalist, and boy was that a mistake, I am not a fan of "alternative medicine" either, what I am really a fan of is de-commercialized medicine, non-profit medicine, Doctors with salaries, not the little tin God model of authoritarian medicine we are so fond of here.)

We don't know what causes autism. That's the truth. And we should, therefore, be circumspect, cautious, and open-minded about it.

[CanSocDem]

24. Good points.

To be fair, do we 'really' know what causes any disease? As a free market society, we set up institutions and industries that produce profit above everything else.

The Health Industry is a free-market "honey-hole". Human nature is such that the self goes through ups and downs as a matter of course or day-to-day living. The Health Industry gets to define, label and treat these "ups and downs" for the sole purpose of making a profit. And they see pretty much everybody as a customer.

"...what I am really a fan of is de-commercialized medicine, non-profit medicine, Doctors with salaries..."

What I'd like is a stress free society. No need for a "health" industry.

.

[bemildred]

25. Thank you. It is certainly true that we are less healthy than we could be.

Especially given the resources we have been able to apply. For many reasons, to be sure, but if you want an easy point of leverage on the problem, I don't see how you can better stress reduction.

My point is that profit as a motive is fundamentally incompatible with scientific objectivity. I like Louis Agazziz' comment: I don't have time to waste making money.

[AtheistCrusader]

27. We know what causes HIV.

We know what causes Glaucoma and Alzheimer's. (Both are mis-folded proteins, and the two diseases are actually closely related. Glaucoma is basically Alzheimer's of the eye.)

The tricky part is in discovering a cure that is not worse or equal to the damage caused by the problem.

http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20120101160

Better understanding of the cause can at least help people make lifestyle changes that might prevent the disease arising, in some cases. (but not all)

Same with HIV. We can prevent transmission with certain behavioral changes. There are also trials for vaccines that can potentially halt new infections. An amazing landmark.

We know what causes a lot of things, but scientific discovery/medical science is a process, not a fixed destination.

[CanSocDem]

34. That's good news about Glaucoma...

The cannabis I am using to treat the glaucoma (I am convinced I suffer from) will, as non-sanctioned studies have shown, stave off Alzheimer's.

Which is the point of the OP. Financial interests steer the course of the health industry and end up preventing actual cures. About the best that can be said of the medical industry is that they sometimes stumble across something that works in a large number of people. Everybody is a potential customer so money is spent on advertising and public relations and not, as the article suggests, on honest research.

Kudo's to med-science for discovering indiscriminate lifestyles are bad for your health. I grew up suspecting that...

To me science is like a religion...it knows where it's going and it can't wait to get there.

.

[AtheistCrusader]

41. I'm not surprised it works for that.

And some of that seems to be blood pressure related as well. I recall reading that power-lifters are more susceptible to glaucoma as a result of what they do, via increases in blood pressure.

I don't smoke now, but when I hit retirement age, I figure (unless we discover something really useful in the next 30 years that obviates it) I might as well take up that activity as a preventative measure.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

37. What I'd like is a real Health Industry, not the Disease Industry we have

The Disease Industry caters to every little fluctuation that people have and creates lots of hypochondriacs who don't take care of the basic issues in their lives.

Got the sniffles? Take a pill! Forget about keeping warm and drinking lots of fluid. Mask the symptoms and run yourself ragged not giving the body a chance to heal.

Got a mild headache? Take a pain reliever and don't attend to the underlying dehydration (or whatever it might be).

Got a pulled muscle? Take a pill and feel no pain! That way you can re-injure the muscle repeatedly and prevent it from healing properly.

Then people get in the habit of taking pills for this and that and everything. Meanwhile they smoke, eat, drink, and laze around to excess.

People need to be more pro-active about health and resist the urge to make every little ache / pain / inconvenience go away. Paradoxically, this means getting more in touch with our own bodies, knowing them better, and being more knowledgeable about our treatments and preventive medicine, especially nutrition and lifestyle.

Most health care costs are engendered in the last weeks of life because we have a Health Insurance Economy and not a Health Economy (Health Assurance) If there really was a Health Industry, then more of those costs would be expended in the early and mid-life resulting in much higher quality of life for much longer which would be a net reduction in health care costs per year.

Let's have Health Assurance, not Health Insurance.

[AtheistCrusader]

42. Totally with you on the masking of symptoms.

Some of those symptoms are beneficial autoimmune responses. Suppressing them removes a tool from your body's toolkit to deal with whatever the problem is.

That seems like a bad idea for the sake of a little comfort.

[AtheistCrusader]

26. Your comment also, I would think, at applies to the poster upthread as well.

That poster has made some apparent conclusions linking alleged causes to potential effects.

If I might speculate for a moment, there has been a recent discovery of a correlation between a condition during pregnancy, and autism.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/813567

Keep in mind, it is not suggesting the mothers are at fault for gaining weight, but that possibly the weight gain is a correlation/indicator for a deeper problem that is responsible for both problems.

If the correlation is established that early in the pregnancy, the only possible link vaccines could have, is whatever vaccinations the mother may have had during or prior to pregnancy. (Not yet studied)

[bemildred]

29. I will be very surprised if autism does not prove to be multi-causal.

With multi- being a large rather than small number. If it was simple we would have got somewhere. This is true for a lot of our more obstinate problems. They are not really one problem, they are a common effect of many causal factors.

People who oppose GMO or vaccines dogmatically are nuts. It is important research, the future of man depends on it.

People who push early adoption of GMO and novel medical treatments are nuts. There is no hurry and the risks are huge.

I avoid dealing in personalities here, it wastes your time and accomplishes nothing.

[truedelphi]

36. The only reason that mercury in autism is still not linked to mercury is

because of the very sloppiness of the study that was used as the "definitive proof" that mercury was not the autism culprit.

Again, I will echo Bemildred's statement of the idea that autism will probably prove to be multi-causal.

But when an American researcher(s) looks at the data supplied from the past histories of children who were vaccinated with vaccines containing mercury, and then compares that data with data gleaned from children whose vaccines contained formaldehyde, a compound almost as dangerous as mercury, as the substitute for the mercury, and that is considered science, I'd be willing to say, "Houston, we have a problem."

Yet that sort of study occurs all the time. Another example of such a ludicrous research set up is when researchers were trying to prove that lots of sugar in a diet has no relationship to children behaving "on a sugar high." So the children had their diets restricted in terms of actual sugar, but were fed cookies that contained either HFCS, or sugar itself, and then the result of that study was used to say that sugar doesn't alter children's behavior.

[AtheistCrusader]

38. Formaldehyde is natural in your foods.

Your body breaks methanol, something you get out of most ripe fruits all the time, down into formaldehyde. It's present in your blood, whether you get a tiny amount of it from a vaccine or not. Pectin methyl-esterase produces it in the fruit as it ripens. You uptake that from your food.

So I don't buy that consuming a tiny bit of it in the form of a subcue injection is 'almost as dangerous' as mercury. Otherwise, we'd be wrong to eat organic apples too.

As for mercury, you uptake a fair amount of that heavy metal from your food as well. Do you let your child eat tuna or salmon? I do. Not every night, because I do keep that stuff in mind, but everything in moderation.

But now we have post-mercury variants of these vaccines. You only get the Thimerosal version if you are getting it from a multi-dose vial, iirc.

Yet, rates appear to be unchanged...

I agree, likely multiple causal vectors. It might turn out that mercury is related, maybe primarily from our diet, and aggravated in some cases by the dose in a vaccine, but I tend to doubt the vaccines just based on the dosages involved. It seems so incredibly tiny...

[truedelphi]

39. Sitting here quite grateful as that as of today's date no one like you is

Employed on the California Commission that oversees the Prop 65 selection of harmful toxins.

[AtheistCrusader]

40. I'm a skeptic, no matter what issue you hand me.

It's a character flaw.

But seriously, you eat methanol, which your body metabolizes into formaldehyde every time you chow down on the most organic piece of fruit you can find. (Well, most fruits anyway.)

It's how our bodies work.

Now, I don't normally directly ingest formaldehyde just for grins, but I also don't want a flu shot that might be harboring some huge dose of living bacteria either, so I weigh the risks.

I'm open to studies that prove the assumptions I make, wrong.

[bemildred]

45. +1. nt

[Bernardo de La Paz]

19. The standards for research & science are much higher now than when the original research was done.nt

[bemildred]

22. Bullshit. nt

[AtheistCrusader]

28. There may have also been financial incentive for the failed earlier studies.

Always a problem, which peer review is required to combat.

Peer review has its shortcomings as well.

[bemildred]

30. I was educated in the 60s, I don't have to research it.

I've seen it and seen the effects too. I know it's bullshit. I see the bullshittiness of it permeating our culture.

Your point about money is well-taken too. I have seen some interesting debates on that lately.

Peer review is like the jury system, it's meant to be an obstacle.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

31. Ok, that's all you got.

Standards are higher. Scientists are better trained. Science is more competitive now. Publications have higher standards. Experiments have to pass ethical reviews that they didn't have to 50 years ago. Requirements for statistical significance are higher. Experimental design is more rigorous.

You got nothing.

[bemildred]

32. Good argument. nt

[Bernardo de La Paz]

33. Thank you. nt

[HuckleB]

35. And they continue to become more stringent over time.

There is no replacement system for discovery.