weekend reading: 80% of medical studies are WRONG

[Spartacus]

got your attention?

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...-science/8269/

>> 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type)
>> turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard
>> randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the
>> platinum-standard large randomized trials.

Some of the worst of the worst? those

>> lead to the widespread popularity of treatments such as the use of
>> hormone-replacement therapy for menopausal women, vitamin E to
>> reduce the risk of heart disease, coronary stents to ward off heart
>> attacks, and daily low-dose aspirin to control blood pressure and
>> prevent heart attacks and stroke

Just wondering when Statins and saturated fat will be added.

And if error rates are this high in a field where your work will be checked someday, how high is the error rate among the scammers who gain legitimacy by saying "quantum !!! quantum !!! quantum !!!" ?

And all the scammers need to do is move to the next scam every couple of years, and just repeat the magic pixie dust "quantum !!! quantum !!! quantum !!!" and the gullible will again fall for it.

I personally feel great about this though (this next little piece of the Atlantic article), because by the time I was 30 I had whittled down my list of supplements to 1 (creatine monohydrate), and it's still recognized valid for my intended use. Now if we can just eliminate fish oil, I'll feel good about never having believed that stuff ...
>> How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional
>> findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.

It's the weekend, so I thought an off topic post to News wouldn't hurt too much.
And a shout out to all the insomniacs out there. Forget the visine, dudes. Real men have red eyes.

[brent217]

Re: weekend reading: 80% of medical studies are WRONG

imo protein is a good supplement for a male as well. Few of us get as much as we need in our crappy western diets.

[Master Shake]

Re: weekend reading: 80% of medical studies are WRONG

Excellent article. Thanks for posting.

[touchring]

Re: weekend reading: 80% of medical studies are WRONG

imo protein is a good supplement for a male as well. Few of us get as much as we need in our crappy western diets.

I never believed in supplements. Egg whites are a good source of protein and is cheap and easy to prepare.

Recently i read that seal and whale fat is marketed as fish oil by some unscrupulous supplement companies. A lot of food and supplement ingredients are now sourced from China, e.g. spirulina (http://www.alibaba.com/countrysearch/CN/spirulina.html), we would never know how the ingredients are prepared and whether they are adulterated or even real in the first place.

[BuckarooBanzai]

Re: weekend reading: 80% of medical studies are WRONG

Does anybody else find it curious that after beginning the article with the provocative statement that drug companies were biasing their research, the author then decided to focus the article on studies of supplements, and not on studies of patented drugs? Frankly, there is FAR more financial incentive to bias the results of a study proving that a certain patent drug "works", than on whether vitamin E "works".

More sloppy, stupid reporting from The Atlantic. Or are they trying to promote a particular agenda?

[Jay]

Re: weekend reading: 80% of medical studies are WRONG

It's good to see an article like this make mainstream publications. The more physicians are confronted with this BS the quicker some real change might be implemented.

At the heart of medicine are a lot of questions and few answers. When you find evidence that actually is legitimate you hold onto it for dear life because so much of it is crap. In my practice, it drives me nuts to talk to other doc's who are wedded to unproven, time consuming and sometimes dangerous strategies. I talked to another physician today and he wanted me to give a patient an outdated, unproven therapy that I told him was voodoo. I was chuckling when I said it and yet he lost his mind and told me he had been doing it that way for 30 years. There is not a shred of proof his practice helps patient care yet he thought I was nuts! He's probably still muttering under his breath right now.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: weekend reading: 80% of medical studies are WRONG

It's good to see an article like this make mainstream publications. The more physicians are confronted with this BS the quicker some real change might be implemented.

The sub-section "Tarnished Gold" (pps 82-90) in Chapter 4 "Limitations of Social Medicine" of the book Vitamin C: The Real Story, the Remarkable and Controversial Healing Factor, by Steve Hickey and Andrew Saul, has an excellent critique of the "Gold Standard" of medical testing, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials. It's a good book in other ways as well. I recommend it. Consider also looking into homemade liposomal Vitamin C.

[Spartacus]

Re: weekend reading: 80% of medical studies are WRONG

I wouldn't think that any paper that wanted to sell more copies would let drug companies off easy.

Freedman seems a conscientious writer (I think I've read parts of his books @ the library) so I assumed he took his lead from his subject & spread the blame around, but where they feel it belongs, with a trowel.

Does anybody else find it curious that after beginning the article with the provocative statement that drug companies were biasing their research, the author then decided to focus the article on studies of supplements, and not on studies of patented drugs? Frankly, there is FAR more financial incentive to bias the results of a study proving that a certain patent drug "works", than on whether vitamin E "works".

More sloppy, stupid reporting from The Atlantic. Or are they trying to promote a particular agenda?

[Spartacus]

Re: weekend reading: 80% of medical studies are WRONG

heh ... no kidding
I had downloaded a copy from PLoS couple of months ago, along with critiques of student's t-test & wondered at the time

why it wasn't in one of the more prestigious journals

and would it make much difference going forward

Turns out he hadn't wanted it locked up in a closed publication

It's good to see an article like this make mainstream publications. The more physicians are confronted with this BS the quicker some real change might be implemented.

At the heart of medicine are a lot of questions and few answers. When you find evidence that actually is legitimate you hold onto it for dear life because so much of it is crap. In my practice, it drives me nuts to talk to other doc's who are wedded to unproven, time consuming and sometimes dangerous strategies. I talked to another physician today and he wanted me to give a patient an outdated, unproven therapy that I told him was voodoo. I was chuckling when I said it and yet he lost his mind and told me he had been doing it that way for 30 years. There is not a shred of proof his practice helps patient care yet he thought I was nuts! He's probably still muttering under his breath right now.

The only valid thing to hold on to sometimes is skepticism.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: weekend reading: 80% of medical studies are WRONG

Does anybody else find it curious that after beginning the article with the provocative statement that drug companies were biasing their research, the author then decided to focus the article on studies of supplements, and not on studies of patented drugs? Frankly, there is FAR more financial incentive to bias the results of a study proving that a certain patent drug "works", than on whether vitamin E "works".

More sloppy, stupid reporting from The Atlantic. Or are they trying to promote a particular agenda?

I did not find the few paragraphs in the middle of the article (bottom first half, top second half) discussing nutrition studies to be excessively out of proportion. He follows that with a discussion beginning

Indeed, nutritional studies aren’t the worst. Drug studies have the added corruptive force of financial conflict of interest.

and further down an anecdote involving one Athina Tatsioni and the misuse of drugs in conventional medicine in a hospital setting.

I did see a bias regarding nutrition however. The article was quick to describe the weakness of pro-nutrition studies, but silent on the weaknesses of other studies that purport to show vitamins don't help much, and silent on the difficulties alternative medicine has in getting funding to study un-conventional therapies regardless of how compelling the other evidence.

But that's ok. The points the article makes are reasonable, several perspectives are covered, and I can't find great fault with not covering all my pet hobby horses.

[zoog]

Re: weekend reading: 80% of medical studies are WRONG

Interesting article, thanks for the link. Since this is primarily an economics website, I feel compelled to pull out the following quote from the article:

Medical research is not especially plagued with wrongness. Other meta-research experts have confirmed that similar issues distort research in all fields of science, from physics to economics (where the highly regarded economists J. Bradford DeLong and Kevin Lang once showed how a remarkably consistent paucity of strong evidence in published economics studies made it unlikely that any of them were right).

Also, I am reminded of the Science News Cycle cartoon

[grapejelly]

Re: weekend reading: 80% of medical studies are WRONG

grateful for your calling this to our attention. Thank you.

I practice and teach a breathing method that cures diseases that nobody believes can be cured. Routinely. And doctors who hear about it are completely in denial because there are not enough double blind studies or whatnot. I know most studies are a crock of you-know-what, and this article helps validate what I have known.

Supplements are interesting...there are only a few that make a difference IMHO. Vitamin D3 with a bit of A seems to do miracles. Vitamin C supplements are important. And there is a lot to be said for CoEnzyme Q10. That's about all I take. If I had to take just one it would be D, because we are not designed to be fully clothed in Northern Hemispheres in the winter and Fall.

But I have found breathing trumps diet and that this is missed by just about everyone. There are some studies but not many as there is no money in breathing as a business.

[dropthatcash]

Re: weekend reading: 80% of medical studies are WRONG

Dr Dean Edell has been preaching the folly of most modern medicine for years. He's a common sense type who wrote "eat drink and be merry", many years ago. Check his radio show and web site here; www.healthcentral.com