90% of Medical Research Is Wrong

[xoxoxoBruce]

Are 90% of all medical studies wrong — including nearly half of those claimed to be the most reliable? That's the provocative claim made by researcher John Ioannidis, profiled in this month's issue of The Atlantic.

Well that's a pretty strong accusation.

Ioannidis was putting his contentions to the test not against run-of-the-mill research, or even merely well-accepted research, but against the absolute tip of the research pyramid. Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated. If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and impact of the problem were undeniable. That article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

I wonder if this applies to other areas beside medicine?

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