Richard Harris, an award-winning journalist who has reported on and "traveled to all seven continents" as the science correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR), echoes the Health Ranger's sentiments in his new book entitled "Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Waste Billions." The level of scientific failure Harris speaks about, which was reported by the New York Post, "costs taxpayers excesses of $28 billion a year." The science writer turned industry critic says wasted dollars, time and the abject failure of non-reproducible studies means that the data and results from any scientific peer-reviewed paper should be taken "with a grain of salt."
For scientific research to be considered legitimate, other scientists must be able to replicate the results. But that only happens in about half of researched case studies. Even more troubling, up to two-thirds of what is considered "cutting-edge reports, including the discovery of new genes linked to obesity or mental illness are later disconfirmed." That's a fancy word for being exposed as a blatant lie. Here's one example. Thousands of studies were published in prestigious scientific journals which concentrated on melanoma cells and their relationship to breast cancer. Later, it was discovered that the melanoma cells utilized in all those studies were the wrong cells. Harris lamented, "It's impossible to know how much this sloppy use of the wrong cells has set back research into breast cancer.”
There are many reasons why modern science is in panic mode and the historically rigorous scientific method has been all but eradicated. Harris believes that all scientists carry an "unconscious bias." They just can't see outside their own theses. The brutal competition for funding dollars is another huge issue. Government funding has dropped from 33 percent to 17 percent over the past thirty years. Post-doctoral employment is dwindling, giving "a greater incentive to publish splashy counterintuitive studies," which are often just plain wrong.
The pressure for funding also pushes scientific groups to publish papers that may state a particular hypothesis, even if facts scream otherwise. A prime example of this is the fact that the CDC still proclaims mercury in vaccines is safe, despite evidence to the contrary. All of the Monsanto studies that claim GMOs are perfectly safe are another. The current system also rewards people who are first to postulate a new area of study, even if that research doesn't stand the test of time.
Stanford professor of medicine John Ioannidis has written about the problems of reproducing scientific results. He's discovered "tens of thousands of papers" linking certain genes to diseases like depression or obesity and out of all those published scientific papers, only 1.2 percent "had truly positive results." The professor has also discovered research that has been cited thousands of times, but turns out to be absolutely false. Professor Ioannidis spoke in Chicago in 2016. His speech was titled, "Evidence based medicine has been hijacked."
Yes, it has. And it's up to us to demand that science and truth are reunited.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N63skNtYaJw
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