Public health policy over decades has been driven by massive fraud. Universities which were supposed to be guardians of scientific integrity instead were complicit in covering up the fraud (Cornell). And there were no consequences for the figure at the center of this particular fraud, other than reputational damage.
The “Food Psychologist” Who Fooled The World (via @Falsumdoc)
Sad to witness the decline in standards. Scientific fraud has always been with us but at the margin. The shift began when careers and opportunities to make a great deal of money money were attached to findings.
I’m less certain about the adjective. I continue to see and believe that most scientists, especially those who are scientists at “heart” – if you will – are honest. The core of good science is curiosity and it tends not to coexist with greed – again, IMO.
Yes, obviously tons of scientists are honest and interested in the thruth. But I think people underestimate the amount if fraud out there, we only find the tip of the iceberg, we only know of those few we find. I think at this point we must be reflexively skeptical and tentative about each and every study, no matter how prominent or famous are the scientists involved.
There is a difficulty that even if people are not fraudulent they are often quite wrong.
I have to come back to this to acknowledge our own complicity. The number of fraudsters peddling phony pea soup is virtually zero. Health and life extending fraud persists because its fruits – both promised to the deceived and delivered to the fraudster-- are prized. We are by no means immune from the colorations delivered by hopes and desires in this very forum.
To bastardize a line from one of my favorite visionaries, It is the business of science to make mistakes.
That may be true, but it is quite extreme.
Lol this literal serial fraudster tricked me, plate size: food ratio and food intake, I think I saw that from Greger.
This type of fraud might’ve been complicit why nothing in diet and lifestyle ever made a dent on population scale obesity, or it was a supply for a demand when nothing worked.
When proper double blind placebo controlled trials with high compliance (GLP-1a) arrived did population obesity change. That type of study isn’t fabricated when seeking FDA approval because of the costs and incentives.
I was going to say RCT’s are difficult to fabricate, but there were tons of such fraudulent studies for ivermectin and covid.
Agree. The RCT is not immune from fraudulent activities. In some ways, its rigid structure makes it easier to identify the “best” way to commit fraud. A much mor common way that RCTs fail is when they are employed in the wrong research context where, even if rigorously true, they have traded so much realism in a misguided attempt to gain precision that the findings – while valid – are not generalizable to the contexts in which you and i live. The RCT is one category of tools in service of scientific progress, it is far from the only one and is too often applied in the health sciences.