90% OF SCIENTIFIC STUDIES FLAWED

Good article from The Atlantic magazine
Jennifer Blair sent me this?articulate and interesting article (see below website) from The Atlantic (Nov. 15, 2010). It is long, but it is good, and for those of you interested in evidence-based medicine, I think you will find it fascinating. The physician interviewed, Dr. John Ioannidas, is a math prodigy from Greece who has published papers with over 1,300 different co-authors from 538 institutions in 43 countries. So, he is quite a productive person and physician. After careful mathematical review of the medical literature, he believes that up to 90% of published, peer-reviewed medical information is flawed. You read that correctly – 90%! Therefore, his conclusion is that much of what we are calling evidence-based medicine is just not so. I found his assumption quite interesting – especially since it tends to agree with recent Cochrane reviews. So it is not just in integrative medicine in which we struggle to figure out which treatments?really work.

The Atlantic Article