There's a huge amount of concern in the medical profession that lots of studies in the area are statistically compromised precisely because the authors gamed th

There's a huge amount of concern in the medical profession that lots of studies in the area are statistically compromised precisely because the authors gamed the statistics after the fact, or because improper metrics were used in the first place. See these (kind of old but still quite appropriate) links: http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou... http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-dam... It's this kind of work that led to pressure to pre-declare statistical objectives, and now we see the results. Biology is hard, medicine is hard, we must be quite humble about what we understand in these fields and therefore how easy it is to be misled by early promising results.