Personally I wouldn't use "confirmed" or "proved" to discuss any hypothesis. However, I think confirmed could be acceptable in some cases. Usually it would be s

Personally I wouldn't use "confirmed" or "proved" to discuss any hypothesis. However, I think confirmed could be acceptable in some cases. Usually it would be some kind of cheap screening test followed up by a more expensive (but more reliable) gold standard test. Sure, the gold standard may still be wrong, but at least everyone knows what you mean by confirmed. I find the use of confirmed here to be highly misleading.