"Before 2000, researchers cheated outrageously. They tortured their data relentlessly until they found something—anything—that could be spun as a positive resul

"Before 2000, researchers cheated outrageously. They tortured their data relentlessly until they found something—anything—that could be spun as a positive result, even if it had nothing to do with what they were looking for in the first place. After that behavior was banned, they stopped finding positive results. Once they had to explain beforehand what primary outcome they were looking for, practically every study came up null. The drugs turned out to be useless." This is a ridiculous "plain English" description of what is happening here, and I say that as someone who is regularly very critical of academia, drug trials, and research science (I've lived it; check my bio). Clinical trials and mandatory registration are great things. It does not mean that researchers were massively cheating in the past, however - it means that they were finding secondary and tertiary findings and reporting them instead of the main investigative thrust of the research. Yes, some blatant cheating happened, as did p-hacking (though this problem still exists), but to act like the clinical registration database completely stopped a massive ring of fraud is ridiculous and the data does not support that, merely a conspiratorial narrative around it.