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This is an excellent question (and reading through those articles now, thank you). I know she thinks about this a lot because her patients bring her research wh
by conorh 5y ago
This is an excellent question (and reading through those articles now, thank you). I know she thinks about this a lot because her patients bring her research which is obviously broken, but why should they trust her? In her specific case she has done thousands and thousands of an extremely specialized operation - one of very few people in the world to have done that many. She keeps an open mind of course, but she also sees a lot of harm done. Medical research is hard, lots of confounding factors, and almost all the time in her particular area researchers have a very small n, so they draw conclusions because of the small n (and because they are often just not good at research, they are doctors!). I'm sure the scientific method will come through in the long run, that's my opinion, but along the way it is doing a lot of harm too.
- ModernMech 5y ago>I'm sure the scientific method will come through in the long run, that's my opinion, but along the way it is doing a lot of harm too. And that's the rub. Most people who try to improve the system reinvent it with the same or worse flaws. You'll notice for all the hand wringing and complaining here about how flawed the process is, no one really has put forth a suggestion on how to fix it. A lot of people here are not even part of the process and looking in from the outside, so they don't even understand the incentives involved enough to fix it. Hence the endless complaining...