I guess it's ok to publish uninteresting and probably false things. This could be a fairly accurate description of biomedical science to be honest. It's annoyin

I guess it's ok to publish uninteresting and probably false things. This could be a fairly accurate description of biomedical science to be honest. It's annoying when it ends up on HN for example, or in the health section of a tabloid newspaper. In theory, these observational findings could suggest treatments that should be evaluated in a randomised trial. I am not actually sure this is true however, it is possible they are less useful than selecting interventions for further testing in some other way. Anecdotally, folk remedies may have a higher hit rate for selecting treatments for proper evaluation. This is often surprising - eg a precursor to aspirin is found in the Willow tree, which has been used as a medicine for thousands of years. Another example is the foxglove plant from which the heart drug digoxin is derived, which was used as a herbal medicine predating modern medicine.