In medicine there is billions of dollars to be made by having studies turning out one way, and millions of dollars to be lost by having them turn out the other

In medicine there is billions of dollars to be made by having studies turning out one way, and millions of dollars to be lost by having them turn out the other way. Wiki has a limited section on medicine on their page [1] on the replication crisis, including: --- In a 2012 paper, C. Glenn Begley, a biotech consultant working at Amgen, and Lee Ellis, a medical researcher at the University of Texas, found that only 11% of 53 pre-clinical cancer studies had replications that could confirm conclusions from the original studies.[79] In late 2021, The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology examined 53 top papers about cancer published between 2010 and 2012 and showed that among studies that provided sufficient information to be redone, the effect sizes were 85% smaller on average than the original findings. --- One of the most interesting things in modern times is that China now has a higher life expectancy than the US, yet working conditions can be difficult, Traditional Chinese Medicine is still widely practiced, there is extremely widespread poverty, and access to modern healthcare is relatively limited. I'm certainly not appealing to that traditional medicine, homeopathy or anything of the like. Rather I'm appealing to some sort of nihilism - that I think we know far less than we think we do. SSRIs would be the best example of this - as the actual experimental evidence for their efficacy leaves them comparable to placebos, yet people treat them as the bleeding edge of treatment for the plethora of disorders they're proscribed for, to say nothing of their tremendous side effects. When we look back in time at all the stupid things people did, we often forget that those things were also seen as the bleeding edge of expert treatment at the time. No less than JFK's sister [2] was lobotomized as was the latest treatment for psychological issues at the time, with the result one could expect. And that was scarcely ~80 years ago. It seems quite arrogant to imagine people 80 years from now will not be looking back at us with similar bemusement. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy