I am an MD/PhD, and I agree that a lot of the research done by clinicians is self-serving and useless. But most medical/health research is not done by physician

I am an MD/PhD, and I agree that a lot of the research done by clinicians is self-serving and useless. But most medical/health research is not done by physicians who are typically quite busy and generally not motivated to do anything that involves statistics and takes time and effort. Also, most clinician-led research is simply ignored because it tends to be overridden by the results of large clinical trials usually conducted by professional scientists. Where I see major problems are in two fields. The first is epidemiology (which receives about 30% of Research funding) where most of the research is done by non-clinicians, often involves data dredging and posthoc theorizing motivated by easy access to larger amount of pre-collected data and the availability of statistical software that permits fitting black box models that typically show whatever results are good for publication. This field is the source of contradictory results that we read every day in the news where something and its opposite are both good and bad for every kind of imaginable illness or symptom -. The other is a lot of basic sciences research which typically represent about 60% of all funded research. The great majority of that research is baseless as was shown by effort to replicate many of the findings. Billions of dollars are spent searching for genetic and other causes of illness using small poorly designed studies that can neither prove or disprove anything. So the problem is much bigger than just poorly trained and busy clinicians trying to prove a pet hypothesis. The problem is everywhere. Edited to fix typos