Little of medical research can be trusted.

Richard Smith: Medical research—still a scandal

http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2014/01/31/richard-smith-medical-research-still-a-scandal/

The Lancet has this month published an important collection of articles on waste in medical research. The collection has grown from an article by Iain Chalmers and Paul Glasziou in which they argued that 85% of expenditure on medical research ($240 billion in 2010) is wasted. In a very powerful talk at last year’s peer review congress John Ioannidis showed that almost none of thousands of research reports linking foods to conditions are correct and how around only 1% of thousands of studies linking genes with diseases are reporting linkages that are real. His famous paper “Why most published research findings are false” continues to be the most cited paper of PLoS Medicine.
Ioannidis’s conclusion as to why so much research is poor is similar to that of Altman’s: “Most scientific studies are wrong, and they are wrong because scientists are interested in funding and careers rather than truth.”