Replication problems in medicine haven’t only affected laboratory based, preclinical research: they can have direct effects on the treatments doctors give to their patients. Common treatments, it turns out, are often based on low-quality research; instead of being solidly grounded in evidence, accepted medical wisdom is instead regularly contradicted by new studies. This phenomenon occurs so frequently that the medical scientists Vinay Prasad and Adam Cifu have a name for it: ‘medical reversal’.57
