Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

It’s understandable that doctors, and those who write the guidelines for medical treatments, sometimes find themselves relying on low-quality evidence. Often the alternative is no evidence at all, and their job is to help patients who need treatment right now. And it’s inevitable that advances in technology, methodology, and funding allow scientists to do better research today than was possible a few years ago: that’s normal scientific progress. But scientists have let doctors and patients down by creating such a constant state of flux in the medical literature, running and publishing poor-quality studies that even students in undergraduate classes on research design would recognise as inadequate. Even at the time many of these original studies were published, we knew how to do better – and yet we didn’t.