It’s impossible to know for sure how many patients have been given useless medical treatments – and false hope – because of p-hacked clinical trials, but the number is surely enormous.83 Think back to the meta-analyses we covered earlier. Even leaving aside the fact that some research is often missing due to publication bias, if the studies included in the meta-analysis are all themselves exaggerated by p-hacking, the overall combined effect – in what’s supposed to be an authoritative overview of all the knowledge on the topic – will end up far from reality.84 You might wonder how doctors and
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