New York Post | 6 May 2017
How many times have you encountered a study — on, say, weight loss — that trumpeted one fad, only to see another study discrediting it a week later?
That’s because many medical studies are junk. It’s an open secret in the research community, and it even has a name: “the reproducibility crisis.”
For any study to have legitimacy, it must be replicated, yet only half of medical studies celebrated in newspapers hold water under serious follow-up scrutiny — and about two-thirds of the “sexiest” cutting-edge reports, including the discovery of new genes linked to obesity or mental illness, are later “disconfirmed.”
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