‘Over the past two decades it has become apparent that the knowledge base for clinical medicine has been corrupted by publication bias, positive result bias, the increasingly strained competition for funding and tenure, and a non-trivial amount of outright fraud.
Perhaps as a result of these problems we see a very high level of research result contradiction and retraction. Sometimes it seems everything we believed in 1999 was reversed by 2014. Retrospective studies of the sustainability of medical research has taught us that the wise physician is better to read textbooks and ignore anything that doesn’t get to the front page of the New York Times…
We can’t change the past, but what do we do with the medical literature we’ve inherited? It is vast, but we know the quality is mediocre. Can we salvage the best of it?’ (Gordon’s Notes)
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