Science starts with theories, hypotheses, that have examinable empiric ramifications
- Science occurs when individuals do experiments or make observations that bear upon the implications or ramifications of the theories
- Those findings tend to support or refute the theories, which are then modified or updated to adjust to the new observations or discarded if compelling evidence shows that they fail to describe nature
- The cycle is then repeated
Cargo-Cult Science
- Richard Feynman delivered the 1974 Caltech commencement address bemoaning irrational beliefs
- Until a theory has objective empirical evidence bearing upon it, it remains only a theory no matter how plausible it may seem to everyone who entertains it.
Evidence-Based Medicine
- "Evidence-based medicine" (EBM) is a medical term coined by Gordon Guyatt in 1990
- EBM is an anodyne plausibility sham
- Proponents claim that EBM follows from "good doctors use both individual clinical expertise and the best available external evidence"
- However, both components are wrong or at least misleading
- Just like other forms of evidence, clinical evidence needs to be systematically collected, reviewed, and analyzed to form a synthesis of clinical reasoning, which would then provide the clinical component of scientific medical evidence
- Judgments about what constitutes the best are highly subjective and do not necessarily constitute causal inference
Randomization
- The flaw of randomization lies in the understanding of confounding.
- Confounding is an epidemiological circumstance where a relationship between an exposure and an outcome is not due to the exposure, but to a third factor (the confounder).
- In such cases, the apparent exposure-outcome relationship is really due to confounding. In theory, randomization removes potential confounding by unmeasured factors as an explanation for an observed association.
Empirical Evidence
- An average of only 8% difference (95% confidence limits, −4% to 22%, not statistically significant) between the RCTs and their corresponding nonrandomized trials results.
- This body of knowledge-the empirical as well as that based upon epidemiologic principles-demonstrates that, contra so-called "plausibility," randomized trials have no automatic ranking as a gold standard of medical evidence or as the only acceptable form of evidence, and that every study needs to be critically and objectively examined for its own strengths and weaknesses.
Other Plausibilities
- The goal of public health pandemic management is to minimize the number of people infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus
- What needs to be minimized are the harmful consequences of the pandemic
- If infection leads to unpleasant or annoying symptoms for most people but no serious or long-term issues then there would be no tangible benefit of general public-health interventions and limitations infringing upon natural or economic rights of such individuals and causing harms in themselves
- In previous influenza epidemics, the impact of school closings on illness rates has been mixed
- General population lockdowns have never been used in Western countries and have no evidence of effect for doing anything other than postponing the inevitable
Plausibility vs. Bad Science
- Cross-sectional studies-by design-identify total numbers of subjects, whereas the numbers of cases and controls, and exposed and unexposed, happen outside of investigator intervention
- The important outcomes that I had addressed in my review, risks of hospitalization and mortality, were distracted in these works by focus on subjective and lesser outcomes such as duration of viral test positivity, or length of hospital stay
Conclusions
- As was seen with the retracted Surgisphere papers, medical journals routinely and uncritically publish this nonsense as long as conclusions align with government policies
- Massive censorship by the traditional media and much of social media has blocked most public discussion of this bad and fake science
- Until the public begins to understand the difference between plausibility and science and how large the effort has been to mass-produce science "product" that looks like science but is not, the process will continue and leaders seeking authoritarian power will continue to rely on it for fake justification
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