Every once and a while, some tv show -usually local news during sweeps – will trot out some sort of snooty looking MD or PHD to talk about chiropractors. The refrain is almost always the same: “There’s not enough peer-reviewed evidence that chiropractic is valid.”
This translates roughly as follows: There are no billion dollar chiropractic companies funding their own mega studies, interpreting results, and sending well-trained sales forces to deliver those results. There are no Universities receiving hugh “research grants” from such companies. There’s little to patent in chiropractic, so no one can afford to buy science.
It’s also endlessly interesting to me that these news shows run hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ads from certain billion dollar companies selling their products that have “proven safe and effective” by the same peer reviewed research.
But what if so-called peer-reviewed science isn’t exactly as scientific as it’s purported to be?
Consider this excerpt from a blog my Denise Minger:
“Peer review might be the best we’ve got right now—but it’s far from infallible, and its biases are no secret. In an article from 2000, Richard Horton—editor of the uber-peer-reviewed journal “The Lancet”—wrote some rather scathing comments about the peer-review system, stating that it is “biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.” Even peer-reviewed journals have published papers on the problems with peer review (e.g., this article in “Nature”).
To top that off, history is speckled with some disturbing cases of research fraud that slipped right through the peer-review system. The best example is Scott Reuben, once considered a pioneer in the field of anesthesiology and pain management, who concocted at least 21 “studies” that were pure works of fiction—and managed to get all of them published in peer-reviewed journals. Over the years, he accepted big bucks from pharmaceutical companies to conduct studies on drugs like Celebrex and Effexor, but instead of actually enrolling patients, he made up some numbers and slid his nonexistent findings into major publications. And as it turns out, many of the drugs he convinced the world were beneficial were either ineffective of downright harmful.”
Nice.