Medicine

Browse the articles related to this topic below.

Join our community on Guilded.

Categories
Publications

Classical peer review: an empty gun – Springer Nature

Published 20 December 2010

If peer review was a drug it would never be allowed onto the market,’ says Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal Of the American Medical Association and intellectual father of the international congresses of peer review that have been held every four years since 1989. Peer review would not get onto the market because we have no convincing evidence of its benefits but a lot of evidence of its flaws.

Yet, to my continuing surprise, almost no scientists know anything about the evidence on peer review. It is a process that is central to science – deciding which grant proposals will be funded, which papers will be published, who will be promoted, and who will receive a Nobel prize. We might thus expect that scientists, people who are trained to believe nothing until presented with evidence, would want to know all the evidence available on this important process. Yet not only do scientists know little about the evidence on peer review but most continue to believe in peer review, thinking it essential for the progress of science. Ironically, a faith based rather than an evidence based process lies at the heart of science.

https://archive.today/2019.11.15-190847/https://breast-cancer-research.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/bcr2742

Categories
Videos

Why knowing infectious disease history and data is so important – Roman Bystrianyk

This history and data of infectious diseases show that they declined by 90-100% before any vaccination programs or major medical interventions. Yet, this freely available information isn’t shared by governments, medical institutions, or the mainstream media. Why? For more information, including free charts with the references that were used to construct them can be found at https://dissolvingillusions.com/ and https://dissolvingillusions.com/graphs-images/

Categories
Videos

The Germ Paradigm Trap – Roman Bystrianyk

Germs. They are the singular cause of all infectious diseases. It’s a basic understanding we all have. It’s an indisputable fact. It’s something that can’t be questioned. It’s woven into our collective human consciousness. Most people believe that once upon a time, way back in history, various germs caused many deadly diseases. Then very brilliant scientists invented medications and vaccines, and now thanks to them, we don’t have to worry about these nasty sicknesses. So, what caused the decline in deaths from diseases such as measles and whooping cough? So what really happened?

Additional charts and graphics can be found at https://dissolvingillusions.com/graphs-images/

Categories
Opinion

I’m a doctor, but Covid’s broken my faith in medical research. I can’t believe anything I read or accept any mainstream facts – Dr Malcolm Kendrick, RT

The main purpose of science is to question and attack. To subject ideas to the greatest scrutiny. Those who decide to shut down and stifle debate – whatever they may believe themselves to be doing – are, in fact, traitors to the cause of science. Stranglers of the enlightenment, assassins of progress.

They are not alone, and things have gotten far worse in the past year or so. Science has taken a terrible battering during Covid-19, though I have always known that dissent against a widely held scientific hypothesis is difficult.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/525071-doctor-covid-medical-research/

Categories
Publications

Skeptical of medical science reports? – NCBI

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor of The New England Journal of Medicine”.

More recently, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, wrote that “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness”.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4572812/

Categories
Opinion Publications

Covid-19: politicisation, “corruption,” and suppression of science – BMJ

Politicians and governments are suppressing science. They do so in the public interest, they say, to accelerate availability of diagnostics and treatments. They do so to support innovation, to bring products to market at unprecedented speed. Both of these reasons are partly plausible; the greatest deceptions are founded in a grain of truth. But the underlying behaviour is troubling.

Politicians and governments are suppressing science. They do so in the public interest, they say, to accelerate availability of diagnostics and treatments. They do so to support innovation, to bring products to market at unprecedented speed. Both of these reasons are partly plausible; the greatest deceptions are founded in a grain of truth. But the underlying behaviour is troubling.

Politicians and governments are suppressing science. They do so in the public interest, they say, to accelerate availability of diagnostics and treatments. They do so to support innovation, to bring products to market at unprecedented speed. Both of these reasons are partly plausible; the greatest deceptions are founded in a grain of truth. But the underlying behaviour is troubling.

The UK’s pandemic response provides at least four examples of suppression of science or scientists. First, the membership, research, and deliberations of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) were initially secret until a press leak forced transparency.2 The leak revealed inappropriate involvement of government advisers in SAGE, while exposing under-representation from public health, clinical care, women, and ethnic minorities. Indeed, the government was also recently ordered to release a 2016 report on deficiencies in pandemic preparedness, Operation Cygnus, following a verdict from the Information Commissioner’s Office.

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4425

Categories
Publications

A Mystery of the Gompertz Function

The Gompertz function describes global dynamics of many natural processes including growth of normal and malignant tissues. On one hand, the Gompertz function defines a fractal. The fractal structure of time-space is a prerequisite condition for the coupling and Gompertzian growth. On the other hand, the Gompertz function is a probability function. Its derivative is a probability density function. Gompertzian dynamics emerges as a result of the co-existence of at least two antagonistic processes with the complex coupling of their probabilities. This dynamics implicates a coupling between time and space through a linear function of their logarithms. The spatial fractal dimension is a function of both scalar time and the temporal fractal dimension. The Gompertz function reflects the equilibrium between regular states with predictable dynamics and chaotic states with unpredictable dynamics; a fact important for cancer chemoprevention. We conclude that the fractal-stochastic dualism is a universal natural law of biological complexity.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-7643-7412-8_27