{"id":3910,"date":"2010-10-18T06:30:40","date_gmt":"2010-10-18T13:30:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/josemarquez.com\/xsml\/?p=3910"},"modified":"2010-10-18T06:30:40","modified_gmt":"2010-10-18T13:30:40","slug":"one-out-of-ten-dentists-is-right-dr-john-ioannidis-research-into-error-rates-bias-and-funding-in-the-atlantic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/2010\/10\/18\/one-out-of-ten-dentists-is-right-dr-john-ioannidis-research-into-error-rates-bias-and-funding-in-the-atlantic\/","title":{"rendered":"One out of ten dentists is right: Dr. John Ioannidis’ research into error rates, bias and funding in The Atlantic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. John Ioannidis profiled in The Atlantic<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u2026Ioannidis was shocked at the range and reach of the reversals he was seeing in everyday medical research. \u201cRandomized controlled trials,\u201d which compare how one group responds to a treatment against how an identical group fares without the treatment, had long been considered nearly unshakable evidence, but they, too, ended up being wrong some of the time. \u201cI realized even our gold-standard research had a lot of problems,\u201d he says. Baffled, he started looking for the specific ways in which studies were going wrong. And before long he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals.<\/p>\n

This array suggested a bigger, underlying dysfunction, and Ioannidis thought he knew what it was. \u201cThe studies were biased,\u201d he says. \u201cSometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.\u201d Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results\u2014and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it\u2019s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Related: Kathryn Schulz on her favorite books about being wrong<\/a> and error, in general.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. John Ioannidis profiled in The Atlantic: \u2026Ioannidis was shocked at the range and reach of the reversals he was seeing in everyday medical research. \u201cRandomized controlled trials,\u201d which compare how one group responds to a treatment against how an identical group fares without the treatment, had long been considered nearly unshakable evidence, but they,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3910"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3910\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}