Fraudulent Research Floods Nutrition Field, Corroding Credibility
By Erik Goldman
Good medical practice is based on trust.
Patients trust that practitioners are knowledgeable, and that they put their knowledge in service of their patients’ best interests. In turn, practitioners trust that clinical researchers run their studies honestly, and that the editors and peer-reviewers of the medical journals carefully scrutinize the papers they receive, sift out the garbage, and only publish studies that pass clinical, statistical, and ethical muster.
Research is, in itself, a trust proposition. From the lead investigators who design trials, and the Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) that approve them, to the research assistants and post-doctoral fellows who crunch the data, and the authors who write and submit the papers for publication, there’s a thread of trust that depends on the right people doing the right things at each point along the path.
[ ...Read More ]