I'm not sure what the point is here. 32 papers over 437 journals? I'm glad the fraudsters got caught. I hope Hindawi tightens up their process.
Here is an interesting bit of history. It is on this day 502 years ago that Pope Leo X excommunicated Martin Luther for refusing to retract 41 of the supposed "errors" in his "95 Thesis" of 1517. I encourage others to think on that for a bit. Especially as a significant part of the very Papal Bull that Pope Leo X used as his justification took the writings of Martin Luther out of context in the first place. Then people wonder why I most often see similar things happening now in a religious context. Many are behaving the exact same way as Pope Leo X did in response to writings he did not agree with. Me, I am actually very much the opposite. If somebody wants to write up a thesis and publish it in a journal that shows that the KT extinction was caused by the Deccan Traps because Xenu was shoved into a volcano and a million atomic bombs were detonated around it, I say go ahead. I will still laugh at it after it was published and look at the publishers as either lunatics or having a sense of humor. But I in no way think such should be repressed.
You may be fine with that. However, I have never heard of a journal of science that didn't strive to present the most accurate science possible at the time.
Naturopaths still cite those early studies while ignoring later studies debunking those early studies
Absolutely. The whole fields of homeopathy, acupuncture, etc., is $1.5 billion scam on Americans. With no standards or testing on safety or efficacy, how could it be anything else?
Yep. Or those that claim that some sweeteners cause autism, as well as vaccines cause autism. I think what I find most fascinating is that as has been seen here, a great many throw any that question the methodology that seems to be used in many peer reviews under the same bus as anti-vaccine nuts, or groups that they see as "attacking" any of their favored beliefs. This has nothing to do with science, but in their belief in orthodoxy.
But that doesn't pertain to peer review in any way. Is the point that that study was published erroneously? Or theoretically maybe it wouldn't have been published if it had been peer reviewed? New drugs are routinely recalled once they are released to the field. Are they peer reviewed? If so, that doesn't speak highly at all of peer review.
What should be taken away is that simply because something is "peer reviewed", that should never be accepted as absolute proof that it is correct. That is what many in here are completely missing. In fact, I would even say that aspartame probably does cause cancer. In the amounts given to the rodents damned near anything will cause cancer or other diseases. But should that be taken as a reflection of the safety of it in food? No, not at all. Unless a person has a history of eating cups full of it every day. And at that point, I would say those individuals have much larger issues.
Drug testing is not the same issue as peer review of technical papers. Drug testing is a multi-layered system of trials, often starting with animals, and then progressing to small numbers of humans as indicated by success. Then the number of humans is increased in steps taken when results are positive. Remember that is what happened with covid vaccines. The first covid vaccine was created a couple weeks after the covid genome became available. Known technology was used in the vaccine, so that was a head start. Still, it took many months of increasing sizes of testing to reach the point that certification was finally accomplished.
Again, drug testing and reviewing technical papers are two very different processes. Papers are reviewed by checking methodology, examining math, comparing to studies of the same topic, etc. The high concentration tests of ingestables do show where risks might exist. Such tests are not used for setting maximum human safe dosage levels. Plus, there is a lot of experience with various test animals, allowing for wise decisions to be made concerning what to worry about.
It doesn't cause censorship. It is censorship whether the paper is published or not. If the journal thinks a paper has enough merit to undergo review, then it should publish it and let the world review it. The scientific community can't check out new ideas it hasn't seen. I see. No room for ideas in Science. So peer review failed in its effort to censor bad science. Every hypothesis is an idea. Normally it develops from observation from the study of nature. Here is a mountain range. I wonder how it formed. Everything in the universe is moving away from everything else. I wonder why. I think we agree on the importance of peer review. The disagreement is just about how and when peer review occurs. Disagreement is not a bad thing. But there is little point in our rehashing our positions any longer. We can leave it to other posters for their input.
. Fake Science Kills, and the current Retraction Crisis proves that scientists now lie like rugs and politicians. Both Lancet and the NEJM were both caught red handed publishing papers based on fudged data and were forced to retract -- after the clinical trails regarding HCQ were stopped. "The journal’s editor, Richard Horton, said he was appalled by developments. “This is a shocking example of research misconduct in the middle of a global health emergency,” he told the Guardian." THE GUARDIAN, Covid-19: Lancet retracts paper that halted hydroxychloroquine trials, By Sarah Boseley Health editor, June 5, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...s-paper-that-halted-hydroxychloroquine-trials
An example more pertaining to what you're talking about is the peer review by Banjamin Franklin and Antwon Lavasia of the Hypothesis that Biomagnetic Therapy cures disease by removing blockages in our bodies. An interesting example of how, ‘the power of suggestion,’ has contributed to the growth of alternative medicine is an experiment by Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier in 1784 to test the claims of a German physician, Franz Anton Mesmer. Mesmer claimed that just as an invisible force of magnetism draws iron shavings to a lodestone, the same invisible force flows through living beings, blockage of which causes disease. Mesmer claimed the cure for the disease comes through releasing the blockage using magnets. To test the null hypothesis that magnetism had no effect and was all in the mind, Franklin and Lavoisier, deceived some subjects into thinking they were receiving the experimental treatment when they were not, while others did receive the treatment but were told they had not. The results were clear. Those subjects who thought they had received the treatment but had not, believed they were cured. While those who actually received the treatment but were told they had not believed there was no effect. In other words, Mesmer’s results were nothing more than the ‘power of suggestion.’ Today we know that iron atoms in a magnet are crammed together in a solid state about one atom apart from each other. While, in the blood only four iron atoms are allocated to each hemoglobin molecule and they are separated by distances too great to form a magnet. However, to this day, people believe in, ‘biomagnetic therapy,’ and Americans spend about 300 million dollars a year on magnets believing they have a powerful healing effect on the body.
Arxiv.com has more than 2 million papers in physics and math that probably have not been reviewed. Plus, the issues that peer reviews look for have to do with methodology - something that everyone cares about, Peer review does NOT resolve any kind of disagreement on a topic.
A few instances where anything improved with it. There are plenty of instances of failed drug introductions that were quickly recalled.
??? Science based medicine has improved outcomes on all medical fronts. Here's a list of 27 different vaccines that have changed people's lives the world over. Just for one, Polio types 2 and 3 have been irradiated throughout the world, while type 1 is limited to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Unfortunately that is not the case. Here’s one example. https://www.nj.gov/health/cd/documents/topics/Polio/polio_provider_information_document.pdf The good news is polio vaccines have provided us with very good herd immunity to polio. But eradication will be very difficult in the near term because of vaccine derived polio. Until all the people who received oral polio vaccine exclusively are gone, most countries will continue to see more polio cases caused by vaccines than wild transmission. Assuming global vaccination rates remain high with exclusive use of inactivated polio vaccines, eradication may be possible. I hope so. Another aspect that will make polio hard to eradicate is it is asymptomatic 95-99% of the time. In contrast, the major virus we did eradicate, smallpox, is almost never asymptomatic. It’s very difficult to eradicate what you can’t manage with quarantine etc. Agree with the point polio vaccines have been a huge blessing.
