[fnordpiglet]

Oh actually proving something as not true you know is likely not true is one of the easiest ways to get a well referenced paper published, and it doesn’t require expensive phased trials because it’s not true and is easily proven. There’s no need to do elaborate safety studies since it’s ineffective, you just need a fairly simply study that most medical professors can fund out of their discretionary research time and pads their paper counts. Journals are replete with “alternative medicine X does nothing” proof studies as a result.

The real challenge is taking something that does work, but isn’t economically worth while, through the phased trial process. However even those studies regularly get published - “X appears to be effective deserves further research,” which is probably the sadder side of medical research as that’s code for “never going to be researched.”