[sjtrny]

Drugs are in a totally different category than peer reviewed articles. They go through rigorous testing that works the vast majority of the time to weed out unsuitable drugs. On the other hand peer review (having been through it a few times) is extremely sloppy and reviewers do not do due diligence. Often the reviewers can't even if they wanted to (no raw data released etc) and they have to blindly accept the authors claims.

I don't think science dies a little bit each time a dissenting or contradictory result is published. In fact it is a good thing. We need more people to try and reproduce others work. But at the moment we have is a problem of scale. In other words it only looks bad when there are two different conclusions. We need many more reproductions to come to a clear answer.

[TallGuyShort]

The problem is that things go from being talked about as a statistical correlation with a probability of error, to being a "link", to being the thing people base their diets and other philosophies on. The anti-vaccine movement resulted in a lot of people touting science as the reason you should trust vaccines, conveniently ignoring the fact that it appears to have started from a phony scientific study. The fact that the phrase "a new study ... has found exactly the opposite" can be published by serious researchers is exactly why we shouldn't be going around proposing that people be legally forced to inject themselves with things because they're considered scientifically illiterate. As Scott Adams said in his piece on the subject, "Science isn’t about being right every time, or even most of the time. It is about being more right over time and fixing what it got wrong." [1] That should be kept in mind by people who are publishing, reporting on, and reading these studies.

[1] http://blog.dilbert.com/post/109880240641/sciences-biggest-f...

[phkahler]

In the link he brings up the "fatty food makes you fat" thing. My memory is that fatty foods were shown to be bad for your heart back in the 1980's and I always wondered where the "makes you fat" part came from. It's almost like once something is labeled (fatty food = bad) people forget the why and substitute their own reasons.

Similar stuff is going on now with saturated vs unsaturated fat. The problem is trans-fat which tends to form in the commercial process for saturating fat, and in the deep fryer. I don't recall any other research, but now there seems to be another "reversal" on saturated fat. Or is it unsaturated? IDK, but the public opinion is getting altered again.