Regular readers of this blog will know that while recognising the tremendous benefits that scientific research has conferred on medicine, I, among many others, am often somewhat sceptical about much of what is offered up to us (and gains wide acceptance) as ‘peer reviewed’ gospel truth.
I was therefore interested in an article by Dariusz Leszczynski in The Scientist Magazine in which he suggests that a combination of shoddy science, shoddy reviewing, shoddy editing and conflicts of interest results in the alarming number of studies that are retracted each year from scientific journals – a number which in no way includes all of the studies which actually should be retracted.
He goes on to examine in some detail the ‘peer-reviewed’ Danish Cohort study which, after the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) had classified cell/mobile phone radiation as a possible carcinogen in May 2011, failed to find any causal link between brain cancer and cell phone radiation.
This is, obviously, a cause close to my heart, but the errors that Leszczynski highlights in reference to the Danish cohort study, appear in many other studies in other fields of illness. It makes for a very interesting read.
For more on the subject of dodgy science, see the often-referred-to 2011 BSEM conference, A tablet a day keeps the patient at bay and regular posts on Dr John Briffa’s blog.
This would seem – once again – to support the proposition that we should all be sceptical of the accepted wisdom and that the more accepted it is the more sceptical we should be.