scientific literature

HALF of all published ‘scientific’ literature is completely fabricated or false.

Posted by

0


For years, alternative news sources such as Natural News have been warning the public about industry-generated scientific research which incorporates falsified data to produce desired results.

Scientific literature

These charges have now been corroborated by Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the world’s best known medical journal, The Lancet. Dr. Horton has publicly stated that as much as half of the scientific literature being published is unreliable and often completely false.

From a commentary by Dr. Horton published in The Lancet:

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.

Those are very strong words, particularly since they came directly from the horse’s mouth. For someone in Dr. Horton’s position to make such statements is indeed compelling evidence that (in his words): “Something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations.”

“Peer-reviewed” studies no longer reliable

According to Dr. Horton, scientists often “sculpt data” to fit a theory or “retrofit hypotheses” to fit the data – even “peer-reviewed” studies published in journals such as The Lancet are no longer reliable.

From Collective-Evolution.com:

It’s common for many to dismiss a lot of great work by experts and researchers at various institutions around the globe which isn’t “peer-reviewed“ and doesn’t appear in a “credible“ medical journal, but as we can see, “peer-reviewed“ doesn’t really mean much anymore. “Credible“ medical journals continue to lose their tenability in the eyes of experts and employees of the journals themselves, like Dr. Horton.

 

Biased industry-sponsored research

Dr. Horton is not the only one among his peers who has been compelled to speak out. Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, has written extensively about corrupt methodology and the influence of industry on scientific research:

Clinical trials are also biased through designs for research that are chosen to yield favorable results for sponsors. … In short, it is often possible to make clinical trials come out pretty much any way you want, which is why it’s so important that investigators be truly disinterested in the outcome of their work.

There are a number of dirty tricks that are routinely used by industry-sponsored researchers. For instance, by not publishing the results of unfavorable studies, the makers of useless or dangerous drugs often manage to market their products to an unsuspecting public.

In the case of one antidepressant drug – paroxetine – which resulted in a record $3 billion lawsuit against GlaxoSmithKline, a dangerous and ineffective medication was prescribed to millions of children before it was revealed to cause an elevated suicide risk.

When legal proceedings uncovered the truth, it was found that GlaxoSmithKline had hidden not only the fact that their product was only slightly more effective than a placebo, but also that it caused suicidal behavior.

Is there a solution?

It is now clear that publication of spurious or falsified research has become endemic within the research publication community.

Dr. Horton offers some suggestions for restoring integrity to scientific research methodology:

Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivised to be right. … Instead of changing incentives, perhaps one could remove incentives altogether. Or insist on replicability statements in grant applications and research papers. Or emphasise collaboration, not competition. Or insist on preregistration of protocols. Or reward better pre and post publication peer review. Or improve research training and mentorship.

The bad news, according to Dr. Horton, is that even though “science is beginning to take some of its worst failings very seriously… nobody is ready to take the first step to clean up the system.”

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/053663_scientific_literature_fabricated_studies_Big_Pharma.html#ixzz45tmqrZDQ

Neuroscientists ‘rediscover’ entire brain region linked to reading.

Posted by

0


Neuroscientists have ‘rediscovered’ a large part of the brain that disappeared from the scientific literature during the early 1900s. Now that it’s been properly analysed, it’s thought to be involved in crucial mental processes such as reading and recognising faces.
Neuroscientists in the US have accidentally rediscovered a forgotten region of the brain while investigating how reading skills develop over time in children.

“We couldn’t find it in any atlas,” one of the team, Jason Yeatman from the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, told Laura Geggel at LiveScience. “We’d thought we had discovered a new pathway that no one else had noticed before.”

What they’d found was a region that, for reasons unknown, dropped out of the scientific literature describing human brains about a century ago, but continued to have a known prescence in the brains of other primates.

First discovered in 1881 by German neurologist Carl Wernicke, region is called the vertical occipital fasciculus (VOF). This flat, 5.5-centimetre cluster of long nerve fibres running vertically along the rear of the brain was found by Wenicke during a monkey brain dissection, and while it was later found in human brains, it remained conspicuously absent from anatomical drawings called ‘brain atlases’ throughout history.

This is something of a major oversight, as the VOF is now thought to play a unique and crucial role in how we’re able to process visual information. It maintains several connections between the nearby ‘vision sub-regions’ of the brain, which work together with visual cortex – also in the rear section of the brain – to process what we’re seeing at any given moment.

“I stumbled upon it while studying the visual word form area,” Yeatman told Mo Costandi at The Guardian. “In every subject, I found this large, vertically-oriented fibre bundle terminating in that region of the brain.”

After poring through both contemporary and historic literature for mentions of the region, Yeatman says a colleague remembered having seen something like it in an old medical textbook. So he dipped into the brain atlases of the late 1800s and early 1900s to discover a bizarre squabble between some of the world’s most imminent neuroscientists at the time.

It seems that Wenicke’s superior, German-Austrian neuroanatomist, Theodor Meynert, more or less ignored his student’s discovery, perhaps because it clashed with his own conclusions about the human brain. Meynert, who also taught none other than Sigmund Freud, had proposed a theory that said the neural pathways of the brain ran horizontally from the front of the brain to the back, not vertically, as Wenicke’s new discovery appeared to do.

Or perhaps Wenicke’s discovery was so removed from what Meynert was working on at the time that he ignored the discovery simply because he was focussing on something else. “Meynert’s apparent non-discussion of these fibre systems may simply have reflected his interest and focus,” Jeremy Schmahmann, a neurologist  from the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the study, told Geggel at LiveScience.

Add the oversight of one of the world’s most respected neuroanatomists to the fact that in many of the brain atlases the VOF did turn up in, it had all kinds of different names, and that it can be very easily missed when you’re dissecting a human brain, and it makes sense how Wenicke’s discovery could have disappeared into obscurity.

Now that they’ve found it, Yeatman’s team has scanned over 70 people to locate and map the VOF properly, and the findings have been published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to Costandi at The Guardian, the team describe the VOF as connecting the ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ streams of the brain’s visual pathway. “The lower stream connects brain regions involved in processes such as object recognition, including the fusiform gyrus, and the upper stream connects the angular gyrus to other areas involved in attention, motion detection, and visually-guided behaviour,” she says.

Yeatman and his team are continuing their research into how learning to read impacts a young person’s brain structure, and he says he thinks there’s a good chance that the newly rediscovered VOF will play a crucial role in that work.