It often amazes me just how much money we spend on research. I don\u2019t mean the popular bugbear of money spent on finding out the obvious \u2013 sometimes the obvious has to be proven. However, an essay published in 2005 entitled \u2018Why most published research findings are false\u2019, written by Dr John Ioannidis from the University of Ioannina School of Medicine, in Greece, has become a cult classic in research terms. He argued that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims, and went on to try and prove that most claimed research findings are false. A follow up article, published recently in PLoS Medicine, an international medical journal, investigated the even more alarming question of our acceptance of incorrect research findings, and levels of what the authors call \u2018acceptable regret\u2019. \u201cObtaining absolute \u2018truth\u2019 in research,\u201d say the authors, \u201cis impossible, and so society has to decide when less-than-perfect results may become acceptable.\u201d \u201cAcceptable regret\u201d is what is worrying. It seems increasingly clear that, as a society, we are easily manipulated to accept errors and injustice, including those that cause the deaths of thousands of people, because somebody solemnly uses the term \u2018regrettable\u2019 while intimating that the end result will in some way be \u2018acceptable\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It often amazes me just how much money we spend on research. I don\u2019t mean the popular bugbear of money spent on finding out the obvious \u2013 sometimes the obvious has to be proven. However, an essay published in 2005 entitled \u2018Why most published research findings are false\u2019, written by Dr John Ioannidis from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-editorials","tag-fergus-byrne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}