by Brenda D Murphy

Source: https://globalfreedommovement.org/why-scientific-peer-review-is-a-sham/

•  Today Science is up on a pedestal. A new god has appeared; his high priests conduct the rituals, with nuclear reactors, moon-probing rocket ships, cathode tubes and laser beams. And their territory is sacrosanct; laymen are denied entry.  Bruce Cathie in The Energy Grid.

An Australian physicist Brian Martin wrote: https://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/98jse.html

• Certain sorts of innovation are welcome in science, when they fall within established frameworks and do not threaten vested interests… Dissenters are not welcome.
• Those who challenge conventional views or vested interests in science are likely to encounter difficulties. Dissenters are likely to be ignored or dismissed. If they gain some recognition or outside support, they may be attacked.
• What do [scientists] have to gain by spending time helping an outsider? If the outsider has made a genuine discovery, that means the outsider would win rewards at the expense of those already in the field who have invested years of effort in the conventional ideas.

The Problem of “Experts”

Scientists are prone — just like lay people — to being cathected to their pet theories and opinions, especially if they have been visibly rewarded or publicly obtained accolades or financial remuneration as a result.

Scientists, like laypeople, have … hefty egos — partially due to their “expertise” and academic titles, qualifications, theories, etc.

Once those hefty egos — belonging to people generally known as “experts” — rise to positions of power and/or influence … too many become mere gatekeepers and seek not to facilitate innovation … but to maintain the status quo which got them there in the first place.

Dr Malcolm Kendrick wrote, in Doctoring Data: 

• By definition, anyone who is an ‘expert’ in an area of medicine will be a supporter of whatever dogma holds sway.

• The players with the deepest pockets have the funds to buy all of the “experts” they need to sell a bogus product or ideology to an unsuspecting public.

Students undergo a magical alchemical process as they proceed through educational institutions and emerge transformed from their chrysalis with their doctorates, masters, stethoscopes and equations. They are the Chosen Ones, the purified, the holy, the redeemed, the righteous. They do not have to answer to the lowly non-scientific peasantry – let alone unbelieving heretics.

Trusting “experts” in oncology, for example, is generally a very good way to artificially speed one’s trip to the grave, particularly if one has metastatic cancer (allopathic medicine is notoriously ineffective in that realm). And yet “experts” are now on a rarified level that perhaps only popes and celebrities can understand — they are virtually demigods today.

“Experts” are lionized because the world that made them experts promotes and validates them when they affirm the already established (and profitable) beliefs — and the media is complicit in this. If you want to be horribly misled on any number of important issues, just head straight to just about any mainstream news media outlet and listen to the establishment’s “experts.”

Is it not time to get the crusty, rigidified, and corrupt Old Guard out of the way so we can let science move forward?

Is Most Research Just Bullshit? 

Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Marcia Angell is the former Editor-in-Chief at the New England Journal of Medicine, where she spent twenty years poring over scientific papers, saturated in the dubious practices that pervade the world of medical research. She states bluntly:

• It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine ~ in Drug companies & doctors: A story of corruption. 

Most “experts” in medicine are, psychologically speaking, simply engaged in well-paid groupthink and confirmation bias exercises, vigorously affirming and defending their ego’s (lucrative) construction of the world.

Once the public has accepted the scientific establishment’s truths, narratives, and designated “experts” then researchers who yield findings deviating from the accepted norm can be immediately branded as crackpots, lunatics, fringe nuts, pseudo-scientists and so on.

The media is crucial in this control dynamic because it sells the establishment’s reality.

Thus is the politically correct status quo maintained.

Cash is king!

Dr. Marc Girard, a mathematician and physician who serves on the editorial board of Medicine Veritas (The Journal of Medical Truth) wrote (http://www.laleva.org/eng/2006/02/false_medical_research_shows_up_systemic_flaws.html):

• The reason for this disaster is too clear: the power of money. In academic institutions, the current dynamics of research is more favourable to the ability of getting grants — collecting money and spending it — than to scientific imagination or creativity.

Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, wrote (The dawn of McScience. New York Rev Books 51(4): 7–9):

• Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.

Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, lambasted the industry for becoming

• primarily a marketing machine and co-opting every institution that might stand in its way.

Richard Smith, was an editor for the British Medical Journal 25 years. He stepped down in July 2004. This was what he wrote:

• Medical journals are an extension of the marketing arm of pharmaceutical companies. (http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020138

John Ionnidis, Professor of Medicine and of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine wrote (Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, Plos Medicine, August 2005):

• Most research findings are false for most research designs and for most fields. 

• Most scientific studies are wrong, and they are wrong because scientists are interested in funding and careers rather than truth.

 

If most studies are wrong, and most scientists are more interested in their own careers and funding than getting at the truth — while journals daily allow bogus and flawed pharmaceutical research to be published and promoted — then why would anyone in their right mind believe the claims made by doctors about the efficacy of products based upon “peer review” or pharmaceutical “studies”?

What does a term like “safe and effective” even mean in this world of deception and subterfuge?

In his article, What is medicine’s 5 sigma? The Lancet, 11 April 2015  Richard Horton wrote: 

• A lot of what is published is incorrect.” I’m not allowed to say who made this remark … 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 … “poor methods get results”.