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Jim Ryser's avatar

Never underestimate just how incompetent ANY correspondents for MSNBC are.

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Mark Brody's avatar

There are several levels of immorality to such bad science, including

1. The authors are likely aware of the flaws of their study, yet go forward seeking publication anyway, so this is the immorality of deception -- pretending they are bringing forth good science when they know they are not.

2. The editors are authorizing publication of bad science, knowing it is poorly done, indicating that they are corrupt and knowingly failing to do their job.

3. Those who ally with science journals are quick to call out those who publish, produce or cite quality science as "conspiracy theorists" or "spreaders of misinformation". Nonetheless, they are willing to reference poor science such as is seen in this study. This is the immorality of hypocrisy.

4. While those involved in publishing science may conceive their roles as disseminators of science, in fact the lives of many people hang in the balance of whether the science backs up medical products as safe and effective or not. Knowing their studies are of poor quality, it is reasonable to expect that they are contributing to the unnecessary sickening or killing of innocent people whose doctors relied on the science being published. This is the immorality of complicity with the crime of murder or assault and battery.

5. Many of those involved in the dissemination of bad science are probably motivated by the four B's: bullying, bribery, blackmail and bullshitting, by powerful interest groups. The failure to blow the whistle on these criminal activities consists of yet another crime of complicity -- allowing immoral at best and illegal at worst activities to taint the information field.

The people behind this pseudo-science, which has been outed by many great physicians, Marcia Angell and Richard Horton among them, may seem to be just unfortunate. It is not. It is a crime and should be prosecuted as one. The ethics underlying science and medicine has been thrown to the dogs. We need honest souls such as Dr. Prasad, Dr. McCullough, Dr. Cole, Dr. Malone, Dr. Kory, and many others to keep morality alive in what used to be a noble profession.

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