by tim » Mon Jun 08, 2026 10:18 am
https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/how ... ls-leaving
How They Rig Clinical Trials and The Price We All Pay For It
A practical guide to spotting doctored research and finding the therapies that actually help
Story at a Glance:
Scientific research has provided immense benefit to society, but as its success earned it power, prestige and enormous financing, incentives shifted from advancing humanity to protecting the status quo and ensuring vast profits for the pharmaceutical industry.
We spend more and more on science each year, yet the problems we’ve tasked it with solving remain unsolved, even when solutions already exist. COVID-19 made this painfully clear: dozens of treatments existed for the disease, but rather than utilize them, the medical establishment treated the infection as “incurable” and used that framing to justify a series of counterproductive policies which devastated the economy and left us with a death toll well over a hundred times greater than the poorest nations that did nothing at all.
Central to maintaining this orthodoxy is the belief that large randomized controlled trials (RCTs) must serve as the primary arbiter of scientific truth while other viable and proven research approaches are discarded. While RCTs are sometimes immensely helpful, their data often has minimal clinical relevance to patients yet their dominance displaces all the scientific data which does.
Because large RCTs cost tens of millions of dollars, only a handful of parties can afford to conduct them, which means they are typically done to bring profitable products to market rather than to advance health. Worse, since so much money rides on each trial, perverse incentives always exist to doctor the results so a positive outcome is guaranteed.
Over the years, a robust system of ways to rig trials has emerged, with tactics that exaggerate or fabricate benefits while downplaying or erasing harms. Despite being well recognized, these tactics persist because the regulators and medical journals who depend on the status quo turn a blind eye.
This article provides a concise summary of how trials are routinely rigged, gives you the resources to spot this manipulation and protect yourself from it, and highlights the straightforward solutions that could bring science back to something that prioritizes advancing humanity.
[url] https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/how-they-rig-clinical-trials-leaving[/url]
[quote] How They Rig Clinical Trials and The Price We All Pay For It
A practical guide to spotting doctored research and finding the therapies that actually help[/quote]
[quote] Story at a Glance:
Scientific research has provided immense benefit to society, but as its success earned it power, prestige and enormous financing, incentives shifted from advancing humanity to protecting the status quo and ensuring vast profits for the pharmaceutical industry.
We spend more and more on science each year, yet the problems we’ve tasked it with solving remain unsolved, even when solutions already exist. COVID-19 made this painfully clear: dozens of treatments existed for the disease, but rather than utilize them, the medical establishment treated the infection as “incurable” and used that framing to justify a series of counterproductive policies which devastated the economy and left us with a death toll well over a hundred times greater than the poorest nations that did nothing at all.
Central to maintaining this orthodoxy is the belief that large randomized controlled trials (RCTs) must serve as the primary arbiter of scientific truth while other viable and proven research approaches are discarded. While RCTs are sometimes immensely helpful, their data often has minimal clinical relevance to patients yet their dominance displaces all the scientific data which does.
Because large RCTs cost tens of millions of dollars, only a handful of parties can afford to conduct them, which means they are typically done to bring profitable products to market rather than to advance health. Worse, since so much money rides on each trial, perverse incentives always exist to doctor the results so a positive outcome is guaranteed.
Over the years, a robust system of ways to rig trials has emerged, with tactics that exaggerate or fabricate benefits while downplaying or erasing harms. Despite being well recognized, these tactics persist because the regulators and medical journals who depend on the status quo turn a blind eye.
This article provides a concise summary of how trials are routinely rigged, gives you the resources to spot this manipulation and protect yourself from it, and highlights the straightforward solutions that could bring science back to something that prioritizes advancing humanity.[/quote]