Drug Companies Bribe Academics
Science is held in unique esteem in our society. When we see the words “a study shows” in a newspaper, most people will just accept that whatever follows is the truth. When we see that an article cites an academic journal, we step back and applaud that finally, somebody is giving us the facts.
And that’s actually a good thing—or, at least, it should be. We should be able to trust that these studies and papers were created by people dedicated to the pursuit of the truth.
But there are a few dirty secrets behind the studies we like to trumpet as the truth. Because the reality is that the academic journals that publish these studies are running rampant with bad science—and there are a few things in place that allow it to continue happening.
One journalist put this to the test by conducting an absolutely terrible experiment. He wanted to see what would happen if he gave newspapers weak proof that eating chocolate makes you lose weight—something that should be obviously untrue.
He gathered together 15 people, gave chocolate to five of them, and measured their health in as many categories as he could. He believed that if he tested a small enough group of people on enough different things, the people eating chocolate would have to become healthier in at least one way just by sheer random chance.
Sure enough, his results let him say that chocolate was a weight loss tool. He paid to have his terrible science put into a journal and then sent his conclusions to newspapers.
The response was incredible. His faked findings were reprinted or reported on byCosmopolitan, The Huffington Post, news networks, and morning talk shows. And not a single person talking about them mentioned his deliberately bad methodology.
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