Rigor Mortis: What’s Wrong with Medical Science and How to Fix It

From ScienceBasedMedicine blog.  Our stroke associations should be able to tell us if stroke researchers are just as bad and need to be completely replaced.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/rigor-mortis-whats-wrong-with-medical-science-and-how-to-fix-it/
Medical research has been plagued by less-than-rigorous practices and a culture that rewards quantity over quality. In a new book, Richard Harris identifies the problems, proposes solutions, and offers hope.

Harriet Hall on January 2, 2018 

I just finished reading Richard Harris’ excellent book, Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions. From the title, I was expecting an angry, biased polemic attacking science and scientists. I was very pleasantly surprised. He doesn’t condemn science. He points out problems with the way science is carried out, mostly problems that scientists are already aware of and are trying to correct. And he offers practical solutions. He explains that the term “rigor mortis” in the title is hyperbole. Rigor in scientific research isn’t dead, but it needs a major jolt of energy. He says scientists have been taking shortcuts around the methods they are supposed to use to avoid fooling themselves. They have often had to choose between maintaining scientific rigor and doing what they perceive as necessary to maintain a career in a hypercompetitive field. That’s a choice no one should have to make. The challenge is not just to make technical fixes in research procedures, but to change the culture.
He cites a study published in Nature in 2012 by C. Glenn Begley on raising the standards for preclinical cancer research. Begley identified 53 potentially groundbreaking studies and tried to reproduce them, working closely with the original researchers. He was only able to reproduce the findings of six (6!) of the studies. The non-reproducible studies had been cited as many as 2,000 times by other researchers as a basis for their own studies. Non-reproducible findings had sent research off in wrong directions. Sometimes huge houses of cards are built on an error, and it can take years for the science to self-correct.
Leonard Freedman, who founded the Global Biological Standards Institute, estimates that:

• 20% of studies have untrustworthy designs:
• 25% use dubious ingredients such as contaminated cells or antibodies that are not as selective as they think.
• 8% involve poor lab technique
• 18% of the time, scientist mishandle their data analysis.

Overall, he found that over half of preclinical research was irreproducible and untrustworthy, representing a waste of $28 billion a year.