First, I know that most of you won’t read the article I’m referencing. And that’s ok.

Second, we’ve been fed swill and have been told it is fine wine. That isn’t ok.

Swill is a mixture of solid and liquid food scraps fed to pigs, or any disgusting or distasteful liquid. Fine wine is a delight to the palate and can carry significant medicinal properties. We believe that modern medicine is based on science and is altruistic; there are many fine ladies and gentlemen who have and are dedicating their lives in the service of others via the allopathic practice of medicine. In many cases they are being compromised.

That isn’t acceptable even if it is politically correct and widely believed to be true. “Modern” science of the seventeenth century said the earth was the center of the universe; Galileo said the earth was the center – he was forced to recant on the sentence of death. That didn’t make those in power right nor him wrong. It just proved that they were able to force their will on the people because “the law” was on their side.

A recent article in The Atlantic takes “the system” to task:

if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right. His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials. The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process—in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish—to suppress opposing views.

Something isn’t right. If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine is proving untrustworthy, shouldn’t that be a concern?

Perhaps you ought to take a look at it.

Then again, you may have a distinct taste for swill…