Doctors are not ur friends!! We are not ur friends. Seth, stop trying to fight the system and do something more lucrative w ur life. No Nobel prize for people who hurt the prize givers! Cmon, u should do something more positive.

That ironic. As it happens, I have such a hole in my heart: a “patent foramen ovale”. When it was discovered, I spoke to a colleague of mine, who had the surgery to close it up. To his suprise, his life-long string of migraines ended, and he’s not had one since.

Turns out there’s two types of patent foramen ovale: the one I have, which operates normally (no blood flow between chambers) and the one he had, which allows blood flow between the chambers, and hence creates micro-clots which can cause micro-strokes, which are thought to be one of the causes of migraines.

I wonder if the failure of this experiment was simply checking the wrong variable?

As to the topic of your quote, I wish it were surprising, but after a few years of research diet and the medical profession, I’ve a: realized that my high esteem for doctors was a matter of faith, not reason, and b: I’ve lost that faith.

I think that you provide good evidence about dishonesty in medicine, but do you think it is more common than in other places? Or perhaps you just think it’s more damaging to lie when it affects physical health directly.

Seth: I think you can do a lot more damage inside the body (drugs, surgery, medical devices) than outside the body (most goods and services). So dishonesty — e.g., hiding bad side effects — is much more damaging.

Publication bias, resistance to replication efforts, fraud. Also, descriptions of efforts to solve the problems.