Return on Investment Slipping in Biomedical Research
[CanLyme note: Medical research should be of the highest standard of all research, but in many cases the opposite is true. A good example is the Infectious Disease Society of America and their published material. Much of it is no more than opinion, not reproducible, and certainly not worthy of publication yet they get broad coverage in medical journals that had once been considered the cream of the crop. (Medical journals in general are more and more being considered now as the rag mags of a corrupt and very controlled multi-billion dollar health research ‘industry’ in which tax payer dollars are wasted on expensive, circular, pointless, and dogma driven published articles that cannot be considered research.)]
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August 17th, 2015
FOCUS ON GETTING PUBLISHED IN BIG-NAME JOURNALS, EXCESSIVE REGULATION COULD BE SLOWING PROGRESS ON NEW DRUG APPROVALS AND LIFE EXPECTANCY GAINS, RESEARCHERS SAY
As more money has been spent on biomedical research in the United States over the past 50 years, there has been diminished return on investment in terms of life expectancy gains and new drug approvals, two Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers say.
In a report published Aug. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers found that while the number of scientists has increased more than nine-fold since 1965 and the National Institutes of Health’s budget has increased four-fold, the number of new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration has only increased a little more than two-fold. Meanwhile, life expectancy gains have remained constant at roughly two months per year.
excerpt …. Casadevall and Bowen also cite “perverse” incentives for researchers to cut corners or oversimplify their studies to gain acceptance into top-tier medical journals, something that has led to what they call an epidemic of retractions and findings that cannot be reproduced and are therefore worthless. “The medical literature isn’t as good as it used to be,” Casadevall says.”