I had to laugh when I saw this! I remember when these first studies came out and all the tobacco folks complained that they were only 6 months long, and that was obvious mistake, and how a 1 year study was required! This was one of the complaints about the Helens study. Now, the French have done the one year study, and now you claim that is not long enough!

What desperation! If someone did a 2 year study that showed a drop, you would ask for a 3 year! If they did a 5 year, you'd want a 10 year, and so on.

My count is that there are now over 6 peer-reviewed studies showing a drop in heart attacks after a ban. (I'm not counting the French study, because I have not yet seen it in peer-reviewed print.) There are zero peer-reviewed studies showing heart attacks stayed the same or went up.
(Although I know two pro-tabacco bloggers put together a "study" so bad they would not get it published anywhere. In real science, that's the end of the story. Six peer reviewed studies, from all over the world, versus zero peer reviewed studies.

JL

Basically, what you're saying is that your view is so widely wrong, that you have to throw out the entire peer review process.

Problems with peer review (and I'm sure there are some somewhere: there are problems with everything) will tend to get papers published when they should not be, not the other way around. Since there are 100s of peer reviewed journals, if you can even find one to publish your work, then you are published. It requires 100s of mistakes (one by each journal) to not publish something right, but only one mistake by one journal to publish something wrong.

So the two tobacco bloggers paper must be completely wrong, in order to fail peer review completely, so that no one , anywhere, would publish it.

JL
JL

I was thinking about why you need to throw out peer review, after all this is a fundimental part of modern scientific practice. And has served us well for decades (if not centuries); not perfectly, but very well.

But it makes sense when I thought about it. People who believe things that are not true end up as conspiricy theorists. They have too, because as more an more people realize they are wrong, they need an explination for why all these people, and organizations, and governments, and companies, etc. are all saying they are wrong. Conspiricy theory provides that explanation, which they need.

But sometimes, it doesn't go far enough. What if you believe something so wrong, that even the biggest conspiricy can not explain all the groups that publish data showing it is wrong? In those cases, you've got to say that peer review itself (and the scientific method of which it is a key part), is wrong. It's a sort of logical extension of conspiricy theory, as an excuse as to why you can't get any scientific support for your ideas.

JL

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