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Dubious study

 •  • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.
Single pane xkcd comic with one person looking over the shoulder of another person sitting a desk. The caption reads: “If something is formatted like a serious scientific paper, it can take me a while to realize it isn’t one.” There is also a brief exchange of dialog: “Are you sure this study is legit?” the standing person says. “Sure, it says it was accepted for publication.” “Where?” “Hmm… The National Academy of Proceedings.”

The alt text (hidden caption): “Sounds fine. I looked up the Academy & it says on their MySpace page that their journal is peer-viewed & downloaded biannually.”
xkcd #1847 © xkcd.com by Randall Munroe

Just because it looks like science does not mean it’s science. Many people don’t realize how much of a problem this is these days, the sheer number of studies that are truly worthless, or close. Junk journals are really a thing, from the merely pathetic to the outright fraudulent. Even in real journals there are way too many ill-conceived studies that don’t really do much except muddy the waters. Nearly all review papers in musculoskeletal medicine point out that most of the evidence available is poor quality: high risk of bias, underpowered, poorly controlled, etc. And that’s the papers that made the cut for review!

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