(you can't make this stuff up!)

I agree this headline sounds ironic, tsuwm, but, if we look beneath the attention-getting headline, we can see that the world-wide medical research community is self-correcting and dynamic and scientifically rigorous and reliable overall.

Extract:

"A single study is not the final word, and that is an important message," editors at the New England Journal of Medicine said in a statement about the study.
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Ioannidis acknowledged an important but not very reassuring caveat: "There's no proof that the subsequent studies ... were necessarily correct." But he noted that in all 14 cases in which results were contradicted or softened, the subsequent studies were either larger or better designed.

"He said the studies most likely to be contradicted later were nonrandomized studies. These are often based on observations of patients' lifestyles rather than on results from a drug or other intervention assigned by researchers."

re you can't make this stuff up!

Well, actually, you can make this stuff up. The best headliner writers do it every day. The whole idea is to attract attention and get people to read the story.

The bottom line message in this story - that patients and doctors shouldn't place too much reliance on the results of a single study - is very important, so we are fortunate that such a clever writer was assigned to write the headline which caught your eye and which you brought here to amuse us.

It reminds me of a bee cross-pollinating a fruit tree or flowering plant. The bee doesn't know it is cross-pollinating the fruit tree or plant, but it doesn't need to know.

Cross-pollination, so critical to the propogation of the recipient, is happening anyway.

Sometimes we serve a higher cause without knowing, or intending, to serve a higher cause. That seems to be nature's way ... its best kept secret, perhaps.