Jacob Stegenga (University of Cambridge)
The best methods that clinical scientists employ to test medical interventions, including the randomised trial and meta-analysis, often said to be the pinnacle of research methods in medicine, are, in practice, not nearly as good as they are often made out to be. Moreover, scientists have begun to recognize the complexity of many pathophysiological mechanisms. If we attend to the extent of bias in medical research, the thin theoretical basis of many interventions, the malleability of empirical methods in medicine, and if we employ our best inductive framework, then our confidence in medical interventions ought to be low.
