Even science is just all made up.

Caught my attention because of the epidemiology bits, the career path of my sis-in-law. Reminded me of something I read a while back, can't remember where, where it talked about the number of medical treatments that had actually passed peer review double blind criteria. A remarkably low percentage, under 50%, if I recall correctly. Science, and its cousin religion, pretty much making it up and finding the evidence for it that they like.

Seed: Dirty Little Secret:

"In a 2005 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, epidemiologist John Ioannidis showed that among the 45 most highly cited clinical research findings of the past 15 years, 99 percent of molecular research had subsequently been refuted. Epidemiology findings had been contradicted in four-fifths of the cases he looked at, and the usually robust outcomes of clinical trials had a refutation rate of one in four.

...The culprits appear to be the proverbial suspects: lies, damn lies, and statistics. Jonathan Sterne and George Smith, a statistician and an epidemiologist from the university of Bristol in the UK, point out in a study in British Medical Journal that "the widespread misunderstanding of statistical significance is a fundamental problem" in medical research. What's more, the scientist's bias may distort statistics. Pressure to publish can lead to "selective reporting;" the implication is that attention-seeking scientists are exaggerating their results far more often than the occasional, spectacular science fraud would suggest.

Cash-for-science practices between the nutrition and drug companies and the academics that conduct their research may also be playing a role. A survey of published results on beverages earlier this year found that research sponsored by industry is much more likely to report favorable findings than papers with other sources of funding. Although not a direct indication of bias, findings like these feed suspicion that the cherry-picking of data, hindrance of negative results, or adjustment of research is surreptitiously corrupting accuracy. In his essay, Ioannidis wrote, "The greater the financial and other interest and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true."

Academic bias could also be to blame. As Ioannidis puts it, "Prestigious investigators may suppress via the peer-review process the appearance and dissemination of findings that refute their findings, thus condemning their field to perpetuate false dogma."

...Ioannidis is adamant that the problem is widespread. "I have heard from scientists from many different fields who think that the problems are the same in their fields as well," he says. "This is a potentially severe crisis, unless we realize the issue and try to address it.""