As in medical doctor.
Among the steps:
- believers in a bogus therapy conduct a clinical trial which is designed to generate an apparently positive finding;
- the fact that the study cannot tell us anything about cause and effect is cleverly hidden or belittled;
- they publish their findings in one of the many journals that specialise in this sort of nonsense;
- they make sure that advocates across the world learn about their results;
- the community of apologists of this treatment picks up the information without the slightest critical analysis;
- the researchers conduct more and more of such pseudo-research;
- nobody attempts to do some real science: the believers do not truly want to falsify their hypotheses, and the real scientists find it unreasonable to conduct research on utterly implausible interventions;
- thus the body of false or misleading ‘evidence’ grows and grows;
- proponents start publishing systematic reviews and meta-analyses of their studies which are devoid of critical input;
- too few critics point out that these reviews are fatally flawed – ‘rubbish in, rubbish out’!
- eventually politicians, journalists, health care professionals and other people who did not necessarily start out as believers in the bogus therapy are convinced that the body of evidence is impressive and justifies implementation;
- important health care decisions are thus based on data which are false and misleading.
