Who can you trust? Consider that even Rachael Ray is a fibber – at least a little bit. After all, she became famous for 30 Minute Meals, only she has everything set out in advance, and doesn’t count the time to get organized. Murphy’s Law says there is no recipe, however simple, for which you have all the ingredients in the house. Even if you had all the ingredients, at least one would be in the back of the pantry, and it will take half an hour to find it. But, if you can’t trust Rachael Ray, whom can you trust?
Obviously not the President who won PolitiFact’s 2019 Lie of the Year award, making President Trump a three-time winner, with top ratings in 2015 and 2017. The claim that the whistle blower got his phone call “almost completely wrong” is PolitiFact’s 2019 Lie of the Year. Mr. Trump has repeated this claim with many variations, but always with a strict disregard for the truth. While President Trump is unquestionably the most proficient liar in American history, some element of mendacity attaches to all politicians.
When Gallup conducted a 2019 poll of most trusted professions, nurses were the most trusted professionals, followed by physicians and pharmacists. The problem with this ranking is that the trustworthiness of the nurse/physician/pharmacist depends on their ability to keep up with new information about medical diagnosis and treatment. Each profession requires its practitioners to keep up with the scientific journals, but how good are they? If a study published in a professional journal turns out to be poorly conducted, or even completely faked, the only recourse is retraction –- the journal, or the author, puts up a note saying “sorry about that” and nobody is supposed to pay attention to the study. In some cases though, a study may be published, and only years, or decades later, the flaws are discovered. According to NPR, “A retraction is a last resort for medical and scientific journals, a sign to readers that the results are no longer trustworthy and are beyond correcting. Although retractions are relatively rare — taking down fewer than 1 in 1,000 published articles — the rate is increasing.”
The system of peer review in scientific journals is supposed to prevent flawed studies from ever being published. It doesn’t work, at least not as well as it should. The Washington Post (1/17/20) reported that Vladimir Putin’s aspiration to have Russian science lead the world crashed when the Russian Academy of Sciences investigated some of the published studies and called for the retraction of at least 869 published articles – mostly for plagiarism. Dr. Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch, the best source of information about retracted studies, said “800 retractions in Russia at once sounds like a lot, and it may be just the tip of the iceberg. But we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the number of retractions over the past two decades, from about 40 in 2000 to about 1,500 per year in the last few years. Those retractions, all available in our database — retractiondatabase.org — reflect more attention to scientific fraud and errors, and better detection methods. Science still has a ways to go when it comes to correcting itself, but it has been catching up.”
A paper is retracted only when a serious flaw is detected. That may take years, or in some case decades, and even then, later researchers may see a copy of the paper that doesn’t mention the retraction. This may influence future research or even medical care for decades to come. While a number of other sources list retractions, including PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar, Dr. Oransky estimates that Retraction Watch has twice the number of listings as the nearest competitor so that a retraction may be easy to miss.
As for other professions, Frank Lloyd Wright said, “A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.” Lawyers have what’s at best a partial record of failures in the National Registry of Exonerations, maintained by the University of California Irvine, the University of Michigan, and Michigan State University law schools. This registry is a record of persons falsely convicted of crimes, although it’s probably safe to say that there are far more innocent people in jail than can be accounted for now. The registry has records of 2,549 exonerations and 22,540 years of imprisonment.
In other occupations, the journal Radiocarbon (Feb 2020) published a study “Using Carbon Isotopes to Fight the Rise in Fraudulent Whisky” about using carbon 14 dating to determine whether a high priced whisky is aged as long as it’s claimed. The authors explain, “A major threat to the Scotch whisky industry is the sale of counterfeit single malt whiskies with purported distillation years in the 19th and early- to mid-20th centuries. However, these are often much more recent spirits, distilled in the latter part of the 20th or first part of the 21st centuries. These sales impinge upon the reputation of auction houses, retailers, brand owners and distillers.”
There’s even a system for when voters make mistakes. The US Constitution offers both Article II Section IV and amendment XXV. Unfortunately, neither one seems to be working properly these days.
Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living in Louisville, Ky. Email sdu01@outlook.com.
From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2020
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