April 18, 2025 - Epoch Times
07:43
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| There is a crisis in research and reproducibility of research as we speak. | |
| And some people would even say corruption of research. | |
| And you're trying to tackle this head-on. | |
| What is it that's happening? | |
| Well, there is no question that, you know, unfortunately, most of the research is being taken hostage by a variety of interests: pharmaceutical industry, political interests. | |
| There are so many things. | |
| And what we're trying to do is just to get True science out there without any outside influence. | |
| That's very difficult, because if you think about it, conflicts of interest are present everywhere. | |
| When you look, for example, on the number of peer reviewers that have some kind of conflict of interest that it pertains to pharmaceutical industry, more than 80% of people that review papers for a journal have some kind of conflict of interest. | |
| So it's very difficult to have a clean... | |
| And what's an example of a conflict of interest that's common? | |
| Let's say that you speak for a pharmaceutical company and you promote one of their products. | |
| And then you get a paper that has to do with that product. | |
| So more likely than not, you will accept that paper just because you work for the other guys. | |
| You get money that's being paid to you as a result of your interactions with that particular pharmaceutical company. | |
| But conflicts can also be sort of unconscious as well. | |
| Like you might not be thinking to yourself at that moment,"Aha! | |
| Because I work for them, I'm going to accept it." Correct. | |
| I mean, there's going to be a time frame where you will not realize that you have a conflict. | |
| I mean, you don't realize it because you've been doing it. | |
| It's part of your normal way of doing things. | |
| But if you think about it, in reality, you have an important problem. | |
| And you have to recognize them. | |
| Trying to get people to recognize that they have a conflict of interest is even more difficult. | |
| Because, you know, many journals, what they do is they say, just disclose your conflict of interest. | |
| That's just not good enough. | |
| I'm sorry, that's not good enough. | |
| If you get a stipend from a pharmaceutical company or stuff like that, just putting it as an addendum to the article, that's not good enough. | |
| Where does this crisis of reproducibility come from? | |
| Years of manipulation of data, years of manipulation of studies by Big Pharma. | |
| You just say that so blanket, but explain that to me. | |
| I mean, it's not as easy as it means, but when you have, let's say, a paper that has 20 authors, and out of those 20 authors, more than 90% of them... | |
| Are in the payroll of a specific pharmaceutical company that makes the product that you are studying, that's a conflict. | |
| And the fact that you disclose it, just you say, you know, we are members of this company, that's not good enough. | |
| Well, there's this famous saying that I always forget who it's attributed to. | |
| Maybe it's Mark Twain. | |
| If you're financially motivated to see a particular outcome or to not see a particular outcome, then you will... | |
| It's the question about it. | |
| You know, throughout the years, we have seen all these kind of randomized, controlled clinical trials that are funded by particular entities. | |
| That when they start seeing that things are not going their way, they change the outcomes. | |
| In the middle of the study, they change the outcomes. | |
| And just explain what that means, they change the outcomes. | |
| What they look is, you know, you're looking for specific points to show, let's say, that a drug works, it doesn't work. | |
| And they say, okay, we're going to look at A. But then in the middle of the study, they say, you know what? | |
| It looks like we're not getting A. So let's change A and make it B. That's not right. | |
| That's not right. | |
| Okay. Well, there's still a whole lot of papers that are being published across, you know, thousands of scientific journals, some of greater impact, some of less impact. | |
| How do we even know what is good? | |
| Because presumably some of it's still good. | |
| In the past, we used to look at the impact factor. | |
| And the impact factor is the number of times that a paper gets referenced in that particular journal. | |
| The problem is that you can even manipulate that. | |
| I can go ahead and write a paper and cite that same journal multiple times so that at the end of the year, the impact factor for the journal goes up. | |
| So those are things that are easily manipulated. | |
| They're not right. | |
| I mean, these are the things that, as a scientist, make me very uncomfortable. | |
| So what's your solution? | |
| I know that this is part of what you're actually trying to do with the Independent Medical Alliance. | |
| So what the Independent Medical Alliance has done, as you well know, we're all about science and advocacy. | |
| That has been our two major things. | |
| What I have been pushing for from the very beginning was the creation of a journal, of an independent journal, a journal that is unbiased. | |
| And you're going to say, well, it's very difficult to get rid of all the biases and conflicts and stuff like that. | |
| But I try to do it as best as I can, trying to keep as transparent as we can. | |
| The things that are particular about the Journal of Independent Medicine, which is a journal of the IMA, is that it's a journal that is not sponsored by pharmaceutical industry or any other kind of industry. | |
| It's basically self-funded. | |
| We fund our journal. | |
| It's a journal that accepts all sorts of scientific papers, but we accept them in a way That nobody knows who is the person writing the paper until the very end. | |
| Because I don't want to have any bias. | |
| So we have what I call a double-blinded method. | |
| What that entails is if you send me a paper, and let's say I know Jan is such a nice guy that I know that everything he writes is good. | |
| So therefore, I'm just going to accept whatever comes with his name. | |
| Well, what I do is I take away your name from the paper. | |
| We actually have a whole system where we remove your name from the... | |
| The papers will remove what institution you are affiliated with. | |
| There is no way to identify you. | |
| No way to identify you whatsoever. | |
| I send that to reviewers, the external peer reviewers, and we have a board of more than 50 people from pretty much all over the world that will look at your paper in a constructive way. | |
| I mean, we're not trying to reject things. | |
| Now, the reviewer doesn't know who you are, and then they give me feedback. | |
| And the feedback is either accept, Except with some changes, requires a lot of changes, I need to see a revision, or definitely reject. | |
| We try to make sure that we include all sorts of topics, even though at the beginning, as you remember, we were mostly COVID. | |
| Now we do pretty much everything. | |
| I am very interested in the use of repurposed drugs, so we encourage the submissions of papers that have to do with repurposed drugs and some of the other things. | |
| You know, we have editorials. | |
| We have original investigations. | |
| We have reviews, systematic and narrative reviews. | |
| Some people want to learn more about a particular medication. | |
| Well, we have those things done. | |
| We also have an area of legal aspects. | |
| I mean, some people have manifested interest in knowing more about the legality of A, B, or C. Well, we have that. | |
| And we have, like, a forum where you can have even people who are not healthcare professionals. | |
| Can submit to you a good paper that may be their own personal experience with the healthcare system. |
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