‘Medical research is broken: Here’s how we can fix it’
8 September 2020
16:30
Every year, around US$200 billion (£150 billion) is spent globally on health research. Meanwhile, millions of people volunteer their time to be participants in health studies. Despite all the resources that go into creating medical research, though, there is a glaring issue—almost all of that time and money achieves nothing. In fact, about 85% of all research is simply wasted.
This might seem too large a figure to be true, but it is much easier to imagine when you consider that around 50% of medical trials are not published at all. Studies that tend not to be published are those with results that are inconclusive or negative – so-called “null results.” To put this into context, this means studies that find that a drug helps to treat a disease are much more likely to be published than those finding no evidence that the drug works.
