What is and isn’t good science changes with changes in metascience (the science of science); which is also why it’s important to keep current with the literature, especially in today’s world. Philosophy and History of Science are fields that are having an exciting little boom right now with tonnes of great researchers and lay books.
(As an aside, I use wiki a lot for a quick jumping off point as I trust it a bit more after I started editing it; they do try their best and are vigilant and passionate.)
I like this guy from Durham in particular: markrubin.substack.com - he’s got some cool links in the about section, but his stuff is a little technical. Nice dude.
They try to correct me here and I laugh at them, then they call me an uncivilized yank. And by they I mean my Brit partner, but he grew up in NJ so I’m not sure who he is calling uncivilised.
You generally got it. ;) The grey areas keep things interesting. Methodology is also important to consider and pick apart more and more considerations of appropriate applications and working contexts. It may be that this practice should be re-categorised rhetorically too, e.g. the language that we use to talk about this subject causes too much confusion as this thread exemplifies.
Lots of things have once been seen as mystical woo, but later had some of the phenomena established with good investigations. From what I have seen, and I’m by no means an expert, that body of literature one would expect for this just isn’t there yet.
Ps: Determining a good IF score will depend on the niche-ness and topic as well but that is why you try not to examine literature in a vacuum of one or two papers. Naturally, those that read more on these specific subjects are the best judges.
Efficacy. It needs to pass through this before it gets to effectiveness testing. Meta studies are important for examining this hence the wiki section mention earlier, which lists a bunch.
Note that just being in the conversation doesn’t mean it’s not being cannibalised. Papers or trends may arise that put other researchers in a tizzy. If it’s an accepted practice, you are likely to see a lot of papers fine tuning methods.
The placebo thing shuffles it under their umbrella. There’s a lot of issues there with those.
That’s ok. It’s good to question things. I realise this stuff is hard. I added an important caveat to how we approach hypotheses. There is actually a lot of writing about how there is too much information to filter these days, even for academics. This is why we rely on things like impact factor. Additionally, anyone can technically publish in a journal but it is hard to get into because of these kinds of politics.
This isn’t a good journal and the author isn’t an MD. The journal barely has an impact factor. 10 or more is considered very good (extremely reliable). This journal has less than 2; that’s super abysmal. Again, there is a reason major journals (IF of much more than 10) don’t deal with this.
The Impact Factor for a journal is calculated by dividing the number of citations in a year by the total number of articles published in the two previous years. This journal is barely a footnote. For comparison, Nature, one of the best of the best, has an IF of 64.8.
Science is a conversation. This low number means that only one or two articles cited each paper from this entire journal in the last two years, even just in passing. It’s not part of the conversation, and hardly has a seat at the discussion table.
This is also a logical fallacy, actually several. False analogy (qualitative vs quantitative) and appeal to authority, namely. There is a practitioner here telling you it’s a placebo (literally a sham medical treatment, that can be useful for secondary effects), wiki classifies it as pseudoscience… Again, even pseudoscientific fields can produce results that appear to be beneficial or effective; however, these results may not be replicable, may be the result of placebo effects, or other biases. No major journal is currently touching this topic as a potential standalone treatment.
I’m not sure what else you want, but I sure hope that you don’t work in the sciences. 😅