Part II:

Major take-home messages:

1. The existence of excellent research skills is NOT a guarantee that results produced by people having them will not be wrong, even catastrophically wrong, for many people.

2. Good science is expensive. Thus, sample sizes are usually small. It is also impossible to test for every problem that might arise. Science is, therefore, necessarily incomplete.

3. If a side effect appears in, let’s say, one-half of one percent of a test population, it would require about 6000 (SIX THOUSAND) test subjects to establish that effect with a high degree of probability. How many studies really test that many subjects? What if an effect occurs in one-tenth of one percent of people? In a population of 330,000,000, that could be a lot of people affected but would not show up in the data.

4. Think about Thomas Kuhn’s idea of a paradigm shift. It takes time—and money—for competing ideas that are not in concord with established models to gain a hearing and become accepted.

5. Scientists who swim against the tide may be unable to get funding for their research. Or, they may be unwilling to risk their academic careers for an unpopular idea that may turn out to be wrong.

6. For all of these reasons, science, even good science, can never be the last word on a subject.