SCI-ART LAB

Science, Art, Litt, Science based Art & Science Communication

I have added about 500 articles written by me alone in this group. Now let me bring articles and answers written/given by other experts  too.

This one is on pseudo-science ...

Q: There are many publications and articles uploaded based on the research done for medicinal properties of Cow urine, available on reputed sites like ResearchGate and National Center for biotechnology Information (ncbi). What is your counter-argument?

Raziman : Ah, this is is a good opportunity to learn some important things.

1. Researchgate is not a reputable site the way you think of it.

I mean, sure, I have an account there.[1] And so do many other serious researchers. But you should think of it as Facebook for academics than anything else. In particular, you can upload anything you write there, before it is peer-reviewed or even submitted anywhere!

I could even export this  answer as a pdf and upload it there. So, just because you see an article on Researchgate, that does not mean that it is peer-reviewed or reputable. You need to check whether it has been published, and if so, where.

2. National centre for biotechnology information[2] is just an aggregator

Think of it like a biomedical newsfeed. As such, it will have articles from a wide range of journals, with varying levels of credibility. And along the same lines,

3. Not all journals are created equal

Scientists who work in a research field have a good idea of this: Which journals are excellent, which are good, which are passable, which are trash and which are so far beyond trash that publishing in them will affect your credibility.

But you are not an expert in the research field. Then what do you do?

One way is to look at the journal rankings in Scimago[3] (that has its own problems, but we can ignore those at this level). For example, my latest paper was published in ACS Photonics (Not the greatest journal there is, but quite good for my field if I may say). Look at its page on Scimago:[4]

Here are the most important metrics that I want you to focus on:

  1. The H-index[5] of 51: This means that there have been at least 51 articles in the journal which have received at least 51 citations. This is an indicator that the journal publishes a lot of articles which a lot of scientists in the community finds useful enough to cite.
  2. The publisher: American Chemical Society.[6] A reputed scientific organisation.
  3. The quartile rankings: The journal is in the top 25% of all journals in the four listed fields — and in particular, my field of Optics.
  4. Average citations per document of 7: This is not the median but the mean, but still indicates that the average article in the journal is of good enough quality to be cited widely.

Time to compare it with the journal linked in the question: Journal of Intercultural ethnopharmacology.[7]

Red flags galore!

  1. Only an H-index of 7. A mediocre early-career individual researcher like me has better!
  2. The quartile rankings: Even among the journals which focus specifically on alternative medicine, it does not fall under the top quartile! And among general medical fields, it is worse than half of the journals there is
  3. The citations per document of barely above 1 shows that the average article in the journal is barely cited.
  4. Finally, the worst. Look at the publisher Ejmanager LLC. It is in Beall’s list of predatory publishers.[8] NCBI says that[9] Sageya provided the articles, but that one is on Beall’s list as well. Oh and BTW, the journal itself is on Beall’s list of potentially predatory journals.[10]

In short, even before reading the article, you can be reasonably sure that it is trash or worse.

4. Not all research is created equal

(Let me start with the warning that I am not an expert in medical research. So please be more critical while evaluating this section. I request any experts in medical research reading this to correct any mistakes and suggest modifications.)

Especially when it comes to medical research, there are very varying levels of evidence. Because lives are at stake, evidence-based medicine[11] has to be careful about what it accepts as acceptable evidence for the efficacy of a treatment. From the Wikipedia introduction,

Although all medicine based on science has some degree of empirical support, EBM goes further, classifying evidence by its epistemologic strength and requiring that only the strongest types (coming from meta-analyses, systematic reviews, and randomized controlled trials) can yield strong recommendations; weaker types (such as from case-control studies) can yield only weak recommendations.

Suppose you find that a chemical kills bacteria in a petri dish in a laboratory environment. We do not immediately go ahead and claim that it is the best antibiotic ever. We need to know how it behaves in the human body — does it still behave the same way, and does it have other side effects? Mandatory xkcd:[12]

Similarly, if a physician observes that the application of A was followed by some condition B in a patient, it is only a case report.[13] We cannot immediately conclude that A caused B, because something else that the physician missed could have well been the cause.

This is where the levels of evidence come in. There might be disagreements about the exact numbering, but you can find tables like this:[14]

Or find it represented graphically in a pyramid form[15]

Well-blinded[16] randomized controlled trials[17] where the treatment and placebo are administered to different participants randomly without even the physicians knowing who gets what are the best kinds of trials. But even then, such trials could be of wildly varying quality. So you need systematic reviews[18] and meta-analyses[19] to analyse the quality of multiple trials and come to a conclusion.

Wikipedia, for instance, has even stricter standards than normal for articles about medicine. From WP:MEDRS[20]

Ideal sources for biomedical information include: review articles (especially systematic reviews) published in reputable medical journals; academic and professional books written by experts in the relevant fields and from respected publishers; and guidelines or position statements from national or international expert bodies. Primary sources should generally not be used for medical content – as such sources often include unreliable or preliminary information, for example early in vitro results which don't hold in later clinical trials.

Please also read the essay about why Wikipedia insists on secondary sources.[21]

Although the linked article is a review, it is not systematic. It simply lists supporting studies with no quality control. Most of the studies it cites are similarly poor-quality appearing in poor-quality journals. And most are in-vitro or animal studies. There is barely anything in the reference list suggesting evidence that it works on humans.


And that is why most of us disregard the articles you pick from the internet to claim that cow urine works for everything from the common cold to cancer. Those of us who are into research (even if not medical research) can identify crap sources from a mile away. It is not impossible that cow urine helps to treat some ailments (and in the same way, dog/camel/donkey/human urine might too!). But a lot of cow urine-related research today is utter trash, and much better studies are required to support the bold claims being made today.

Footnotes

Thanks, Raziman for an excellent answer.

Views: 76

Replies to This Discussion

63

RSS

Badge

Loading…

© 2024   Created by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service