Another example of the junk clinical studies celebrated in Evidence Based Medicine because of methodology alone. Beloved "gold standard" of opinion launderers and cherry pickers, often designed with little or no mechanistic understanding or subject-matter expertise.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13756-015-0086-z
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13756-015-0086-z
Comments
🤷🏻♀️🤞
The easy way would be if the journal's editors were committed to scientific integrity and did the right thing when we tried asking nicely.
But, last time we did that we did get a "no" from the editors at JAMA Pediatrics.
Initially. 😁
https://bsky.app/profile/mark-ungrin.bsky.social/post/3led4mor5j22j
Preprint: https://osf.io/preprints/metaarxiv/xk3n9_v1
H/T Dr. Ruzycki, an aerosol expert who first called this out.
Pregnant nurses were tested while wearing a spirometry mask, with or without a small piece of N95 material taped over the hole.
The...tiny...little...hole.
You know,
For science.
This isn't just one overconfident jackass. Where was ethics review? What strings were pulled to get this funded? Peer review was obviously a joke. The editors shielding this stuff are clearly quacks, and where's the integrity of the readership?
It's bad enough to...
The hole in the rubber mask is <10% the surface area of an N95.
Flow velocity must therefore increase >10x.
In this range, breathing resistance is roughly proportional to velocity.
🤨
The only question the study addressed was "would wearing 10 well-sealed N95s on top of one another make it harder for pregnant women to breathe?"
This is why EBM-based guidance is so consistently silly.
But the pseudoscience says "gold standard".
https://bsky.app/profile/mark-ungrin.bsky.social/post/3kfivym4ptd2d
Or at least reviewer #1 does. It's not clear if the editor even read the reviews.
Glad to hear that it's being contested.