When you hear about new medical advances in the news, you will only hear about peer-reviewed research. Peer review means it passed some kind of basic quality standards. It is the gold standard of research.

But is it real gold or fool’s gold?

Medical research seems especially mystical and inspiring to the average person. The basics of medicine, which are not really difficult to understand, are deliberately shrouded in Latin terminology and other confusing jargon, making medical knowledge and theory seem out of reach for the common person.

After all, every profession should make you think that you need their services. Lawyers make the legal system so complex and confusing that the average person is completely helpless without legal assistance. Accountants help the IRS modify the tax code so that it is virtually impossible for the average person to know everything, understand everything, or follow all the changes that are constantly being made. Doctors have made it so that you cannot order medical tests or take over-the-counter medications. Name a profession and you can see the ways it perpetuates itself by disempowering the public.

What about the medical research profession?

One of the most important things to know about medical research is that it is a profession first and foremost. Researchers often earn money from both salaries and grants. The investigator’s job is to find a sponsor for your special type of research. The more research projects and publications they get, the more sponsors they will have and the higher their income. And if a researcher comes up with a patentable drug or device, there are intellectual property rights to include in the compensation package.

This means that researchers do not work for free. They are mercenaries. There can be very interesting research and, by societal standards, very important what needs to be done and what they could do. But unless, and until they are paid to do it, the work is not done.

This means that the sources of funding for research, whether they are government or private sources, determine what research is actually done. Most of the money for medical research comes from the private sector, usually pharmaceutical companies, which is why drugs dominate modern medicine. Government funding is a bit different, as it comes from agencies that are heavily pressured by drug companies and run by trained doctors and paid for by drug companies. Medicine is a public-private partnership that gives the pharmaceutical industry a power similar to that of a government over culture and its health research.

Research on non-drug alternatives is rarely done for this reason. It is also the reason why medicine claims that it knows very little about the causes of most diseases of our time. They care much more about the treatment than the cause, as the treatment is profitable for the research sponsors, while knowing the cause can lead to prevention, which translates into “non-billable” medical terminology.

Of course, this is a pretty big scam to pull off. Consider your scope. The public must pay taxes and ask for donations to pay for medical research that is used to discover drug treatments that the public will then have to pay insanely high prices to obtain, and only after paying the doctor for an office visit to obtain a prescription. And if the drug produces unpleasant side effects, it only generates more orders for more money to find newer drugs with different side effects.

Is the public getting a good deal here? How do you know that the research is scientifically valid? Where is the quality control?

Since most people have been conditioned to believe that they cannot judge medical research unless they have a Ph.D., MD, Newcastle disease, or other license, the research is evaluated by other scientists in the field. This is called peer review.

Research scientists, as with all professions, belong to a club of like-minded researchers in the same business, promoting their services and products. They belong to the same type of industries, such as universities or large multinational pharmaceutical corporations. They have the same education, which means that they all think alike. The purpose of your organization is to provide standards of practice that are supposed to ensure quality. Any research must be reviewed in some way by the fellow members of this club to ensure quality guidelines are met, before the research can be published.

However, despite this quality assurance, the fact remains that most of what is considered true today will be discarded as false in the future. “Ninety percent of what you learn in medical school will be out of date and out of date in ten years,” the dean of students told us when I started medical school. This means that most of what doctors learn is wrong. It also means that new information that will arrive in 10 years to replace and update current misconceptions and errors will also be considered out of date in another ten years. This is a powerful indictment from medical research, which appears to produce little more than temporary information.

It also means that the peer review process does not ensure the truth. It just means that current standards of practice are being followed. Currently, this allows for conflicts of interest, as most drug research is funded by the companies that produce and benefit from those same drugs. Even the research that proves the dangers of drug side effects is paid for by companies that stand to lose, big time, if their drugs are shown to be unsafe. Given that pharmaceutical companies have their results, and not selfless service to humanity, as their reason for their existence, it is extremely unwise to entrust them with researching their own products. The researchers do not take any oath of honesty or integrity. They work for whoever pays them, and they are not above manipulating the results to obtain the desired result.

This is not good science, of course. But it is science as practiced in a culture that has professionalized research in a for-profit enterprise. It is not, as people fantasize, the sacred trust necessary to help the sick and injured with selfless devotion. Medical research is about making money off newly patented drugs to replace newly off-patent drugs that generic drug competitors are selling too cheaply.

Peer review does not stop conflict of interest. Medical journals accept conflict of interest, knowing that it is the way medical research is done. Knowing what research is coming allows these experts to get a feel for new drug developments before the public knows it, so they can change the mix of their investment portfolio for anticipated stock price adjustments.

Peer review also avoids alternative theories and ways of doing research. Any innovation threatens the status quo, and those who control the peer review process, such as Supreme Court justices, can decide which cases to hear and which to ignore. They are the guardians of the status quo, which maintains the current powers that are in power. Since peer review boards are the culture’s final authority on quality, there is no way to challenge their decisions. In fact, the quality of the research can be poor, which is evident when you look at how many research articles criticize other peer-reviewed research as flawed in some way. Any researcher will tell you that a lot of bad research gets published. However, it is a world of publish or perish. Since researchers and their peers are caught up in this very demand for publication or death, and they review each other’s work, they subtly collude to get as much research funded and published as possible. You scratch my back and I scratch yours. They argue with each other in the journals about the quality of their work, and surely there is some competition between scientists, since they apply for grants from the same sources to do more or less the same thing. But there is a general understanding that, as pairs, united they stand and divided they fall.

Of course, this means that the peer review is nothing more than a political arrangement for researchers, like a guild or union. Your goal is to maintain control over your field, suppress competition, and ensure continuous cash flow. It has nothing to do with science, the systematic search for the truth, which should not be contaminated for economic reasons or tempted by personal gain.

So the next time you hear a news story about some new wonder drug, look for the union tag. If it is peer reviewed, there is a ninety percent change that is wrong.