Fake News and Medicine - Ask Seinfeld!
Fake news over the Internet has become, well, "huge". With pressure to publish, many scientists fudge results. In a recent review in Nature (http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970) they reported that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments.
And there are many so-called medical journals, often quoted in "stay healthy buy my vitamin" web pages, that are considered predatory, and will publish almost anything without proper review.
Seinfeld fans may remember the famous episode called “The Parking Garage” where Jerry is caught urinating in public? Jerry tried to get out of trouble by telling the security guard he had a disabling fictitious condition known as “uromycitisis.”
So non-scientist and non-urologist Sienfeld fan John McCool sent the Urology & Nephrology Open Access Journal a mock paper about uroymycitisis, it was "peer reviewed?" and accepted for publication within a few days. They asked him to pay $799 to publish it (not the standard in real journals), but published it anyway.
Read about it here
http://www.precisionscientificediting.com/-uromycitisis-.html
Fake News seems to be the new normal!
