utrafilter–I would say, again, just because a journal is listed somewhere doesn’t make the research “not bad research”.
But, yeah, I think the link you listed gives me all the cites I need to decide for myself. I could read the articles and reach my own conclusions as to whether I believe what they say.
I guess what pisses me off about the “published research citations makes it legitamate” point of view is the stuff my father showed me when my mother was dying of terminal cancer.
People were showing him “literature” that promoted cancer cures and cited published articles to back the claim of their cure. For a lot of dollars, you can have this cure.
My father was an engineer (with no biological science background beyond high school, my brother also) and he presented me with “journal articles” promoting cancer cures.
“Is there any hope in this”? he asked. My background is that I have graduate degrees in biology and molecular biology and work in a lab. I read the science journals (at least the relevant stuff to my area) every week (and I can’t even pretend to keep up).
My father’s spouse and my mother is dying of cancer. Wouldn’t anybody grasp at whatever straw was offered?
When I searched for the citations on PubMed, I only could find a few. Further Internet searches showed that most of these “cititions” were abstracts presented at meetings.
As anybody who has presented an abstract at an annual meeting of whatever society knows, your shit has to really suck not to be accepted (especially at the less competitive societies).
The cancer cure in question was a compound that was presented at meetings dealing with cancer, HIV, and anti-aging.
WOW, this chemical compound cures AIDS, cancer and aging!
And yet, somehow, the world at large dosen’t know this cure exists.
Can anyone say “snake oil”? But yet they had citations in the journals to bolster their claims of acceptance.
That’s why I’m skeptical.
