Science Monopoly
A call to reform critical care science
A call to reform critical care science
You are invited for a free lecture given by Dr. Lawrence Lynn at Consilium Scientific on May 8th, 2025.
He discusses how our specialty stalled and how we can disentangle ourselves from this mess.
Here’s the link
While reformers have been focused on “Big Pharma”, the unrecognized emergence of medical science monopolies funded by the NIH may be a more ominous 21st century development potentially wasting billions of research dollars and severely delaying medical progress.
In just one example, a 2023 review in Critical Care demonstrated that only 6% of single center critical care RCT published in prestigious journals were reproducible. Even considering the RCT threshold effect on “reproducibility”, this is entirely indefensible, yet it was largely ignored.
Furthermore over the decades, most of the “evidence based” critical care standard treatment protocols for syndromes were
reversed because the subsequent RCT demonstrated that the treatment had either no effect or was harmful.
In the most striking example, the standard ventilator protocol derived from a large multicenter RCT was found to be harmful during the COVID pandemic causing the “ventilator revolt” of bedside physicians in 2020. This protocol has been abandoned but the pathological methodology which generated it has not. How did this happen?
Real science operates as a Darwinian ecosystem, wherein the weaker paradigm is displaced by the stronger and progress evolves naturally as diligent scientists in the field seek truth, police themselves, and timely abandon, without regard to political expediency, those methods that have consistently failed to render reproducibility. However a centrally controlled science driven by shepherding task forces, who direct funding to their preferred paradigm does not self-correct so it does not progress
toward truth.
The science, lacking self-correction, is a pathological science which becomes stagnant and wasteful. In this talk we will discuss how the self-correction feature of science can be destroyed by well-intentioned central control and describe the pathognomonic characteristics of a science monopoly.