The staggering death toll of scientific lies
Story by Kelsey Piper • 20h
You probably haven’t heard of cardiologist Don Poldermans, but experts who study scientific misconduct believe that thousands of people may be dead because of him.
Poldermans was a prolific medical researcher at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, where he analyzed the standards of care for cardiac surgery, publishing a series of definitive studies from 1999 until the early 2010s.
One crucial question he studied: Should you give patients a beta blocker, which lowers blood pressure, before certain heart surgeries? Poldermans’s research said yes. European medical guidelines (and to a lesser extent US guidelines) recommended it accordingly.
The problem? Poldermans’s data was reportedly fake. A 2012 inquiry by Erasmus Medical School, his employer, into allegations of misconduct found that he “used patient data without written permission, used fictitious data and… submitted to conferences [reports] which included knowingly unreliable data.” Poldermans admitted the allegations and apologized, while stressing that the use of fictitious data was accidental.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/the-staggering-death-toll-of-scientific-lies/ar-AA1pjmO2?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=HCTS&cvid=687bd376dd65499aa98e4a85de615c7e&ei=63
