Partly that and also based on my experience getting a PhD in physics where I found: (i) published physics papers with 30 pages of math in them frequently had errors, (ii) if you have a large number of signs the odds are 50-50 you will get the sign right in a long calculation, and (iii) you can't say high energy physics papers are "right" or "wrong" anyway... I mean, does anybody think we really live in an anti-DeSitter space?

Medicine on the other hand has the problem that you can't really afford large enough sample sizes to have sufficient statistical power.

>"Medicine on the other hand has the problem that you can't really afford large enough sample sizes to have sufficient statistical power."

This really isn't the major problem w/ modern medical research. In fact, if they had properly powered studies there would be far too many "discoveries" and the real problem would become obvious.

The real issue is that the efforts to come up with and study models capable of precise predictions (eg Armitage-Doll, SIR, Frank-Starling, Hodgekin-Huxly) have been all but choked out in favor of people testing the vague hypothesis "there is a correlation". There is always some effect/correlation in systems like the human body, so it is only a matter of sample size. As explained long ago by Paul Meehl, this is a 180 degree about-face from what was previously called the scientific method: http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/me...