Look at this guy, trying to drive down the selling price. I'm onto you!

Someone should do a study to link the quality of studies over time to the implosion of credibility of studies. At this point, because the cancer that has been pervasive in “science” for decades at this point has never been meaningfully addressed, only fools and those personally invested in “the science” take any “study” with anything less than a metric ton of salt.

It is a shame, but if “scientists” are unwilling to actually follow the scientific method, maybe they are not scientists at all, but rather just run off the mill con artists. And for those who are not aware, “con artists” is short for “confidence artist“, i.e., a manipulative person committing tricks, i.e., fraud, through their ability to instill confidence in their target that they are knowledgeable or have a credible expertise in a field … confidence tricks.

I think your anger is misdirected. Take the diabetes study for example:

Scientists didn't publish the headline "Mouthwash twice a day increases diabetes risk by 50%". That was the press. The press are generally the ones who drop all the uncertainty/nuance and add the panic. And the scientifically illiterate public don't question how the headlines represent the studies and think each study contradicts the previous. Switching examples for a moment: does "eggs are bad" -> "eggs good again", etc. sound familiar? Bet you can't find studies that state that so absolutely though...

Instead, in the diabetes study the scientists showed a correlation, suggested a mechanism by which it might be true, described limitations of their data and analysis, and proposed areas for further study. And they answered questions from interested parties such as the author of the article I linked. This is real science. It moves slowly.

I'm interested to see follow-up studies. In the meantime, we live with uncertainty. A possibility has been raised but neither proven nor disproven, and it's a personal choice how we change our behavior. I think the article I linked had a good take—with the potential downsides, it's wise to look at how much benefit we get from antiseptic mouthwash as opposed to just brushing well and the like. YMMV.

> only fools and those personally invested in “the science” take any “study” with anything less than a metric ton of salt.

I think the real foolish move is taking a mainstream press article as representative of the study it describes with anything less than a metric ton of salt. You'd be wise to consider if you're doing this...

In short they seem to be saying "useful when recovering from surgery" / "increasingly looks like it could be a bad idea to use it all the time" / "once per day max" / "brushing and flossing are preferred".