HURRAY, WE HAVE A WINNER! Here is the worst paper of 2022

You, the readers of this blog, have spoken!

The WORST PAPER OF 2022 competition has concluded with a fairly clear winner.

To fill in those new to all this: over the last year, I selected articles that struck me as being of particularly poor quality. I then published them with my comments on this blog. In this way, we ended up with 10 papers, and you had the chance to nominate the one that, in your view, stood out as the worst. Votes came in via comments to my last post about the competition and via emails directly to me. A simple count identified the winner.

It is PAUL VARNAS, DC, a graduate of the National College of Chiropractic, US. He is the author of several books and has taught nutrition at the National University of Health Sciences. His award-winning paper is entitled “What is the goal of science? ‘Scientific’ has been co-opted, but science is on the side of chiropractic“. In my view, it is a worthy winner of the award (the runner-up was entry No 10). Here are a few memorable quotes directly from Paul’s article:

• Most of what chiropractors do in natural health care is scientific; it just has not been proven in a laboratory at the level we would like.
• In many ways we are more scientific than traditional medicine because we keep an open mind and study our observations.
• Traditional medicine fails to be scientific because it ignores clinical observations out of hand.
• When you think about it, in natural health care we are much better at utilizing the scientific process than traditional medicine.

But I am surely doing Paul an injustice. To appreciate his article, please read his article in full.

I am especially pleased that this award goes to a chiropractor who informs us about the value of science and research. The two research questions that undoubtedly need answering more urgently than any other in the realm of chiropractic relate to the therapeutic effectiveness and risks of chiropractic. I just had a quick look in Medline and found an almost complete absence of research from 2022 into these two issues. This, I believe, makes the award for the WORST PAPER OF 2022 all the more meaningful.

PS

Yesterday, I wrote to Paul informing him about the good news (as yet, no reply). Once he provides me with a postal address, I will send him a copy of my recent book on chiropractic as his well-earned prize. I have also invited him to contribute a guest post to this blog. Watch this space!