According to Greek epidemiologist John Ioannidis, the latest medical research is wrong about one-third of the time - or at least that's what the latest research shows.

Ioannidis, whose findings were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, examined 49 widely cited medical studies and found that the results of 14 of them were contradicted or downplayed by later research.

He went so far as to claim that "most published research findings are false."

While Ioannidis' work raises some hard questions - Is there a fundamental flaw in medical research or is this just part of the scientific process? - he joins a growing chorus of critics of the way research is conducted, published and subsequently reported by the mass media...

Typically, it's not that researchers are trying to mislead people - but the sponsor of the study might be. Until recently, few medical journals included information on who paid for the research or whether the researcher stood to gain financially from the outcome.

"Today, private industry has unprecedented leverage to dictate what doctors and patients know - and don't know - about the $160 billion worth of pharmaceuticals Americans consume each year," writes Shannon Brownlee, a journalist and fellow at the nonprofit New America Foundation.

That's because, during the past two decades, the money for most clinical studies has come not from the federal government, as it once did, but from the pharmaceutical and biotech industries themselves. If a study doesn't show its drug to be effective, a company sometimes does its best to delay or even prevent publication. A drug-maker may even sponsor several trials until it gets the results it wants...