The 'healthy' is important too! See here for some balance. The idea is to read critically, but not cynically.
The article above is partly a response to this one: Lies, Damned Lies and Medical Science. There's a link to this in the article above, but I'm including it here anyway, for the sake of completeness.
Thanks, I went over the tutorials and searched for some papers for practice. The list of peer-reviewed journals - What is the search term to find this in future since it mentions that the list of publications is subject to change?
It turns out I was not skeptical at all! These are illuminating and as you have predicted, very disheartening. The silver lining probably is that I can let those damn chia seeds go bad with no guilt.
Just stay with Medline or Pubmed. When journals get shady - as some for-profit ventures do - then their big punishment is to be delisted from Pubmed. One example here.
Not necessarily. There's usually no reliable data supporting most of those. The science is getting trickier because: (1) Too many scientists chasing limited funding. Competition leads to corner-cutting. (2) Extremely complex technology and multy-disciplinary research, means no single person understands all aspects of the work. This in turn means that screw-ups can creep in. A single coding error - a floating point error of the sort that undrgrads are often tested on - caused an Ariane 5 rocket to crash. The more complex the research, the greater the possibility of error. (3) There's money to be made in startups and IPOs and whatnot. Those days of Salk giving away the polio vaccine are over. For a quick overview of weak research, hype, and a guide to spotting medical charlatanry, see: Bad Science Bad Pharma Website: badscience.net TED Talk: Ben Goldacre Also see: An American Sickness The Truth About Drug Companies Bitter Pill
Please don't get the wrong idea. I am NOT trying to depress you. Progress in medical research is very real and quite dramatic in some areas. I am simply trying to ensure that you make medical decisions responsibly, for your own well-being. After these caveats, we'll get to something a bit more useful perhaps.
Not depressed about science or the scientific process. Deflated about my abilities to keep up with it.