Science Under Pressure, Humanity at Stake: An Interview with John Ioannidis
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 212 Ratings
🗓️ 10 September 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
John Ioannidis is a Stanford professor, a physician, and one of the most eminent scholars in the world in the field of evidence-based medicine.
Ioannidis has spent his career exposing the weak foundations of much of modern medicine. His 2005 paper, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False," became the most-viewed article in the history of PLOS Medicine and helped spark a global reckoning with reproducibility. He has since warned about how evidence-based medicine can be hijackedby industry influence, how biased reward systems in academia favor quantity over quality, and how even systematic reviews can recycle flawed data. His critiques extend to psychiatry, where pharma-funded trials often tilt toward positive results, guidelines are shaped by insiders, and neuroscience findings are more fragile than they appear.
He is a tenured professor at Stanford and has an extensive background in medicine, epidemiology, population health, and data sciences. As much as he is a champion of good science, Ioannidis is also a lover of the arts and humanities. He's a novelist, teaches poetry, loves operas, and has written libretti for four operas himself.
In this interview, he discusses the extensive bias that pervades scientific research, the problematic practices and pressures that enable flawed science, and the significant issues with antidepressant research. At the same time, he reminds us why good science is a gift to humanity and something we must protect for our well-being and dignity.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice. |
| 0:13.7 | Welcome to Mad in America. Your host for today is me, Ayurdi Dhar. I'm assistant professor of psychology at Amity University, editor of |
| 0:22.9 | Mad in South Asia, and Spotlight interviewer for Mad in America. If you are on social media, |
| 0:28.7 | which, let's be honest, most of us are, it is difficult to avoid posts on mental health. |
| 0:35.2 | Posts that claim that we have found ADHD in the brain or trauma in the brain |
| 0:39.5 | are the one gene that causes schizophrenia. But have we ever wondered about the quality of these |
| 0:45.4 | studies? The pressures on researchers who conduct them, the intentions of the companies who often |
| 0:51.3 | fund them. You see, once these studies go out into the world, |
| 0:55.3 | they become powerful narratives, they become stories that shape our experience of us, |
| 1:00.0 | our experience of grief and distress and pain and joy. And they're kind of difficult to budge |
| 1:05.8 | irrespective of how bad the research was. So sometimes they end up causing much harm. |
| 1:11.5 | That's what we will talk about today. So our guest today is John Eonidis, possibly one of the most eminent |
| 1:17.4 | scholars in the world in the field of evidence-based medicine, research integrity. Dr. Eonides |
| 1:22.9 | took the scientific world by storm when he showed in his 2005 paper how most medical research |
| 1:29.0 | findings are false. Since then, he has been on the forefront of questioning bad research, |
| 1:35.0 | challenging shari science, and also, most importantly, showing us a better way to conduct |
| 1:40.1 | research and practice medicine. Dr. Eonidis is a Stanford professor. He's a writer, a novelist, |
| 1:46.2 | I think, a scientist, a physician, an epidemiologist, and a lover of operas. He has a background |
| 1:52.8 | in medicine and mathematics, but he also teaches a class in poetry, if I'm not wrong. Dr. Eonidis, |
| 1:59.6 | welcome to Mad in America. Thank you for the very |
| 2:02.1 | kind invitation. I have often heard you say across different interviews and different papers |
| 2:07.7 | that science is the best thing that has happened to us, to humans. And your work has been about |
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