  This is an excerpt from an article in the July/August 2010
issue of Discover magazine, written by David H. Freedman.
Researchers tend to look for answers where the looking is good,
rather than where the answers are likely to be hiding. The
result: a lot of dubious science.  A bolt of excitement ran
through the field of cardiology in the early 1980s when anti-
arrhythmia drugs burst onto the scene. Researches knew that
heart-attack victims with steady heartbeats had the best odds of
survival, so a medication that could tamp down irregularities
seemed like a no-brainer. The drugs became the stand of care for
heart-attack patients and were soon smoothing out heartbeats in
intensive care wards across the United States.    I have spent
the past three years examining why expert pronouncements so
often turn out to be exaggerated, misleading, or flat-out wrong.
There are several very good reasons why that happens, and one of
them is that scientists are not as good at making trustworthy
measurements as we give them