Is it Peer Reviewed?

Please see the following link to an article written in a newspaper titled “The Australian”, by a gentleman named Brendan O’Neill.

What do we want? Peer review. When do we want it? Never.

Whilst this article mainly refers to climate change as an example of a scientific subject, I think this article is very relevant to any profession using scientific literature as a basis for its practice. Physiotherapy is obviously one of these professions.

Let me provide some quotes from Mr O’Neill’s article:

More and more campaigners and commentators now insist that only ideas that have been peer-reviewed should be taken seriously. Everything else is bunkum, or possibly charlatanism.

Under the guise of promoting “correct science” and slamming “bad science”, the priestly peer-review lobby is actually enforcing an ideological world view, using the tags “peer reviewed” and “non peer-reviewed” to distinguish between those who are politically on side and those who remain stubbornly heretical. 

Much peer review involves little more than well-connected academics getting people they know or mates who owe them a favour to sign off on their latest bit of work. 

In essence, huge swaths of the cultural elite are using peer review as a kind of intellectual licence, with those lucky enough to receive this stamp being treated seriously and everyone else being branded a dangerous outsider. 

So my questions:

Is physiotherapy/medicine/health research guilty of the above?

Should we be wary of just reading “peer reviewed” journals/articles?

I will be the first to say that I have next to no experience in the research field, apart from reading scientific literature. I have also never published an article in a journal, nor have I undertaken a research project, so I have no idea on the answers to the above questions. I do however,  fail to see how scientific literature relating to our profession could be immune to the issues that Mr O’Neill mentions in the article. But then again I might be also be completely wrong!

I might throw a quote in to conclude. This one comes to mind in relation to this topic, maybe this is applicable to the peer review process in some professions:

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 – 1860)

Thanks for reading. Interested to hear your thoughts…..especially if you have some involvement in the research field.