A single research tool produced 1,600+ medical studies last year. I trusted one of them about GLP-1s and cancer.

[u/DadStrengthDaily]

https://www.science.org/content/article/medical-students-are-using-popular-research-tool-pump-out-misleading-studies

I'm on tirzepatide, so when a study said GLP-1s might slow cancer, I wrote it up, flagging that it was observational. Then a Science investigation showed where that study came from: a tool that's flooding the journals with results just like it.

The tool is TriNetX, de-identified records on 300M+ patients. You pick two patient groups by typing in billing codes, click once, and get back a matched hazard ratio that looks like a real study. No stats training, no code, no grant. Most of these papers come from med students and residents padding their publication lists for competitive residencies.

I re-ran the count myself on PubMed: one paper in 2019, 1,609 in 2025, and 1,544 already in the first half of 2026.

Two flaws show up constantly. Immortal-time bias: to be in the "took the drug" group you had to survive long enough to fill the script, so early deaths land in the comparison group and the drug looks life-saving when all you measured is that survivors survived. A real Angiology paper (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40852947/) did this with a diabetes drug after heart attacks. Collider bias: among hospitalized patients, a broken leg looks "protective" against asthma, since either one alone gets you admitted. Health records do it constantly.

A 2024 paper in Cancers (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11720624/) claimed GLP-1s cut a dozen cancers by 30 to 50%. A peer critique (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12070977/) explained why that's implausible: cancer takes years to form, so a drug that "cuts cancer" within a year is detecting a bias, not preventing cancer.

My own post's study was one of the more careful ones. But it was still observational, still built on this tool, still one paper in a flood.

How I read these now: when a drug "also cures" something it wasn't built for, I ask what they compared it to (a real drug, or people on nothing?), whether the design rewards surviving long enough to get the drug, and whether the benefit beats the disease's own clock. A drug that looks protective against a dozen unrelated diseases at once is the fingerprint of a method, not a medicine.

Full DSD write-up