This article annoys me on so many levels Imma go ahead and find out on how many scientific levels this thing went wrong.
First off, the researchers get the idea to figure out if doping works or not. All good so far. Now, to start doing medical research you need funding, for which you usually write a research proposal you send to one or several instances that then may or may not fund your research. This proposal had to have said that they were gonna do a retrospective study to investigate the effect of doping. according to the acknowledgments of the article, which by the way contains a type in one of its only two sentences (while ironically the other sentence mentions a dr assisting in editing the text), it was funded by both a postgraduate scholarship and some sort of bequest (don't know what that is), butboth of these instances apparently didn't understand how ridiculously bad the study design is.
Then, when the research money is granted, the research is conducted by these so-called 'researchers'. I assume the data they used is public and they didn't have to request data from other researchers, so I guess there's nobody else to blame here.
After conducting their research and writing the article, they have to send it to a scientific journal. The editor then reads it, and when he or she concludes that a) it is interesting enough for readers to put in the journal and b) the research isn't total *** (which they apparently failed to see).
Then, the editor sends the article to other 'experts' in the field, for peer review. This is actually the saddest part. Apparently, scientific experts in the field of doping and sports and exercies CRITICALLY read the article and thought: "well, there's nothing wrong here. Everything is well explained, all assumptions are plausible, the study design makes sense, the results definitely supports the conclusion and there is no other way we can interpret the data".
Aaaand last but not least (actually, it is least), newspapers are all picking up on it and instead of using their own *** brain, they go "O MY GOD, DOPING DOESN'T HELP". Sometimes I think that journalists are people who are supposed to think critically about everything and everyone they write about (which I think is a very important thing in society), but no, they could score an easy headline through terribly conducted research.
Actually, only article of the lead author I could find on PubMed is a similar, *** article about how the 100m is not affected by doping.
I can't believe it
***