Many fake papers are me-too studies, supporting treatments already backed by other work. For the most part, these are unlikely to sway clinical practice. But some fraudsters have been the inspiration for specific medical interventions which have turned out to be useless, or even harmful.
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Likewise, for more than a decade cardiac patients in Europe were given beta-blockers before surgery, with the intention of reducing heart attacks and strokes—a practice that rested on a study from 2009 which was eventually determined to have been based, at least in part, on fabricated data. By one estimate, this approach may have caused 10,000 deaths a year in Britain alone.
@sullybiker It’s very worrying.