Is psychopharmacology the scientific fraud of the century?

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You can also do a 24-hr urine collection for catecholamines, which includes norepi. (That way you're not taking a mere snapshot in time.) It's an easy collection test.

This doesn't necessarily relate to levels in the central nervous system...

 

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Is psychopharmacology the scientific fraud of the century? 64% of psychology experiments can't be reproduced - NaturalNews.com



See full article here.

I haven't gone into depth on that article (that website is suspicious at best), but I'll assume it's correct.

There's no inherent problem with not being able to reproduce these studies. The problem comes from any selection effects caused by the system, mainly seeking positive results.

Psychology is one of the most complex sciences, and unlike the hard/simple sciences like physics, where you only need about half the scientific method to make progress until the very advanced stages, in the complex/soft sciences you need a very rigorous methodology to make even basic progress. As such you would expect most of the studies to not provide much information on their own, hence not be reproducible.

Studies != science, they're just a building block, and it is only the expectation that these studies are more significant or should be more significant that leads to the problems. In a healthy psycho-pharmacological system, it would be expected that most studies will not be replicable.