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Rain comments on Even if you have a nail, not all hammers are the same - Less Wrong
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This is an interesting point in itself. Why health and medicine?
Maybe causal inference is straight up more difficult in health and medicine: effects are smaller and more ambiguous than in hard sciences, and have many hard-to-manipulate causes that blur the signal.
There are borderline results in fields like physics, obviously, but they're usually more esoteric and tend to have relatively clear cut theory behind them (which is why I'd guess you're not too worried about, say, last year's ambiguous results from the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search), so they don't provoke so much back-and-forthing.
This leads me to a prediction: you'd have as much difficulty reading up on results in psychology and sociology as you do in health and medicine. As for what to do about it? Uh...not sure. I'm still chewing over this thread.
You're right. I mentally boxed them off when I made my original statement. Thinking further, I might add economics to the list.
You don't get these problems with economics. In economics journals its standard practice to include your specification, as well as the whole regression output, including a full list of included terms and their significance tests.
When I was completing my Master's degree I was a sessional assistant for an introductory quantitative methods course for economics and finance majors. The type of simple linear regression would be considered overly simplistic at that level (at least in the absence of some simple specification testing), and if the j curve is already accepted in medicine, to model linearly is unforgivable. It's not like non-linear transformations are hard to do either, you can do them in Excel without too much trouble.
FWIW, I'm of the impression that economists get a better grounding in quantitative methods than other social scientists (and I would say that the profession is a bit too keen on mathematical approaches in some cases), so maybe you would have similar problems with psychology or sociology. But I don't think economics has this problem.