No, it just means we put very little weight on individual studies. We don’t pay much attention to results that haven’t been replicated a few times, and rely heavily on summaries like meta-analyses.

So, for instance, Skinner, who may or may not have demonstrated and published something really important and blindingly obvious in hindsight, gets ignored and then eventually pretty much struck off for it, even though his results could have been put to formal trial for about 50p.

Is the only way we learn anything new if seven different people do the necessary research at their own expense and get their lives destroyed as a consequence?

And nothing done outside the system is worth anything at all?

And the opinions of patients and doctors are 'placebo effect?'.

And the patients' obvious symptoms are 'psychosomatic/somatoform/hypochondriac/malingering'? All the same bloody word, changed every decade or so when people realise what they mean.

And someone invents a wonderful new measurement technique that bears on a hard problem, and it's used to make things worse?