It's not just that. You're going to have to contend with the resistance of people you're attempting to dislodge conventional wisdom from.

To quote Alistair Fraser, "I find teaching of science fairly easy. I have no difficulties with science education; my difficulties are with science reeducation. If I can teach something about which the students have never heard, I find that they generally both welcome and understand it. It is when I have to teach them about something that they have already learned incorrectly, that I start to identify with Sisyphus."

http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/BadScience.html

It's not just folk wisdom. A significant portion of our medical wisdom, what many doctors pass off as science, has little basis in fact. My wife's pregnancy was eye opening on this regard.

Doctors are one of the few groups who don't think they need to justify themselves. When pressed doctors typically respond with what is essentially "trust me, I'm a doctor".

What unjustified advice did your wife get?

When she was pregnant, my wife did a lot of research into what the studies actually said about the impact of caffeine, alcohol, breastfeeding, etc, on fetal and childhood development. The way doctors and nurses talked about it, you'd think there were conclusive studies showing major impacts from even low levels of caffeine and alcohol consumption, and not breastfeeding for up to a year.

I think the breastfeeding debate is a great example. The studies showing any non-trivial advantages are tenuous, and often fail to detect any statistically significant advantage at all. At the same time, doctors completely and thoroughly fail to analyze these decisions in a rational cost/benefit way. Breastfeeding is a tremendous burden on career women. If not breastfeeding enables a woman to get back to work sooner, get less behind on her career progression, etc, then there is a monetary benefit to not breastfeeding, a very concrete one one that must be balanced against the tenuous and uncertain costs of not breastfeeding.

Same thing for drinking during pregnancy: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peggy-drexler/-a-loaded-questi.... I recommend reading the Peggy Drexler article, it's wonderful.

Same thing for caffeine: http://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20100721/moderate-coffee-drin.... Note that: 1) 200 mg is about two and a half red-bulls, and 2) exercising, something which doctors recommend to pregnant women without reservation, has been linked to similar increases in risk of miscarriage as heavy caffeine consumption.

When it comes to pregnant women, the medical communities recommendations are wildly unscientific and highly irrational.

>Studies like this make you question how much of our folk knowledge and wisdom is false

If you really start to try making hypotheses and then test them objectively, and keep an eye on your track record, it starts to become surprising that folk wisdom ever turns out to be true. A maddeningly small minority of plausible hypotheses are actually true, and confirmation bias is strong. If you haven't already, you should probably just go ahead and cut your confidence about everything you think you know in half - especially if it isn't backed by hard science.

> I stretch before and after my daily runs under the assumption that this has been reducing my injury risk. From these results, I should stop wasting time on pre-run stretches.

Have you been injured? Have you seen and/or felt a decrease in fitness due to your stretching routine? If not, I wouldn't change much of what you are doing due to a blog post or this study...

The problem with all these studies is that those that are on the bleeding edge of Strength and Conditioning research are the coaches out in the gym working with athletes and soccer moms. Sadly, no matter how many lives these people change for the better, their methods are discounted due to the lack of scientific rigor.

I've been a strength and conditioning coach for 5 years now and I get very little value out of any of the articles and studies published by NSCA, despite their clout. I continue to pay my dues for access to the information.

You do have a great point though about how well trenched the conventional "wisdom" is in these areas and the large commercial influence that controls these studies through funding or not funding a program.

These studies did not look at injury risk, they looked at top-end strength and power.

I'm not saying the studies are wrong, just that one must read very carefully when evaluating the applicability of this sort of statistical research. Muscular performance has many aspects--strength, power, endurance, range of motion, elasticity, resistance to injury, energy storage, lactic tolerance, etc. off the top of my head. Plus these all change over time in response to how you exercise, eat, stretch, etc.