In my mind, there is also underlying all this the idea that if a drug actually works, then there will be many doctors going on CNN to say that it totally works; that they're super excited by their patients recovering. In other words, the effect should be profound. If the effect is marginal, why bother, even if it is a real measurable effect in well conducted trials? I mean : that doctors observe that some therapy or drug works well is step 1, then step 2 is to conduct trials to prove conclusively that step 1 wasn't a statistical fluke. In this case we seem to have it backwards : we first observed that there is an effect in vitro, then ran trials which proved nothing much, then extracted noise from that data to prove whatever we wanted.