> it is also true that pure scientists who never set foot in the clinics are very limited when evaluating practical aspects.

Yes, but most medical/epidemiological papers fall over under the lightest methodological scrutiny. Even advanced scientific concepts like "have a control group" is seemingly beyond the analytical capacity of a fair number of MDs. When you get into things like "comparing small effect sizes with confidence intervals", they're positively adrift. We really are talking about table stakes, here.

I'd love to live in a world where MDs were sufficiently knowledgable of experimental design so that domain expertise is the limiting factor, but I can count the number of such papers I've read in the last two years on one hand.

I could write a much longer post on the arrogance of researchers when interpreting medical data or extrapolating lab results into humans...but that's a different subject.