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False beliefs and wishful thinking about the human experience are common. They are hurting people — and holding back science.
[...] These myths often blossom from a seed of a fact — early detection does save lives for some cancers — and thrive on human desires or anxieties, such as a fear of death. But they can do harm by, for instance, driving people to pursue unnecessary treatment or spend money on unproven products. They can also derail or forestall promising research by distracting scientists or monopolizing funding. And dispelling them is tricky.
Scientists should work to discredit myths, but they also have a responsibility to try to prevent new ones from arising, says Paul Howard-Jones, who studies neuroscience and education at the University of Bristol, UK. "We need to look deeper to understand how they come about in the first place and why they're so prevalent and persistent."
Some dangerous myths get plenty of air time: vaccines cause autism, HIV doesn't cause AIDS. But many others swirl about, too, harming people, sucking up money, muddying the scientific enterprise — or simply getting on scientists' nerves. Here, Nature looks at the origins and repercussions of five myths that refuse to die.
These are some of the science myths that will not die.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2015, @06:53AM
Some dangerous myths get plenty of air time: vaccines cause autism,...
I can take you to see a family whose once happy 4 yo was reduced to a bibbering wreck from one vaccine shot. 16+ years on this unfortunate individual has a "good day" when there are "only" 4 seizures and they will never be able to live on their own...
Some church of big-pharma disciple will quickly dismiss this with "happens in only 1 in 100,000 cases", but when your child is that one...
A life ruined, and big-pharma have denied this case even exists, never offered a penny in assistance or compensation.
Science, and particularly sponsored medical science, has lost all credibility. Its like dietary 'research' - "meat causes cancer", a study paid for by the Vegan Exclusivite Society; "meat is great for you", paid for by the Meat Producers Assoc. ...and so on. 99% of today's "science" is bullshit.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Sunday December 20 2015, @07:21AM
Agreed. I have seen way too much science practiced like a religion. Driven by money. Easy money.
Money paid in exchange for the persuasion of the word of a respected entity.
Scientists have long enjoyed credibility, as the science was based on the revealing of a repeatable phenomenon.
Now, a lot of science is based on "studies" whose results read like businesstalk. Funnytalk involving statistics. Said in such a manner its hard to interpret.
I trust most of these "studies", underwritten by interests who have much to win or lose based on the findings of that study, about as much as I hold preachermen trying to "convert" me when its kinda obvious they are after the tithes.
Get the money incentive out of the damned thing, use a personal passion for the truth, and I will respect it.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2015, @10:05AM
Research is funded by grants, which are basically business proposals sent to the govt or business who want research done on their niche interest. You can't take the money out of science because then there would be no grants. It's colossal waste of time that awards the best grant writers the money, not the best scientists. You would hope there is a correlation but there isn't necessarily.
(Score: 2) by rob_on_earth on Monday December 21 2015, @10:32AM
I have just been reading about this in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Science_(book). [wikipedia.org] Andrew Wakefield was being paid to promote his own single vaccine to to price of £50k and by the end of it was paid over £400k in legal fees.
His original results were from just 12 children, not a random sample and the random samples done later with 1000s of children clearly show no link.
At every step of the way scientists and experts did the right thing said the right thing, this is a problem with the media. They did not publish the scientists reports and stirred this for as long as they could.
the book lists a number of other salient events that fanned the flames and the chapter on the MRSA scare is even more media led.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 20 2015, @07:46AM
When my youngest was born, he was suffering from Craniosynostosis. He was taken by Caecerian, we brought him home for two days, then took him to meet the neurosugeons at Children's Hostital in Little Rock. That's how I met a father and son who were cursed by the Random Number Gods. The boy was a perfectly normal toddler until he got one of those shots.
With each and every inoculation, the parent is supposed to recieve a brochure, detailing the reactions that a child may have to that inoculation. It warns of symptoms to watch for, and actions to take if those symptoms should manifest. Each and every one of them lists the odds of the various side effects.
AC is right. A one in ten million chance of life threatening conditions sounds like pretty good odds, until your own child is the ten millionth. If I recall correctly, this particular child had a reaction to DPT. It turned him into an apparent mindless vegetable. The best reaction that anyone could get from the child was a vague smile. I wasn't exactly shocked at this tale of woe, because I had read the brochures when each of my elder sons were inoculated. But, I couldn't help seeing one of my own sons in that little boy's condition.
Remember - each shot that you subject your child to has killed other children. Each shot has crippled other children, physically or mentally or both. Read those statistics listed on the brochures, and remember that all of those statistics represent other people's dead babies.
That is science, people. Vaccines may save a lot of lives, but they also destroy lives.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 5, Informative) by NoMaster on Sunday December 20 2015, @08:26AM
On the other hand, don't forget that if you walked down any street in the 40's or 50 you'd be walking past dozens of famiies who'd had a child die at birth, or during childhood from whooping cough, or diarrhea, or scarlet fever, or meningitis, or diphtheria, or measles, or pneumonia; or had a family member living into adulthood affected by polio, or TB, or disabled through rubella, or ...
Everyone is playing a life-or-death game with the Random Number Gods. Vaccines certainly aren't perfect, but they sure as hell tip the odds in your favour. When it happens to you or your family it is terrifying - but we've forgotten that, and are now more terrified by the rare cases & chance of something happening than the exposure to the true horrors of the commonplace diseases everyone faced before modern vaccines & medical treatments.
Live free or fuck off and take your naïve Libertarian fantasies with you...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Francis on Sunday December 20 2015, @09:13AM
Indeed, I once nearly died from an infection of the stomach. Had I contracted the H. Pylori before doctors knew about them or had antibiotics, I likely would have starved to death. I could only keep down about a half cup of food a day until the antibiotics ran their course. Not a particularly pleasant way to die either.
People used to die of dysentery as well because there were no treatments available. Now people only die of that in areas where they don't have access to proper medical care. But in the past that was a relatively common cause of death.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2015, @01:36PM
Don't forget polio.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Francis on Sunday December 20 2015, @09:08AM
And what about the risks associated with contracting the illness?
For example, the Measles has between a 1/10 000 and 1/300 000 chance of causing panencephalitis, which is usually fatal. And that doesn't include the other risks such as hearing loss. Vaccines are approved and required because the risks associated with not being vaccinated are sufficiently greater than the risks of the vaccination over the population that there's a benefit to society.
My brother could only get 2 of the 3 shots in the MMR series because of a reaction. I couldn't have gotten the small pox vaccination thanks to a skin problem. Thankfully I was born after small pox was eradicated, but I would have been depending upon other people to suck it up and get their shots because the risk to me of getting the shots would have been unreasonable.
1/10 000 000 sounds like a small number because it is. You'd get better results worrying about suicide and murder than having that kind of reaction from a vaccination.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2015, @07:26AM
The other thing to remember with many vaccines is they will be applied to billions of people, many of whom are well and do not have the disease. In contrast many elective treatments are only applied to those who are already sick and in need of treatment so the benefit/harm is clearer. So a cancer treatment that only causes problems with one in 10,000 is damn good to near miraculous but if a vaccine was about that safe and applied to all children it could harm 12000 kids per year. So what's the actual safety ratio like? With the vaccine promoters ignoring all complaints how can they really get the true facts? It's not like Big Pharma or the Gov hasn't lied about such stuff. ;)
Billions can eat peanuts/etc and not die, but that does not mean peanuts are safe for all. There's even a person who is allergic to eating apples while near a birch tree (birch tree pollen is allergenic), she's fine with eating apples elsewhere, and fine with birch tree pollen on its own, but together it's a big problem for her.
Of course all sorts of things can go wrong with people too, and problems developing just after a vaccination could just be a coincidence.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Marco2G on Sunday December 20 2015, @08:22AM
While that one anecdotal case truly does not prove anything, I have to agree with you on the latter part of your post.
The cold blooded capitalism behind big pharma and the corruption going on is staggering. My wife worked in chemical engineering, or however you'd translate that into English, for Roche. The unethical shit that went on on the meetings the moment a suit and tie was involved is next to unbelievable.
However, the corruption was even worse: Every year the whole population of Switzerland bitches and moans about how health insurance, which is mandatory, is getting more expensive. So what happens? Hospitals pay meagre salaries to anything below full doctors (meanwhile specialists are rolling in cash but that's neither here nor there). Which in turn leads to just about all nursing staff being German. Which in turn, as you can imagine, leads to people going "They took our joooobs!"
Now remember Tamiflu? That magical drug that was supposed to deliver us from the ravages of swine flu? Yeah, doesn't work... as many, many people have expected. So Swissmedic, the government agency that is responsible for making sure we don't get dangerous drugs and is also responsible to make sure that drug prices aren't overinflated said "Well, gee, we only ever use one study to confirm a drug's validity and we use that of the producer since who would know their drug better than them? Also, we've had such a good relation we just trust our buddies".
No one was on the streets protesting. People just shrugged and went "Pharma will be pharma".
So yeah, science and pharma in particular are fucked up. But since nobody even wants to listen to what is wrong with this crap much less do something about it I just decided that, just as with government, we all get the pharma we deserve.
(Score: 5, Informative) by ledow on Sunday December 20 2015, @02:43PM
As sad as that may be, you have to understand:
There is no medical procedure on Earth that is without risk.
Watch every time you are given general anaesthetic of any kind. There's a "you may not ever wake up" clause in there. Because it's true.
Look at the forms you have to sign, no matter what country you go to, to say that you agree to surgery. Anything and everything can go wrong, even without including human error into the equation.
There is absolutely no documented, recorded, link between autism and a particular MMR vaccination (note: a particular vaccine in a particular form, but there's still zero evidence of any other vaccine having the same problem either!): "The research was declared fraudulent in 2011 by the British Medical Journal. Several subsequent peer-reviewed studies have failed to show any association between the vaccine and autism." In the UK, the original researchers have gone to JAIL for claiming so because the proof they offer is not only wrong, but fucking wrong. Any time you have two things that coincide it does not prove any kind of correlation, and it certainly does not prove causation. And in this case, neither exist past random chance (as in literally, it's like saying that homosexuality causes earthquakes - as some of the Romans believed - because there was once an earthquake during a particular bed-session).
Misunderstanding of statistics in an emotionally-charged situation is the real enemy here. Everyone knows the smoker who lived to 100 while smoking every day of their lives, while simultaneously forgetting all those who died early from smoking-related diseases. Everyone coos over the great-grandmother who always ate bacon at breakfast, and forgets the dozens of relatives they have that died from heart disease. Selective memory causes lots of problems like this.
Vaccines do not cause autism. We're not even sure if you can CAUSE autism in any particular way at all, to be honest. And autism is measured on a spectrum, and autism is quite a "new" diagnosis of something that's existed for the entirety of human existence.
Maybe you have to be autistic to understand the mathematics. But a heart-rending anecdote does not a science make. Coincidence, even twice, three, four, ten, twenty times, does NOT provide a correlation, and certainly not a causation. There are estimates that intersex conditions exist on percentages as high as 1% in modern populations (and we have no reason to suspect any difference historically). Would you have guessed that? That just seems extraordinarily high to me, personally. But go look at the numbers range from 0.2 to 1.7-ish and average out at about 1% for all the studies done. Guess what autism hits? About the same. 8.3% of the adult population of the world are diabetic, ffs.
As such, parents in one in every hundred births will be able to point fingers at things they think are "linked to autism". But in actual fact, correlation or causation will be absolutely minimal, if it exists at all. In the base population, 1% of people have autism anyway, without doing anything in particular. Any recent rise in diagnosis is because of tweaks to the definition and some people WANTING their child to be diagnosed as autistic (It's also shown in studies that doctors will push a diagnosis to child patients more when the parents push for it then if they don't - it's purely subjective and a lot of medicine is "to keep people happy"!).
As sad as stories like this may be, they are statistically insignificant. That's the heartless mathematician in my autistic self talking. There is no link there. Nothing even approaching 90% certainty, let alone something actually statistically significant. There will be more correlation to the colour of their bedroom walls than what vaccines they were given.
Until you can understand that are remove extremely-affecting personal experiences, say by becoming a doctor and seeing the same thing thousands of times a day, or by being a mathematician and looking only at the data, you can't be in a position to judge such things.
But your opinions are so strong that they should override the entirety of the medical world, no?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2015, @01:03AM
There is no medical procedure on Earth that is without risk.
Yes there is: It's the needless one you don't get if you're sane, Such as circumcisions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2015, @04:15AM
http://www.newsmax.com/health/Health-News/autism-vaccines-cdc-suppress/2014/09/10/id/593865/ [newsmax.com]
"The paper suggests the re-analysis provides “new evidence of a statistically significant relationship between the timing of the first MMR vaccine and autism incidence in African-American males.” It says some children may be genetically predisposed to suffer negative effects from the vaccines.
In the wake of the publication of Hooker’s paper, William Thompson, co-author of that original 2004 CDC study, released a statement, admitting to omitting the data after a secretly recorded conversation he had with Hooker was released on YouTube.
“I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article … [suggesting] that African-American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism,” said Thompson, a senior CDC scientist, adding: “I want to be absolutely clear that I believe vaccines have saved and continue to save countless lives.”
Late last month, the editors of Translational Neurodegeneration retracted Hooker’s paper, saying, “This article has been removed from the public domain because of serious concerns about the validity of its conclusions. The journal and publisher believe that its continued availability may not be in the public interest.”"
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2015, @04:20PM
Some church of big-pharma disciple will quickly dismiss this with "happens in only 1 in 100,000 cases", but when your child is that one...
What dumb logic. Why drive in cars? It's all well and good until *you* get in an accident. If people thought like this, they'd all live in bubbles.