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from the even-smart-people-can-perpetuate-stupid dept.
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: 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.