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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: 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.