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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: 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.”"