This same reasoning was in Bad Science by Ben Goldacre 10 years ago.
Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?
21–30 of 159 posts
Re: Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?
#22L-ornithine L-aspartate pill can flush out excess alcohol from body
Re: Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?
#23because more people are becoming alcoholics and the penalties for a DWI are getting harsher. bottom line is... if you think you have a problem, you already have a problem. Get help and get help now before you hurt someone (you don't want this on your conscience... trust me). Go to AA, NA, a therapist, a doctor, rehab, a detox, doesn't matter, open up and tell someone you have a problem and get the help you need befor…
> because more people are becoming alcoholics
Do you have a source for this claim, which both does a good job of defining a measurement schema for alcoholism and also shows convincingly that it is on the incline?
Do you also have a source for the claim that this particular increase is the reason (or even a contributing factor) to the apparent decline in correlation between moderate wine consumption and positive health outcomes?
> if you think you have a problem, you already have a problem
Now this just seems like toxic thinking to me. Plenty of thoughtful, responsible people continually ask themselves whether they are experiencing various problems in life, and sometimes the answer really is "no."
> Go to AA, NA, a therapist, a doctor, rehab, a detox, doesn't matter
Really? It doesn't matter?
Your links at the end of your comment are only to AA and NA. Can you explain what aspects of these programs are preferable to you?
I hope that my comment isn't minimizing the issues of drug abuse (including alcoholism) in our culture - I totally respect that these are serious issues with many grave outcomes. I just want to be sure that we're discussing them in a way that is... well, sober.
Anyway, even if you don't have answers to the above questions, your perspective is welcome IMO.
Re: Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?
#24That page was nearly unreadable in Chrome on my phone due to bizarre scrolling ads everywhere and eventually crashed and died. A pity, I was learning a lot.
Re: Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?
#25L-ornithine L-aspartate pill can flush out excess alcohol from body
They increase urea, which lowers blood ammonia. I have never heard of using LOLA for alcohol, but seems possible. Got any links, and rurthermore, how this would be useful in this context?
Re: Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?
#26L-ornithine L-aspartate pill can flush out excess alcohol from body
Source?
Re: Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?
#27I've often felt that there was something sketchy about meta-analysis,...
"But as the headline-generating study in The Lancet notes, “Until recently, most meta-analyses of alcohol consumption have not controlled for the composition of the reference category,” and that “subsequently, assessments of harm relying on these studies have been biased.”"
...but overall systemic bias wasn't what I was thinking of.
Re: Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?
#28I have been reading for years about the numbers of studies being done (especially in the public health field) that can be whittled down to correlation without any strongly proven causality. Is this an issue with science, or with how the media reports on science? Is it really as bad as it seems? I understand that it's difficult to control for various factors when doing large scale studies of health and behavior, but m…
Observational studies can be incredibly hard to do in a way where you can infer causality. But most of the data you can get your hands on are observational. Does cataract surgery reduce mortality in older women? It sure looked like it, until it was recognized that the study suffered from a concept called "immortal time bias" [1]. Now the reverse "seems" to be true. (Unhelpfully, it's easy to make an "explanation" for…
Is 'immortal time bias' not 'survivorship bias'?
Re: Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?
#29I have been reading for years about the numbers of studies being done (especially in the public health field) that can be whittled down to correlation without any strongly proven causality. Is this an issue with science, or with how the media reports on science? Is it really as bad as it seems? I understand that it's difficult to control for various factors when doing large scale studies of health and behavior, but m…
>correlation without any strongly proven causality How would one really prove causality or does it even matter. When I think of science, I try to think of it like how I think of physics, where we create a model that best describes the evidence but which doesn't have any guarantee of being how things really work. Take Newtonian gravity. It is a pretty good model that describes a lot of basic interactions. Given a stat…
There's a big difference between knowing that A causes B and knowing how A causes B. For most purposes relating to health it's sufficient for a layperson to know just that A does cause B, no matter how. But if A is just correlated with B and doesn't cause it, that makes a world of difference.
Re: Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?
#30I have been reading for years about the numbers of studies being done (especially in the public health field) that can be whittled down to correlation without any strongly proven causality. Is this an issue with science, or with how the media reports on science? Is it really as bad as it seems? I understand that it's difficult to control for various factors when doing large scale studies of health and behavior, but m…
>correlation without any strongly proven causality How would one really prove causality or does it even matter. When I think of science, I try to think of it like how I think of physics, where we create a model that best describes the evidence but which doesn't have any guarantee of being how things really work. Take Newtonian gravity. It is a pretty good model that describes a lot of basic interactions. Given a stat…
> So, is it really important to describe why a ball falls to the ground when I release it, or is it good enough to have a system that describes the interactions enough that I can apply it to problems?... does it really matter if I think the ball falls back to earth because mass attracts mass or because mass bends spacetime?
I think you answer this question in your own post. The answer depends entirely on your goals.
"All models are wrong, but some are useful".
If all we ever wanted to do was shoot cannon balls over/into walls accurately, then we probably would've never bothered inventing modern physics.
But we did want to do other things, so we built better models. It's worth noting that some of those things we wanted to do were more philosophical than others, e.g., engineering ("put satellites into orbit"), explaining empirical observations that seem important ("explain how electricity really works") and philosophical ("understand the nature of reality") are all answers to the question "what are you goals?" that have inspired progress toward better models in physics.
> What does applying a similar mind set in something dealing with vastly more complicated systems, such as in medicine, looks like?
It takes a certain amount of philosophical sophistication to realize that even the most perfect model is still a model and to then reason through what that entails -- epistemologically -- for less perfect models and for the entire scientific enterprise.