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'Staggering' number of people believe unproven health claims

nature.com

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Re: 'Staggering' number of people believe unproven health claims

#21

Post by expedition32 »

mathgladiator wrote: post #19

The real hard thing is accepting that people are going to make different decisions and get different outcomes. I believe a lot of crazy health stuff because in my N=1 story, they work and drive results. This where I polarize people because I only eat meat, love raw cheese or a2 cheese. I have fixed so many problems. My wife has also fixed a large number of problems such that her MS is so much more manageable and life…

Improving life quality is easy all you need to do is eat your vegetables and exercise.

I actually find it amusing how complicated people try to make it with all their retarded diets and pills. And then you ask how often they go to the gym and they clam up.

Re: 'Staggering' number of people believe unproven health claims

#22

Post by tonyarkles »

foobarchu wrote: post #17
dekhn wrote: post #2

No health claim is ever proven. Even with overwhelming evidence for a claim we can't really say it's proven. At best we can say we have very high confidence, supported by a lot of data. Further, what exactly are we supposed to believe? Should we read the NY Times or Nature and just accept that what gets published there is the absolute truth? As we know, many paradigms have been overturned over the years- sometimes re…

As a complete non-expert, as far as I can tell, the only true agreement out there is that certain very specific substances are bad for you if you consume them too often. That's tobacco, alcohol, painkillers...and that's about it for consensus ones, with alcohol having wiggle room among the public thanks to some poor studies. Just about every other piece of nutrition advice out there can easily be categorized as contr…

> that certain very specific substances are bad for (for the general population) if you consume them too often

There are people who smoke their entire lives, die at 90, and tobacco had nothing to do with their individual deaths or even really any tangible negative health outcomes. There are people who drink or smoke pot every day and it has nothing to do with their deaths or quality of life. There are people who have steak and eggs cooked in butter every morning with no cholesterol or cardiac problems.

As a whole, people who do these things have a statistically higher probability of having negative outcomes. On an individual basis, there is a lot of variation as to what the actually effect might be.

Re: 'Staggering' number of people believe unproven health claims

#23

Post by tonyarkles »

arjie wrote: post #15

It's hard to tell what the correct public health play is. Take the controversial mask issue. Anthony Fauci on why he didn't say that masks would be effective said: > Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short…

You absolutely nailed it. The way COVID-19 was handled by governments around the world has unequivocally eroded trust in public health as an institution. I'm not by any means a conspiracy theorist, but between the lies (like you've quoted), the denials[1], and the contradictory enforcement[2], I don't think the cat's ever going back in the bag. People will die because of it, because actual sound medical advice will be mistrusted due to their past behaviour.

[1] I don't know that we'll ever know the true rate of COVID vaccine injuries but I know more people with medically diagnosed vaccine injuries than I aught to given the official statistics in Canada.

[2] When the Canadian government allowed large outdoor protests (the Prime Minister showing up to a Black Lives Matter protest in June 2020 in support of George Floyd) but did not allow outdoor worship gatherings... it started to really look like some of the restrictions and exceptions were politically motivated and not strictly for public health reasons.

Re: 'Staggering' number of people believe unproven health claims

#24

Post by tonyarkles »

stinkbeetle wrote: post #16

It's interesting they didn't ask questions like whether people believed that the COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus. The number might have been even more staggering.

> COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus

People aren't good at subtlety and nuance, and it's quite necessary:

- Did the COVID vaccine prevent transmission of the virus? No, clearly not, because I was double vaccinated and still caught the virus and inadvertently spread the virus.

- Did the COVID vaccine reduce the probability of transmission of the virus? Probably.

- Did the COVID vaccine reduce the severity of symptoms if you were infected? Also probably.

- Was there a non-zero risk of injury due to the COVID vaccine? Definitely. In the general population, did the risk of severe illness due to COVID outweigh the risk of vaccine injury? Very likely. For specific individuals who ended up debilitated for 12 months (like my close family member), undergoing a number of tests to try to find a cause other than vaccine injury, was it worth it? Hard to say.

Edit: someone replied about vaccine injury and was flagged. In this particular case the doctor was convinced that it was Addison’s Disease and the onset was within days of, I believe her third dose. It’s an autoimmune disorder that affects the adrenal glands and results in insufficient cortisol. Except… there was nothing wrong with her adrenal glands and it went away a year later.

Re: 'Staggering' number of people believe unproven health claims

#25

Post by throwawaypath »

chungus_amongus wrote: post #3

maybe medical professionals shouldn't have discredited themselves through rent seeking and playing politics

Healthcare professionals: "Gathering in large groups in causing a genocide of the old, infirm, and immunocompromised!"

Healthcare professionals a week later: "Racism is a global health crisis and you must gather and protest in large groups to combat it. No, these specific gatherings won't spread COVID."

Re: 'Staggering' number of people believe unproven health claims

#26

Post by LorenPechtel »

stinkbeetle wrote: post #16

It's interesting they didn't ask questions like whether people believed that the COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus. The number might have been even more staggering.

Huh?

1) No vaccine is 100% effective.

2) Against something that mutates quickly the vaccine will always be behind. Thus the new variants win out. (The same thing would happen in the absence of vaccines, but it would take longer.)

The idea that it could actually be stamped out was very wishful thinking. But the vaccine does have a big benefit in reducing death.

Re: 'Staggering' number of people believe unproven health claims

#27

Post by LorenPechtel »

tonyarkles wrote: post #24
stinkbeetle wrote: post #16

It's interesting they didn't ask questions like whether people believed that the COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus. The number might have been even more staggering.

> COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus People aren't good at subtlety and nuance, and it's quite necessary: - Did the COVID vaccine prevent transmission of the virus? No, clearly not, because I was double vaccinated and still caught the virus and inadvertently spread the virus. - Did the COVID vaccine reduce the probability of transmission of the virus? Probably. - Did the COVID vaccine reduce the severi…

[dead]

Re: 'Staggering' number of people believe unproven health claims

#28

Post by LorenPechtel »

phs318u wrote: post #9
chungus_amongus wrote: post #3

maybe medical professionals shouldn't have discredited themselves through rent seeking and playing politics

Or perhaps “journalists” shouldn’t wildly and sensationally extrapolate from the most nuanced of findings in research to create unrealistic and unjustified expectations, especially when there exists other research drawing somewhat different conclusions. Maybe people need a better education in science, the scientific method, logic, and reasoning.

Yeah, most "scientific" wild claims upon investigation are journalists ignoring the nuances.

Admittedly, sometimes the scientists involved are complicit--consider the oft-reported claim that 2/3 of bankruptcies are due to medical debt. No, what the study actually said is that 2/3 involve medical debt. Well, duh, when someone's going bankrupt think they don't have unpaid bills?? The fact that the majority have an unpaid medical bill doesn't mean the medical bill caused the bankruptcy. It's only a few percent that are mostly medical in nature. I think it was crafted to get journalists to make this mistake.

And all too often the real issue is something caused both medical bills and a loss of income.

Re: 'Staggering' number of people believe unproven health claims

#29

Post by zbentley »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #20

>> "Raw milk is healthier than pasteurized" Oh dear, my very own pet peeve. Anecdotally this is common also between anti-vaxxers or vaccine skeptics or what have you. It makes sense because those ideas really form a continuum that is basically denying the Germ Theory of Disease, i.e. the knowledge that humanity has acquired in the last couple hundred years that there exist micro-organisms that are the direct causal a…

> You have to take scientists at their word.

The public is going to have to make a semi-to-un- informed judgement call regardless.

If they take scientists at their word, and different groups of scientists are saying different things, the public is going to have to make a judgement call as to which of those groups' credentials they trust more, or which sources they trust re: group-composition claims like "it's not 80% vs 20% of scientists, only a few of those 20% are accredited, so it's more like 98% vs 2%".

And that's an even trickier problem to solve than "scientists need to build trust". Which scientists? How do you determine if an opinion is from trustworthy scientists or from elsewhere? Even if scientists build trust, there will be very well-resourced forces trying to influence the public's answers to those questions.

Re: 'Staggering' number of people believe unproven health claims

#30

Post by mathgladiator »

expedition32 wrote: post #21
mathgladiator wrote: post #19

The real hard thing is accepting that people are going to make different decisions and get different outcomes. I believe a lot of crazy health stuff because in my N=1 story, they work and drive results. This where I polarize people because I only eat meat, love raw cheese or a2 cheese. I have fixed so many problems. My wife has also fixed a large number of problems such that her MS is so much more manageable and life…

Improving life quality is easy all you need to do is eat your vegetables and exercise. I actually find it amusing how complicated people try to make it with all their retarded diets and pills. And then you ask how often they go to the gym and they clam up.

exercise is beyond important which my wife and I do in spades, but the crazy thing is what happens when you fix the diet at a foundational level. For example, my wife has MS and due to carnivore alone (lion diet specifically), she is off both anti-depressants and generic adderal (common for MS patients). That alone is worth whatever silly risks are associated with lack of vegetables (and having gone over a year on this, I'm not sure what those risks are)
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