alt Hacker News'Staggering' number of people believe unproven health claims
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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 quality is great.
Whatever science someone has has to contend with lives stories, and i no longer care to bother to believe centralized science. I want a thousand experiments to run where the results are life and death.
>People disagree on a bunch of extremely politicized topics within the realm of nutrition and health which is famously complex and hard to understand even for experts in the field.
Yup, I'm "staggered".
Table of question vs country (page 42): https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2026-0...
Recent small discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876068 (13 points | 11 days ago | 6 comments)
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 supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected
As a public health official, perhaps you want to create an outcome like this by ensuring that you sacrifice some number of unknown people in order to preserve the capacity to fight the disease (and perhaps through doing that, save untold more people, including the people who are originally placed at risk). That will make sense to anyone who has played an RTS, I suppose. But if you're the guy about to be sacrificed, you are less likely to be thrilled about it. Trying to solve a collective action problem is hard, so I won't claim to knowing what I'd do in his position.
However, one way or another, each individual is going to look at that and conclude "sometimes the government will not tell me the truth in order that society may make it and they'll say I'm wrong and not following science to make sure I go along with it" and some individuals will say "okay, we need to take some risk to go along with the thing" and maybe another will say "no, fuck you, tell me the truth" and so on. I think this particular cat is out of the bag.
Once it's made obvious to people that the things you're telling them may not be entirely truthful so that you can create an outcome you want, they won't trust you. I lean on the side of being entirely truthful and appealing to the better angels of people's nature. But I'm an armchair quarterback. Hard to play it back and see what would have happened, or if we were in the counterfactual world with a Spanish Flu like disease that killed the working age more.
One thing that would help, and that I don't see addressed here is "avoid taking public positions on divisive issues that are not absolutely clear and directly linked to your area of expertise."
Avoid politics like Codex avoids goblins.
I wonder what are the stats just for doctors rather than general population so we know what the realistic results to strive for are.
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.
They really picked a strange set of claims to ask people about.
- For the protein one, it's too general of a question. Some plant proteins aren't complete proteins while others are, and animal proteins can range from super-healthy oily fish to less-healthy bacon.
- The next three are more standard "almost certainly false" claims that would make sense to ask in a survey like this.
- The acetaminophen/autism thing was in headlines recently with lots of people either hyping it up or trying to discredit it. It's hard to say anything is clear either way, but it isn't completely outrageous to believe this one.
- Finally, "vaccines are used for population control" is just an outright conspiracy theory and not even mainstream for "false health claims."
Lumping different types of questions together like this is like saying "more than 70% of people believe that butter isn't as bad as we thought or that the moon landing was faked."
>> "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 agents of some diseases. It's like a return to the bad parts of the Middle Ages were people got sick and died and nobody could tell why.
It's also a particularly dangerous belief to hold. People have destroyed their own kids' kidneys for life with it: drinking raw milk infected with Shiga-toxin producing E-coli can cause Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS) which particularly affects children with under-developed immune systems, and which can really destroy young ones' kidneys [1,2]. It's insane and heartbreaking and infuriating and omg I cannot think of anything more terrifying than living with the knowledge that I've caused so much harm to my own children because I was too stupid to understand the risks and thought I was doing them good [3].
>> “There has definitely been a growing number of people who question widely accepted scientific evidence,” agrees Heidi Larson, who studies confidence in vaccines at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “It’s important to pay attention to.”
OK but this I really have to push back on. Who the hell really knows and understands "the scientific evidence"? When you start throwing around shibboleths like that, that's when people lose the plot and think they're doing the right thing and "doing their own research" and so on. Scientists train for years to be able to understand "the scientific evidence". The lay public can't be expected to have the same ability. You have to take scientists at their word.
And that means that scientists have the responsibility to build trust. I don't know how that's done. Thank god I'm only a computer scientist and my work can hardly poison or kill anyone, I mean unless someone ends up running my software on a kamikaze drone or something [4].
And anyway science is a debate and "the scientific evidence" keeps changing year after year. My friend tells this story where her two grandmothers, one a farmer (though well-educated), the other a biologist, were talking about ... eggs. Grandmother A, the farmer, had hens and one year Grandmother B, the biologist, advised her to wash the eggs because the latest scientific evidence was that this reduced the risk of food-borne illnesses. A few years later, Grandmother B told Grandmother A that the scientific evidence had changed and it was now considered riskier to wash eggs because that could cause contaminants to permeate the shell. "So better stop washing them" said Grandmother B. "Oh, don't worry", said Grandmother A, "I never started washing them anyway".
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[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10919754/
[2] https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-abstract/48/11/1637/348...
[3] And I don't even have children.
[4] Unlikely.
maybe medical professionals shouldn't have discredited themselves through rent seeking and playing politics
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 requiring heroic efforts to change the status quo. Many of the health claims about cholesterol, fat intake, and other diet/nutrition have turned out to be less important that originally believed.
There are a few exceptions and even then I wouldn't call them "proof". For example, smoking causes cancer- we have enough evidence to safely conclude actual causality (multiple replicated double-blind experiments).