Is your medical treatment based on hocum?

Science is getting a lot of attention these days. People seem to love it or hate it… and are even marching about it.

Science has brought us a long way. It’s sent men to the moon and diseases into oblivion.

And for the most part we are living longer healthier lives, thanks in large part to brilliant scientific discoveries.

As great as science is though, it’s not completely infallible. But people who go against the scientific grain are treated like blasphemers.

So why is it ok to question most things in life, but not science?

A higher standard

Scientific proof, or at least those intellectual superstars of scientific research — scientists — have always been held to a high standard.

After all, these are people who dedicate their entire lives to the betterment of humankind. They’ll spend decades in schools, internships and fellowships, followed by careers in laboratory studies, hypothesizing, proselytizing and experimenting… all to prove or disprove — in the name scientific research.

These are people with exceptional intelligence, to whom the truth matters. Because what better truth is there than a proven, indisputable fact? A fact can have but one true result… it is what it is. It works or it doesn’t. The line is hard.

Or is it?

Science is coming under fire. Its flaw? Scientists are human.

The pressure to publish

No one wants to spend years on a project, no matter what sort of project, full of anticipation only to reach a dud at the end. It’s anticlimactic. And it doesn’t do much to further your career.

Having your successes published is the huge pat on the back for scientists and the padding in their pockets. It’s how you catch the eye of those big pharmaceutical giants who run their own expensive for-profit labs and pay their researchers the big bucks.

But with those big bucks come industry-funded studies, conflicts of interest and immense pressure to please. And this is where hard line facts can get muddled…

Facts speak for themselves

Or do they? Obfuscation isn’t quite lying. It isn’t quite telling the truth either. It’s a way to present some facts or partial facts or manipulate data as relative or absolute numbers in a confusing, unclear and difficult to understand way.

And obfuscation is a big enough problem in scientific research that researchers at Stanford are trying to design a computer program to recognize it. According to lead researcher Jeff Hancock, “Science fraud is of increasing concern in academia, and automatic tools for identifying fraud might be useful.”

I wish them luck, because, quite often, these papers even make it past a review of peers who fail to pick up on these mistakes or outright lies. Recently a research paper was submitted to the prestigious British Medical Journal containing eight major errors. But not one of the 221 scientists who reviewed the paper caught all of the errors.

This type of thing isn’t a rare occurrence. According to an article in the Waking Times:

• A recent review of 67 pharmaceutical research findings published in prestigious journals found that three-fourths of them weren’t right.
• In more than 75 percent of their drug trials, drug giant Bayer simply couldn’t replicate findings that were published.
• Another study of cancer research found that only 11 percent of preclinical cancer research could be reproduced.

It’s all relative

If you search the Urban Dictionary for the meaning of the phrase “it’s all relative,” you’ll find it means: Everything is quantifiable in terms of individual perception.

Unfortunately when it comes to a lot of the research surrounding blockbuster drugs, the aim is to mold the results to fit a preferred theory or outcome. And the ultimate outcome is income.

My colleague Dr. Michael Cutler writes in his book, Surviving Cancer — A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding the Causes, Treatments and Big Business Behind Medicine’s Most Frightening Diagnosis…

“If you or a loved one has breast cancer, doctors may recommend the drug Tamoxifen. You’ll likely hear that it reduces the chances of breast cancer recurring by an impressive 49 percent — based on “relative” numbers. But the truth is, based on absolute numbers, Tamoxifen reduces the risk of breast cancer returning by 1.6 percent — 30 times less than advertised.”

The big drug companies love relative numbers. Relative numbers can be manipulated in many ways. And Big Pharma has a way of making sure they are manipulated in a way that makes for a fat bottom-line profit — regardless of how ineffective the medicine truly is.

Hippocratic or hypocritical

The really big problem I have with this is the hypocrisy. Science doesn’t hold all the answers. But the scientific community and its supporters are among the very first to rally against anyone else that might offer an alternative solution — even though a climbing number of their own studies are being proven to be nothing more than hocum.

Take natural medicine. Despite the failings of their flawed studies and lackluster results that are the backbone of conventional medicine, the mainstream seems to get some sort of empowerment out of convincing the public that the use of vitamins, minerals, supplements, exercise and diet — as means to prevent or alleviate disease — is pure hocus pocus and conjecture.

Perhaps they just can’t accept the fact that natural, and what are now considered alternative methods of medicine but could be considered the precursors to modern medicine, have been time- and people-tested for millennia.

And in recent times, they’ve been lab-tested too. Take echinacea for example…

A review of 14 clinical trials determined that taking echinacea reduces your odds of developing a cold by 58 percent and cuts down the length of your cold by one to four days.

Of course, there was a 2014 scientific review that suggested the evidence for echinacea’s effectiveness was weak. But even in that review, researchers admitted that it is at least somewhat effective.  They determined that certain echinacea preparations can reduce your risk of catching a cold by 10 to 20 percent.

So the next time you read one of those self-righteous articles or news stories telling you nothing good comes from taking vitamins, consider the source — and question their motives and the research. Keeping you sick and coming back for more keeps them in business. Preventing illness yourself will put them out of business. And that’s what they are afraid of. More and more people are choosing an alternative healthcare plan that leaves them in the cold.