Addiction and Self-Medication

[xise]

For anyone who is fascinated by people's reaction to studies that turn supposed conventional scientific recommendations on their head, here's two recent New York Times articles (past 2 days). I find the comments fascinating as people grapple with seemingly different pieces of advice.

"Vast Study Casts Doubts on Value of Mammograms"

"Why Vitamins May Be Bad for Your Workout"

Comments from some of articles that seem to have common themes:
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AH
Oklahoma 22 hours ago
Isn't it odd that all these studies are coming out now when governments everywhere are seeking to cut back medical costs? Naturally almost all the studies calling breast imaging into question emanate from countries with one-payer systems. For my part, I know several women whose lives have probably been saved by early detection as well as some who died because they waited too long before being examined. As Einstein said, 'The theory (in this case cost-cutting) determines what you see.'”

LaPortaMA
ROSELAND, FL 36 minutes ago
This is the same debate that took place the year I finished my training at an academic center in 1982 with truly thoughtful people who did not yet have an enormous stake and it had not yet acquired the enormous gravity of "standards". What goes around comes around.

The word "science " implies an orderly acquisition of knowledge and comes from the same root as scissors, dissection and discernment. The Greeks had two words for science: tekne , the knowledge to influence outcomes, and episteme , knowledge of truth.

We're a very long way from understanding. I, for one, have long believed that our entire approach was misdirected from very early on -- decades if not centuries -- and that fits the recurring vascillation in results statistics and and outcome assessments.

Professors will continue to do what they do.

Rev. E.M. Camarena, Ph.D.
Hells Kitchen, NYC 5 hours ago
Who is really behind the newly minted war on vitamins? And why? That is what I want to know.

Elliot
NJ 5 hours ago
It's amazing how studies like this get published. I actually wrote to the author of the study to ask a couple of questions. First of all they used a synthetic Vitamin E. For those who don't know the difference, vitamin E in it's natural state has 8 parts. The study used only 1 part (alpha) and that part was a synthetic version (dl alpha) of the vitamin, which has only around 25% of the potency of alpha. So you can see the researchers started off with a inferior form of vitamin E and concluded it doesn't work except to get headlines, which is becoming very common now. If that's not enough Dr. Paulsen concludes without any basis, that "It’s probably only concentrated extracts that are potentially dangerous". Some scientist!

David Michael
Eugene, Oregon 6 hours ago
Spare us from another vacuous article on the pros and cons of vitamins. Everything associated with these so called "Authoritative" works of research are suspect....

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Perhaps it's personal distortions of the media to create controversy that creates the appearance of potential institutional issues with study reliability? Curious stuff. Although it's been an effective meme to tap into when arguing to the jury to disregard expert testimony because it was based on a recent, and therefore unreliable, study.

Edit: Found another interesting article about the subject. "Chart of the Day: Conservatives Don't Trust Science". "Conservatives with high school degrees, bachelor’s degrees, and graduate degrees all experienced greater distrust in science over time [or decades]....In addition...conservatives with college degrees decline more quickly than those with only a high school degree."