Problems with Science

Every now and again I report on what seems like a total, mindless waste of money. Like this study. 13 years and 15,000 people interviewed and tracked, at  Gawd knows what cost. And the results? A pot belly makes you more likely to have a heart attack and die a sudden death! What a breakthrough […] The post More Stupid Science Wastes Money appeared first on Dr. Keith Scott-Mumby.

Surprise, surprise: a scientific study of scientific studies finds that most are crap! But what if the study that found that most studies are shabby is also shabby and unreliable? (just kidding…) Thing is, we already knew this, didn’t we? I’ve ben saying for nearly forty years that so-called clinical trials are just marketing in disguise. Still, it’s nice to find the industry is trying to do some of its own dirty washing. What got me going? A new analysis of registered clinical trials finds that many are small and of poor quality. Studies of cancer treatments, in particular, often fail to follow the highest standards of medical research, the analysis found, and a full 7% of studies didn’t even bother to mention what their purpose was (required by law), while others failed to provide many important details. “We can see that we can do better,” said report author Dr. Robert Califf, in something of an understatement!

Surprise, surprise: a scientific study of scientific studies finds that most are crap! But what if the study that found that most studies are shabby is also shabby and unreliable? (just kidding…) Thing is, we already knew this, didn’t we? I’ve ben saying for nearly forty years that so-called clinical trials are just marketing in disguise. Still, it’s nice to find the industry is trying to do some of its own dirty washing. What got me going? A new analysis of registered clinical trials finds that many are small and of poor quality. Studies of cancer treatments, in particular, often fail to follow the highest standards of medical research, the analysis found, and a full 7% of studies didn’t even bother to mention what their purpose was (required by law), while others failed to provide many important details. “We can see that we can do better,” said report author Dr. Robert Califf, in something of an understatement!

You probably thought science was simple; that’s what they taught you at school. You do a test, get a result and you have learned something about reality. Science is about the truth, right? Wrong! You do the test but if you get a result that disagrees with your prejudices, you throw out the truth and stick with what you believe. You just ignore anything different. That’s really a summary of modern science. The Big Bang theory has been proved over and over and over to be false. But scientists won’t let it go. “It must be true,” they say and so ignore all the evidence to the contrary. There was a time in science when, if your theory had holes in it, you revised your theory. Not so today. If you haven’t got the proof you want, then you just say, “we will find it” (like the Higgs boson). The Big Bang theory predicts dark matter, lots of it—but unfortunately, there isn’t any! Rather than look for a better explanation of reality, physicists are just hanging around waiting for dark matter to show up. The twentieth and twenty first century are the times when truth in science is not valued but keeping your job and paying the mortgage is what motivates most scientists. Those who don’t kowtow to the fashionable prejudice are often ruined financially. Science worked best when it was in the hands of European gentlemen of means. They didn’t care about money, they had pots of it, so the truth to them was what they found was real: the behavior of gases, metals, electricity, magnetism, evolution, etc. Lord Kelvin, Antoine LaVoisier and Charles Darwin are examples. The world of quantum physics today has proved almost anything can happen and that all concepts of time and space we knew and loved are utterly false. Time can and does run backwards; space does not exist (it’s called non-locality); particles come into existence without any precursors and disappear just as amazingly; only one billionth of the universe is “stuff”, the rest is all just energy and information (not that anyone has the faintest idea what energy is, only that it changes things). You would think that modern science, which has more or less dismantled the simplistic Newtonian view of reality, would look very favorably upon interesting phenomena of the mind that appear to also be in violation of the so-called laws of physics. Curiously, however, scientists living in the Alice in Wonderland world of quantum physics still rage about telepathy, telekinesis, prescience and so on. These notions are fake, unscientific, delusory, “voodoo science”, to echo just a few of their derisory comments. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve adopted a saying from a friend in England, Cyril Smith, who is fond out pointing out that advanced physics doesn’t just say that the strange things we encounter in holistic healing could happen, it says that they MUST happen! But when it’s convenient, the critics just drop all pretense of science and shove their heads in the sand. They cherry-pick their “science”.

You probably thought science was simple; that’s what they taught you at school. You do a test, get a result and you have learned something about reality. Science is about the truth, right? Wrong! You do the test but if you get a result that disagrees with your prejudices, you throw out the truth and stick with what you believe. You just ignore anything different. That’s really a summary of modern science. The Big Bang theory has been proved over and over and over to be false. But scientists won’t let it go. “It must be true,” they say and so ignore all the evidence to the contrary. There was a time in science when, if your theory had holes in it, you revised your theory. Not so today. If you haven’t got the proof you want, then you just say, “we will find it” (like the Higgs boson). The Big Bang theory predicts dark matter, lots of it—but unfortunately, there isn’t any! Rather than look for a better explanation of reality, physicists are just hanging around waiting for dark matter to show up. The twentieth and twenty first century are the times when truth in science is not valued but keeping your job and paying the mortgage is what motivates most scientists. Those who don’t kowtow to the fashionable prejudice are often ruined financially. Science worked best when it was in the hands of European gentlemen of means. They didn’t care about money, they had pots of it, so the truth to them was what they found was real: the behavior of gases, metals, electricity, magnetism, evolution, etc. Lord Kelvin, Antoine LaVoisier and Charles Darwin are examples. The world of quantum physics today has proved almost anything can happen and that all concepts of time and space we knew and loved are utterly false. Time can and does run backwards; space does not exist (it’s called non-locality); particles come into existence without any precursors and disappear just as amazingly; only one billionth of the universe is “stuff”, the rest is all just energy and information (not that anyone has the faintest idea what energy is, only that it changes things). You would think that modern science, which has more or less dismantled the simplistic Newtonian view of reality, would look very favorably upon interesting phenomena of the mind that appear to also be in violation of the so-called laws of physics. Curiously, however, scientists living in the Alice in Wonderland world of quantum physics still rage about telepathy, telekinesis, prescience and so on. These notions are fake, unscientific, delusory, “voodoo science”, to echo just a few of their derisory comments. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve adopted a saying from a friend in England, Cyril Smith, who is fond out pointing out that advanced physics doesn’t just say that the strange things we encounter in holistic healing could happen, it says that they MUST happen! But when it’s convenient, the critics just drop all pretense of science and shove their heads in the sand. They cherry-pick their “science”.

In 1895 Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer published one of medicine’s greatest milestone books; it’s called “Studies In Hysteria”. In it they showed that disease can be induced by mental states and by reversing these mental patterns, cures took place. It was a very shocking book because it stated plainly that men could suffer from hysterical illness and, as everyone knows, hysteria is really only caused by a floating uterus (that’s what hysteria means; that’s why it sounds like hysterectomy). OK, I’m  joking—but they weren’t back then; that’s what Freud and Breuer faced at the time. Eventually Breuer publicly disavowed his colleague. But Freud stayed the ground and became one of the greatest and most compassionate figures in medicine (even if a lot of his stuff is just plain wrong). He’s a household name; Breuer is virtually forgotten. As a result of the historic Freud/Breuer collaboration, the concept of psychosomatic disease was born. It exists, unquestionably. But it’s also a great curse. Because when doctors are incompetent and can’t diagnose or treat successfully, they blame the patient and say “It’s all in your head”.

In 1895 Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer published one of medicine’s greatest milestone books; it’s called “Studies In Hysteria”. In it they showed that disease can be induced by mental states and by reversing these mental patterns, cures took place. It was a very shocking book because it stated plainly that men could suffer from hysterical illness and, as everyone knows, hysteria is really only caused by a floating uterus (that’s what hysteria means; that’s why it sounds like hysterectomy). OK, I’m  joking—but they weren’t back then; that’s what Freud and Breuer faced at the time. Eventually Breuer publicly disavowed his colleague. But Freud stayed the ground and became one of the greatest and most compassionate figures in medicine (even if a lot of his stuff is just plain wrong). He’s a household name; Breuer is virtually forgotten. As a result of the historic Freud/Breuer collaboration, the concept of psychosomatic disease was born. It exists, unquestionably. But it’s also a great curse. Because when doctors are incompetent and can’t diagnose or treat successfully, they blame the patient and say “It’s all in your head”.

Today I read what must be the most mind-numbingly stupid “scientific study”. Some are bad; this was awful. To test whether polyphenols in red wine really had any benefit (why?), a young doctor from the Netherlands decided on the bright idea of adding synthetic polyphenol “extracts” to dairy drinks and giving them to patients, to see what happened to their blood pressure. There are TWO stupid problems with this: The polyphenols are stripped of all their accompanying substances, enzymes, etc, found in the grape Milk is probably the number #1 cause of blood pressure I have found over the years. Put anything in milk and it will not work in lowering blood pressure. The first problem is typical of medical “thinking” (if I can use so bold a word for it): the belief there is one magic bullet in natural food or plant substances and that “one thing” must be the reason the food or plant works therapeutically. They call it the active ingredient but it’s a scientific nonsense. The obsession with isolating a single compound comes, of course, from the desire to then mutilate it beyond Nature’s best and so patent it. But nothing works out of context. There may be a million other substances in grapes which make the polyphenols work properly (so-called adjuvants). 

Today I read what must be the most mind-numbingly stupid “scientific study”. Some are bad; this was awful. To test whether polyphenols in red wine really had any benefit (why?), a young doctor from the Netherlands decided on the bright idea of adding synthetic polyphenol “extracts” to dairy drinks and giving them to patients, to see what happened to their blood pressure. There are TWO stupid problems with this: The polyphenols are stripped of all their accompanying substances, enzymes, etc, found in the grape Milk is probably the number #1 cause of blood pressure I have found over the years. Put anything in milk and it will not work in lowering blood pressure. The first problem is typical of medical “thinking” (if I can use so bold a word for it): the belief there is one magic bullet in natural food or plant substances and that “one thing” must be the reason the food or plant works therapeutically. They call it the active ingredient but it’s a scientific nonsense. The obsession with isolating a single compound comes, of course, from the desire to then mutilate it beyond Nature’s best and so patent it. But nothing works out of context. There may be a million other substances in grapes which make the polyphenols work properly (so-called adjuvants). 

Trying to knock the value of vitamin and mineral supplements. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote carefully to you all, explain the distortions of studies which ignored the “sick user” effect. It seems like more people are dying of a therapy, whereas in fact they are taking the therapy because they already have a problem. This latest study (Oct 10th 2011) ignored it royally and came to a disastrous conclusion. You might think they INTENDED to make vitamin and mineral substances look bad! At the very least, it’s a childish conclusion.

Trying to knock the value of vitamin and mineral supplements. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote carefully to you all, explain the distortions of studies which ignored the “sick user” effect. It seems like more people are dying of a therapy, whereas in fact they are taking the therapy because they already have a problem. This latest study (Oct 10th 2011) ignored it royally and came to a disastrous conclusion. You might think they INTENDED to make vitamin and mineral substances look bad! At the very least, it’s a childish conclusion.

Today I read what must be the most mind-numbingly stupid “scientific study”. Some are bad; this was awful. To test whether polyphenols in red wine really had any benefit (why?), a young doctor from the Netherlands decided on the bright idea of adding synthetic polyphenol “extracts” to dairy drinks and giving them to patients, to see what happened to their blood pressure. There are TWO stupid problems with this: The polyphenols are stripped of all their accompanying substances, enzymes, etc, found in the grape Milk is probably the number #1 cause of blood pressure I have found over the years. Put anything in milk and it will not work in lowering blood pressure. The first problem is typical of medical “thinking” (if I can use so bold a word for it): the belief there is one magic bullet in natural food or plant substances and that “one thing” must be the reason the food or plant works therapeutically. The obsession with isolating a single compound comes, of course, from the desire to then mutilate it beyond Nature’s best and so patent it. But nothing works out of context. There may be a million other substances in grapes which make the polyphenols work properly (so-called adjuvants). But to me the dumbest blunder of all is using milk as a vehicle. Milk is one of the most toxic foods known to man. It’s a major cause of blood pressure (and death by heart disease).