Problems with Science

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).

I got a curious response from one of my readers last week. It was quite amusing, except VERY SAD. I should preface it with an old medical joke: something works well in practice—but does it stand up in theory? (you know it should be the other way round: “It’s OK in theory but does it actually WORK in practice?” is the real question). The joke is, of course, about things working well and yet don’t seem to fit with accepted theory. There’s lots of that in medical science! Well, this guy read some comments about Mike Adams on my blog. The visitor is a “Mike Adams is a smart guy and knows everything” kind of hero worshipper. He was then going to check me out, he said, to see if I knew what I was talking about in comparison! Seems very odd to me that you would be measuring one of the world’s top alternative physicians, who has been a pioneer for 40 years and made medical history on more than one occasion, against a blogger who has no medical training and never served a patient in his life? No disrespect to Mike, who has his own action agenda, but isn’t this a kind of crazy logic? How can you compare a person who’s DONE it, been there and got the t-shirt, with someone who sits at home and thinks about it? More to the point, this sort of hero worship is very bad. The measure by which I like to judge my information is whether it has any scientific validity: are there studies to support this? Not who said it.

I got a curious response from one of my readers last week. It was quite amusing, except VERY SAD. I should preface it with an old medical joke: something works well in practice—but does it stand up in theory? (you know it should be the other way round: “It’s OK in theory but does it actually WORK in practice?” is the real question). The joke is, of course, about things working well and yet don’t seem to fit with accepted theory. There’s lots of that in medical science! Well, this guy read some comments about Mike Adams on my blog. The visitor is a “Mike Adams is a smart guy and knows everything” kind of hero worshipper. He was then going to check me out, he said, to see if I knew what I was talking about in comparison! Seems very odd to me that you would be measuring one of the world’s top alternative physicians, who has been a pioneer for 40 years and made medical history on more than one occasion, against a blogger who has no medical training and never served a patient in his life? No disrespect to Mike, who has his own action agenda, but isn’t this a kind of crazy logic? How can you compare a person who’s DONE it, been there and got the t-shirt, with someone who sits at home and thinks about it? More to the point, this sort of hero worship is very bad. The measure by which I like to judge my information is whether it has any scientific validity: are there studies to support this? Not who said it.

It’s all very well Mike Adams (The Health Ranger) getting up in arms about conspiracies and supposed scientific fraud. I admire his enthusiasm and there is certainly plenty of the things he gets angry about going on in the world. But science is nowhere near as cut and dried as untrained people think. Mike is not a doctor and has never been in a clinical situation or had to figure out fact from fiction in a patient setting. Not all doctors and scientists who come up with odd answers are crooks, Mike! As an example, let’s take a published study that investigates the taking of vitamins: it follows a bunch of people who take supplements and concludes that vitamins actually shorten your life. On average, the supplement takers died sooner… That’s obviously a fraudulent study; we know that vitamins help you live longer, right? Well, no! That’s not necessarily true.

It’s all very well Mike Adams (The Health Ranger) getting up in arms about conspiracies and supposed scientific fraud. I admire his enthusiasm and there is certainly plenty of the things he gets angry about going on in the world. But science is nowhere near as cut and dried as untrained people think. Mike is not a doctor and has never been in a clinical situation or had to figure out fact from fiction in a patient setting. Not all doctors and scientists who come up with odd answers are crooks, Mike! As an example, let’s take a published study that investigates the taking of vitamins: it follows a bunch of people who take supplements and concludes that vitamins actually shorten your life. On average, the supplement takers died sooner… That’s obviously a fraudulent study; we know that vitamins help you live longer, right? Well, no! That’s not necessarily true.