What should you believe?

[Bill]

I used to think that, if I read something by an author with "MD" behind their name, it was pretty reliable. How naive.

Now, I know that, just because someone is a doctor, that does NOT mean they know what they are saying is true. Oh, I'm sure that most BELIEVE what they are saying, but KNOWING and BELIEVING are not always the same. In this thread (let's try to stay on topic in this one, okay?) I want to discuss ways that you can decide whether what you are reading is the truth or just something the author believes to be true.

[Bill]

Let's start off with an easy one:

"Researchers agree..."

If what you are reading has those words in it, this should be a red flag to you that this person isn't necessarily giving you the whole story. The truth is, researchers rarely agree. If they all agreed, why would they be researching it? If they already know the answers, why explore the question?

Since this board is specifically about UV exposure, let's use that topic as an example:

Take a look at my signature line. That pretty well sums up how much agreement there is among researchers. Almost 30 years of research exploring the role of UV exposure in relation to risk of melanoma has failed to produce any actual proof there is any increased risk. Now, that could be due to a lot of reasons ranging from poor study design to there being no relationship. However, it is clear, researchers do NOT agree. If they agreed either that UV caused melanoma or that UV did NOT cause melanoma, nobody would be bothering to study the topic.

[Bill]

This one is harder to spot, but is even worse than the above generalization.

The bait and switch.

The bait and switch is a way to get you hooked into a topic by starting off with a big lead that really has nothing to do with what the article is about, then switching to the non-story they are talking about.

"Skin cancer is the most common type of cancer in this country. About one in 55 of us will get the most deadly form -- melanoma -- in our lifetime. Last year, more than 8,000 Americans died of melanoma."

Did you spot the bait and switch? This actually a bait, different bait, then switch...

Skin cancer is the most common type of cancer in this country. TRUE. Last year, there were more than one million people diagnosed with non-melanoma skin cancer. The word cancer is shocking to us and writers know this. That's why they use it. However, out of the over one million cases, only a little over 2,500 people actually died from non-melanoma skin cancer. That is about 0.2%. Pretty boring stuff. Nobody is going to get worked up over a skin lesion that has a one fifth of one percent chance of dying from.

About one in 55 of us will get the most deadly form --melanoma-- in our lifetime. TRUE Well, I guess it's true. It sounds about right, though I didn't check the math. And that is what the author is counting on. Most people are bad at math. Which sounds more scary, "one in 55 of us will get melanoma" or "less than 2% of us will get melanoma" ? The numbers are the same, but they know that most people are not going to do the math and actual numbers sound scarier than percentages when the relative number is small. So, not only did they make the risk of getting melanoma scarier than it is, why are we even talking about melanoma? The article is about skin cancer myths. They know that a skin condition that has less than a 0.2% death rate (non-melanoma skin cancers) isn't scary enough to get read. They know that even melanoma with it's less than 2% incidence rate and a 91% overall survival rate after 5 years is not too scary, so they word it in such a way to make it as scary as possible. Then, even though the article is about non-melanoma skin cancer, they throw in the big almost scary melanoma. So, you lead (bait) with some numbers and twist them around to make them sound as bad as you can, then you talk about something totally different (switch) and hope that nobody notices.

By the way, last year, more than 8000 Americans died of melanoma. TRUE That is out of the almost 60,000 people that developed melanoma. So, it is a condition that less than 2% of us will develop, and of the ones that do develop melanoma, over 90% will survive.

If you see this type of misleading twist with numbers and the bait and switch technique, don't bother reading the rest of the article unless you just enjoy reading fiction. You will not get any useful information out of anyone that has to resort to this type of writing.

All the statistics and numbers that I have used in this post are either directly from the American Cancer Society website or were obtained using those numbers and some basic math skills.

[clubby]

The above issues are further aggravated by the fact that most doctors believe everything another doctor says. Doctors are trained to NEVER publicly disagree with another doctor. "Don't rock the boat and we'll all profit" seems to be the modern day mantra in the medical industry.
It has become obvious that most doctors rarely treat the cause of an illness but rather treat the symptoms with pills. A recent article in my local newspaper report that the FDA has seen a dramatic rise in adolescents being prescribed cholesterol and high blood pressure medications. The cause of these conditions would seem obvious to most adults. The children are not being fed a proper and healthy diet and the children are not being encouraged to exercise. So how do the "doctors" resolve these issues? They give the kids a bunch of pills RATHER than instructing the parents on how to provide a healthy life style for themselves and their children. There's no money to be made in making people healthy. There's a huge amount of money to be made by keeping people sick. Starting a child out at a young age to think it's "normal" to take pills for everything will create an adult willing to do the same thing for their entire life.

[Papa]

Don't forget- those pills have a slew of side effects that in many cases are just as bad as the original problem whose symptom they are trying to treat.