The problem may be more serious than just a clickbait title or misformulated abstract here and there. Published papers tend to be the source of “approved” medical knowledge. The healthcare community don’t have time, resources or capacity to experiment on the human body, so they naturally derive their working knowledge from the canon of “peer-reviewed” truths. Most of them may even be unaware of the traps in methodology. They are simply buying the headlines in the blind and apply them in their work. They may even not read the conclusions - why should they if they found 250 studies on “drug xx improving condition yy”. The numbers and desired effects will win over curiosity, professional due diligence or time constraints.
In the long run, the HCWs community will grow its own “knowledge” based on catch phrases and metrics of papers, without ever checking on their credibility. The patient will disappear (has already disappeared?) from the equation. How dare you not to improve if doctors x, y, and z wrote clearly that you should? Either you do not follow the recommendations (an easy one) or you are genetically broken (an easy one) or there is something else wrong with you (an easy one). The doctor(s) will feel relieved of the responsibility for actually seeing the patient and solving his puzzle.
This growing fake knowledge will eventually find its way back into medical handbooks - which are basically compilations of small-size articles on selected subjects, written by a narrow group of authors. Reports from the front lines will drown under the burden of routine statements with nice graphics, “justified” by big names in the medical journal world.
Patients will naturally slide into avoiding medical consultation because of its uselessness, cost, waste of time, and irrelevance to their actual condition (already happening). The gap will grow. Theory has been increasing exponentially, while the actual, real-world experience is becoming an outcast. The solution? Obvious: increase funding of research (free money, anyway, taken from taxpayers’ pockets), which will more increase the publication load, and the spiral will continue…
I believe a lot of what you are saying is true. There seems to be a general problem in many health and medicine practitioners not doing their due diligence in looking at the actual research. Nutritionists/dieticians can see these sorts of studies and just tell you to avoid X or Y without understanding if the underlying research is of merit.
With doctors there's a more insidious aspect in the fact that doctors are likely not looking at the clinical trials and various studies related to a drug. The may just rely on health officials or people who work in the pharma industry to promote the drug. It's one of the biggest issues we saw with COVID where I doubt most clinicians even bothered looking into some of the research being put on regarding the vaccines or any of the therapeutics.
I honestly have a lot to say about the type of information we get now and how tainted all of it is. I recall an article a few days ago in which someone on TikTok was warning against some health guru, who for some reason was telling people to put cinnamon (i believe) on orange peels and eating them to help with inflammation. The women who tried it ended up receiving burns in her esophagus.
I just look at something like this and wonder where the hell people get these ideas to do these sorts of things. Why was it necessary to douse orange peels with cinnamon instead of infusing them both in a drink or something? The only reasonable conclusion is that such things are so out of the ordinary that it will likely spark attention, even if common sense should prevent one from doing something that outrageous. The same goes towards a lot of stuff related to health and medicine. The more absurd or gimmicky the claim the more attention it will get whether good or bad, and that's how most people unfortunately operate.
We seem to have departed from the search for truth (aka science) to the desperate efforts by many circles of people “to be right”. Even if they cannot be right because their thought process is based on unverified inputs. But the outputs… grants, fame, publications…
The cinnamon people… I grew up in a countryside. No electricity, no water line, no sewage lines. Everything dirt dirty, inflammable and potentially lethal. No safety rules for farming work. Kids wandering everywhere on their own, completely unsupervised, from morning till evening, including unapproved trips into the forest, experimenting with the few tools and machines in the shop and provoking available animals. No education. No parent tutoring. In a magical way, health-risky ideas have never occurred to us. Is the internet and city-wall isolation making people dumb?
Does it spread to medical professionals? Are they so obsessed with searching for new, unheard of, unique things that they have killed their own basic survival instinct? This trend seems to me to be highly contagious.
To your last point, note the general health and lifestyle decisions of medical professionals -- not all that different from the rest of us (some studies earlier in the millennium suggested longer lifespan but rates of chronic illness appear similar in more recent work). Either they face unusual barriers to health not experienced by others, their education is insufficient, or something other than improved health motivates their work. My vote is on the last two, with emphasis on the ulterior motives.
I think similar things can be said about bio scientists and science journalists. What MD rightly identifies as hypocrisy is not understood as such from within these fields.
Many other professionals wear their desire for status, pleasure, and money on their sleeves. The abovementioned should do the same.
A good insight, and about (roughly) all of us. I don’t mind when a person enjoys the status, pleasure and money which they have earned with their own hands, time, effort, skills and diligence. The problem with the cult of medics is that they (usually) are given their status, possibilities and earning capacity paid by others, from studies to the whole career path. So, on one end, they are given a lifetime earning capacity paid by others, and, on the other end, most of them are a disgrace to humanity, with their arrogance, impertinence and disregarding of patients. They simply do not deserve to be given the privilege of caring about other people - and, frankly, few of them have the inner structure suitable for such a social role. But this is a mental disease which spreads easily among those who are given power or “authority” over others, especially when it is fenced with the power to use physical or mental force or violence. The medical profession will become virtuous once the medical studies start with teaching and training humane behavior and mentality. So far, it hasn’t happened (in the Euro-American medical model). In other words, all great technologies and progress are useless when their operator is not a human being.
I enjoyed your post, but maybe not for the right reasons. I spent quite a bit of time 15 years ago, give or take, looking into misleading nutrition-related studies. I subscribed to a service that would let me "rent" paywalled research reports, and I went at it. What a mess. Even with my limited background, I could spot all kinds of problems to which the peer reviewers seemed to be immune. So yes, I'm chuckling now as you dig into these things.
One interesting analysis that I came across back in those days was that researchers, while bound by certain rules when publishing their reports, were not similarly bound when writing press releases about those reports. So they could play by the rules within the reports (never mind the quality of the research), but they could pretty much say what they really wanted to prove (and didn't) in the press release. The "science journalists", of course, would read the press releases and report on that.
Going back 25 years, I remember coming across vegan fake meat. I was a vegan back then, and I looked at the ingredients in some of these things I came across on store shelves, and I was very disappointed. I made vegan replacements from scratch, like nut milks and cheeses, not really attempting to imitate the dairy versions, but fake vegan meat was not on my menu, either before or after reading the labels.
That's very interesting! You know, even with a science background there's a lot of stuff here that that make feel like an outsider. There's a lot of stuff that I don't actually do in a lab or learned in school so I am learning a lot of things on the fly while researching.
But I think this is also helpful because being outsiders means that we don't fall for the "status quo" that may happen in research. Even based upon the several studies I covered it seems that this methodology of just doing a few baseline surveys or blood collection and extrapolating that out to future events (without even keeping up with participants) is extremely rampant. Scientists may argue that this is the way that the research is done, but for outsiders we may argue that this just looks like super crappy methodology. It kind of takes a hammer to the aboveboard, respectable assumption people have of research, and it's likely why so much gatekeeping on science is done.
To your second point I have noticed that with many of Hazen's quotes. If you look up any quotes on the xylitol study you'll notice that he makes reference to the issues of xylitol consumption even though his study never tied cardiovascular events to consumption of xylitol.
Here is a quote from Hazen as reported in Cleveland Clinic's article:
“This study again shows the immediate need for investigating sugar alcohols and artificial sweeteners, especially as they continue to be recommended in combatting conditions like obesity or diabetes,” said Dr. Hazen, Chair of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Sciences at Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute and Co-Section Head of Preventive Cardiology in the Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute. “It does not mean throw out your toothpaste if it has xylitol in it, but we should be aware that consumption of a product containing high levels could increase the risk of blood clot related events.”
“Humankind has not experienced levels of xylitol this high except within the last couple of decades when we began ingesting completely contrived and sugar-substituted processed foods,” he added.
So the fact that Hazen is able to make these comments and not be scrutinized is pretty concerning. Maybe I should write about this issue but I'm not sure if people are burned out by this work.
To "vegan fake meat" I will again reference my friend who sort of had this superiority complex about being vegetarian, and yet he was telling me about all of these super processed vegetarian items he was eating. Quite frankly, I'm not impressed by a product that is made to taste like animal if that is made possible by pumping in a bunch of additives and fillers. It doesn't matter if it's vegan if it's still full of a ton of stuff that probably shouldn't be eaten in the first place.
CNN referenced "high xylitol levels" without any reflection upon historical "high levels of refined sugar"? I think it was Gary Taubes that wrote about how refined sugar only became affordable in the late 18th century, thanks to slave labor. Refined sugar is not exactly the "good guy".
As I recall, Taubes claimed that the diabetes epidemic had its roots in this reduced cost. Now whether all that is true or not, or if I even remember correctly, I couldn't say, but it sure sounds like it might be worth investigating.
The problem may be more serious than just a clickbait title or misformulated abstract here and there. Published papers tend to be the source of “approved” medical knowledge. The healthcare community don’t have time, resources or capacity to experiment on the human body, so they naturally derive their working knowledge from the canon of “peer-reviewed” truths. Most of them may even be unaware of the traps in methodology. They are simply buying the headlines in the blind and apply them in their work. They may even not read the conclusions - why should they if they found 250 studies on “drug xx improving condition yy”. The numbers and desired effects will win over curiosity, professional due diligence or time constraints.
In the long run, the HCWs community will grow its own “knowledge” based on catch phrases and metrics of papers, without ever checking on their credibility. The patient will disappear (has already disappeared?) from the equation. How dare you not to improve if doctors x, y, and z wrote clearly that you should? Either you do not follow the recommendations (an easy one) or you are genetically broken (an easy one) or there is something else wrong with you (an easy one). The doctor(s) will feel relieved of the responsibility for actually seeing the patient and solving his puzzle.
This growing fake knowledge will eventually find its way back into medical handbooks - which are basically compilations of small-size articles on selected subjects, written by a narrow group of authors. Reports from the front lines will drown under the burden of routine statements with nice graphics, “justified” by big names in the medical journal world.
Patients will naturally slide into avoiding medical consultation because of its uselessness, cost, waste of time, and irrelevance to their actual condition (already happening). The gap will grow. Theory has been increasing exponentially, while the actual, real-world experience is becoming an outcast. The solution? Obvious: increase funding of research (free money, anyway, taken from taxpayers’ pockets), which will more increase the publication load, and the spiral will continue…
I believe a lot of what you are saying is true. There seems to be a general problem in many health and medicine practitioners not doing their due diligence in looking at the actual research. Nutritionists/dieticians can see these sorts of studies and just tell you to avoid X or Y without understanding if the underlying research is of merit.
With doctors there's a more insidious aspect in the fact that doctors are likely not looking at the clinical trials and various studies related to a drug. The may just rely on health officials or people who work in the pharma industry to promote the drug. It's one of the biggest issues we saw with COVID where I doubt most clinicians even bothered looking into some of the research being put on regarding the vaccines or any of the therapeutics.
I honestly have a lot to say about the type of information we get now and how tainted all of it is. I recall an article a few days ago in which someone on TikTok was warning against some health guru, who for some reason was telling people to put cinnamon (i believe) on orange peels and eating them to help with inflammation. The women who tried it ended up receiving burns in her esophagus.
I just look at something like this and wonder where the hell people get these ideas to do these sorts of things. Why was it necessary to douse orange peels with cinnamon instead of infusing them both in a drink or something? The only reasonable conclusion is that such things are so out of the ordinary that it will likely spark attention, even if common sense should prevent one from doing something that outrageous. The same goes towards a lot of stuff related to health and medicine. The more absurd or gimmicky the claim the more attention it will get whether good or bad, and that's how most people unfortunately operate.
We seem to have departed from the search for truth (aka science) to the desperate efforts by many circles of people “to be right”. Even if they cannot be right because their thought process is based on unverified inputs. But the outputs… grants, fame, publications…
The cinnamon people… I grew up in a countryside. No electricity, no water line, no sewage lines. Everything dirt dirty, inflammable and potentially lethal. No safety rules for farming work. Kids wandering everywhere on their own, completely unsupervised, from morning till evening, including unapproved trips into the forest, experimenting with the few tools and machines in the shop and provoking available animals. No education. No parent tutoring. In a magical way, health-risky ideas have never occurred to us. Is the internet and city-wall isolation making people dumb?
Does it spread to medical professionals? Are they so obsessed with searching for new, unheard of, unique things that they have killed their own basic survival instinct? This trend seems to me to be highly contagious.
To your last point, note the general health and lifestyle decisions of medical professionals -- not all that different from the rest of us (some studies earlier in the millennium suggested longer lifespan but rates of chronic illness appear similar in more recent work). Either they face unusual barriers to health not experienced by others, their education is insufficient, or something other than improved health motivates their work. My vote is on the last two, with emphasis on the ulterior motives.
I think similar things can be said about bio scientists and science journalists. What MD rightly identifies as hypocrisy is not understood as such from within these fields.
Many other professionals wear their desire for status, pleasure, and money on their sleeves. The abovementioned should do the same.
A good insight, and about (roughly) all of us. I don’t mind when a person enjoys the status, pleasure and money which they have earned with their own hands, time, effort, skills and diligence. The problem with the cult of medics is that they (usually) are given their status, possibilities and earning capacity paid by others, from studies to the whole career path. So, on one end, they are given a lifetime earning capacity paid by others, and, on the other end, most of them are a disgrace to humanity, with their arrogance, impertinence and disregarding of patients. They simply do not deserve to be given the privilege of caring about other people - and, frankly, few of them have the inner structure suitable for such a social role. But this is a mental disease which spreads easily among those who are given power or “authority” over others, especially when it is fenced with the power to use physical or mental force or violence. The medical profession will become virtuous once the medical studies start with teaching and training humane behavior and mentality. So far, it hasn’t happened (in the Euro-American medical model). In other words, all great technologies and progress are useless when their operator is not a human being.
I enjoyed your post, but maybe not for the right reasons. I spent quite a bit of time 15 years ago, give or take, looking into misleading nutrition-related studies. I subscribed to a service that would let me "rent" paywalled research reports, and I went at it. What a mess. Even with my limited background, I could spot all kinds of problems to which the peer reviewers seemed to be immune. So yes, I'm chuckling now as you dig into these things.
One interesting analysis that I came across back in those days was that researchers, while bound by certain rules when publishing their reports, were not similarly bound when writing press releases about those reports. So they could play by the rules within the reports (never mind the quality of the research), but they could pretty much say what they really wanted to prove (and didn't) in the press release. The "science journalists", of course, would read the press releases and report on that.
Going back 25 years, I remember coming across vegan fake meat. I was a vegan back then, and I looked at the ingredients in some of these things I came across on store shelves, and I was very disappointed. I made vegan replacements from scratch, like nut milks and cheeses, not really attempting to imitate the dairy versions, but fake vegan meat was not on my menu, either before or after reading the labels.
That's very interesting! You know, even with a science background there's a lot of stuff here that that make feel like an outsider. There's a lot of stuff that I don't actually do in a lab or learned in school so I am learning a lot of things on the fly while researching.
But I think this is also helpful because being outsiders means that we don't fall for the "status quo" that may happen in research. Even based upon the several studies I covered it seems that this methodology of just doing a few baseline surveys or blood collection and extrapolating that out to future events (without even keeping up with participants) is extremely rampant. Scientists may argue that this is the way that the research is done, but for outsiders we may argue that this just looks like super crappy methodology. It kind of takes a hammer to the aboveboard, respectable assumption people have of research, and it's likely why so much gatekeeping on science is done.
To your second point I have noticed that with many of Hazen's quotes. If you look up any quotes on the xylitol study you'll notice that he makes reference to the issues of xylitol consumption even though his study never tied cardiovascular events to consumption of xylitol.
Here is a quote from Hazen as reported in Cleveland Clinic's article:
“This study again shows the immediate need for investigating sugar alcohols and artificial sweeteners, especially as they continue to be recommended in combatting conditions like obesity or diabetes,” said Dr. Hazen, Chair of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Sciences at Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute and Co-Section Head of Preventive Cardiology in the Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute. “It does not mean throw out your toothpaste if it has xylitol in it, but we should be aware that consumption of a product containing high levels could increase the risk of blood clot related events.”
https://newsroom.clevelandclinic.org/2024/06/06/cleveland-clinic-led-study-links-sugar-substitute-to-increased-risk-of-heart-attack-and-stroke
And this is a quote from CNN:
“Humankind has not experienced levels of xylitol this high except within the last couple of decades when we began ingesting completely contrived and sugar-substituted processed foods,” he added.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/06/health/xylitol-heart-attack-stroke-wellness/index.html
So the fact that Hazen is able to make these comments and not be scrutinized is pretty concerning. Maybe I should write about this issue but I'm not sure if people are burned out by this work.
To "vegan fake meat" I will again reference my friend who sort of had this superiority complex about being vegetarian, and yet he was telling me about all of these super processed vegetarian items he was eating. Quite frankly, I'm not impressed by a product that is made to taste like animal if that is made possible by pumping in a bunch of additives and fillers. It doesn't matter if it's vegan if it's still full of a ton of stuff that probably shouldn't be eaten in the first place.
CNN referenced "high xylitol levels" without any reflection upon historical "high levels of refined sugar"? I think it was Gary Taubes that wrote about how refined sugar only became affordable in the late 18th century, thanks to slave labor. Refined sugar is not exactly the "good guy".
As I recall, Taubes claimed that the diabetes epidemic had its roots in this reduced cost. Now whether all that is true or not, or if I even remember correctly, I couldn't say, but it sure sounds like it might be worth investigating.