Discerning Between Science and Pseudo-science
The Battle over Science
“I’m scared!”
This isn’t something you really want to hear from a world expert in children’s infectious disease. But that’s exactly what Paul A. Offit, MD, said in an op-ed piece in the New York Times this February.
Who is Dr. Offit and why did he say that?
A Brief Glimpse of the Problem
Dr. Offit is a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His comment was a response to the anti-vaccination controversy that made national headlines earlier this year.
The root of the controversy couldn’t be more relevant right now because it’s about how we decide what we think, what we believe, and how we live our lives.
Here’s the story: A group of parents chose not to vaccinate their children because they were afraid of the long-term health effects from vaccination. As a result, these parents helped create an outbreak of a potentially deadly infectious viral disease that public health officials had considered to be totally eradicated
What was the engine fueling the parents vaccination fears?
A long-debunked and discredited study suggesting that vaccination carried long-term health risks.
And, what was the disease?
As the measles crisis unfolded, it seemed that legitimate, peer-reviewed science was being trumped by the parents’ belief in pseudoscience, half-truths, fear mongering, and blatant quackery.
Because they were skeptical of science, well-meaning parents put their children at risk for developing the potentially deadly measles infection.
What do doctors say?
Doctors and public health experts recognize the parents’ desires to do the best for their children. And they respect parents’ rights to do that. But decisions based on pseudoscience leave them shaking their heads. It also leaves them anguishing about what to do. Refuse to treat unvaccinated kids? What happens when the kids get sick? How do you balance individual interests with the welfare of an entire population?
These are some of the difficult issues the measles controversy has raised.
Measles is no laughing matter: Approximately 1 in 4 unvaccinated people in the US who get measles will be hospitalized; 1 out of every 1,000 people with measles will develop brain swelling (encephalitis); 1 or 2 out of 1,000 people with measles will die.
This isn’t a story about deadly infection on the civil war battlefield of the 19th century or in the wilds of underdeveloped countries. In 1991, an outbreak among unvaccinated children killed 9 in the Philadelphia area. This year, the US had its first confirmed measles death in over a decade.
The benefits of vaccination? According to the CDC, vaccinations have prevented an estimated 323 million illnesses and 732,000 deaths.
What Leads Parents to Risk Children’s Lives?
One problem has been that traditional newspapers and television news sources have been pressed by competition from digital publishers for audience attention. As a result, many have made Faustian bargains that have decimated reporting standards. In some cases, news divisions have been taken over by entertainment divisions.
The increasingly competitive publishing environment also has put financial pressure on legitimate publications to publish “advertorials.” Advertorials—advertisements dressed up to appear as a legitimate news stories—can be hard to distinguish from real news. These so-called ‘stories’ often include “science”-backed claims that are anything but credible. And in their haste to meet deadlines and get out attention-getting stories, journalists and copy editors may let a lot of inaccuracies and unfounded claims get into print.
Another problem is that international researchers are under tremendous pressure to publish…or perish. Having credentials and published research is crucial for career advancement and credibility. Unfortunately, as these pressures have mounted, predatory publishers create publications with lower standards and less rigorous review procedures to fill the void.
Do People Really Believe this Stuff?
Recently, John Bohannon, a PhD in molecular biology, convinced a less-reputable science journal to publish a study he purposefully constructed to prove a point. Bohannon was able to convince “millions” that eating chocolate would help dieters lose weight, based on the published data from his purposely flawed report. He did this primarily to expose the growing problem of pseudoscience.
Of course, credible researchers in virtually every imaginable field churn out myriad study reports that go through rigorous peer-review and are published and disseminated through legitimate scientific journals and scientific meetings.
But the standards for what are accepted as scientific data are rapidly declining; and, the financial incentives for maintaining fail-safe methods that journalists have relied on for decades to ensure quality reporting are diminshing.
The incredible competition for advertising dollars also contributes to the problems. Just consider how Dr. Oz pushes “miracle cures” on a weekly basis to a public that has been swayed by his charisma and projection of authority. (He is a real doctor, after all.)
Of course, we all crave miracles. We want the magic pink pill…especially if it means we can avoid a lot of effort. That’s human nature. It’s part of our survival mechanism to preserve energy.
But miracles don’t come from pseudoscience, quackery, or even good science done on too small a scale to allow for generalization to an entire population.
What we, as consumers, fail to understand is that, as Professor Timothy Caulfield of the University of Alberta put it, “Scientific breakthroughs are rare, and their effects are sometimes exaggerated.”
We so want miracles that we create the expectation and financial incentive for publications to report miracle scientific results, even when the “miracle” results being reported are bogus.
The danger is that—as what happened in California with the vaccines—we will listen to pseudoscience more than legitimate science to the detriment of everyone.
Whether it’s something mundane, such as how to lose a little weight, or something far more critical, such as how to prevent new outbreaks of deadly diseases or respond to health emergencies, we should base our decisions on validated, credible science and best practices, not wishful and flawed thinking.
But, what is happening is exactly this: flawed thinking. Experts such as Professors Bohannon and Caulfield, fear that the public is increasingly accepting crank science as real, and rejecting or ignoring legitimate, hard-won scientific advances.
We saw in last year’s Ebola panic, that efforts to close borders and grill CDC doctors was counterproductive and even potentially dangerous (because monitoring and tracking cannot happen without travel).
Ben Franklin’s warning that “Passion governs, and she rarely governs wisely” is as applicable today as it was during Colonial times.
What’s Real and What’s Not: How to Navigate Today’s “Science”
Every day we are confronted in press stories and web news with miracles and with warnings of impending disaster.
Who do you tell what’s real and what’s not?
Dramatic headlines are actually a pretty predictive red-flag.
For example, all weight loss requires trade-offs. If you are reading a story about a cost-free diet, the science behind that article is questionable at best.
Ultimately, how we question, interpret, and digest the actual information and data presented in the stories we read is more important than how much our attention is captured by the sensationalistic headlines preceding them.
Probably the most important thing that we can do is to apply skepticism at pseudoscience at least as vigorously as we question peer-reviewed science.
Good science can withstand scrutiny while pseudoscience cannot.
National Public Radio’s On the Media program has published a set of checklists you can use to better question science reporting in the popular press. Some of the more helpful debunking tools on the lists include:
Watch out for single-source stories
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is
Anecdotes are not data
Watch out for disease- and fear-mongering
Celebrities are as prone to magical thinking as the rest of us
Beware of any stories that don’t mention costs
Beware of hyperbolic language
Miracles are rarely secrets
The truth in science, as Timothy Caulfield puts it, unfolds “slowly.” We should stop expecting miracles to emerge daily and be skeptical when they do.
More important, as Professor Caulfield explains in a different article, we should correct our “misunderstanding of what science is.” We should accept that, “Rather than a list of facts…it is a process (science).”
Despite our greatest hopes for easy solutions or dramatic new discoveries, the process of science is generally slow and its true results usually reaffirm and rarely change the basic laws of physics or of how the world works.
At IWE, we train Wellness Coaches to use critical appraisal to evaluate, assess, and apply the information they gather so their actions are based on credible sources, not wishful thinking, hype, and quackery disguised as science. Our commitment to good science is reflected by how we incorporate into our program, tools and techniques from SAMHSA’s National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices.
Do you have stories to share about your encounters with pseudoscience or scientific hype? We would love to hear what you have to say. Feel free to leave a comment!
