Bogus health research

Women, particularly, have an almost insatiable appetite for stories relating to their health and, knowing this, the media is always on the look out for health stories that will have instant appeal – even shock value - and Becky wants us all to wise up to bogus health research.

“It must always be remembered that almost all studies (and experts cited in health articles) are funded by vested interests,” says Becky, “and if one article is published and funded by, say, the apple industry showing that apples are better for you than oranges, it will not be long before the orange industry replies with a study refuting this.”

“Industries wanting government funding need to keep in the news to keep people talking,” explains Becky, “and if there is not a continuous stream of new research about any health issue then the newsworthiness of old disease stories can be constantly extended and renewed by reworking data so that what is essentially the same old information can be presented in a new and interesting form for media presentation."

“This is a popular way industries wanting government funding keep up the pressure,” explains Becky. “By presenting old information in a way designed to arouse public interest as well as including cash-for-comments from leading medical and scientific authorities calling for action, these health articles can command considerable media attention and serve to shift public focus from the health impact on them to the need for government intervention.”

“Old research can be renewed by inflating the relative enormity of a product’s good qualities in relation to that of others,” says Becky. “It can also be renewed by breaking down global data into local data, increasing the importance of the product in the local community – even though it has no relevance there.”

“Another trick is to dramatize the public policy implications of a product by calculating the number of children, for instance, who will be saved by it – or ruined by it if talking about another industry’s product.”

“The tobacco and the alcohol industries, for instance, have always been at loggerheads in regard to whose product is more harmful,” says Becky, “and the alcohol industry has been very successful at supporting the inclusion of nicotine in a poisons register while keeping its own product out of it!”

“The tobacco industry is at pains to characterize the scientific case against tobacco as unproven, with only a statistical relation – in that any product consumed in excess, or abused, can be hazardous,” explains Becky, “but its reputation has been ruined so much by its opponents that no scientist with any self-respect would work with the industry to promote anything healthy about tobacco (even though it was used throughout the centuries for its medicinal properties).”

“Another critical development in tobacco’s demise was the US Surgeon General’s classification of tobacco smoking as an ‘addiction’ in 1988,” says Becky. “This was contrary to the long-standing definition of addiction, and trivialized the vital differences between tobacco and hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine.”

“Depicting smokers as addicts – and alcohol drinkers as ‘normal’ – allowed anti-tobacco researchers to unfairly dehumanize the smoker,” says Becky, “and a great deal of bogus research and statistical claims have been made which merely assume a cause, but never an explanation of cause.”

“Smoking-related mortality, for instance, is a statistical fiction where causal explanation is conspicuous by its complete absence.”