Biomedical Scientist Answers Pseudoscience Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED
I'm Dr Andrea love biomedical scientist I fact check false Health claims this is pseudoscience [Music] support at away from the keys wants to know how do you define pseudo science so pseudo science refers to beliefs or practices that appear scientific on the surface but they lack the repeatability the reliability or The credibility of science often they're making claims that are based on anecdotes as opposed to evidence they often start with a nugget of Truth and then widely exaggerate that beyond what reality would indicate at Shanny xray wants to know should I buy this flat tummy tea or not anyone tried it I hate to break it to you that these things are really just glorified laxatives so what's happening is that you're speeding up your digestive process beyond what it should be normally but what you're flushing out is food that you haven't finished digesting properly and absorbing their nutrients so you're creating a lot of diarrhea and you're also dehydrating yourself so while you might feel like you have a very flat tummy it's not because you're actually losing weight or removing toxins it's simply because you've removed food too quickly from your body and you're dehydrating yourself at its s duche is asking why am I only just learning that chiropractors are not real doctors yeah so Chiropractics is a $15 billion industry and it was invented by by a guy named DD Palmer who thought that ghosts were telling him to create it they believe that the joints and the nerves that go through our body are the cause of every ailment that we know of unfortunately Chiropractic is a full-on pseudo science there are certain chiropractors that maybe stay in the lane of More Physical Therapy and there's a little bit of data to suggest that for certain types of low back pain Chiropractic adjustment can offer temporary relief but it's not fixing a musculoskeletal problem and it's definitely not doing the other things that chiropractors claim to do so if you see the abbreviation DC after someone's name on social media that means that they're a chiropractor and they're not a medical or scientific expert at pathogen flock is it just me or is belief in pseudoscience Rising recently this is absolutely correct we have seen a dramatic rise in anti-science and pseudo science beliefs and this does Trend with the prevalence of social media also coincides with the recent co9 pandemic and the increasing amount of politicization of vaccines so this past year only 93.1% of entering School AG children received vaccinations for the MMR measles mumps and rebell of vaccine this is a 2% drop compared to the previous school year particularly for disease where you need at least 95% coverage to stop the spread of measles this is a very concerning Trend at guts not guts wants to know how the F did the vaccines cause autism myth even start this myth started in 1998 because of a British gastroenterologist named Andrew Wakefield who has since lost his medical license and the ability to practice medicine but he published a paper in the Lancet which is a very prestigious medical journal and claimed that he had to demonstrate a link between the MMR vaccine which is the measles mumps and rebella vaccine and autism symptoms in children the problem was he falsified all of the data in that paper more than that he used self-reports from parents who were planning to sue the existing manufacturers of the MMR vaccine on top of that he was trying to sell and Market his own MMR vaccine but because it was published in such prestigious medical journal it took the World by storm and caused a lot of fear eventually that paper was retracted but that retraction did not occur until 2010 12 years later now in recent years we're seeing measles rates above what we have ever seen in the US and it is really a cause for concern because the very first measles vaccine was put on the market in 1963 so we have over 60 years of data that demonstrate that there is no relationship between vaccines and autism at Briney for Trump GMOs change our DNA every day and give people several diseases why did we approve of this this is not true in the 1980s and 1990s the papaya was being wiped out by a virus called the papaya ringspot virus so we created a GMO papaya that can resist the papaya ring spot virus 90% of the papayas are GMO and when you eat them it is not changing DNA so when you eat the papaya you're eating all of its cells and all of those cells contain DNA so those DNA molecules are going to enter your stomach and it's going to mix with an enzyme called pepsin so when the pepsin interacts with the DNA molecule it blasts it apart into all of these individual subunits and therefore the DNA is no longer intact it's not going to change your DNA it's not going to cause any harmful consequences at Johnny V 453 85760 wants to know how can you tell if a health influencer is legit or full of some of the red flags to look for are number one they are trying to evoke very strong negative emotions things like fear anxiety or worry particularly as it relates to your health or the health of your children or your family number two they're making all or none statements they're saying that this thing is causing cancer or this thing is going to fix some disorder number three if they're selling you something that is related to the claims that they're making whether that is a supplement or a diet plan or a protocol or a book number four if they have an obvious conflict of interest are they working for the company of the product that they're selling you and last but not least if they're speaking way outside of their area of expertise if someone is a neuroscientist that specializes in optic nerve signaling and they're pretending to be an expert in infectious disease Immunology that's probably a red flag at 10,000 problems wants to know why does homeopathic medicine work so much better than real medicine unfortunately that is not the case but let me tell you a little bit about what Homeopathy is because it's often confused with other sorts of alternative remedies Homeopathy is a pseudoscience that was created or invented in the 1700s by a German guy named SEL hanaman he created this based on two beliefs the first is that like cures like meaning that if something causes a symptom that same substance can cure cure an ailment that creates that symptom onion causes watery eyes when you cut it therefore homeopathic onion is going to cure things like allergies that also cause watery eyes but that goes along with the second belief or the law of infinite tmals meaning that the remedy becomes more potent the more it is diluted if you find a label on a homeopathic remedy that says 12 c c means 100 and 12 means that you've diluted the substance 12 times 100f over which means you have one part in this many parts which is also called one septian so what that means is that there's no actual active ingredient in that that is probably a good thing because there are many homeopathic remedies that can be very dangerous if you would ingest them at normal dosage for example teething tablets that claim to have homeopathic badana which is deadly nightshade were contaminated with measurable levels of Bell and hundreds of babies developed seizures and at least 10 babies died this happened starting in 2010 and 2012 and there were several brands that were to blame one final danger of Homeopathy is that many people believe that they're taking something that's beneficial and Beyond the fact that it is nothing more than a sugar pill it often leads people to forgo actual medical care which is one of the biggest harms of all at Paul meta 555 asks our cell phone Towers detrimental to our health why so many why do they emit high pitch noises are they carcinogenic why the spiking cancer rate since they arrived cell phone towers look like this you have this primary node that's coming out from all sides and you have these radio waves that are being emitted you also have these secondary nodes that are a little bit smaller but all of these radio frequency waves are projected in every direction because otherwise we wouldn't have cell reception so this myth kind of started because people heard heard the word radio frequency radiation and got scared because we know that there are certain types of radiation that are linked to cancer here we have the electromagnetic spectrum things on this end are very high energy and this rainbow right here is our visible light spectrum ultraviolet and above these types of radiation can potentially damage our cells and our body and can lead to changes in our cells and mutations but when you get below the energy level of visible light and you get into infrared and microwaves way down here those are your radio waves so this radio frequency radiation is one of the lowest energy types of radiation and it's considered what we call nonionizing meaning it cannot penetrate your body so even if those radio waves are all over our planet because we have cell reception everywhere the amount of energy that they're exerting is not actually going to damage your body or cause you any potential harm at John Peterson FW wants to know I'd really like to know from someone that actually knows if buying organic food for double a price is actually worth it/ better for you the biggest misconception is that organic is pesticide free here we have organic blueberries they are grown using Organic pesticides and Organic pesticides are simply chemicals that have not been synthetically altered from the original state in which they exist somewhere in nature in contrast these are conventional blueberries who were grown using conventional pesticides conventional pesticides are those that can be synthetically altered in order to improve their specificity a 2010 study in plus one was looking at six different pesticides that are used to control aphids on soybean plants it was found to not only control aphids but it also killed the natural predators of the aphids the Insidious flowerbug and the Asian lady Beetle having a more broad negative ecological impact another misconception about all produce is that they have all these residues of pesticides on them we're talking about parts per trillion parts per billion these are minuscule levels if you're very concerned about it absolutely wash your produce in water but aside from that you don't need to be stressing about your produce at Toya relle wants to know what do people think they're cleansing when they do juice and smoothie cleanses or detoxes I hate to break it to you if you have funk ing organ systems you're already detoxing all day every day so when people say that they're doing a parasite cleanse or a cleanse and they're claiming that these stringy things in their poop is Parasite pars what they're actually seeing is mucus and sloughed off intestinal cells which is not a good thing it's actually harming your GI tracks at Big Papa Briggs wants to know on a scale from 1 to 10 how scared should I be of Lyme disease so as someone who's actually stuck studied Lyme disease for several decades Lyme disease is actually not as easy to get as you think not only do you have to have the right species of tick actually bite you but it has to feed on you for at least 24 hours in order to have a chance to transmit the bacteria for you your likelihood or risk of getting Lyme disease is very very low scale of 1 to 10 I would give it about a two or a three there's only two species of ticks in the US that can transmit Lyme disease there are some areas in the country that you have higher risk like the Midwest and the Northeast and this is because you have higher proportions of both the ticks that live there and the bacteria in those ticks in other parts of the country the risk is almost zero there are a lot of common myths about Lyme disease the first is that once you're infected you're always going to be infected and that is just not true it is a bacterial infection and once you've taken antibiotics for standard course they're very effective treatments you're going to eliminate the bacteria but unfortunately since it was discovered in the 1980s it has really been the target of a lot of misinformation and that can be attributed partially to some of these tests that are sold direct to consumer that claim to be able to diagnose you with lime disease unfortunately these tests are not FDA approved and are not accurate but they tell people that they have Lyme disease when in reality they do not so it creates the perception that Lyme disease is not only more widespread than it is but is much more prevalent and severe at retired Dent I'm seeing more and more parents giving their children non-fluoridated toothpaste what's up with that why why are people so afraid of fluoride fluoride is a naturally occurring substance that can be found in minerals and soil and in our environment and it was determined many many years ago that communities that had naturally higher levels of fluoride in their water were less likely to develop cavities so we started fluoridating water and adding fluoride to toothpaste over 75 years ago and that's really plummeted the amount of dental carries or cavities unfortunately claims on social media that are not based on reality tell people that fluoride is a neurotoxin what they don't mention is that the dosage at which you'd have to consume fluoride in order to have any Toxic effect is well outside of the reality of anything you could possibly consume fluoride and water is added at7 mg per kilogram which means that in order to hit the minimum threshold where you might have skeletal effects from fluoride if you were a child weighing 22 lbs you'd have to drink 50 7 L of water a day so it really is not a concern at Karen fron says everybody should have a gluten-free diet I'm just saying the reality is if you don't have a medical reason to avoid gluten you don't need to avoid gluten gluten is a structural Protein that's found in certain grains like wheat barley Carin and others and there are certain medical conditions that you should avoid this particular protein this would be something like celiac disease which is an autoimmune disorder there's been a lot of studies and whether or not avoiding gluten offers a benefit and the big consensus is is that it doesn't sometimes we hear claims that the gluten here is worse because we use all the processed chemicals and we use all the pesticides and when you went to Europe you were able to eat all the bread you wanted and you didn't have those issues with the gluten and unfortunately the gluten quantity in Wheats across countries is essentially the same on top of that we also use the same pesticides glyphosate is one that's often demonized because it's used to dry down wheat but it's also used in Europe Europe Imports millions of pounds of American wheat every year to make the very breads that you're eating I would suggest that maybe you're more relaxed while you're on vacation and you're not gulping down your food in between bringing kids to activities and swallowing air leading to the perceived feeling of bloat which has nothing to do with the gluten but everything to do with the rushing and the stress that you have with your day-to-day life at teal PB wants to know what makes a study any study reliable so when we talk about the scientific method we have what we call the hierarchy of evidence at the bottom you have things that are generally based on small sample sizes or opinions from there you're going into animal trials and inv vitro data so these are your petrish studies or your animal data that are not automatically representative of what's happening in people say you want to study a disease process in humans and you use an animal model that that disease doesn't occur in that's not not going to be an accurate or representative research model because it's not going to give you data that you can then generalize to people once you get above that you're moving into human studies randomized control trials they're usually also blinded those are considered our gold standard so with vaccine studies this is very common there is a group of people that receed the placebo which is usually salt water and there are people that received the vaccine none of them know what they received you might report different symptoms than if you knew you were getting the placebo at the very top you have what we call metaanalyses and systematic reviews these are analyses where we take multiple studies and we pull them and analyze them together there are really high quality journals like jamama which is the Journal of the American Medical Association or pnas which is the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences but as a rule of thumb if you're trying to find information on a given topic you want to look for at the minimum that it is indeed peer revieww and that it is aligning with other topics or other papers that are in that field it is very very unlikely that one study is going to displace the thousands of other studies within a given field on a topic we call that cherry-picking at wishwell therapy wants to know study after study has revealed that aspartame sucrose and sacarin lead to cancer and other disorders of the cells and organ sacarin was actually banned temporarily in the US because there was thought to be a relationship between sacarin and bladder cancer it turns out that the studies they were using were using a type of rat these rats had a genetic predisposition that they developed these bladder crystals and made them more likely to develop tumors not only were we using rats that were not an appropriate or realistic research model these rats were being fed close to 10% of their body weight per day in sacarin and it was at that point that a proportion of the male rats developed bladder cancers follow-up studies using reesus maax mice and looking at human data have demonstrated that sacarin is not related to cancer in humans at all and so the band was lifted But ultimately that stigma related to sacarin has actually transferred to other artificial sweeteners at fly rodo asks how do we know that supplements work is there any real research on all these supplements that exist EG athletic greens Etc so in the United States alone the dietary supplement industry is worth nearly $60 billion unlike FDA approved medications supplements do not have to prove that they are helping or offering a benefit a lot of people may take powdered vitamin C and mix it into their water when they feel like they have a cold or a flu coming on vitamin C supplementation doesn't reduce the duration of respiratory illnesses it doesn't lessen the severity of them it doesn't prevent them there's been a lot of studies especially in recent years that have been looking at the benefits of vitamin D supplement so this one assessed the efficacy of vitamin D and zinc in combination to improve outcomes of covid-19 and ultimately what these show is that vitamin D supplementation did not lessen disease severity did not reduce Hospital stay did not reduce severity of symptoms and did not improve mortality outcomes there was a study that actually found over 50% of immune boosting supplements were lying about what was in the product and worse some were not mentioning things that were in them at Penn by Cameron wants to know is there scientific evidence of crystals before and after charging many people believe that crystals have energetic powers that the crystal or the energy in the crystal is vibrating with your own personal energy and unfortunately there have been no studies that have suggested that this is a true relationship it is likely nothing more than the placebo effect the placebo effect can be very strong there is a body of data that suggests that in some instances people can feel like they're recovering from things more quickly or that their symptoms or side effects are lower because they have that power of the placebo so we don't want to Discount the placebo effect but we certainly don't want it to replace actual science-based medicine at janani 802 wants to know can fasting help cancer patients so this claim is really pervasive and as someone who works in cancer research is really harmful for a lot of reasons and it kind of breaks my heart this claim originated from inv vitro studies or petri dish studies where we're growing cancer cells and what they found was depriving them of nutrients or simulating fasting caused the cancer cells to die but what that fails to account for is that any cell deprived of nutrient is going to fail to grow and what happening in a piece of plastic or a plastic dish like this is not what is happening inside the complex being of a human who has cancer fasting can actually be harmful if you're battling cancer because you're depriving yourself and your body of very essential nutrients and calories that you need for your immune system to do its best work so those are all the questions for today always be skeptical when you encounter things that may not be as they seem thanks for watching pseudo science support [Music]
2024-05-29 17:35
