When they’re not taking cheap shots at U.S. President Donald Trump, the mainstream media loves to publicize studies that purport to discredit dietary supplements. When it comes to nutritional supplements, let’s stipulate that here are some products on the market that contain substandard ingredients and/or don’t live up to the hype. Other such products have turned out to be effective and safe according to proponents, including complimentary doctors.
Faith in studies may not be all that, however. In a post on his Intelligent Medicine website about health headlines that might constitute junk science, integrative physician and health literacy champion Dr. Ronald Hoffman highlights what he considers methodological flaws in many such studies.
Here are a few them as presented in his thought-provoking essay entitled “15 reasons why most health studies are wrong.”
Poor Placebos:
“The ‘Gold Standard’ of scientific research is the ‘double-blind placebo controlled trial” in which neither the researchers nor the subjects know who’s getting the active treatment vs. the placebo. But sometimes, researchers choose a ‘placebo’ that actually may distort a study’s conclusions. A classic example of this is a study which concluded that fish oil wasn’t beneficial for the heart—after a comparison with subjects taking identical olive oil capsules. Trouble is, olive oil is heart-healthy! In this study, both the active treatment and the placebo conferred comparable protection, leading to the false conclusion that fish oil was worthless.
Follow the Money Trail:
“Research has conclusively demonstrated that if a drug company is sponsoring a study, it’s more likely to show that a medication is effective or superior to a rival drug. Many such studies, in fact, are ;ghosted;” by pharmaceutical copy writers and influential doctors are paid just to put their imprimatur on them.
“Similarly, researchers-for-hire sometimes exaggerate the benefits of supplements…
Bias:
“This is a supremely human trait—even honest researchers are never completely free of unconscious bias. Medical journals are rife with pharmaceutical bias—they are just not hospitable to natural therapies. In some, an ‘anti-quackery’ bias leads them to feature poorly-written accounts of alleged supplement harms.
Rodent Research:
“Rats and mice have it good. We’ve ‘cured’ Alzheimer’s, spinal cord injury, and cancer countless times in rodent models. But people aren’t rodents (well, perhaps with a few exceptions!). Therefore, studies showing this or that is good or bad in an animal experiment may have human implications—or not….
Sample Size:
“A study of 12 individuals shows that ginkgo biloba cures tinnitus; 6 patients receiving a new brain cancer drug are now disease-free; your aunt Sally took apple cider vinegar for three months and lost 18 pounds. Fine, these are hypothesis-forming investigations that will require larger trials with larger numbers of subjects to achieve the statistical significance to raise them beyond the status of mere anecdotes. The trouble is, large trials are expensive, and the advantage goes to the pharmaceutical industry which can invest the 100s of millions of dollars necessary to prove their drugs work; additionally, what use is there to sponsoring expensive research on non-patentable natural substances that other companies can readily copy?”
Subset Effect:
“Should you take aspirin? Should your child receive a new vaccine? Is coffee right for you? While studies of thousands of individuals may show that something is harmless or beneficial on average, you are an individual, not a statistic. A large study may miss the fact that a tiny but very real subset of the population has unique or paradoxical reactions.”
Study Quality:
“Whether it’s done in a test tube, or comprises the dietary recall of thousands of individuals with poor memories, or was done in a developing country with notoriously-poor scientific standards, it’s still called a ‘study’. Was it published in a reputable scientific journal? Are the researchers free of conflicts of interest? Is there an over-reaching conclusion drawn from the results on a Petri dish? Were controls in place to make sure subjects actually stuck to that diet or consistently took that supplement? These are all considerations when evaluating the quality of research.”
Lazarus Effect:
“This is often invoked to demonstrate that supplements are inefficacious. Lazarus, as you may remember from Sunday school, was raised from the dead by Jesus. A supplement is given—too late to make any difference—to a very sick population, say with established heart disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, or advanced cancer. Naturally, the supplement does very little at that point. Conclusion: Worthless! The problem is, such research does not address the more modest and plausible proposition that a given supplement might help to arrest the progression of early disease or prevent it in the first place.’
Meta-Analysis Misdirection:
“These are studies of studies, aggregating previous research and weighting their conclusions based on the objective quality of trials involved. Trouble is, meta-analyses are highly susceptible to bias; it’s easy for authors of meta-analyses to ‘cherry-pick’ studies that buttress their preconceptions about a research problem.”
The lazy, ethically compromised media that worships studies to the same degree that they extol rigged opinion polls is also in the pocket of Big Pharma, given the massive amount of paid advertising for prescription drugs.
Healthcare Equals Health Freedom
As this blog has discussed previously, there is no one panacea when it comes to health challenges. Millions of Americans, however, have obtained good results with reputable alternative and/or mind/body health options, including but not limited to, major changes in food choice, herbal medicine, chiropractic, shiatsu, and nutritional supplementation, as an adjunct to conventional western medicine. Tai Chi and yoga also have many advocates.
A combination of conventional (allopathic) and alternative modalities could be beneficial depending on the circumstances, but you should first always seek the advice and guidance from a trained healthcare professional.
