8 ms·

This study was published from a journal that got caught publishing a questionable study on a major health issue a few years ago that they later had to retract.

This study was published from a journal that got caught publishing a questionable study on a major health issue a few years ago that they later had to retract. This was despite their reputation of being one of the best and peer-reviewed. So I don't blame you for questioning it. But I'm a parent with children with issues. And everything we study from other very mainstream sources says their issues are on the rise. These are issues that you can't ignore or not recognize.

johnnymorgan 3y ago
Love how you framed this, also a parent with a kid with issues. All issues are rising, the whole 'we are just smarter now' is hubris, we really are not.
- Grimblewald 3y ago
  absolutely, technology changes but people don't. It is precisely because of technology that we aren't changing, that is its entire point.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    Wait, are you saying humans would be evolving if not for technology? Interesting take...
    - nverno 3y ago
      Always evolving, but technology has surely influenced natural selection - a lot of illnesses/conditions that might have killed people prior to them reproducing are no longer factors in that regard
      - gnz11 3y ago
        We're altering the environment rapidly. Environment has a large influence on gene expression. Not a biologist but that is more likely the reason.
    - Grimblewald 3y ago
      pretty much - we don't adapt our form to our environment, rather when a problem arises we develop a technology that removes the discomfort we feel, which would otherwise act as an adaptation driving pressure. We develop our tech such that any segment can be readily learned as an isolated component, and as such our memory isn't under pressure to improve. We outsource memory to digital storage, and so there is even an allowance for memory to shrink. Overall, all our tech looks at helping us not have to change, grow, or adapt. We want to live a life of comfort but comfort means no pressure and no pressure means no adaptation reinforcement of advantageous mutations, since what is most advantageous is being average in every way.
      - pohl 3y ago
        The notion that “we don't adapt”, though, is really a euphemism for “people, who otherwise might not, are surviving to reproduce and are therefore not selected out”. But the truth is that death is still inevitable and people are still being selected out, and we are still, therefore adapting. The only thing that has changed is what environment we are being selected for: Earth in the Anthropocene.
      - PeterisP 3y ago
        The technology-caused changes of environment are so recent that we wouldn't have had adapted to them no matter what. Adaptation takes a long time, the last significant adaptation we've had is lactose tolerance (lactase persistence mutation) which was unusually fast to spread and took only a few thousand years to do so. A few centuries is so small time (for human generations - it's different for bacteria or insects) that we should expect literally zero adaptation even if the "pressure to improve" would be the same.
        throwaway290 3y ago
        This sounds more logical. We change the environment way too fast so that we become worse adapted to the new, human-modified, environment as a result
    - collegeburner 3y ago
      i mean yeah i knew a bunch of weak sickly kids growing up who wouldnt've survived natural selection. instead they will go on to breed more scrawny allergy ridden asthmatics i wonder how this carries over to mental stuff. like autists or psychopaths might have gotten forced out of society a few hundred years ago so they couldn't reproduce as much, might explain why the former is so much more common? idk
      - watwut 3y ago
        There is absolutely no reason to think psychopaths were excluded from society. Chances are, they were very successful and run even more unchecked then now.
        throwaway290 3y ago
        Cultures had good psychopath tests then too, like this is where dares originate from. You could get excluded quickly. After religion and tech arrived I think on balance it's more comfortable for them.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    We are also changing because of technology. The food we eat, the drugs we get, the lifestyles we have, the air we breath- are all different and make us different people than prehistoric humans. For better and for worse.
    - nradov 3y ago
      Given that fentanyl overdoses are now the leading cause of unintentional death for young people in the USA, if that trend continues then we should expect to see higher average levels of opioid resistance evolve over the next few generations. I also expect to see hormonal birth control become less effective over many generations. Those for which birth control fails are likely to have more children. Of course, all of us here will be long dead before any exploration pressure exerted by those drugs becomes apparent at a population level.
      - saltcured 3y ago
        It's an amusing thought, but I don't understand how you can apply such a darwinian rulebook here unless you conflate behavioral traits with bio-molecular pathways. Do you think abstinence is part of opioid resistance, or that forgetting to take pills is part of hormone resistance? Most people _not_ dying of fentanyl overdoses are not taking them in the first place, rather than surviving exposures due to sturdier nervous systems. I think a normal interpretation of the phrase "opioid resistance" would mean that their systems can tolerate a higher dosage. Conversely, most birth control failures are thought to be behavioral differences. I.e. whether the user is aware that protection may be absent due to missed doses or other scenarios called out in the instructions. Maybe these two forces will cancel out since one selects for more discipline and the other for less...
        thaumasiotes 3y ago
        > Do you think abstinence is part of opioid resistance, or that forgetting to take pills is part of hormone resistance? Forgetting to take pills is already part of the measured effectiveness of hormonal birth control. It's included in the official statistics. As it should be, obviously. Not taking pills is the easiest and most important way to resist their effects.
- refurb 3y ago
  The idea that the rates of disease increase when screening increases is widely known. Any epidemiologist who tries and analyze data and model disease trends accounts for a number of factors that can impact prevalence - screening rate, screening accuracy, etc. The number of people with a disease can stay static, but the number of diagnoses can increase dramatically with widespread screening and accurate tests.
  - 2devnull 3y ago
    Moreover it’s a vicious (virtuous) cycle. To get better funding to research a specific disease experts will play up how important their research is by playing up the severity, the “increasingness” of the thing. With funding secure you can now roll out more research studies that tell practitioners all about the disease and how it’s “increasingly important”. Now doctors will test more patients for the disease, maybe over diagnose it too. And so and so forth. Humans are flawed. Humans make research. We should be more skeptical about supposedly “established” science.
jemmyw 3y ago
I've been doing some searches since I asked the question and I wouldn't say there's a satisfactory answer. A mainstream source just saying that autoimmune disorders are on the rise isn't good enough, especially as most articles I've read couch that with "and we now recognise more of these disorders" or something similar. There seems more evidence that allergies are on the rise. Maybe. I note that I found a lot of articles saying things like "autoimmune conditions are a Western disease" and blaming modern lifestyle. But arthritis is as old as the hills. I'm not at all denying that they are actually on the rise, but nothing really seems to tackle this in a way that answers all the questions - is it on the rise or do we just detect and categorise it now. Does it occur because people live longer? In the past did people have these conditions and not know, have to live with it or die? I know that for my back condition people in the past got it and their back bones fused together over time, nowadays people tend to get treated with anti-inflammatories and now biologicals plus exercise regimes to prevent it. As there is a wide range of intensity within each autoimmune disorder the majority of people who had a condition in the past might be unreported. So if anyone can point to articles or papers that address all those things I'd be very interested.
- hirako2000 3y ago
  That's a lot of tough questions. I don't think answers are lacking, but you will find anything and its exact opposite. Who funds this and that research? You will find that pharnaceuticals in their desire to show growing market opportunities to their backers, and grow, will make very well sure to fund enough groups so that some of them come up with the conclusion: these issues are on the rise and don't appear to relate to environnemental exposures, even adding that treatments are or will be made available to diagnosed patients. You will then find another paper, likely funded by an NGO working on reducing the use of pesticides, or other surely health impacting industrial habits, that there is undeniable correlation between the intensive use of chemicals in agro and the rise of auto-immune disease, with a lag of X years, whatever make the numbers look legit. I'm not qualifying scientific research in general as biased towards the backers' incentives, but there is a lot of noise in statistical discoveries, scientists mostly interested in publishing something since that's their financial prerogatives to stay in the game. With all that being said, I will give my "opinion" which may answer part of your questions, but my conclusion wasn't reached by the standard of scientific methods: - we are ingesting and getting exposed to a wider range and higher quantities of toxic compounds, often so synthetic. - the immune system is a complex machine, that tilts and can overreact when on alerts, tends to have good memories, and can trigger or retrigger oversensitiveness, all for our survival's sake, it isn't de facto a disease to have the immune system take the wrong fights. - that immune system, shown to not always discriminate properly, probably having evolved to be rather safe than sorry. - we don't fully understand the immune system, maybe we barely do. Is it possible that we diagnose as a disease what might simply be the expected consequences of long term exposures to undersirable chemicals? That pharma got to sell something so they don't have any problem marketing chemical therapies and strongly promoting that rather than suggesting addressing the causes might be a better option? It wouldn't be the first time in history that physicians insist with the known treatments for symptoms they ignored the causes. Again take this with a pinch of salt, i am not advising against drug treatments altogether but took the opportunity to remind this thread that health care is also a business. From a non medical scientist who happen to have allergies and skimmed through a few hundred papers on the subject.
_Microft 3y ago
Which journal do you mean? "The Lancet"?
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  Apparently we discount everything The Lancet says now based on one retraction.
  - _Microft 3y ago
    Not just that but not retracting fraudulent research is much worse than that?
    - carlmr 3y ago
      Exactly. It's like a friend of mine who said he doesn't want to buy some car brand because they have so many recalls. I want to buy that car brand because it has so many recalls. Every system has bugs, and recalls means you're fixing them. Which to me is much better than hiding them.
EGreg 3y ago
Yes we can’t ignore these issues. I always challenge people to attempt all kinds of mitigations upstream, before medicating downstream. This is also true for diabetes and autoimmune diseases — for example, stop buying food from factory farms, or fruits with tons of genetically engineered sugar or foods with tons of high-fructose corn syrup or aspartame, and tell our government to tax negative externalities, rather than “ag-gag” laws that criminalize exposing it. Your media will rarely talk about the role of actual sugar intake in diabetes, preferring to focus on “inherited” and “intrinsic” factors, and same with many other medical issue the pharma industry will medicate downstream. The government specifically works with industry to allow corporations to get away with saving a buck at the expense of the wider public, while the wider public is given a medications and bandaids downstream that decades later turn out to be scams: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362 Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Like when the government allows Coca Cola and Snapple bottling companies to switch to metric tons of non-biodegradeable plastic, while individuals are told they can’t have a plastic straw or bag, and can save the world by recycling plastic (a scam by the plastic industry to distract from the upstream problem, nearly all of the “recycling” consisted of shipping to China). Or how factory farms are now causing more negative externalities, which we are now finding out last month: https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/25/use-of-antibiotics-in-farming-endangering-human-immune-system https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/25/use-of-antib... https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/01/why-are-eggs-so-expensive-because-an-avian-flu-killed-43-million-hens-last-year https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/01/why-ar... I invite you to consider the same dynamic with autoimmune diseases and others. It’s the same question of whether kids always had this level of gender dysphoria and ADHD and autism, or did something happen in the environment, or did the industry start to overdiagnose them? The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but activists on either side insist on their explanation being the dominant one, or perhaps the only one. Similarly to how other activists might insist on systemic sexism or racism to explain a gender pay gap, or systemic antisemitism to explain criticism of Israel, etc. (Disclaimer: I’m a Jewish straight cis male.) This is an impulse by people with a specific agenda / issue to make sure their agenda “wins”. In every case, there are real problems that need to be solved upstream, but the focus by well-meaning activists is only on downstream solutions (eg prescribing amphetamines to ADHD-diagnosed kids) rather than upstream solutions (eg shortrr school days and allowing kids to climb trees like in Finland, where ADHD has far less diagnosed). They will spend decades advocating the same thing and expect a different result — it’s not collective insanity, it is actually learned helplessness. It is common to think this way when one’s “tribe” is involved. To illustrate it, I will touch on an issue with dynamics that have affected many people on HN. I hope it’s alright to mention it, because that is the only way you’ll see that the “downstream focus” even concerns many sacred cows. So — to hit home, this even happened on HN with depression. I have seen it for years, where any attempts to attribute some diagnosed depression to upstream causes like diet and exercise and environental factors are met with “you just don’t understand, clinical depression is completely different, and you should be quiet”. In each of these issues, the science shows that the theory that promotes medical interventions downstream is often wrong, eg in 2022 we found this out when it comes to the theory of chemical imbalance / low serotonin explaining depression: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0 https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2022/jul/20/scientists-question-widespread-use-of-antidepressants-after-survey-on-serotonin https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2022/jul/20/scientists-q... On the other hand there is a ton of studies on everyone from young girls to middle aged people getting far more sad and depressed: Teen girls: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/health/teen-girls-sadness-suicide-violence.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/health/teen-girls-sadness... 20% of all middle-aged women is on antidepressants (surely it can’t all be explained by a chemical imbalance, right?) https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/cdc-states-1-in-5-women-between-ages-40-59-on-antidepressants-buffalo-mental-health-expert-shares-reasons-why https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/cdc-states-1-in-5-women... Opioid epidemic in men, once again much of it is due to capitalism, both from an employment and a pharma industry side: https://www.cdc.gov/opioids/basics/epidemic.html https://www.cdc.gov/opioids/basics/epidemic.html But it’s easy for society to just prescribe medications to people rather than fixing systemic issues, eg implementing a UBI or 20 hour workweek overtime protections so people can spend more time with their family. In capitalism we’d rather allow companies to social problems with surveillance capitalism, social networks and AI to optimize clicks, because that’s what the market demands. On the other hand there are tons of studies and books on how the market and new technology has led to the breakdown of American social and family life. Starting with “Bowling Alone” by Robert Putnam back in the early aughts. People in big cities don’t even know their own neighbors. They live alone with their cats, order in netflix and uber eats, they stick their kids in public schools and parents in nursing homes, but hey, the economy is good right? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/opinion/microplastics-health-environment.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/opinion/microplastics-hea... Anyway to end with autoimmune diseases… notice how much more effort it would take for our society to stop producing plastics in clothes, that break down into microplastics on every wash, aren’t caught in drains and now find themselves everywhere, humans accumulate more and more microplastics. Rather than confront these environmental issues head-on (as we did once with CFCs and Toronto Protocol, the one big win for solving collective action problems) we allow the microplastics to accumulate in all biological beings, including us, throw up our hands and wonder aloud what could be causing autoimmune diseases? Meanwhile it is more convenient to open a new plastic spoon from a plastic package shipped from china, than wash a metal one. Instead of refilling bottles like our ancestors, we buy new ones every day and chuck them in the “recycling” LOL. Oh, and polyester is just so stretchy and convenient, as is teflon non-stick coating on our pans, why demand our government tell the industry to phase out nonbiodegradeable stuff and research biodegradeable alternstives? Nah that’s too hard to do as a society. So the problems get worse every year and “activists” arise who attribute it to a systemic issue like sexism or racism — they think they’re a great ally but rather than fighting each other we should band together to demand our govenrnment aggressively tax negative externalities upstream with Pigouvian taxes. Fiscal policy btw would be a great way to remove stimulus and UBI money from the economy. Certainly much nore targeted and better than crude monetary level the Fed has, raising interest rates on everyone. But our politicians are scared to raise taxes on industries, or go up against Big Ag or Big Pharma. So we as a society allow Day Zero to occur in cities, antibiotic resistant bacteria to grow, etc. all because of regulatory capture and cowardice. It will continue unless people recognize that the real problems are upstream, stop fighting each other and clearly spell out how we can organize to demand our government raise taxes on industries externalizing costs to others. If there was ever a proper role for government, it is that! PS: with AI, experts say 10% chance that humanity is wiped out… yet we can’t stop the competition and progress, and certainly when people are affected we’ll have industries to help them out downstream. Just another example, perhaps may be the biggest and fastest one soon.
6nf 3y ago
Which study was that?
matthewdgreen 3y ago
I think phrases like “a journal that got caught publishing a questionable study” imply a level of malice that isn’t appropriate. Journals publish studies all the time with some degree of peer review and a fraction of them are going to have problems, plus there is always the possibility of deliberate fraud that peer-review systems are explicitly not designed to catch. You shouldn’t believe every published study is 100% accurate just because it was published. But you also shouldn’t use phrases like “got caught” unless your goal is to imply deliberate malfeasance.
- totalZero 3y ago
  Journals operate in an information brokerage business and they are compensated to ensure reasonable review of what they publish. What you wrote would be applicable to something like reddit but you can't accept funds for a job that you don't carry out.
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    The problem here is that journals are relying on an open source peer review process for which they pay nothing, and then trying to cash in on the fruits of that. Blaming the reviewers is like blaming the medieval serfs for the fact that their landlords sold you rotten grain.
    - watwut 3y ago
      Even if they were paid, it would not check for this. Peer review checks formalities, obvious methodological problems, citations, that sort of stuff. It is not an independent study meant to validate data themselves.
  - watwut 3y ago
    What you wrote is false and suggests you do not know how science works. Peer review does not mean fraudulent studies can't go through, it is not even meant for that. Reasonable review does not excludes these.

johnnymorgan 3y ago

Love how you framed this, also a parent with a kid with issues. All issues are rising, the whole 'we are just smarter now' is hubris, we really are not.

Grimblewald 3y ago
absolutely, technology changes but people don't. It is precisely because of technology that we aren't changing, that is its entire point.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  Wait, are you saying humans would be evolving if not for technology? Interesting take...
  - nverno 3y ago
    Always evolving, but technology has surely influenced natural selection - a lot of illnesses/conditions that might have killed people prior to them reproducing are no longer factors in that regard
    - gnz11 3y ago
      We're altering the environment rapidly. Environment has a large influence on gene expression. Not a biologist but that is more likely the reason.
  - Grimblewald 3y ago
    pretty much - we don't adapt our form to our environment, rather when a problem arises we develop a technology that removes the discomfort we feel, which would otherwise act as an adaptation driving pressure. We develop our tech such that any segment can be readily learned as an isolated component, and as such our memory isn't under pressure to improve. We outsource memory to digital storage, and so there is even an allowance for memory to shrink. Overall, all our tech looks at helping us not have to change, grow, or adapt. We want to live a life of comfort but comfort means no pressure and no pressure means no adaptation reinforcement of advantageous mutations, since what is most advantageous is being average in every way.
    - pohl 3y ago
      The notion that “we don't adapt”, though, is really a euphemism for “people, who otherwise might not, are surviving to reproduce and are therefore not selected out”. But the truth is that death is still inevitable and people are still being selected out, and we are still, therefore adapting. The only thing that has changed is what environment we are being selected for: Earth in the Anthropocene.
    - PeterisP 3y ago
      The technology-caused changes of environment are so recent that we wouldn't have had adapted to them no matter what. Adaptation takes a long time, the last significant adaptation we've had is lactose tolerance (lactase persistence mutation) which was unusually fast to spread and took only a few thousand years to do so. A few centuries is so small time (for human generations - it's different for bacteria or insects) that we should expect literally zero adaptation even if the "pressure to improve" would be the same.
      - throwaway290 3y ago
        This sounds more logical. We change the environment way too fast so that we become worse adapted to the new, human-modified, environment as a result
  - collegeburner 3y ago
    i mean yeah i knew a bunch of weak sickly kids growing up who wouldnt've survived natural selection. instead they will go on to breed more scrawny allergy ridden asthmatics i wonder how this carries over to mental stuff. like autists or psychopaths might have gotten forced out of society a few hundred years ago so they couldn't reproduce as much, might explain why the former is so much more common? idk
    - watwut 3y ago
      There is absolutely no reason to think psychopaths were excluded from society. Chances are, they were very successful and run even more unchecked then now.
      - throwaway290 3y ago
        Cultures had good psychopath tests then too, like this is where dares originate from. You could get excluded quickly. After religion and tech arrived I think on balance it's more comfortable for them.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  We are also changing because of technology. The food we eat, the drugs we get, the lifestyles we have, the air we breath- are all different and make us different people than prehistoric humans. For better and for worse.
  - nradov 3y ago
    Given that fentanyl overdoses are now the leading cause of unintentional death for young people in the USA, if that trend continues then we should expect to see higher average levels of opioid resistance evolve over the next few generations. I also expect to see hormonal birth control become less effective over many generations. Those for which birth control fails are likely to have more children. Of course, all of us here will be long dead before any exploration pressure exerted by those drugs becomes apparent at a population level.
    - saltcured 3y ago
      It's an amusing thought, but I don't understand how you can apply such a darwinian rulebook here unless you conflate behavioral traits with bio-molecular pathways. Do you think abstinence is part of opioid resistance, or that forgetting to take pills is part of hormone resistance? Most people _not_ dying of fentanyl overdoses are not taking them in the first place, rather than surviving exposures due to sturdier nervous systems. I think a normal interpretation of the phrase "opioid resistance" would mean that their systems can tolerate a higher dosage. Conversely, most birth control failures are thought to be behavioral differences. I.e. whether the user is aware that protection may be absent due to missed doses or other scenarios called out in the instructions. Maybe these two forces will cancel out since one selects for more discipline and the other for less...
      - thaumasiotes 3y ago
        > Do you think abstinence is part of opioid resistance, or that forgetting to take pills is part of hormone resistance? Forgetting to take pills is already part of the measured effectiveness of hormonal birth control. It's included in the official statistics. As it should be, obviously. Not taking pills is the easiest and most important way to resist their effects.
refurb 3y ago
The idea that the rates of disease increase when screening increases is widely known. Any epidemiologist who tries and analyze data and model disease trends accounts for a number of factors that can impact prevalence - screening rate, screening accuracy, etc. The number of people with a disease can stay static, but the number of diagnoses can increase dramatically with widespread screening and accurate tests.
- 2devnull 3y ago
  Moreover it’s a vicious (virtuous) cycle. To get better funding to research a specific disease experts will play up how important their research is by playing up the severity, the “increasingness” of the thing. With funding secure you can now roll out more research studies that tell practitioners all about the disease and how it’s “increasingly important”. Now doctors will test more patients for the disease, maybe over diagnose it too. And so and so forth. Humans are flawed. Humans make research. We should be more skeptical about supposedly “established” science.

jemmyw 3y ago

I've been doing some searches since I asked the question and I wouldn't say there's a satisfactory answer. A mainstream source just saying that autoimmune disorders are on the rise isn't good enough, especially as most articles I've read couch that with "and we now recognise more of these disorders" or something similar. There seems more evidence that allergies are on the rise. Maybe. I note that I found a lot of articles saying things like "autoimmune conditions are a Western disease" and blaming modern lifestyle. But arthritis is as old as the hills. I'm not at all denying that they are actually on the rise, but nothing really seems to tackle this in a way that answers all the questions - is it on the rise or do we just detect and categorise it now. Does it occur because people live longer? In the past did people have these conditions and not know, have to live with it or die? I know that for my back condition people in the past got it and their back bones fused together over time, nowadays people tend to get treated with anti-inflammatories and now biologicals plus exercise regimes to prevent it. As there is a wide range of intensity within each autoimmune disorder the majority of people who had a condition in the past might be unreported. So if anyone can point to articles or papers that address all those things I'd be very interested.

hirako2000 3y ago
That's a lot of tough questions. I don't think answers are lacking, but you will find anything and its exact opposite. Who funds this and that research? You will find that pharnaceuticals in their desire to show growing market opportunities to their backers, and grow, will make very well sure to fund enough groups so that some of them come up with the conclusion: these issues are on the rise and don't appear to relate to environnemental exposures, even adding that treatments are or will be made available to diagnosed patients. You will then find another paper, likely funded by an NGO working on reducing the use of pesticides, or other surely health impacting industrial habits, that there is undeniable correlation between the intensive use of chemicals in agro and the rise of auto-immune disease, with a lag of X years, whatever make the numbers look legit. I'm not qualifying scientific research in general as biased towards the backers' incentives, but there is a lot of noise in statistical discoveries, scientists mostly interested in publishing something since that's their financial prerogatives to stay in the game. With all that being said, I will give my "opinion" which may answer part of your questions, but my conclusion wasn't reached by the standard of scientific methods: - we are ingesting and getting exposed to a wider range and higher quantities of toxic compounds, often so synthetic. - the immune system is a complex machine, that tilts and can overreact when on alerts, tends to have good memories, and can trigger or retrigger oversensitiveness, all for our survival's sake, it isn't de facto a disease to have the immune system take the wrong fights. - that immune system, shown to not always discriminate properly, probably having evolved to be rather safe than sorry. - we don't fully understand the immune system, maybe we barely do. Is it possible that we diagnose as a disease what might simply be the expected consequences of long term exposures to undersirable chemicals? That pharma got to sell something so they don't have any problem marketing chemical therapies and strongly promoting that rather than suggesting addressing the causes might be a better option? It wouldn't be the first time in history that physicians insist with the known treatments for symptoms they ignored the causes. Again take this with a pinch of salt, i am not advising against drug treatments altogether but took the opportunity to remind this thread that health care is also a business. From a non medical scientist who happen to have allergies and skimmed through a few hundred papers on the subject.

_Microft 3y ago

Which journal do you mean? "The Lancet"?

Mistletoe 3y ago
Apparently we discount everything The Lancet says now based on one retraction.
- _Microft 3y ago
  Not just that but not retracting fraudulent research is much worse than that?
  - carlmr 3y ago
    Exactly. It's like a friend of mine who said he doesn't want to buy some car brand because they have so many recalls. I want to buy that car brand because it has so many recalls. Every system has bugs, and recalls means you're fixing them. Which to me is much better than hiding them.

EGreg 3y ago

Yes we can’t ignore these issues. I always challenge people to attempt all kinds of mitigations upstream, before medicating downstream. This is also true for diabetes and autoimmune diseases — for example, stop buying food from factory farms, or fruits with tons of genetically engineered sugar or foods with tons of high-fructose corn syrup or aspartame, and tell our government to tax negative externalities, rather than “ag-gag” laws that criminalize exposing it. Your media will rarely talk about the role of actual sugar intake in diabetes, preferring to focus on “inherited” and “intrinsic” factors, and same with many other medical issue the pharma industry will medicate downstream. The government specifically works with industry to allow corporations to get away with saving a buck at the expense of the wider public, while the wider public is given a medications and bandaids downstream that decades later turn out to be scams: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362 Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Like when the government allows Coca Cola and Snapple bottling companies to switch to metric tons of non-biodegradeable plastic, while individuals are told they can’t have a plastic straw or bag, and can save the world by recycling plastic (a scam by the plastic industry to distract from the upstream problem, nearly all of the “recycling” consisted of shipping to China). Or how factory farms are now causing more negative externalities, which we are now finding out last month: https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/25/use-of-antibiotics-in-farming-endangering-human-immune-system https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/25/use-of-antib... https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/01/why-are-eggs-so-expensive-because-an-avian-flu-killed-43-million-hens-last-year https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/01/why-ar... I invite you to consider the same dynamic with autoimmune diseases and others. It’s the same question of whether kids always had this level of gender dysphoria and ADHD and autism, or did something happen in the environment, or did the industry start to overdiagnose them? The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but activists on either side insist on their explanation being the dominant one, or perhaps the only one. Similarly to how other activists might insist on systemic sexism or racism to explain a gender pay gap, or systemic antisemitism to explain criticism of Israel, etc. (Disclaimer: I’m a Jewish straight cis male.) This is an impulse by people with a specific agenda / issue to make sure their agenda “wins”. In every case, there are real problems that need to be solved upstream, but the focus by well-meaning activists is only on downstream solutions (eg prescribing amphetamines to ADHD-diagnosed kids) rather than upstream solutions (eg shortrr school days and allowing kids to climb trees like in Finland, where ADHD has far less diagnosed). They will spend decades advocating the same thing and expect a different result — it’s not collective insanity, it is actually learned helplessness. It is common to think this way when one’s “tribe” is involved. To illustrate it, I will touch on an issue with dynamics that have affected many people on HN. I hope it’s alright to mention it, because that is the only way you’ll see that the “downstream focus” even concerns many sacred cows. So — to hit home, this even happened on HN with depression. I have seen it for years, where any attempts to attribute some diagnosed depression to upstream causes like diet and exercise and environental factors are met with “you just don’t understand, clinical depression is completely different, and you should be quiet”. In each of these issues, the science shows that the theory that promotes medical interventions downstream is often wrong, eg in 2022 we found this out when it comes to the theory of chemical imbalance / low serotonin explaining depression: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0 https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2022/jul/20/scientists-question-widespread-use-of-antidepressants-after-survey-on-serotonin https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2022/jul/20/scientists-q... On the other hand there is a ton of studies on everyone from young girls to middle aged people getting far more sad and depressed: Teen girls: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/health/teen-girls-sadness-suicide-violence.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/health/teen-girls-sadness... 20% of all middle-aged women is on antidepressants (surely it can’t all be explained by a chemical imbalance, right?) https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/cdc-states-1-in-5-women-between-ages-40-59-on-antidepressants-buffalo-mental-health-expert-shares-reasons-why https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/cdc-states-1-in-5-women... Opioid epidemic in men, once again much of it is due to capitalism, both from an employment and a pharma industry side: https://www.cdc.gov/opioids/basics/epidemic.html https://www.cdc.gov/opioids/basics/epidemic.html But it’s easy for society to just prescribe medications to people rather than fixing systemic issues, eg implementing a UBI or 20 hour workweek overtime protections so people can spend more time with their family. In capitalism we’d rather allow companies to social problems with surveillance capitalism, social networks and AI to optimize clicks, because that’s what the market demands. On the other hand there are tons of studies and books on how the market and new technology has led to the breakdown of American social and family life. Starting with “Bowling Alone” by Robert Putnam back in the early aughts. People in big cities don’t even know their own neighbors. They live alone with their cats, order in netflix and uber eats, they stick their kids in public schools and parents in nursing homes, but hey, the economy is good right? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/opinion/microplastics-health-environment.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/opinion/microplastics-hea... Anyway to end with autoimmune diseases… notice how much more effort it would take for our society to stop producing plastics in clothes, that break down into microplastics on every wash, aren’t caught in drains and now find themselves everywhere, humans accumulate more and more microplastics. Rather than confront these environmental issues head-on (as we did once with CFCs and Toronto Protocol, the one big win for solving collective action problems) we allow the microplastics to accumulate in all biological beings, including us, throw up our hands and wonder aloud what could be causing autoimmune diseases? Meanwhile it is more convenient to open a new plastic spoon from a plastic package shipped from china, than wash a metal one. Instead of refilling bottles like our ancestors, we buy new ones every day and chuck them in the “recycling” LOL. Oh, and polyester is just so stretchy and convenient, as is teflon non-stick coating on our pans, why demand our government tell the industry to phase out nonbiodegradeable stuff and research biodegradeable alternstives? Nah that’s too hard to do as a society. So the problems get worse every year and “activists” arise who attribute it to a systemic issue like sexism or racism — they think they’re a great ally but rather than fighting each other we should band together to demand our govenrnment aggressively tax negative externalities upstream with Pigouvian taxes. Fiscal policy btw would be a great way to remove stimulus and UBI money from the economy. Certainly much nore targeted and better than crude monetary level the Fed has, raising interest rates on everyone. But our politicians are scared to raise taxes on industries, or go up against Big Ag or Big Pharma. So we as a society allow Day Zero to occur in cities, antibiotic resistant bacteria to grow, etc. all because of regulatory capture and cowardice. It will continue unless people recognize that the real problems are upstream, stop fighting each other and clearly spell out how we can organize to demand our government raise taxes on industries externalizing costs to others. If there was ever a proper role for government, it is that! PS: with AI, experts say 10% chance that humanity is wiped out… yet we can’t stop the competition and progress, and certainly when people are affected we’ll have industries to help them out downstream. Just another example, perhaps may be the biggest and fastest one soon.

6nf 3y ago

Which study was that?

matthewdgreen 3y ago

I think phrases like “a journal that got caught publishing a questionable study” imply a level of malice that isn’t appropriate. Journals publish studies all the time with some degree of peer review and a fraction of them are going to have problems, plus there is always the possibility of deliberate fraud that peer-review systems are explicitly not designed to catch. You shouldn’t believe every published study is 100% accurate just because it was published. But you also shouldn’t use phrases like “got caught” unless your goal is to imply deliberate malfeasance.

totalZero 3y ago
Journals operate in an information brokerage business and they are compensated to ensure reasonable review of what they publish. What you wrote would be applicable to something like reddit but you can't accept funds for a job that you don't carry out.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  The problem here is that journals are relying on an open source peer review process for which they pay nothing, and then trying to cash in on the fruits of that. Blaming the reviewers is like blaming the medieval serfs for the fact that their landlords sold you rotten grain.
  - watwut 3y ago
    Even if they were paid, it would not check for this. Peer review checks formalities, obvious methodological problems, citations, that sort of stuff. It is not an independent study meant to validate data themselves.
- watwut 3y ago
  What you wrote is false and suggests you do not know how science works. Peer review does not mean fraudulent studies can't go through, it is not even meant for that. Reasonable review does not excludes these.