Posted: May 25, 2010 6:50 pm
generalsemanticist wrote:Thanks for the lesson in double blind studies. Even so, statistics can be manipulated quite easily by unscrupulous drug company officials. I don't have much to say about homeopathy and I don't really care if people want to use it fine with me. I went to a chiropractor and didn't like that but others swear by it. To each his own I say. My biggest concern is the emphasis on sickness instead of health by our so-called "health-care" system. There should be taxes on unhealthy food to discourage people from buying them just like on cigarettes.
You can manipulate statistics all you want, but if you do, you will either not get published or competitors will not be able to repeat your experiment, in which case, you are outed and destroyed. If it ever became known that a pharmaceutical company faked their own research (which can be easily discovered by independently repeating the study; independent studies are almost always done before putting a new drug on the market), it would be all over for them, both financially and legally. It is much easier to just create drugs that work if you want to make a large profit.
You are free to believe whatever you want to believe, but you cannot have your own facts. Once you reject science and reason, you start to walk down a very dangerous path to a place you do not want to get. You might get to Thabo Mbeki. He was a former President in South Africa, a country that has been plagued the most with HIV/AIDS. As it happens Mbeki is an AIDS denialist who do not accept the scientifically established notion that HIV cause AIDS and belives that antiretroviral drugs (that we know works) is really a western plot to damage the African people. Because of this, he refused to give his suffering population antiretroviral drugs against HIV/AIDS, but believed, without any evidence or reason, that garlic and lemon cured HIV. Scientists at Harvard School of Public Health estimates that this stunt caused the premature deaths of almost 350000 of his own people.
So don't tell me that there are no consequences to irrational beliefs; there are, and they can be profound.