If anyone has any basic knowledge of science, youll know that when trying to link cause and effect, its extremely important to consider the size of population and demographics. For example, a great deal of research in the humanities is based on wholly student populations. (When is the last time you heard of a PhD student whose research was fully funded?). To illustrate: I am as some may know, educated in the field of communication research. As such, I am often astounded at how, in my field, certain facts (ostensibly related to human behaviour) are hastened to ascendant memes even though they are decades old and completely irrelevant in this age of technology and leaps in human knowledge evolution. To prove this some time ago I set out to disprove one of the widely held beliefs relating to public speaking. You will know that public speaking is oft held up as the number one fear of the greatest number of people. This statistic is based on a 1970s publication The Book of Lists and no one seems to have ever discredited it. But back in 2005 I applied a fairly basic survey to an audience of around 50 business leaders. And guess what the number one fear actually was? Spiders! Yes. Spiders. But curing arachnophobia isnt nearly as profitable as curing speaker fear is it? Voila. A thriving industry of presentation training, speaker training and so on. I find that the misinformation is particularly rife in the field of cancer. Everything from milk to eating too much processed food (a suggestion I found hugely offensive), plastic bottles to underarm deodorant and even tight underwire bras have been suggested to me as causes of my breast cancer. As per my last post however, much of our future health is often prescribed by a combination of fate and gene pool, none of which can really be fixed by a scientist. Be wary of dodgy science. Always remember, as I do, the word scientist is not equal to the word god. A lone scientist working in his or her rarified laboratory environment will not him or herself, have all the answers. Only through randomised, repeated and repeated again studies is science ever confirmed and then, only when sample population has been extrapolated to be truly representative. As one of my favourite sayings goes: You do not know what you do not know. upworthy/16-years-ago-a-doctor-published-a-study-it-was-completely-made-up-and-it-made-us-all-sicker?c=ufb4
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 00:52:16 +0000
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