|
A 15-year-old teenager from Wales has prompted a global Internet campaign against a phony “miracle drug” after posting warnings about it on the social networking website Twitter.
|
|
“I found out about it while browsing a support forum for Crohn’s disease, which I was diagnosed with earlier this year,” Morgan told AFP.
|
|
Morgan’s search led him to a website run by the drug’s apparent creator Jim Humble claiming that MMS was “the answer to AIDS, hepatitis A, B and C, malaria, herpes, TB, most cancers and many more of mankind’s worse diseases”.
|
|
The website also claims that MMS has been tested on over 75,000 people in Africa and that Humble has personally treated over 2,000 malaria victims with the drug.
Read more at news.smh.com.au |
|
Plenty of today’s scientific theories will one day be discredited. So should we be sceptical of science itself? Anthony Gottlieb explains …
|
| Good sense is the most fairly distributed commodity in the world, Descartes once quipped, because nobody thinks he needs any more of it than he already has |
| No group of believers has more reason to be sure of its own good sense than today’s professional scientists. |
| There is no full-blown logical paradox here. If a claim is ambitious, people should indeed tread warily around it, even if it comes from scientists; it does not follow that they should be sceptical of the scientific method itself. |
| When you paint yourself as a defender of the truth, it helps to keep quiet about how often you are wrong. |
| That fact partly explains why some influential climate scientists today, and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are having a hard time. |
| Wary of yielding any ground to those who think that global warming is some sort of hoax, they have sometimes been mightily unwilling to be open about exaggerations, mistakes and confusions in influential reports about climate change—such as the flawed “Hockey Stick” paper, published in Nature in 1998 |
| Physicists, in particular, have long believed themselves to be on the verge of explaining almost everything. In 1894 Albert Michelson, the first American to get a Nobel prize in science, said that all the main laws and facts of physics had already been discovered |
| In a recent book, “Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—And How to Know When Not to Trust Them”, David Freedman, an American business and science journalist, does a sobering job of reviewing dozens of studies of ignorance, bias, error and outright fraud in recent academic science. |
| He notes that discredited research is regularly cited in support of other research, even after it has been discredited. Trials of the safety and efficacy of drugs, which are often paid for by pharmaceutical companies, seem to be especially liable to errors of various sorts. |
| That helps to explain why medicines that can do unexpected harm—such as thalidomide, the sedative which was withdrawn in 1961 after causing deformities in babies, and Vioxx, a painkiller that had been used by 84m people before it was pulled in 2004—make it to the market. |
| It is perhaps the biases of science reporting in the popular press that produce the most misinformation, especially in medicine. The faintest whiff of a breakthrough treatment for a common disease is news, yet the fact that yesterday’s breakthrough didn’t pan out—which ought to be equally interesting to a seeker after truth – rarely is. |
| When a drug is tested on animals and seems promising, it makes headlines, even though the majority of drugs that pass animal trials never become usable for people. |
| The contest is not a zero-sum game: the shortcomings of science do not make it rational to believe cranks instead. It’s a fair bet that many of today’s scientific beliefs are wrong, but only your grandchildren will know which ones, and in the meantime, science is the only game in town.Read more at moreintelligentlife.com |
