Pseudoscience: Opioids, Contraception, Abortion and Cancer.

It's a great day for ideologically motivated pseudoscience!

From BeliefNet, a new study that, against all odds, establishes a link between contraception, abortion and cancer.

And from the super GeriPal, a debunking look at the swelling but false meme that opioids like morphine cause cancer growth.

Why is it important to not leap to the conclusion that opioids cause cancer growth? Two recent examples come to mind: hormone replacement therapy for post-menopausal women and vitamin E. Early retrospective studies (in humans, not mice) seemed to demonstrate that hormone replacement therapy led to reduced mortality. Unfortunately, large prospective cohort studies showed the opposite to be true! When researchers went back to re-examine the earlier studies, they found those earlier studies failed to account for important baseline differences in women: those who were healthier were more likely to take hormone replacement therapy, and therefore had better health outcomes that were attributed to the drug. Similarly, there was a great deal of excitement about vitamin E, including bizillions of laboratory studies that showed plausible mechanisms by which vitamin E could reduce heart attacks (antioxidant properties, etc). Again, large studies showed the opposite: people who do not take vitamin E live longer and have fewer heart attacks than people who do take vitamin E. In both the case of hormone replacement therapy and vitamin E, patients were taking the drug and health care providers were recommending treatment based on early evidence. And people died.

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As Christian Sinclair (of Pallimed) noticed, if you Google search "morphine cancer" the fourth hit is "Pain drug morphine may accelerate cancer growth | Reuters." Think of all of our patients and caregivers who, seeking information, are clicking on that link.

Let's set the record straight.

The world is full of suppositions and pseudoscience that is meant to support an ideology - the media plays sucker again and again. Got your own examples? Post them in comments!

Pseudoscience, Junk Science in Politicized Discourse.

The ubiquitous Jill Stanek, great lover of babies, abstinence and God, has a column at WorldNetDaily titled, "Under Obama, STD Super Strains All the Rage." It's an absolutely star example of unscientific, unreasoned fear-mongering in politicized media, meant to make the point that the evil Obama administration - and liberal policies in general - are infecting citizens with increasingly untreatable strains of diseases. Stanek scribbles:

Recalling the Rev. Jeremiah Wright once famously accused the "government … [of] inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color," it is ironic that his protégé, Barack Obama, along with other carriers of the deadly diseases of political correctness and liberal ideology, would actually be the ones guilty of spreading not only HIV but other plagues.

Political correctness is loose conservative code for anti-discriminatory language or tolerance or something like that. It developed to make racists aware of how ignorant and discriminatory they were. Liberal ideology is as nebulous a term. For conservatives, it can stand in for anything found objectionable. And the reference to Jeremiah Wright is a great starter for Stanek's like-minded readers who know exactly were the article is going without reading it. Wright's paranoid accusation that HIV was unleashed to kill blacks, perfectly linked to the left and the sitting president, is taking a (black) exception as representative of all thought on the left regarding disease - not credible.

Stanek cites three news reports about resistant strains of disease, the first on resistant strains of tuberculosis, the second about the rise of sexually transmitted diseases, and the third about the ban lifted on HIV positive travelers into the US. She claims that while these three stories have nothing in common - and they don't - that she will prove they do.

Her non-argument:

To begin connecting the dots, Homeland Security Today on Dec. 29 reported on the scale of diseases resistant to drug treatment:

[P]hysicians and researchers around the world are expressing growing alarm over the disturbing escalation of a variety of antibiotic-resistant diseases they say are rapidly mutating. Some … fear these diseases will evolve into dominate strains for which we have no new antibiotics to treat the level of resistance that we are now witnessing.

Why is this happening? The Associated Press reported in the aforementioned Juarez piece:

Today, all the leading killer infectious diseases on the planet – TB, malaria and HIV among them – are mutating at an alarming rate, hitchhiking their way in and out of countries. The reason: Overuse and misuse of the very drugs that were supposed to save us.

Just as the drugs were a manmade solution to dangerous illness, the problem with them is also manmade. It is fueled worldwide by everything from counterfeit drugmakers to the unintended consequences of giving drugs to the poor without properly monitoring their treatment.

Then she throws in scary reports of drug-resistant malaria in Cambodia and Africa (as if it's one country) and the rise of animal-to-human cross-over diseases. Scared yet? If any recent report mentions disease or drug-resistance, apparently she's determined to cobble them together to prove that the Obama administration is working to perpetuate policy that aids the spread of these diseases.Then Stanek breaks into the nether realm of illogic:

So states legislating the distribution of antibiotics for unverified cases of sexually transmitted diseases are only making matters worse.

Speaking of, England's Venereal Diseases Act of 1917 defined three: chancroid, gonorrhea andsyphilis, all bacterial.

Today there are over 25 viral (incurable) and bacterial (with hundreds of strains, many antibiotic resistant) STDs.

Interestingly, widespread use of the birth-control pill beginning in the 1960s is being partially blamed for the spread of STDs for two reasons, the increased number of sexual partners and decreased use of condoms.

Today contraceptive advocates suggest using condoms in conjunction with birth-control pills. They also recommend stocking morning-after pills in the medicine cabinet for feared failure of the first two as well as keeping a dental dam (don't ask) in the night stand to guard against infections caught from oral sex.

Meanwhile, they call abstinence education stupid.

Get it? Birth control is the cause of new strains of drug-resistant diseases around the world! From Malaria to TB, from gonorrhea to syphillis. Stanek concludes the poorly-strung piece with a quote from Homeland Security Today that reports on the spread of drug-resistant TB. The report, by Anthony Kimerly, states only that those with HIV are more susceptible to TB because their immune system is weakened by the former. She concludes with:

Political correctness and liberal ideology both cause and aggravate the spread of communicable and sexually transmitted diseases.

And these people want to take over the American health-care system.

According to Susan Jacoby, there are five primary characteristics of Junk Thought. There are:

1. Confusion of coincidence and causation:

Stanek comes to the information with an already-formed premise: that the Obama administration's policies are bad for the health of the nation and lethal to quality health care. Running the conservative screed, she also wants to show that current foreign policy is deadly. The information she gathers to make this point has only tangential applicability to the rise of TB in the world (the 1917 British Venereal Disease Act? Health Care Reform? The birth control pill?)

Her assertion that the advent of the birth control pill caused an increase in venereal disease infections (nobody in Westernized countries loses a nose to siphillis today), more sexual partners (actually a change in social mores, divorce rates and women's equality since the sixties - and by the way, alone not a bad thing), and decreased use of condoms (the use of which has been hampered by abstinence teaching and funding here and around the world) are all conjecture. She doesn't have a single fact to back any of it up and she confuses advent of the pill with these issues, ignoring that other factors had an impact as well.

2. Appropriation of scientific-sounding language for emotional stories that are used as representative of fact but are unreasoned:

Citing credible sources but using faulty logic to string them together, she throws out the AP (not always credible, I should note), the World Health Organization, Homeland Security Today as though provide her premise with legitimacy. But her effort is to cause an emotional reaction of fear and anger in her readers that masquerades as science. The peppering of numbers and dates make it look like she knows what she's talking about.

3. Innumeracy, or sloppy numbers:

Despite a plethora of credible studies that conclusively show that abstinence education causes increased spread of sexually transmitted disease in the US, she makes her own conclusions based on ideology - because she does not want to believe in the facts. She prefers to cling to unproven but "pure" ideas of abstinence and human behavior.

4. Definitions so broad as to be meaningless:

Disease, sexually transmitted viruses, global politics, abstinence education (quite different in the US than in Uganda, Kenya or Cambodia): Stanek neglects to differentiate between sexually transmitted and air-born viruses, global travel issues (she's got no facts on how many HIV travelers will come to the US, nor on how many of those have drug-resistant TB but uses fear of infection to make the possibilities credible). And she conflates STDs and HIV infection.

5. Expert-bashing which keeps the public confused on the legitimacy of science and facts and prevents clear distinction between pseudo science and good, tested, provable science:

By criticizing policies unpopular among conservatives, health care reform and immigration, she has an audience ready to take her assertions at face value. That the smart people in government can't see the facts plays into existing fear of a black president, terrorism, and health concerns. Never mind that she's got no way to prove that all these disparate factors - coincidence of HIV and TB infection, the lifting of the ban on HIV travel, the revision of health care, and abstinence education - are in any way related.

We're not encouraged to logically or scientifically analyze news information. We live in an environment that runs on outrage, fear and conjecture. Were common readers able or willing to assess the information that passes their way on it's scientific and factual merit, they would better grasp the ideological motives behind such "reports." But in a culture where intelligent design is taught in schools and man is considered to be made in God's image, proof too seldom plays a role in how we govern our actions and our country country.

For all the science that have proven abstinence education doesn't work, Stanek and her contingency cling to the belief that it will solve social problems like teenage pregnancy, the spread of STDs - and sadly, the move to treat women with equality in society. But facts and current human behavior prove otherwise.

If her objective is to reduce these challenges in society (STD infection, teenage pregnancy, HIV), logically Stanek would be the greatest proponent of birth control on the planet. Condoms again and again have been proven to work. But, sadly, that's not her objective. And sadly, she's still spreading unfounded ideology far and wide.

Smoking Gun? No, Just The Discovery Institute Instigating Persecution.

Oh the Discovery Institute is so invested in disseminating pseudoscience - in this case intelligent design - that it's making a giant hyperbolic issue out of the California Science Institutes refusal, unfortunately at the last minute, to show Darwin's Dilemma, a film that dresses up unprovable mythology in scientific language. My guess is that the scheduler heard the title and thought they were in for an excavation of Darwin, his methods, his studies, something fact based. Then when they found out that Darwin's Dilemma was really a religiously motivated attack on science they decided to pull the plug. Then got afraid that exactly what is happening now would happen.

Poor management, yes. "Tip of the proverbial iceberg?" Two forked assault on the first amendment? "Smoking gun?" Persecution of intelligent designers? They're kidding, right?

But the Discovery Institute, that well-funded, bully purveyor of religious ideology wrapped in science-ese, has a reason to make such a giant issue out of this whole situation. First, they get to claim the wronged position - My God! Violation of the Establishment clause! - and they posit themselves as great upholders of the law. Self-righteousness is what they do best and they are all a-glory with accusing the Science Center of denying "the people" access to information, even if it is at the core religious missionizing disguised as a National Geographic special.

It's a real shame that organizations like Discovery aren't run out of existence for duping the gullible public into snuggling down in their own ignorance. Denying science isn't a very strong position to fight from unless you're doing so from a stage spied by the uneducated.

From the Discovery Institute's site:

There are two big stories arising from the California Science Center’s censorship last October of the pro-intelligent design film Darwin’s Dilemma. The first big story, which was the primary focus of a Los Angeles Times article last week, is the act of censorship itself. As an agency of state government in California, the Science Center is required to abide by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. The Science Center didn’t have to rent its facilities to the public, but once it did so, as a government agency, it was legally obliged by the First Amendment to treat all citizens equally.

But there is another big story tied to the Science Center that hasn’t received sufficient attention yet: The Center’s illegal cover-up.

The California Science Center has flagrantly violated California’s open records law in an apparent effort to hide the real story behind its censorship of Darwin’s Dilemma. The Center’s evasion of the law is the reason for the open records lawsuit recently brought by Discovery Institute against the Center. In October, the Institute filed a comprehensive open records request demanding that the Science Center turn over all documents relating to its abrupt decision to cancel the privately-sponsored screening of Darwin’s Dilemma. In early November, the Science Center released 44-pages of documents in response to the records request. At that time, the Center assured Discovery Institute that it had turned over "all documents" and that "no documents have been withheld," apart from a few e-mail addresses that were redacted. The Science Center did not tell the truth. Discovery Institute independently obtained incriminating emails involving Center officials that should have been turned over by the Center but weren’t.

Most importantly, the Institute obtained a smoking-gun e-mail confirming that the censorship ofDarwin’s Dilemma was connected to the Science Center’s relationship with the Smithsonian Institution. In an Oct. 6 email to the American Freedom Alliance, Science Center Vice President Christine Sion specifically cited alleged damage to the Center’s “relationship with the Smithsonian” as the reason for canceling the Darwin’s Dilemma screening. In its open records request, Discovery Institute had asked for all documents relating to the screening cancellation that referenced the Smithsonian. The Christine Sion e-mail was clearly covered by that request and therefore should have been produced. It wasn’t. Another email from a Smithsonian official to the Science Center complaining about the screening was likewise suppressed.