How often do you log on to Facebook or turn on the TV to a news program and see something along the lines of "new study shows that drinking wine is as good as going to the gym for an hour a day"?
The answer is probably quite often. We are constantly bombarded with information that seems too good to be true. Coffee is the cure for cancer, drinking wine is the way to your beach bod, Time even ran a report that claimed that smelling farts is an effective way to prevent cancer. Depending on what you are looking for, it seems like you could find some 'scientific justification' for just about anything you wanted.
The problem obviously is that most of these claims are not correct. However, a culture of media consumption coupled with a desire to provide a scientific justification (no matter how credible) to our vices has promoted the continual exposure of scientific studies that seem to come out of nowhere.
You're probably wondering where these claims are coming from. Obviously the media cannot just make up studies in order to increase their viewership (to their chagrin). However, they can take claims such as "Synthesis and bioavailability of the endogenous gasomediator hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is perturbed in many disease states, including those involving mitochondrial dysfunction. There is intense interest in developing pharmacological agents to generate H2S. We have synthesised a novel H2S donor molecule coupled to a mitochondria-targeting moiety (triphenylphosphonium; TPP+) and compared the effectiveness of the compound against a standard non-TPP+ containing H2S donor (GYY4137) in the inhibition of oxidative stress-induced endothelial cell death. Our study suggests mitochondria-targeted H2S donors are useful pharmacological tools to study the mitochondrial physiology of H2S in health and disease." and turn it into "Farts help prevent cancer", even when the journal fails to explicetly mention farts or cancer.
Many other issues may exists with these types of studies; including small sample sizes, manipulation of data, over-extending the impacts of results received, and failing to state that the studies were only done on mice.
Issues also exist in the scientific community. There is a continual arms race to publish. A common expression at research universities is "publish or perish", and the pressure by universities may push scientists to publish findings that may not be completely solid. There is also a lack of replica studies. This is when other scientists repeat a study to see if the results are accurate, and is critical in the process. However, there is almost no funding for this, and also little incentive for scientists. After all, who wants to be the second guy to discover something? Fact checking does not a Nobel Prize winner make.
This isn't to say that good science isn't being done. We are on a frontier of new and exciting and ground-breaking science. I hope to just call attention to what is so often pushed in our faces, and to point out the obvious, that you should probably take those articles that your-friends-weird-mom posts with a grain of salt.
