Anti-science fearmongering

[feuervogel]

Yesterday, a friend on twitter retweeted this link. The title, as the writer intended, made me go, "Oh, shit." Then I read the article and thought, "What a fucking load of horseshit."

The comment I left (which, I guess, didn't need approval, because it appeared right away; I wonder if it'll get deleted later):

This is some serious anti-science fearmongering, and sadly, far too many people who read it don't have the basic knowledge to critique your fear-based commentary.

Injectable vitamin K is a prescription drug. Do you know what else is a prescription drug? Injectable vitamin C. Injectable caffeine (yes, it exists). Injectable chemotherapy. Hint: all injectable drugs require a prescription. You can buy a calcium supplement with added vitamins D and K (brand name: Viactiv) at most major drug stores.

Molybdenum is a necessary trace mineral that's found in the soil. It's a cofactor in DNA metabolism, and deficiencies have been linked to esophageal cancer. http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-molybdenum-deficiency.htm

Acetone (your apparent problem with bromelain) is also a natural part of the human body's metabolic processes. Anyone who's done Atkins has purposefully generated acetone (one of the ketone bodies), and the human body can metabolize it. No, that doesn't mean you should go out and drink a bottle of it, but in the trace amounts left from processing and extraction are well within the amount a healthy body can handle.

Most Americans reading this guy's blog don't have the basic science education necessary to see that what this guy's basically saying is OMG CHEMICALS!!! BE AFRAID!!! My bachelor's degree is in chemistry (and German), and I'm a pharmacist (PharmD). The OMG-ONOEZ!CHEMICALS!! argument has never flown with me.

But you know what? Most Americans maybe took chemistry in high school. Many Americans never went to college, so they never had an opportunity to learn more science. Of the Americans who went to college, how many were science majors? Half? A third? And even if they had to take a science class or two to fill a distribution requirement, how many took chemistry over, like, biology, geology, or astronomy (which was the most popular non-science-major science distribution filler at my liberal arts college)? It's easy to see how so many people are suckered by these anti-science hucksters and fearmongerers. (And the global warming denialists, the anti-vaxxers, and other such types.)

Which gets back to a conversation in the car on the way back from Atlanta on whether college qua college has value. I say it does, because schools are failing to teach real thinking skills. A good college (or even community college) curriculum ought to emphasize thinking critically and synthesizing information: taking something from one of the courses in your distribution requirements and applying it to your major, or vice versa.

Knowledge -- and the ability to see when someone is bullshitting you that comes with it -- is power. Saying that only a certain class of people deserves access to knowledge is denying them the power to avoid being deceived. Saying that education is utterly useless for certain types of people implies that those people deserve to get the wool pulled over their eyes by snake oil salesmen.

Bullshit.

Comments

[quinfirefrorefiddle]

I do not see your comment there now.

[feuervogel]

I still see it. Weird. Maybe it does need approval, but it just doesn't say "your comment is awaiting moderation"?

[feuervogel]

I screencapped it: http://yfrog.com/gyzgtnp

[legionseagle]

I don't see your comment, I'm afraid.

I think, by the way, that you're right about the need for college, but I'm disturbed by your comment bere

Which gets back to a conversation in the car on the way back from Atlanta on whether college qua college has value. I say it does, because schools are failing to teach real thinking skills.

I think the problem you have when people get as far as college without thinking skills is that it's too late for them either to benefit from college or to develop those skills. I've just ducked out of a fruitless argument in another forum because the idea of social cost/benefit analysis was so clearly foreign to the people I was trying to have a discussion with; things had to be absolutes. It's expecting people to do practical mechanics with no toolkit.

[feuervogel]

Naturally, addressing the issue of critical thinking much earlier (like starting in 2nd grade) would be ideal, but given the hostility present-day America (and the GOP) has toward education and paying teachers what they're worth, let alone giving them the ability to, you know, TEACH as opposed to play babysitter for 30 kids, I'm cynical about that ever happening.

[legionseagle]

You're probably right, but it's a depressing thought.

[feuervogel]

It is. Living in the US right now is pretty depressing.

I screencapped my comment: http://yfrog.com/gyzgtnp

[ranyart]

A few years back, around 2007-2008, I started hearing a lot of people with concerns about added synthetic Vitamin K in dog food. Apparently there are some studies that point to it being toxic in large amounts, but I don't have an idea of what counts as a "large amount" and it isn't clear how definitive those studies are. For about a year we had to be aware of which foods had the synthetic K because we had many customers who wouldn't feed it, but that seemed to die down after a while. Possibly this is because the better brands either stopped adding Vitamin K or switched to a natural source; I'm not sure. But it was extremely difficult, at the time, for us to sift through various sources to find actual unbiased information on the issue.

[feuervogel]

There's no known vitamin K toxicity in humans, except for vitamin K3. Phytonadione, the additive in Kashi and your average multivitamin, as well as the ebil prescription injection (which is used as an antidote to warfarin/Coumadin overdose), is vitamin K1. It's the only available form of vitamin K in the US.

It's true, pets are smaller, but honestly, the whole "OMG SYNTHETICS! EBIL!!" thing drives me up a tree. God bless the person who figured out how to synthesize levothyroxine, because I'll be damned if I'm going to take a pill derived from dessicated pig thyroid. It's NATURAL! Therefore it's BETTER! No, it isn't. See also insulin. I still don't understand why people use a pill derived from pregnant mare urine rather than nice, clean, synthetic estrogens. (Also, getting the pregnant mare urine in quantities sufficient to make enough Premarin for every menopausal woman in the US/world requires some pretty nasty animal cruelty; they don't let the horses drink a lot of water so their urine is more concentrated.)

[legionseagle]

Every time I hear people talking about "natural ingredients" I mutter "belladonna."

[feuervogel]

And foxglove!

[legionseagle]

Actually, arsenic's quite natural - they mine it.

But there's nothing says "natural" quite like Yersinia pestis.

[feuervogel]

Lead's pretty natural, too...

Mmm, Yersinia. The Clostridium family is also all-natural.

(Yes, I prefer to buy produce grown without pesticides from non-Monsanto seeds. I'm not anti-laboratory-genetic-modification, though I object strongly to Monsanto's business practices and modifying plants to be resistant to pesticides, especially when we don't know how they'll interbreed in the wild. Adding a gene to give rice vitamin A? COOL! That'll help a lot of impoverished people around the world. Not as much as fixing our society so they're not impoverished and living on rice, but until that day (hahahahaha), preventing nutrient deficiencies is good. A shocking lot of the natural living crowd is blindly, knee-jerk anti-science.)

[princess]

(SO MUCH THIS!)

[smarriveurr]

Yes, this. Pretty much literally.

Whenever some commercial goes on about "All natural ingredients", I think "Like Deadly Nightshade!" For the ones that add "And it's been used for centuries, so you know it works!" I double down with mercury.

Natural doesn't mean safe, and the fact that people have done something for ages doesn't mean it's a good solution. People are, on the whole, sadly not that bright.

[feuervogel]

This exactly is why I'm skeptical of the fad evolutionary diets (have you heard of the paleo diet? Apparently humans haven't evolved in 10000 years of agriculture to digest wheat, so we MUST EAT ONLY MEAT! And vegetables, because I guess they don't count as agriculture.) and the raw food craze.

We discovered how to control fire a long time ago.

[ranyart]

Yeah, K3 was the type in question.

I remember reading about Premarin maybe eight or ten years ago and freaking the fuck out.

[feuervogel]

I don't know if K3 is at "more studies needed to determine the safe upper limit" or "unsafe at any level." Or why the manufacturers wouldn't use K1 like in human-grade things. $$$, probably. Yay, capitalism! Cheaper, less safe ingredients means more profit for us!

I learned about it in pharmacy school, and I was grossed out. (See also Armour Thyroid.)

[leora]

While I don't need thyroid supplements, I know that my past thyroid problem puts me at increased risk for developing hypothyroidism at some point. I might not ever do so, but I well may. I am so incredibly pleased that if I do so, I will have the option of a synthetic. I already take pain killers in tablet form when I take them, rather than gel-caps, to avoid the gelatin. But when you get to less common drugs you tend to have fewer options for the format in which you take them or the source. Knowing I won't need to eat bits of pig every day to deal with a thyroid problem is a huge relief to me.

[feuervogel]

*nods* I actively seek out the vegetarian vitamin D and multi vitamins (luckily, not hard at my co-op) and prefer tablets over capsules, though I do occasionally eat things made with gelatin. (I also eat tuna periodically, so...)

[leora]

I take vegetarian (vegan actually, I think simply because it's simple to find) multivitamins. It's easy with multivitamins, because that's a widely taken item. When I had to get one of my diagnostic tests done, I had to swallow a gel cap, as there was simply no alternative. And for sufficient medical reasons, I'll do that. But I really don't like doing that, and I would hate having to do that daily. It's quite nice when there are options. Although I do understand that sometimes because of the delivery mechanism needed there aren't going to be many options, and there isn't enough demand to make the coatings vegetarian. And some prescription drugs just don't come in numerous varieties (and while liquid compounding is sometimes potentially possible, it'd be extremely expensive). It's one of the things I was looking at when looking over migraine drugs - which have tablet versions. Also, which have which side effects, of course. As the whole medical aspect is important too. :)

[oonh.livejournal.com]

Relatedly, did you see Penn and Teller (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi3erdgVVTw) with an anti-DHMO petition?

[feuervogel]

Ha, no, though I'm well acquainted with the campaign to ban DHMO. We hung some warning signs up by water fountains as an April Fools joke when I was in college.

[tiurin.livejournal.com]

Well, the comment is still up. He even responded. *snicker*

[feuervogel]

I replied to his response, but my response doesn't appear to be out of moderation yet.

[a-nightengale.livejournal.com]

In a lot of ways I think of myself as smart, but I have to admit that in college, I failed the basic chemistry course (which is part of what changed my major from biology to Spanish).

So while I tend to be skeptical of the type of post you linked to, my knowledge to form a solid response is somewhat shaky. I'm grateful to folks like you who DO have the science knowledge to go, "Hey y'all, don't panic." :)

[feuervogel]

You're welcome! And, yeah, that blog post was all "OMG! PANIC, EVERYONE!"