Biomedical Scientist Answers Pseudoscience Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

May 29, 2024

I'm Dr. Andrea. I love

biomedical

scientist

. I verify the facts as false. Health affirmations. This is

pseudoscience

. Support away from keys. He wants to know how

pseudoscience

is defined. Pseudoscience therefore refers to beliefs or practices that appear scientific on the surface but lack the repeatability, reliability or credibility of science, often make claims that are based on anecdotes rather than evidence, often start with a nugget. really and then they greatly exaggerate that beyond what reality would indicate in Shanny xray wants to know if I should buy This tea for a flat belly or no one has tried it.

I hate to tell you that these things are actually just glorified laxatives, so what's happening is that you're speeding up your digestive process beyond what it should normally be, but what you're eliminating is. It is food that you have not finished digesting properly and absorbing its nutrients, so you are generating a lot of diarrhea and you are also dehydrating yourself, so although you may feel that you have a very flat belly, it is not because you are actually losing weight or eliminating toxins, it is simply because you have removed food from your body too quickly and are becoming dehydrated. s duche wondering why I'm just learning that chiropractors aren't real doctors, yeah, so chiropractic is a $15 billion industry and It was invented by a guy named DD Palmer who thought ghosts were telling him to create it.

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biomedical scientist answers pseudoscience questions from twitter tech support wired...

They believe that the joints and nerves that run through our body are the cause of all the ailments we know of. Unfortunately, chiropractic is a complete one. pseudoscience, there are certain chiropractors who perhaps stay in the More Physical Therapy lane and there is some data to suggest that for certain types of low back pain the chiropractic adjustment may offer temporary relief, but it does not solve a musculoskeletal problem and it definitely is not. do the other things chiropractors claim to do if you see the abbreviation DC after someone's name on social media that means they are a chiropractor and not a medical or scientific expert on pathogens, is it just me or is it a belief. in pseudoscience On the rise recently, this is absolutely correct, we have seen a dramatic increase in anti-scientific and pseudoscientific beliefs and this does not make the trend with the prevalence of social media also coincide with the recent co9 pandemic and the increasing amount of politicization of vaccines, so this past year only 93.1% of the children who entered the AG School received vaccines against MMR, measles, mumps and the anti-rebellion vaccine.

This represents a 2% drop compared to the previous school year, particularly for diseases where at least 95% coverage is needed to stop the spread of measles. It's a very worrying trend in guts not guts wants to know how vaccines caused the autism myth they even started this myth started in 1998 because of a British gastroenterologist named Andrew Wakefield who has since lost his medical license and ability to practice medicine, But he published an article in The Lancet, which is a very prestigious medical journal, and he said that he had to demonstrate a link between the MMR vaccine, which is the measles, mumps and influenza vaccine, and the symptoms of autism in children. children.

The problem was that he falsified all the data in that article, more than that, he used his own reports from parents who were planning to sue the existing manufacturers of the MMR vaccine, on top of that, he was trying to sell and market his own MMR vaccine, but because it was published in such a prestigious medical journal, it took the world by surprise and caused a lot of fear, eventually that paper was retracted, but that retraction didn't happen until 2010, 12 years later, now in recent years we are seeing measles rates higher than what we've seen in the US and it's really a cause for concern because the first measles vaccine was released in 1963, so we have over 60 years of data showing that there is no relationship between vaccines and autism in Briney for Trump.

GMOs change our DNA every day and give people various diseases, why do we approve of this? This is not true in the 1980s and 1990s, papaya was being wiped out by a virus called papaya ringspot virus, so we created a transgenic papaya that can resist papaya ringspot virus. 90% of papayas are GMO and when you eat them the DNA does not change, so when you eat papaya you eat all its cells and all those cells contain DNA, so those DNA molecules will enter your stomach and mix with a enzyme. It's called pepsin, so when pepsin interacts with the DNA molecule, it breaks it down into all these individual subunits and therefore the DNA is no longer intact, it won't change your DNA and it won't cause any harmful consequences.

Johnny V 453 85760 wants to know how you can tell if a health influencer is legit or full of some of the red flags to look for are number one, they are trying to evoke very strong negative emotions, such as fear, anxiety or worry , especially when it comes to your health or the health of your children or your family number two, they are making all or nothing statements, they are saying that this is causing cancer or that this is going to solve some disorder number three, yes They are selling you something that is related to the claims they are making, whether it is a supplement, a diet plan, a protocol or a book number four, if they have an obvious conflict of interest, they are working for the company of the product they are selling to you. selling and lastly, but not at least if they speak outside their area of expertise, if someone is a neuro

scientist

who specializes in optic nerve signaling and claims to be an expert in infectious diseases.

Immunology, which is probably a red flag for 10,000 problems, wants to know why Homeopathic medicine works so much better than real medicine, unfortunately that is not the case, but let me tell you a little about what homeopathy is because it is often confused with other types of alternative remedies. Homeopathy is a pseudoscience that was created or invented in the 18th century by a German guy named SEL hanaman created this based on two beliefs, the first is that like cures like, which means that if something causes a symptom, that same substance can cure, cure an ailment that creates that symptom, onion causes watery eyes when you cut it, therefore, homeopathic onion.

It will cure things like allergies that also cause watery eyes, but that goes hand in hand with the second belief or the law of infinite tmals, which means that the remedy becomes more potent the more it is diluted if you find a label on a homeopathic remedy that says 12 c c means 100 and 12 means you have diluted the substance 12 times 100f which means you have one part of so many parts it is also called septian so what that means is there is no real active ingredient In that, that's probably a The good thing is that there are many homeopathic remedies that can be very dangerous if you ingest them in normal doses, for example, the teething tablets that claim to have homeopathic badana, which is a deadly nightshade, were contaminated with Bell's measurable levels and hundreds of babies developed seizures and at least 10 babies died this happened from 2010 and 2012 and there were several brands that were to blame.

A final danger of homeopathy is that many people believe that they are taking something that is beneficial and beyond that it is nothing more than a sugar pill often leads people to forego real medical care, which is one of the greatest harms of all in Paul meta 555 question to our cell phone Towers harmful to our health why so many why they make high-pitched noises are they carcinogenic why the cancer rate increases Since cell phone towers came along they look like this, you have this primary node that comes out from everywhere and you have these radio waves that are emitted.

You also have these secondary nodes that are a little bit smaller, but all these radio frequency waves are projected in all directions because otherwise we wouldn't have cell reception, so this myth started because people heard the word radio frequency radiation and they got scared because We know that there are certain types of radiation that are linked to cancer. Here we have the The things of the electromagnetic spectrum at this end are very high energy and this rainbow here is our ultraviolet visible light spectrum and above these types of radiation can potentially damage our cells and our body and can cause changes in our cells and mutations, but when you get down to the energy level of visible light and you get into infrared and microwaves down here, those are your radio waves, so this radio frequency radiation is one of the lowest energy types of radiation. and it's considered what we call non-ionizing, which means it can't penetrate your body, so it doesn't even If those radio waves are all over our planet because we have cellular reception everywhere, the amount of energy that they're exerting on It won't actually harm your body or cause any potential harm to you.

John Peterson FW wants to know. I really like. To hear from someone who really knows if buying organic food for double the price is really worth it or better for you, the biggest misconception is that organic doesn't contain pesticides. Here we have organic blueberries, they are grown with organic pesticides and organic pesticides are simply chemicals that have not been synthetically altered from the original state in which they exist somewhere in nature, in contrast these are conventional blueberries that were grown using conventional pesticides . Conventional pesticides are those that can be synthetically altered to improve their specificity. A 2010 study in plus one was examining six different pesticides used to control aphids on soybean plants and found that they not only controlled aphids but also killed aphids' natural predators, the soya bug. insidious flowers and the Asian ladybug, which had a broader negative ecological impact.

Another misconception about all produce has all these pesticide residues, we're talking parts per billion, parts per billion, these are tiny levels, if you're really concerned, wash your produce with water, but other than that, I don't need to. being stressed about your products at Toya Relle wants to know what people think they are cleansing when they do cleanses or detoxes with juices and smoothies. I hate to break it to you if you have organ systems that aren't working, you're already detoxing everything. every day, so when people say they are doing a parasite cleanse or a cleanse and claim that these stringy things in your poop are parasites, what they are actually seeing is mucus and shed intestinal cells, which is not a The good thing is that it's actually damaging your gastrointestinal tract in Big Papa Briggs wants to know on a scale of 1 to 10 how scared he should be of Lyme disease, so someone who's stuck studied Lyme disease for several decades.

Lyme disease is actually not that easy to treat. To get what you think you not only have to have the right species of tick to actually bite you, but it also has to feed on you for at least 24 hours to have a chance of passing the bacteria on to you, your chance or risk of getting Lyme. The disease is very, very low. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give it about a two or three. There are only two species of ticks in the US that can transmit Lyme disease. There are some areas of the country where there is a higher risk, such as the Midwest and Northeast, and this is because there are higher proportions of both the ticks that live there and the bacteria on those ticks.

In other parts of the country, the risk is almost zero. There are many common myths about Lyme disease. The first is that once you are infected you will always be infected and that is not true, it is a bacterial infection and once you have taken antibiotics as a standard treatment, they are very effective treatments, you will eliminate the bacteria, but unfortunately, since it was discovered in the 1980s and has really been the subject of a lot of misinformation and that can be attributed in part to some of these tests that are sold direct to consumer that claim to be able to diagnose lime disease.

Unfortunately, these tests are not from the FDA. approved and are not accurate, but they tell people that they have Lyme disease when they actually do not, creating the perception that Lyme disease is not only more widespread than it is, but that it is much more widespread than it is. more prevalent and serious in retired Dent. More and more parents are giving their children fluoride-free toothpaste. What's up with that? Why are people so afraid of fluoride? Fluoride is a naturally occurring substance that can be found in minerals and soil and in our environment and many years ago it was determined that communities that naturally had higher levels of fluoride in their water were less likely to developcavities, so we started fluoridating water and adding fluoride to toothpaste over 75 years ago and that really plummeted the number of cavities or tooth decay, unfortunately claims on social media that are not based on reality, le tells people that fluoride is a neurotoxin, what they don't mention is that the dose at which you would have to consume fluoride to have any toxic effects is far outside the reality of anything that can consume fluoride and Water is added to 7 mg per kilogram, which means that to reach the minimum threshold where you could have skeletal effects from fluoride, if you were a child weighing 22 pounds, you would have to drink 50.7 liters of water a day, so it really is like that .

It's not a worry for Karen Fron says everyone should have a gluten-free diet. I'm just saying that the reality is that if you don't have a medical reason to avoid gluten, you don't need to avoid gluten. Gluten is a structural protein found. in certain grains like wheat, barley, Carin and others, and there are certain medical conditions that should be avoided, this protein in particular, this would be something like celiac disease, which is an autoimmune disorder, there have been a lot of studies and whether to avoid Does gluten offer a benefit or not and the big consensus is that it doesn't, sometimes we hear claims that gluten here is worse because we use all the processed chemicals and we use all the pesticides and when you went to Europe you could eat all the bread that you wanted and you didn't have those problems with gluten and unfortunately the amount of gluten in wheat in all countries is essentially the same, on top of that, we also use the same pesticides, glyphosate is one that is often demonized because It is used to dry wheat, but it is also used in Europe.

Europe imports millions of pounds of American wheat each year to make the breads you're eating. I would suggest that maybe you are more relaxed while you are on vacation and you are not devouring your food between taking the kids to activities and gulping air, which creates a perceived feeling of bloating that has nothing to do with gluten, but with the rush and stress you have during the day. -Everyday life at Teal PB wants to know what makes a study reliable, so when we talk about the scientific method we have what we call the hierarchy of evidence at the bottom, there are things that are usually based on small sample sizes or opinions from there, you go to animal trials and inv vitro data, so these are your Petrish studies or your animal data that are not automatically representative of what is happening in people, you say you want to study the process of a disease in humans and you use an animal model. that that disease doesn't occur in that won't be an accurate or representative research model because it won't give you data that you can then generalize to people once you get over that you're moving on to human studies randomized control trials They're also usually blinded , they are considered our gold standard, so in vaccine studies this is very common, there is a group of people who receive the placebo, which is usually salt water, and there are people who received the vaccine and none of them know what what did you recieve.

You may report different symptoms than if you knew you were getting the placebo on top. It has what we call meta-analysis and systematic reviews. These are analyzes where we take multiple studies, put them together, and analyze them together. There are very high quality journals like jamama, which is the Journal of the American Medical Association, or pnas, which is the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but as a general rule, if you are trying to find information on a certain topic, you should look for at a minimum that In fact, it is peer reviewed and aligns with other topics or other articles that are in that field, it is very, very unlikely that one study will displace the thousands of other studies within a given field on a topic we call selective selection. at Wishwell Therapy wants to know study after study has revealed that aspartame sucrose and saccharin cause cancer and other disorders of cells and organs.

Saccharin was actually temporarily banned in the US because there was thought to be a link between saccharin and bladder cancer. We discovered that the studies they were using were using one type of rat, these rats had a genetic predisposition that developed these crystals in the bladder and made them more likely to develop tumors, not only were we using rats that were not an appropriate research model or Realistically, these rats were being fed saccharin about 10% of their body weight per day and it was at this time that a proportion of the male rats developed bladder cancer. Follow-up studies using reesus maax mice and analyzing human data have shown that saccharin is not linked to cancer in humans, so the band was lifted.

But ultimately, that saccharin-related stigma has actually been transferred to other artificial sweeteners at Fly Rodo asks how we know supplements work. Is there any real research on all these supplements out there? sports vegetables, etc. In the United States alone, the dietary supplement industry is worth nearly $60 billion. Unlike FDA-approved medications, supplements do not have to prove that they are helping or offering a benefit. Many people can take vitamin C powder. and mix it with their water when they feel they have a cold or flu and vitamin C supplements do not reduce the duration of respiratory illnesses they do not reduce the severity of them it does not prevent them there have been many studies, especially in recent years that have been looking at the benefits of vitamin D supplements, so this evaluated the effectiveness of vitamin D and zinc in combination to improve Covid-19 outcomes and ultimately what they show is that vitamin D supplements D did not reduce the severity of the disease.

Hospital stay did not reduce symptom severity or improve mortality outcomes. There was one study that actually found that over 50% of immune boosting supplements lied about what was in the product and even worse, some didn't mention what they contained at Penn. Cameron wants to know if there is scientific evidence of the crystals before and after charging them. Many people believe that crystals have energetic powers, that the crystal or the energy in the crystal vibrates with their own personal energy and unfortunately there have been no studies that have suggested that this is a true relationship, it is probably nothing more than the placebo effect the effect. placebo can be very strong there is a number of data that suggest that in some cases people may feel that they are recovering from things more quickly or that their symptoms or side effects The effects are less because they have the power of the placebo, so they do not We want to rule out the placebo effect, but we certainly don't want it to replace real science-based medicine.

Janani 802 wants to know if fasting can help cancer patients, so this statement is very generalized and as someone who works in cancer research, it is really harmful for many reasons and it breaks my heart. This claim originated from in vitro or petri dish studies where we grew cancer cells and what they found was depriving them of nutrients or simulating fasting caused the cancer cells to die, but what that doesn't take into account is that any cell Deprived of nutrients you will not be able to grow and what happens on a piece of plastic or on a plastic plate like this is not what is happening within the complex being of a human being who has cancer, fasting can actually be harmful if you are fighting cancer because you are depriving yourself and your body of very essential nutrients and calories that you need for your immune system to function better.

So that's all the