EBM

• Information overload is a popular term used to describe the abundance of data available to us
• While "overload" suggests an unmanageable quantity, this is not always the case
• Benefits of widespread availability of data

  • Walmart using data to track sales and stocks
  • Consumers using search engines to find best-priced airline tickets
• Transparency and access to data is valued in an "Open Society"
• Lack of secrecy can be beneficial, such as making it difficult to engage in corruption
• Short-term memory


  Can hold about 7 pieces of information at a time, and only about 4 concepts and/or relationships
• This natural limitation puts pressure on us to use critical tools to evaluate information and identify where it might be misleading or harmful
• Newspaper headlines


  • Designed to summarise complex stories and sell newspapers
  • Often misrepresent information by leaving out important details
• Contradictory health claims in the media are common, such as whether certain foods are good or bad for you
• Confirmation bias can lead people to selectively believe headlines that reinforce their existing beliefs
• Some publications provide platforms for advocating against scientifically proven safe and beneficial practices, like vaccination
• Misleading headlines and poor scientific reporting can lead to poor choices by neglecting context, such as the actual failure rate of a contraceptive device
• Personal-health journalism is often superficial and misleading, with a lack of scientific rigour
• The BBC reported that 'hundreds' of women had fallen pregnant while using this contraceptive device
• By putting those numbers in the context of the number of women who had actually bought the device compared to the number of unwanted pregnancies, the failure rate translated to 0.014%, making this device one of the safest on the market
• Availability bias


  Also called ease of recall, may lead some women to make the worst choice about safe contraception
• An article published in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) discussed the problems with "personal-health" journalism
• Even articles written by very good journalists, based on thorough reporting and highly credible sources, can take stances that directly contradict those of other credible-seeming articles
• Personal healthcare decisions affect our lifespan, the quality of our lives, and our productivity, and the result — our collective health — has an enormous impact on the economy
• Due to the scientific misconduct of a doctor named Andrew Wakefield, many parents have been falsely led to believe that there exists a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism
• Unvaccinated children also put other children at risk
• Availability heuristic


  A mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method, or decision
• The availability heuristic is inherently biased toward recently acquired information
• Studies have found contradictory results on various medical topics, such as the safety and effectiveness of hormone-replacement therapy, the benefits of vitamin supplements, the effectiveness of low-carb vs high-carb diets, the efficacy of back surgery, and the effects of secret prayer on cardiac patients
• The Attention Economy is made up of more information than we can pay attention to, and a lot of conflicting information
• The author is referring to scientific literature, rather than other non-specialist publications like newspapers and websites, when discussing contradictory evidence
• Science


  Enormously complex and ever-changing, but depends on just a few very simple principles
• Scientific theory


  • No scientific theory is absolute – it is simply the best we have so far
  • There is always the possibility than it can be disproven and/or replaced with a better theory
• Falsifiability


  Any theory, claim or idea that cannot be tested (and re-tested) cannot be considered scientific
• Anything that does not conform to the principles of no absolute theories and falsifiability is not science
• Alternative "medicines" sold in health shops have typically not been tested for either effectiveness nor safety
• Naturalistic fallacy


  The faulty assumption that everything in nature is moral by default
• Double-blind clinical trial


  Giving two groups of people a treatment: Group A (the treatment group) receives an actual drug, while Group B (the control group) receives a dummy treatment (something with no active ingredients, usually a sugar pill)
• If a statistically significant number of people in Group A experience the desired effect of the drug, then the treatment has passed its test, and may be considered safe for its intended market
• If a large number of people in Group B also claim to be experiencing the benefits of the drug, even when they have only taken sugar pills, then this is known as the placebo effect
• Every drug (and scientific theory) must be falsifiable
• Pseudoscience


  Something pretending to be science, but cannot be tested or falsified
• Observational studies can be useful for establishing a correlation between two phenomena, but do not prove causation
• Misguided notions about correlation and causation can contribute negatively to our health, as seen with the tobacco industry's attempted denial of the causal link between smoking and lung cancer
• Tools for skeptical thinking (from Carl Sagan)

  • Independent confirmation of the "facts"
  • Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view
  • Arguments from authority carry little weight
  • Spin more than one hypothesis
  • Don't get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it's yours
  • Quantify
  • Every link in a chain of argument must work
  • Occam's Razor (choose the simpler hypothesis)
  • Always ask whether the hypothesis can be falsified