How Bogus Scientific Studies Are Created
As mentioned in my “Introduction to Alternative Cancer Treatments” article, over a period of 42 years, the tobacco industry spent over $220 million funding over 1,500 scientific studies, yet not a single one of these studies could find a relationship between tobacco and lung cancer, heart disease, etc. As I mentioned in that article, a group of high school students with a phone book could prove a relationship between tobacco and lung cancer. My point to mentioning this fact was that scientists are more than willing to accept money to do bogus scientific studies.
In fact you can almost always predict what conclusions a “scientific” study will come to by knowing just one key fact: “who funded the study.” The person who funded the study will always get the conclusion they want. People who loosely call themselves “scientists” will always make sure of that.
The pharmaceutical industry, with their total control over the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Cancer Institute (NCI), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), etc. have also funded many, many millions of dollars of bogus scientific studies. In fact, their budget is in the billions of dollars every year!! Couple this with their control of the media and you have the situation we are in today.
It is the Prime Directive of medical research to do two things:
First, make it appear there is “scientific evidence” for orthodox cancer treatments, orthodox heart disease prevention treatments, etc., and
Second, make it appear there is “no scientific evidence” for alternative cancer treatments, alternative heart disease prevention treatments, and so on.
But how can a scientist not find value in a nutrient that treats cancer or heart disease when the truth of the matter is that this substance does have value? That is what this web page is about.
This web page will summarize a number of different tactics and tricks that scientists can use to insure that their masters who fund their studies get exactly what they want.
Tactics, Tricks and Fraud in Scientific Studies
Using Synthetic Versions of a Nutrient In the Study
In many studies of nutrients, especially vitamins, synthetic versions of the nutrient were used in the study. Synthetic versions of a vitamin do not have nearly the effect on a disease as a quality-processed natural version of the same nutrient. For example:
A new landmark study suggests that pregnant women should ask their physicians for a prenatal supplement that contains natural vitamin E for optimal health insurance. According to this new research, the human placenta can deliver natural vitamin E to the fetus in much greater concentration (3.5 to one) than the synthetic supplement.
Natural and synthetic vitamin E are not the same. Previous research has shown natural vitamin E is better retained and more biologically active than synthetic. To identify the kind of vitamin E in a supplement, it is necessary to read the ingredients listed on the label. Natural vitamin E begins with “d,” as in “d-alpha-tocopherol.” The synthetic version begins with “dl.
http://www.pslgroup.com/dg/63882.htm
The Dosage is Too Low
When the news media blasts to the world that a particular vitamin or other nutrient “does not work” at preventing or treating a disease, they may mention the dosage of the product used by the orthodox scientist, but they won’t mention the real world dosage used by alternative medicine practitioners. Frequently, the orthodox “study” only used a small fraction of the dosage generally used by alternative medicine.
Isolating a Natural Substance That Works in Synergy With Other Nutrients
Scientists like to study one nutrient at a time, ignoring that in raw, whole foods, this nutrient may be the best nutrient in isolation, but in fact this nutrient only works in combination with several other key nutrients in the raw, whole food. For example, orthodox scientists may study Vitamin A, by itself, instead of the effect of fresh, properly prepared carrot juice. By isolating one substance, they can then generalize that they have proven that the entire natural food has no effect on prevention or treatment.
Isolating and Studying the Wrong Nutrient
There are many thousands of phytonutrients in plants. No one has a clue how many of them there are. Most of them have not been identified or isolated. Few of them have ever been tested for treating cancer. With glyconutrients, the situation may even be worse. Glyconutrients may some day be found to be more effective at curing cancer than phytonutrients.
When massive evidence suggests that carrot juice is one of the best treatments for cancer, scientists quickly try to guess what it is about carrots that kills cancer cells so well.
It might be beta carotene, it might be alpha carotene. No one knows for sure. It might be a combination of 20 different things, only 4 of which have been isolated and identified as of this date.
Nevertheless, such a possibility will not stop scientists from trying to prove that carrots cannot cure cancer. They will select one or two nutrients in carrots, claim that they know that these nutrients are the only cancer-fighting nutrients in the carrots, and then use every trick and tactic they can come up with to “prove” that carrot juice cannot cure cancer.
No one knows the truth about why it works, but many people do know that carrot juice is a major part of many alternative cancer treatments. That is a fact. So is Essiac Tea, but know one knows for sure why. Doctors have known for over a hundred years that the herb Sheep Sorrel kills cancer cells, but no one can truthfully say they know what it is about Sheep Sorrel that kills cancer cells.
But scientists don’t want you to know how complex the synergy is between multiple nutrients. They want you to think that they know what the nutrients are that work, and that they have proven that since these nutrients cannot, in isolation, cure cancer, that carrot juice (or whatever) cannot cure cancer.
Contaminating the Substance Being Tested
In one case, at least, the NIH contaminated an already bogus pill being used in a study. Natural laetrile cannot and has never given a patient the symptoms of cyanide poisoning. It simply is impossible. The NIH refused to allow an alternative laetrile vendor to supply natural laetrile for the study – so they could create a custom pill for the study.
In creating their custom bogus laetrile pill, it was not enough for them to not have any natural laetrile in the pill. A worthless pill would not have given any patient the symptoms of cyanide poisoning. They also had to lace the pill with inorganic cyanide so that the patients would have the symptoms of cyanide poisoning.
In other words, since they could not make a natural laetrile pill big enough to induce the symptoms of cyanide poisoning, they provided a pill with no natural cyanide, but laced it with inorganic cyanide to induce the symptom.
Modify the Complete Treatment Plan
Generally, when the federal government wants to make sure a study it funds will kill all of the patients, in order to make some natural substance look ineffective, they will use multiple techniques. For example, when doing a study of laetrile they created a totally bogus “laetrile pill” and laced it with inorganic cyanide, as just mentioned. But that was not enough. They also did not give the patients the standard cancer diet used by alternative practitioners in a complete laetrile treatment. This was easy to see because this cancer diet, by itself, even without laetrile, would have produced a survival rate significantly higher than orthodox medicine.
Tricky Statistics
Particularly with regards to “survival time,” scientists frequently use worthless statistical techniques to come to the conclusions their funding sponsors want them to come to. For example, rather then measure the total survival times of two groups, they may measure the percentage of people who are still alive after a short length of time. My “Introduction” article goes into this trick in more detail.
Choosing the Confidence Interval
A “confidence interval” is a number used in statistics which provides the level of confidence that the results of the study are valid. In trying to find “evidence” that an orthodox treatment works, another statistical trick is to use a low confidence interval combined with a large number of studies. In other words, if you use a low confidence interval and fund a lot of studies, eventually one of the studies will give you a “statistically valid” study. But it is not because the product works, it is because of the nature of statistics and probability.
On the other hand, when looking at alternative studies, there is no confidence interval high enough that will convince the FDA to approve an alternative treatment. As I show in my eBook, applying statistics to the results of one alternative doctor yielded a confidence interval equivalent to more than a thousand standard deviations (three standard deviations yields a commonly accepted confidence interval in science, using more than three standard deviations is too high for most studies). But more than one thousand standard deviations is not enough evidence for orthodox medicine.
Not Looking For the Right Thing
This was the tactic used over and over again in tobacco studies, and it is a trick used over and over again in the pharmaceutical industry. For example, in order to get funding from the tobacco industry, you could not directly look for a relationship between tobacco and lung cancer. You had to look for some irrelevant, but seeming relevant, issue that “skirts” or avoids the real issue.
As an example from the pharmaceutical industry, the FDA only accepts studies that compare an “old” toxic sludge to a “new” toxic sludge. They will not legally allow or accept a legitimate study comparing an alternative treatment to an orthodox treatment.
Preaching the Importance of “Double Blind” Studies
Scientists love to preach the importance of “double blind” studies because in that way they can compare their “old” toxic sludge to their “new” toxic sludge in the same study. But in many cases, a double blind study makes no sense in the world. For example, how could you do a double blind study comparing a person who refuses all orthodox cancer treatments with someone who goes through chemotherapy? It is a stupid concept, because after one day a person would know which group they were in.
Likewise, how can you compare chemotherapy to Vitamin C in a double blind study? The chemotherapy group would have intense pain, sickness, their hair will fall out, and so on. The Vitamin C group would have no added pain, no sickness (except perhaps diarrhea), and their hair will not fall out, etc. A double blind study in this case is nonsense. What are you going to do, secretly put Drano (a toxic sludge used in plumbing to clean drain pipes) and ipecac (which makes people vomit) in with the Vitamin C so the Vitamin C group will experience intense pain and sickness and not know which blind group they are in?
There is nothing more stupid in the world of science that requiring a double blind study in cases where it makes no sense.
But it gets worse. The whole point of a “double blind” study is to remove any possible “psychological” effect in the study. In other words, since the patients don’t know which group they are in, there is no “psychological” benefit or detriment to the treatment caused by their beliefs.
So what is the ultimate situation where there cannot possibly be any “psychological” effect? Using medical records, especially of people that are already DEAD! When a person doesn’t know that their treatment is going to be used in a study long after they are dead, there certainly is no “psychological” effect that influences their outcome.
As a further point in this regard, the patients who are dead, and now only exist in medical records, could not possibly have known about treatments that didn’t even exist when they were being treated. So how could there be a psychological effect?
Patient Selection (i.e. Selection Protocol)
When scientists want to make sure they do not accidentally duplicate the successful treatment of alternative medicine, they may use a clever way of selectively picking participants for the study. For example, when Pauling and Cameron selected patients for their study comparing Vitamin C therapy to chemotherapy, they selected patients who had a wide variety of cancers. When the Mayo Clinic wanted to make sure they did not come to the same conclusions as Pauling and Cameron they did not use a wide variety of cancer types, they used a small number of different types of cancers. By carefully choosing the patients in a study you can largely control the outcome of the study.
Another trick they can use with patient selection is designed to make alternative medicine look bad. But they usually don’t use statistics to do this, but rather they will use one patient at a time to make alterantive medicine look bad.
For example, they can find a patient who was send home to die, after being mutilated, poisoned and burned so bad that there is no way this patient can survive. They then tell the story of an alternative cancer patient who died, failing to mention that he was essentially dead before he started taking the treatments.
Or they can find someone who didn’t pick the right treatment for their situation and died because of that. Because they suppress the truth about alternative medicine, it is easy to find these people. These people probably died due to the lack of truth available to them, rather than the ineffectiveness of alternative medicine.
In essense, they can find a lot of people who took alternative treatments who died. By not telling the whole story (whatever that story was), they can make it look like alternative medicine is useless.
Give Drugs Known to Interact With the Treatment
When the NIH wanted to “prove” that Hydrazine Sulphate did not treat cachexia, they had a problem – there were already many scientific studies that proved it did work. So what they did was give 94% of the patients in the study a prescription drug that was known to neutralize the effect of Hydrazine Sulphate. The patients died of course, and the NIH got the data they wanted.
Hiding Who is Funding the Study
Many scientific studies are done by Big Pharma. Since these studies are too overtly biased to be taken seriously, Big Pharma will frequently seek out a big name scientist to attach his or her name to the study, as if they had actually done the study. There are in fact many different ways to hide who really does a study and many medical journals couldn’t care less anyway.
In addition to this, many medical journals ignore who funds a study done by non-Big Pharma scientists. As was mentioned in my “Introduction” article, with aspartame studies there was a clear correlation between what the studies found and who funded the studies.
Bribing the Peer-Review Group
As mentioned in my “Introduction” article:
In June [2002], the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most respected medical journals, made a startling announcement. The editors declared that they were dropping their policy stipulating that authors of review articles of medical studies could not have financial ties to drug companies whose medicines were being analyzed.
The reason? The journal could no longer find enough independent experts. Drug company gifts and “consulting fees” are so pervasive that in any given field, you cannot find an expert who has not been paid off in some way by the industry. So the journal settled for a new standard: Their reviewers can have received no more than $10,000 [per year] from companies whose work they judge. Isn’t that comforting?
This announcement by the New England Journal of Medicine is just the tip of the iceberg of a scientific establishment that has been pervasively corrupted by conflicts of interest and bias, throwing doubt on almost all scientific claims made in the biomedical field.
The standard announced in June was only for the reviewers. The actual authors of scientific studies in medical journals are often bought and paid for by private drug companies with a stake in the scientific results. While the NEJM and some other journals disclose these conflicts, others do not. Unknown to many readers is the fact that the data being discussed was often collected and analyzed by the maker of the drug involved in the test.
http://www.healtoronto.com/big_pharm.html
Contracts With Scientists
Virtually all contracts between a scientist and a pharmaceutical company will include a stipulation that if the pharmaceutical company does not like the results of the study, they have the legal right to suppress the results of the study, and the scientist is forbidden from publicizing the results of the study and is forbidden from submitting the study to a journal.
Very, very few colleges have the integrity to sign a contract that does not have this contract clause.
What this means is that when a study finds a dangerous side-effect of a prescription drug, or if it is found that the drug is worthless, the information is legally suppressed.
Control By Funding
The fastest and quickest way to get on the “black list” of pharmaceutical companies is to come to a conclusion they don’t like. Perhaps you have found out that one of their drugs kills more people than they admit. Perhaps you have found a higher incidence of new cancers in patients who took a particular type of chemotherapy drug. Perhaps you have found that a natural treatment for cancer is superior to all chemotherapy drugs. You can forget ever being funded again.
In short, if you don’t give Big Pharma the conclusions they want, you won’t get funded again. Ever. Everybody knows that. It is the basic “rule of the game.”
Flooding Scientific Journals With Bogus Studies
To put all of these items in perspective, it was the ultimate goal of the tobacco industry to flood the scientific journal market with bogus scientific studies in order to dilute the valid scientific studies that they were not able to control (i.e. fund).
The pharmaceutical industry has set even higher goals: use the corruption of science and government to flood the scientific journal market with bogus scientific studies, PLUS make sure the peer-review people are also in their hip pocket, PLUS make sure that no studies making alternative treatments look good can be published. They have done well.