{"id":5825,"date":"2013-08-03T09:22:28","date_gmt":"2013-08-03T15:22:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/?p=5825"},"modified":"2013-08-03T09:22:28","modified_gmt":"2013-08-03T15:22:28","slug":"dr-kendrick-on-bad-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/2013\/08\/03\/dr-kendrick-on-bad-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr. Kendrick On Bad Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you like seeing bad science and bad policy ripped apart by someone with a sharp wit, I can’t recommend Dr. Malcolm Kendrick’s blog<\/a> highly enough.\u00a0 (Same goes for his book The Great Cholesterol Con<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

In one of his recent posts, titled Proving that black is white<\/a>, he demonstrates how researchers managed to torture their data in order to reach a conclusion that was the opposite of what the raw data revealed. Their conclusion, of course, is that elevated cholesterol is a risk factor for heart disease in old people.<\/p>\n

Here are a couple of quotes from Dr. Kendrick:<\/p>\n

I remember when I first read this paper a few years ago. My initial thought was to doubt that it could be true. Most of the evidence I had seen strongly suggested that, in the elderly, a high cholesterol level was actually protective against Coronary Heart Disease (CHD).<\/span> However, when a bunch of investigators state unequivocally that elevated cholesterol is a risk factor for heart disease, I try to give them the benefit of the doubt. So I read the damned thing. Always a potentially dangerous waste of precious brainpower.<\/span><\/p>\n

… Dying is not really something you can fake, and once a cause of death has been recorded it cannot be changed at a later date. So how can someone seem to die of something \u2013 yet not die of it?<\/span><\/p>\n

The answer is that you take the bare statistics, then you stretch them and bend them until you get the answer you want. Firstly, you adjust your figures for established risk factors for coronary heart disease \u2013 which may be justified (or may not be). Then you adjust for markers of poor health \u2013 which most certainly is not justified \u2013 as you have no idea if you are looking at cause, effect, or association.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then, when this doesn\u2019t provide the answer you want, you exclude a whole bunch of deaths, for reasons that are complete nonsense<\/span>.<\/p>\n

That’s just a taste.\u00a0 I’d urge you to read the post, then go read his many other posts.\u00a0 Then you’ll know (as if you didn’t already) why I like to say Scientists Are Freakin’ Liars. <\/em>(Not all of them, of course.)
\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you like seeing bad science and bad policy ripped apart by someone with a sharp wit, I can’t recommend Dr. Malcolm Kendrick’s blog highly enough.\u00a0 (Same goes for his… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bad-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5825"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5830,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5825\/revisions\/5830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}