08.24.06
In the words of the immortal Mark Twain, “there are three kinds of lies – lies, damned lies and statistics. “
This morning I was thinking about how so much information is now at our fingertips. Tons of books and articles have been written on so many different subjects. With all this research we would think that we could easily find the truths to any one subject if we just took the time to read what others have already observed and documented. But the funny thing is that it’s not always as simple as it would seem. Instead of things being “clearer,” issues tend to become more “unclear.” An example would be the issue on saturated fats. We have been told so long that saturated fats are bad for us, but then if you look for all the literature you can find, then you’ll see that not all scientists agree that saturated fats are harmful to the body. This happens with other topics as well, such as which type of water is best to drink? Spring, distilled, RO, tap, etc. A lot of the opinions are written with their reasons for why they think they are right. So even though all the different opinions make it harder to know what is right, I do feel that these people were at least being “honest” with what they thought was right.
That reminded me that another aspect that makes finding the truth difficult is not just that people have differing opinions, but that some articles are “purposefully” misleading. In particular, medical statistics. I’ve read about the problems with statistics, but the first place I read about the deception of medical statistics was from Ralph W. Moss, PhD. in his book Questioning Chemotherapy.
For those who may not be familiar with Ralph Moss, he was a science writer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) starting in 1974. He writes that he started out as an enthusiastic believer in chemotherapy. As part of his job in the Public Affairs department, he wrote monthly articles on cancer science for MSKCC’s in-house newsletter, Center News. For that, he interviewed many oncologists. At first, guided by what these doctors told him, he wrote glowingly about their triumphs over such rare malignancies as bone cancer and Hodgkin’s disease. But he soon learned about the grave reservations that lurked behind even their most sanguine public pronouncements. Moss wrote that, “some of the scientists and administrators I encountered intimated — strictly off the record, of course — that finding cures for the common solid tumors of adults, such as breast, colon, and lung, would be an order of magnitude more difficult than treating the unusual pediatric malignancies. In a memorable phrase, one of them told me it would be like trying to dissolve a person’s left ear while leaving the right one intact.”
Moss continues by explaining the he later found that publicizing imminent cures for cancer was nothing new. It was commonly done for fund-raising since there was never enough money being pumped into cancer research. Media attention helped to change that so that with the creation of the war on cancer, hundreds of millions of dollars were suddenly up for grabs.
Part of the way cancer research was shown in a favorable light was with the use of statistics giving the impression that survival from cancers was increasing due to all the new medical discoveries/treatments. Well, that may be true depending upon how you look at it. As Moss wrote in Questioning Chemotherapy, “In order to make their results appear better than they are some researchers employ ’strategies of torturing [their] data until it confesses.’” This can be done in various ways, but one way is the following example, which is copied from Moss’s Cancer Decisions Newsletter Archives dated April 11, 2004 http://www.cancerdecisions.com/041104_page.html
“The US News article further claims that “nearly 10 million Americans…are living with cancer. Most were diagnosed five or more years ago; many who would have died just 15 or 20 years ago are alive today….” This is highly misleading. As the Fortune article showed, it is METASTATIC cancer that kills the great majority of those who die, and for the most common forms of the disease (such as cancers of the breast, colon, lung, and prostate) metastasis is still the relentless killer it always was. There has been virtually NO change in the survival from metastatic cancer over the last 50 years. The apparent improvement in the survival figures has mainly been due to the earlier detection of illness: people appear to be living longer, whereas in fact what has often happened is that they have received a diagnosis earlier, and have been officially on record for longer before metastasis overtakes them. In other words, many of them are the beneficiaries of a statistical artifact.
“Sophisticated screening and early detection tests have also succeeded in finding many patients who have conditions that are not life-threatening (for example, some very early precancerous or encapsulated lesions of the breast or prostate). These people are often labeled as cancer patients, thereby weighting the statistics to make it appear that people with cancer are living longer overall. But many if not most of these people would not have died of cancer even if their tumors had not been detected. Of course, none of these statistical irregularities is a secret to the biostatisticians who are the gatekeepers of data analysis in the cancer field. But these are not the sort of facts that it is considered wise to share with the general public, upon whose generosity vast enterprises such as the American Cancer Society depend.”
So next time someone tries to throw cancer statistics at you to push chemotherapy, be wary.
