Blinded by Science
/Facebook is usually a great place for me to get ideas for columns. Within any given week, the odds are someone has posted something absurd enough for me to use as a segue into a topic. This week, I had at least two of them. As they were loosely related, I'll use them as my lead in. One was about a study done about homeopathic medicines. Supposedly 68 different 'common' ones were studied and they did nothing significant to help the condition. The other was about the anti-vaccine movement that links vaccines to autism. This is not a political column, so I'm making no statement about either of these two issues (although I am willing to go on record as saying both of my kids had their vaccines). What I noticed in common for these topics was the number of people who simply dismissed the science behind the facts. Someone had a bad experience with a prescription but a good one with some homeopathic remedy so this becomes 'proof'.
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