Steve Pavlina always gets me thinking. Sometimes the points he makes are a bit out there, but there is usually a grain of profound truth at the heart of whatever issue he’s discussing. This is true of his article about health care studies being worthless to those who care about health. In this article he contends that, as the title says, it’s just a waste of time to pay attention to all the health care articles you find in major media. There are some statements he makes that I agree with and others with which I’d take issue.

I used to place a lot more stock in the health crisis du jour. These are the stories of the day filled with ominous warnings about the dangers of eating red meat or the mercury content of fish or how milk is a vital part of your diet and no one is getting enough. Inevitably, there is some new study that was just released and some bored reporter picked it up and drew some incredibly simplistic meaning from it.

When Steve points out the connections between big agriculture and pharmaceutical money to government policies, he makes a very good point. While I wouldn’t discount every big study sponsored by one of these companies, I would take all of their conclusions with a grain of salt. It’s true that everyone has an agenda. At the very least, the studies that are undertaken and then publicized are generally only the ones that benefit certain industries. Would the dairy industry really release a study that concludes that dairy isn’t all that necessary to the diet of an adult?

Something that isn’t mentioned in the article, but is also very important is the fact that many of these studies end with dire warnings about certain things that will increase your chance of getting this debilitating disease or that painful syndrome by 5%. Have you stopped to think about what this really means? If you have a 2% chance of getting the disease in the first place, now you may have a 2.1% chance. Isn’t that terrifying? Keep in mind, too, that there is always a margin of error in these studies because of the complexity of the human body. That margin of error is often higher than the percentage increase in risk they’re quoting. I read somewhere that if the incidence doesn’t increase by at least a hundred percent, that is, doubling your total chances of some sort of benefit or negative effect, then it’s not considered signficant. In light of the statistics we often see quoted, this makes sense.

Oftentimes, the mass media versions of these conclusions give us only enough information to cause alarm, but leave out much of the important detail behind the studies. For instance, if the study only included caucasian American males ages 40 to 50, would the results be applicable to the population in general? What if the sample was more diverse, but only included 25 people? Would 100 people make it more accurate? How were these people selected then? See, there are so many factors involved in a study like this that it’s important to put them in perspective.

If a study was conducted with a small sample size, or a very specific segment of the population, the results might not be generally applicable to the population at large. Many results are the taken from studies that were undertaken for other reasons entirely. How much can these results be trusted?

At the end of the article, Steve concludes that some of the warnings we get are so obvious that we don’t need them. He mentions smoking and obesity as examples. This is a good point. I see many people who are clearly at risk healthwise who make very poor health choices on a daily basis. I know a middle aged guy who is very overweight and out of breath with the slightest effort. He complains that he’s going to have to have several surgeries on his intestines in the near future. He’s also constantly snacking on junk food and candy bars and soda pop throughout the day. Can’t he see that he’s killing himself?

While I can understand that bad habits are hard to break, I also know that we have ultimate control over what we do. Eating bad food, not getting enough sleep, drinking or smoking too much or using drugs - all of these things give us warning signs at some point that they aren’t good for us. If we don’t heed these warnings, we’ll have to suffer the consequences and we’ll only have ourselves to blame. We really don’t need a million dollar health study to tell us this.