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From: jlg@lanl.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.med
Subject: Re: Re: Unconventional Cancer Therapy  F
Message-ID: <22999@lanl.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 7-Mar-85 21:38:43 EST
Article-I.D.: lanl.22999
Posted: Thu Mar  7 21:38:43 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 9-Mar-85 08:42:32 EST
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Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Lines: 51

> I happened to glance at the April '85 issue of Science 85 just out, and
> quote the following from their "Highlights" section:
> 
> 	Vitamin C is ineffective as a treatment for cancer.  So say
> 	doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who found
> 	that victims of bowel cancer given large doses of vitamin C had
> 	no better survival rate than victims treated with a placebo.
> 	The report contradicts the assertions of two-time Nobel Prize
> 	winner Linus Pauling, a longstanding advocate of the vitamin's
> 	powers to treat some diseases.
> 
> Mmmrmmph!  Don't you love the way they make it sound so final, so
> resolved, so unambiguous?  I think you (LPI) would be doing their
> readers a favor to write a letter to the editor, pointing out some 
> of the experiments you've quoted here.

Media reporting of scientific matters always tends to sound final, or at
least authoritative.  This is especially true of reports prepared for the
lay public.  Remember all the press about ozone and spray cans?  Turns out
that the current estimate of the average steady-state decrease of ozone
concentration is about 3-5% !!!  That's MUCH less than one standard
deviation of the daily variation of ozone concentration.  In short - little
real effect.  The problem is that the lay public is not able to correctly
interpret the meaning of a carefully worded scientific result - it sounds
to uncertain.

I tend to agree with Richard Feynman - we live in a very unscientific
society, but one which is increasingly oppressed by pseudo-scientific
argument.  Fortunately, there are enough people in scientific fields that
can read an article such as the one above and still discern its real
meaning:

        Doctors at the Mayo Clinic failed to find a statistically
        significant difference in mortality between two small
        groups of cancer patients under treatment that differed
        in the amount of Vitimin C prescribed.  The wording of
        the article indicates (through the use of the word
        placebo) that the study was a properly done, double-blind
        test - just what you should expect from a place like the
        Mayo Clinic.

To make this interpretation requires that you understand the degree to
which journalists indulge in hyperbole, the present status of cancer
research in general and Vitimin C treatment specifically, and the size of
experimental samples that the Mayo Clinic is able to put into one study.

Its too bad that you have to decode media reports of such things in this
way, but there's always Science and Nature to turn to for the actual
announcements of such studies.

J. Giles