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YouTube Breeding Harmful Scientific Misinformation
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Dec 06, 2007 01:17 PM
from the playing-to-the-emotions dept.
from the playing-to-the-emotions dept.
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "University of Toronto researchers have uncovered widespread misinformation in videos on YouTube related to vaccination and immunization. In the first-ever study of its kind, they found that over half of the 153 videos analyzed portrayed childhood, HPV, flu and other vaccinations negatively or ambiguously. They also found that videos highly skeptical of vaccinations received more views and better ratings by users than those videos that portray immunizations in a positive light. According to the lead researcher, 'YouTube is increasingly a resource people consult for health information, including vaccination. Our study shows that a significant amount of immunization content on YouTube contradicts the best scientific evidence at large. From a public health perspective, this is very concerning.' An extract from the Journal of the American Medical Association is available online."
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Big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the blind leading the blind out there. And not only that, they distrust the sighted.
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Re:Big deal (Score:5, Funny)
Oh? The newspapers cover their every word up to the time when one of them gets elected.
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Re:Big deal (Score:4, Insightful)
What we've got to do is get past the assertion that we can automatically delegate thought to other people based upon criteria such as age, office, net worth, attractiveness, eloquence, etc.
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Re:Big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Before the printing press it was harder for the uneducated or misinformed to get an audience.
Before the television it was harder for the uneducated or misinformed to get an audience.
Before websites it was harder for the uneducated or misinformed to get an audience.
Before blogs it was harder for the uneducated or misinformed to get an audience.
Now its before youtube...
You know, maybe we should go back to the old system, where the only form of written/tangible communication was bible scriptures copied in monasteries. That way the "sighted" could keep leading all of us poor little blind folks in their infinite wisdom.
As for your "Insightful" cynicism about NIH videos being disregarded, I doubt that would have anything to do with their "the man" factor. I wonder why you can't find any medical information from "the man" in a google search, oh wait, you can. You can also find information (and misinformation) from independent sources! Not only can you search out a source you trust, you can compare what you find with the opinions, research and facts presented by other sources.
Once people actually start thinking "oh, I'm feeling sick, I'm going to see if I can find something about my condition on youtube, instead of an easily searchable forum like the web" I'm sure there will be more accurate health related videos on youtube to balance it out.
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Re:Big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, hell, I thought most people knew that wikipedia, while indeed a nice place to start looking up topics, is hardly an authoritative source to be trusted as the gospel truth?!?!
On the other hand...I didn't realize YouTube had any real content other than kids doing stunts, bootleg videos, guitar lessons, and the like. I didn't know there was anything the purported to be 'serious' on there.
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Re:Big deal (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Big deal (Score:4, Funny)
If anyone is using youtube to get medical information, I say that the best (and laziest) solution would be to just let natural selection run its course.
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Re:Big deal (Score:4, Insightful)
And that's just Joe Public opting out of vaccination for no reason. The election of governments is basically a popularity contest, and if a government starts following the factually unsound requests of a misinformed population, well then you start doing things like swapping MRIs for X-rays or exploratory surgery because an MRI has magnetic fields and soon you're utterly screwed.
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Re:Big deal (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Big deal (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
I trust the government more than I trust the web site that brought us "Leave Britney alone!"
Medical advice from YouTube... what the fuck? Who on earth would go there for definitive advice on anything (except maybe old TV shows).
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Re:Big deal (Score:4, Informative)
I agree, it should be the way you say, but it's not.
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Re:Big deal (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Cattle...? Thanks! (Score:4, Insightful)
And is there any actual evidence to support these beliefs, or is it more like a creationism thing?
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Meh. (Score:5, Insightful)
But now I've got my doctor telling me I have to get my infant kid vaccinated quick quick right now! He could get hep at any second!!! What a crock of crap. It's even less likely now than it was when I was a kid, because the infection rates are still dropping.
Likewise the chicken pox vaccine. The mortality from chicken pox is off the bottom of the chart, but none the less, unless I wanna home school my kid, I have to get them the shot.
I'm sure by next year, they're going to be calling for all infant girls to go ahead and get the hpv shot, because you can never be too careful about protecting your infant from STDs.
I think a lot of people are getting leery of having their kids turned into pincushions to meet an arbitrary timetable attached to low risk infections. I think it's 15 vaccinations before 1 year? Out of those, easily half could be pushed back a year or two or three (or 18 in the case or the 3 course goddamn hep vaccination), so why subject your kid to that kinda crap?
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Re:Cattle...? Thanks! (Score:5, Informative)
I recognize Wikipedia is not definitive, but everything linked below has references, so it allows these to be tied up with a bow quite nicely.
However, correlation is not causation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_causation [wikipedia.org]. Assuming you're from the US or Europe, Thimerosal is not used in vaccines except for influenza (which isn't required) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thimerosal [wikipedia.org]. In addition, the CDC, FDA, and WHO categorically reject any relationship between Thimerosal and autism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_controversy [wikipedia.org]. The CDC, Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences,and the UK National Health Service have determined no link between MMR and autism.
The risks of not vaccinating children far outweigh even the real risks of the vaccine. Multiple-vaccine shots don't "overstimulate" the immune system. Not vaccinating your children can expose populations to previously squelched or heartier strains of disease. http://www.healthcentral.com/ency/408/002024.html [healthcentral.com]
http://www.boystownpediatrics.org/HealthTips/immunization.asp
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/285/12/1573 [ama-assn.org] (warning, login needed)
True, autism rates have been rising over the years. However, it's unclear how much of this is really "new" or incremental, and how much is due to attention paid to it and more advanced diagnosis mechanisms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism [wikipedia.org]
. There are many, less nefarious but more plausible explanations. The vaccine hysteria is simply not supported by any real evidence. To be honest, most mothers of autistic children also probably ate carrots during pregnancy or (more recently) used their wireless phones. That doesn't mean either caused the autism. I realize your family tragedies are tied closely with significant, stand-out events. Augment this with pseudo-scientific fear-mongering about vaccines, and I can see why you might feel this way. However, thoughts and beliefs simply don't equal fact - no matter what you (or anyone), well, believes.
This doesn't mean you're an "indoctrinated idiot" - by your own admission, you're fairly biased based upon personal experience. I might be afraid to get back on a roller-coaster if I survived a horrible accident (or lost a close family member in one). However, I (would like to think that I) would not go so far as to suggest that my personal experience and bias ought to be construed as factual, even if it were in line with a bunch of people who were for the closing of amusement parks and dismantling of all roller-coasters.
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Re:Cattle...? Thanks! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Another piece of anecdotal evidence (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Cattle...? Thanks! (Score:4, Insightful)
That was "progress".
But you know, having any distrust of the medical establishment, or any desire to have more than a few years of tests determine if some new concoction is ok enough to INJECT INTO A FUCKING CHILD, and you're obviously a raving lunatic.
Certainly, accept the authority of others. without question! Otherwise, you're a luddite. right?
To the others, let me put the plainly. The burden on proof is on the legitimacy of whatever you are trying to sell me and put in my child. Not on my skepticism of it. Ok? And that burden of proof is both high and onerous, because we were born with most of what we need to survive, and augementations to that I want evaluated very heavily before just assuming we've figured out something better than a few million years of evolution.
Science is awesome, I love it to death, and I cheer on discoveries like mad. But have some perspective people. Until we have a damn good answer for what causes fibro myalgia, rising cancer rates, etc, then a dose of skepticism is a potential survival trait.
"new" is not ALWAYS "improved".
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Re:Big deal (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, by that time it will be too late, because the fluoride powered transmitter in your tooth will have alerted the authorities to your plans, and the black helicopters will already be on their way to pick you up.
You can be skeptical of the motives of drug companies, the media, or whomever, but you should not abandon reason or the scientific method, which is where a lot of the critics of "mainstream medicine" go off the deep end. You still should realize that the human body is a complex system and, thus, doing medicine requires significant education and expertise and learning anything about a system requires systematic, controlled experiments done on a large sample with rigorous data analysis. What the amounts to is that you have to be fairly selective in whose advice you take, and, even if it isn't the NIH, logic dictates that it should probably be some other relatively large organization that has people with enough expertise and resources for the necessary testing.
The other key point is that however skeptical you are of the medical establishment you should be equally skeptical of anyone else who steps up to offer you an alternative. Sadly, such skepticism seems to be seldom applied to "alternative medicine".
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Mainstream medicine and paywalls (Score:5, Insightful)
If mainstream MDs and researchers care about getting their point of view out to patients, so that people who find out they have a disease don't have to learn about it from YouTube, spam, and pharmaceutical company sites, they're going to have to start using more Open Access journals or get their existing journals to go Open Access.
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Oh come on... (Score:4, Informative)
I think this is a non-story. There are people who are suspicious of to downright hostile towards immunizations. Those people are probably not that bright. So where do people who are not that bright and wouldn't be taken seriously by any mainstream media go to air their 'information'? YouTube. Where do people who share their opinions go to get video of the opinions they want? YouTube.
There's a reason the videos with poor information are rated higher. And it's simple. It's because only the idiots who believe it are watching videos about immunization on YouTube and rating them. People who are not idiots are not watching these videos at all.
There have always been dumb people. The only difference between the 'old days' and now is we've made communicating easy enough that even dumb people can do it, so you're now more likely to run into a dumb opinion or bad information. But smart people can continue to do the same things they've always done: Ignore it.
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Re:Big deal? Sort of... (Score:3, Interesting)
My interpretation of these facts is that the general public is uneducated, panicky and superstitious. And, more importantly, it has been like that all along. It was just that superstition and dubious reasoning never had a forum that powerful. And now, it is all for everybody to see and appreciate. The famous
"Affect the entire society" (Score:5, Insightful)
People getting fat? Health care costs go up. Ban pizza. Mandate vegetable consumption.
Auto accidents? Ban private cars. Mandate public transportation use.
I've got two children, and I've had them both vaccinated. But lets not pretend that there are no dangers with vaccines. Our doctors were, to their credit, very upfront with us about that. You're essentially taking a chance, playing the numbers when you take a vaccine, as a percentage of people will always have adverse reactions. Those numbers of adverse reactions are statistically low, and your chances are pretty good, but I do have a friend whose daughter lost the use of her legs from a vaccination. It does happen. And as for the HPV vaccine, you can't call all those parents nutjobs when Gardisil has had some unexpected side-effects [news.com.au]. And should a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease be mandatory anyway?
Non-vaccinated people are a danger to no one but themselves. If everyone else is vaccinated, they're safe. And far from under-vaccinating, the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that we may be over-vaccinating [sciencedaily.com]. Increasing disease resistance to drugs and immunizations is a far greater threat to the populace than any parent withholding a vaccine.
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Natural Selection (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Going back to the first quote, let's just say for sake of argument you're right, about being a single person in the population who does not get immunized. Let's just say at that point you run a higher risk of getting the disease from the vaccine than from another source.
How do you know when you're in that situation? How do you know, you're the ONE person, of all the people you may come in contact with, the one lone person who has system beat? (And of course that the only vector by which the disease will spread to you is through another unimmunized person.)
Oh, that's right, you don't. So you've set up some fantastical situation that will never occur, even if your conclusion is correct.
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WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
Who is stupid enough to go to Youtube for authoritative information about anything? I mean, I get why people might use something like Wikipedia for this (with all the pitfalls that can bring), but this just plain does not make sense to me.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Both the Republican and Democratic parties?
Also shocking... (Score:4, Funny)
Though it *is* the best place to find a poorly constructed car analogy.
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You've got it coming... (Score:5, Insightful)
You are simply never going to protect all the stupid people from themselves, and making the effort often only punishes the smart people who didn't make those mistakes. That's the unfortunate realization I've come to in my adulthood.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's something else I'd like to point out: Youtube merely puts out in the open what people think at home. Stupidity that used to be restricted to friends and family is now out in the open for all to see.
I can't help but think... (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't help but think that it could only help the gene pool if the type of people who would think "hey, let's go look up important medical information on YouTube!" were given bad medical advice. Darwinism and all that.
(Except, of course, that this is more about misinformed parents harming their children. But still - I can't imagine why anyone would think "hey, I wanna find out more about immunization on YouTube!" I suppose they could be starting on a search engine and winding up at YouTube. But that ruins the joke.)
Natural Selection At Its Finest (Score:4, Funny)
Those people that go to YOUTUBE for HEALTH ADVICE?
Kind of like the age old:
Mr. Idiot has joined #IRC
Idiot: Hey guys, I hate this stuff 2 hours ago and my eyes are starting to turn green, any ideas?
IRC1: Go to a Dr.
IRC2: Go to a Dr.
IRC3: Go to a Dr.
IRC4: Call poison control THEN go to a Dr.
IRC5: Take pictures and post them for us!
Who does Mr. Idiot listen too? IRC5.
Let em die.
(no, I am not ACTUALLY suggesting eugenics by not educating these idiots, it is just tempting)
Re:Natural Selection At Its Finest (Score:4, Funny)
the only thing sillier is folks who go to lolcat websites [wikipedia.org] for their medical information and advice.
"I CAN HAS VAXINASHUNZ?"
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Funny you mention this (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Funny you mention this (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly the verdict is still out on whether or not taking the first Google result is significantly less accurate than going to the doctor, and doctors are increasingly turning to Google themselves to help diagnose patients. The last study I saw placed Google's accuracy at about 65% and doctors at 69% for a first diagnosis. As someone who has spent much of the last year going to what are supposedly some of the better hospitals in the nation with little luck, my faith in the medical community is pretty much obliterated. Most any rational person would turn to Google and research their symptoms and possible diagnosis. The sad part is when you go back to the doctor and realize they spent half an hour reading one of the many articles you did and they are unable to answer any additional questions and don't even know some of the information you do. Taking a look at studies of how long it takes to be properly diagnosed if you have anything unusual (several years of seeing doctors) is just depressing.
Personally, I wish doctors would ignore what information their patient knows or thinks they know, but I sure wish they'd do some research themselves and actually have a fucking clue what they're talking about after you spend a week playing phone tag while violently ill, only to find out they haven't bothered to do their homework on your condition.
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Re:Funny you mention this (Score:5, Interesting)
Recently a close relative was diagnosed with stage IV medullary thyroid cancer. According to everything I could find (using only medical sites) his outlook was 100% mortality within 5 years.
My sister works at a hospital and had access to journals that cost several-thousand per year (according to her) and she saw treatments that raised his life expectancy to 5 years with a 10 year cap on life expectancy.
We went to the best thyroid surgeon we could find. He actually knew the doctor who had written the papers my sister had found as they attended the same conferences. Furthermore he had access to follow up studies detailing promising treatment plans that actually gave a 5% possibility of being completely cured. Now my relative was not 100% cured -- but I would put his life expectancy up in the 10 years category so he has 2 times longer to live than anyone could have expected and he might live even longer than that.
So basically each tier we went up the studies were more relevant and contained newer treatments. We were all reading articles by the same doctors, but my sister had access to newer data, and the expert knew what the study author was doing today.
On one last note. It is worth noting that medullary thyroid cancer is hard to diagnose and the local doctors misdiagnosed it several times. My relative self-diagnosed it online and paid for the additional tests (which are not normally performed in the US) to prove that he had the rare, almost untreatable version of the disease. But he also became despondent because he _knew_ he had only a year or two to live from the same documentation I found. It was only the expert in the field that knew of any way to potentially cure him.
So the web can help you look up possibilities. But the data you see and the treatments are quite old. When I have symptoms I go online to look up common maladies and when I go in to my doctor I tell her what I researched already to save her time. Often times she can dismiss a couple options quickly, but several times it has been quite useful. If my relative had not done the same, I wouldn't be visiting him this Christmas as he would be dead.
Several doctors had misdiagnosed the type of cancer, and even at Mayo several residents were shocked that the patient had gotten the diagnosis as none of the residents had gotten it right on the walk-through session. So doing self-diagnosis might help, but even with the right knowledge and education the residents and local doctors were wrong. The patient has a more time and interest to look at every possible option while the doctor has several people he needs to see today so they tend to lean towards common maladies as they are just more likely to be right.
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Think of it.. (Score:3, Funny)
(see also "Darwin Awards")
Holy 8mm cameras batman.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm willing to bet that at least one of these concerned researchers went to a school where he was told that masturbation will make him crosseyed or make him go blind. Misinformation has been around since the advent of spoken language, and possibly before. It was only relatively recently that we all agreed (well most of us) that the earth is round.
It is not medical information that needs to be filterd, or the fscking Internet... we need to teach people how to get through life without falling prey to every scam and rumor that falls into their world. I remember recently the many people who recommended Chantix to me to help me stop smoking... Guess what Mr smart research scientists.. they were doctors and experts, and I had no reason to not believe them till people started having psychotic episodes and killing themselves.
Lets all just sing in 3 part harmony about the evils of not educating your kids, the public, your friends, and the world in general. The problem is not that there is misleading information out there, the problem is that people are so willing to be mislead.
While we are on subject... ehh, people who are willing to be mislead are also willing to believe that the government's "need" to encroach on their rights is necessary. An EDUCATED public is a strong one, but that is hardly what big business and big government want.
Educate people in general, not on just one little danger. Teach a man to fish..... nuff said
Article makes a HUGE assumption (Score:5, Insightful)
It's one thing to simply count hits. It's quite another to infer the reason(s) behind them.
This will keep hapening (Score:5, Insightful)
And things like youtube are perfect for the type of disinfo that these theories represent. The question now is how do we counter these claims? I would highly suggest listening to the Skepticality podcast ( http://www.skepticality.com/p_listentopast.php [skepticality.com] )ablout the documentary Flock of Dodos. The main theme is a discussion about how real science needs to learn to present its information and findings in a far more entertaining and easily digestible format. Just throwing facts and numbers at people, while it makes me happy, turns off the majority.
This is kind of like the whole 9/11 truth issue. People who have seen the conspiracy videos on youtube can be almost immune to evidence about physics, metallurgy, demolitions, and such. Their eyes just glaze over when you try to use facts and numbers and evidence. But if you point them towards a source like http://www.youtube.com/user/RKOwens4 [youtube.com] which is comprised of simple arguments against the 9/11 truth theories, in easy to understand 3 minute chapters, then you start to make headway.
This is the course science must take with the public. Like it or not. The alternative is far to dangerous.
This is news? (Score:5, Interesting)
This weekend I had a chat with a fine gentleman who is one of the youngest polio survivors in the USA. He's in pretty good shape (he's in his 50s) but from visits with many others he knows what his future is like. Apparently, those who recover from polio do so by "swapping in" spare neurological paths -- the same ones that keep the rest of us functional as time takes its toll. Well, his "spares" are already used, so any additional losses as he ages are coming straight from function.
Measles? Look up the numbers. Case mortality for measles in the USA has been steady for over thirty years at 2/1000. In 1964, there were about 400,000 cases reported. Back when it was nearly universal, every state had well-filled schools for the deaf and blind -- most of them there thanks to neurological sequelae to measles, and which are still just as common as ever on a per-case basis. Those schools are empty now.
I have a smallpox vaccination scar on my arm, and wear it proudly. Most of you don't. You're welcome.
If you listen to the anti-vaccinationists, the vaccines are immeasurably worse than polio, measles, and smallpox. The best answer to that was stated by George Santayana [wikipedia.org]. The rest is commentary; go and learn it.
Misinformation is not the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
We'll take a parallel into Hollywood. The fact that there's entertainment based off of lies or misinformation is no big deal. I don't know of too many people who think their car will randomly transform into a robot or their body is being used as a battery to power a giant ai network. The problem the article is hinting at is many of these videos are supposed to be informative and we break into the realm of documentaries or informational movies (i.e. Fahrenheit 9/11, An Inconvenient Truth, etc.) Now I don't want this debate to get political (although I think it may) but we'll further examine Fahrenheit 9/11. I personally am a democrat and when I saw this movie, I believed much more than I should of to be the absolute truth. Later on a fair portion of the movie was debunked, but because it was a compelling story in line with my own viewpoint, it was easy to believe.
To add to this, I have heard many people tell urban legends to me (which I knew to be untrue) as the absolute truth. The point is that humans tend to believe what makes a good story and not necessarily the truth, which in many cases is too bad.
I don't think it's unlikely or unheard of that there's misinformation on the net and I really don't feel that's what this article is getting at. Instead the article is pointing a blame-ful finger at the gullibility of human kind.
Sometimes lies may be fun, but take them only at face value.
YouTube is irrelevant (Score:5, Interesting)
The Internet is wonderful (Score:4, Funny)
I can get investment advice from stock spam, legal advice from Slashdot, and now medical advice from YouTube... however did people manage to make major life decisions before the Internet?
Let's see.... (Score:4, Funny)
- fart videos
- stuff crashing & people hurting themselves
- a study in the limitless narcissism of humanity
Re:Getting what you deserve... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Not Quite (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Not just Vaccination, also Evolution (Score:4, Informative)
If you had any background in the debate, you'd know fundamentalist Christians represent a large part of the movement against vaccines [150m.com], some going so far as to believe vaccines cut you off from God [vaclib.org].
In fact, it's the very people he is referencing whom you claim have nothing to do with vaccinations that have recently been some of the biggest opponents of general vaccinations for a variety of reasons [cbsnews.com].
So, once again, before calling troll because someone said something you don't like, consider educating yourself on matters.
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