Survey Finds Nearly 50% In US Believe In Medical Conspiracy Theories

cold fjord writes in with some bad news for the people using water fluoridation to pacify the public and install a new world government. "About half of American adults believe in at least one medical conspiracy theory, according to new survey results. (paywalled, first page viewable) Some conspiracy theories have much more traction than others ... three times as many people believe U.S. regulators prevent people from getting natural cures as believe that a U.S. spy agency infected a large number of African Americans with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). J. Eric Oliver, the study's lead author from University of Chicago, said people may believe in conspiracy theories because they're easier to understand than complex medical information. ... Some 49 percent of the survey participants agreed with at least one of the conspiracies. In fact, in addition to the 37 percent of respondents who fully agreed that U.S. regulators are suppressing access to natural cures, less than a third were willing to say they actively disagreed with the theory. — One of the conspiracy theories, that the U.S. created HIV, was created for an active disinformation campaign by the Soviet Union against the U.S. as a form of political warfare during the Cold War, and still gets repeated."

Comments

Jenny McCarthy

[PopeRatzo]

That says it all.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[hermitdev]

I love her (I've also a Bear's fan) argument that "We didn't used to have this problem". Yeah, we also used to die by 40. We also didn't even know what the hell cancer is. We also didn't smoke. We also didn't use to drive. We also didn't use to send our kids to school. We also didn't use to mandate our kids go to school. We also didn't use to send people to the moon. We also didn't use to stick our head up our ass because it makes us feel all warm and fuzzy.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[ShanghaiBill]

Actually, that's very likely to be false. If they are "natural cures", everyone could get them

They can get them only if they can afford them. Under Obamacare, not every natural/alternative treatment is covered. In addition the government funds medical research that suppresses "natural cures" by exposing them as ineffective frauds. I really don't see why this is considered a "conspiracy theory", since it is something that the government is clearly doing, and doing in an open and transparent process.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[plover]

Q: You know what they call a "natural cure" that has been tested and found to work?

A: Medicine.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange, I working in a University in a microbiology department no less and the department pays for the staff to have flu vaccines. I would suspect the staff know a damn sight more about vaccines that you do and I can guarantee they are probably a lot smarter than you too.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[PopeRatzo]

Now who said anything about children "dying in droves due to not being vaccinated"? But there are some very troubling statistics. Like the outbreak in measles in NY, and polio being on the rise. Kids dying of whooping cough which hasn't happened for decades.

I don't know if you're old enough to remember polio. It was a disease that crippled thousands of young kids and because of vaccination was wiped out until these knuckleheads decided they didn't want to vaccinate their kids.

Here's an assignment. Look up "herd immunity". Read about it and come back here and tell us what you've learned. I know you want to be well-informed on this subject, and herd mentality is why refusing to vaccinate your kids is a hostile act toward the rest of us.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Jason Levine]

Yes, it is true that the reason why it is such a small chance is because of vaccinations

The problem with this is that the anti-vaccination folks are essentially relying on herd immunity to stay healthy. Previously, when it was just kids who were too young to be vaccinated or people with medical reasons (allergies, immune system issues, etc), herd immunity had no trouble keeping them safe. Measles was all but wiped out in the US. A few people started skipping the vaccines due to one scare or another (e.g. Wakefield's "MMR causes autism" which despite being debunked repeatedly still gets quoted), but they were fine because herd immunity protected them as well. However, when too many people jump on the anti-vax bandwagon and skip vaccinations, herd immunity breaks down and you begin to get outbreaks. This is where we are now. Outbreaks of disease preventable illnesses popping up because some people listen to Jenny McCarthy railing about toxins (just before she gets botox injected into her), listening to some other celebrity, or listening to "some stuff I read on a natural cures website" instead of listening to someone with actual medical experience.

And when these diseases break out again, people will die. (Despite some anti-vaxxers - who obviously have never seen the diseases - claiming that whooping cough and measles not killing anyone.)

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Jason Levine]

I completely agree but would only add that herd immunity also covers people with actual valid reasons for not vaccinating. These include medical issues like allergies or immune system problems or age (too young to get the vaccine). A six week old baby shouldn't die of Whooping Cough because some idiot thinks it's their "personal right" to be a disease carrier.

If not vaccinating meant that only you or your children would get sick, I'd say "it's your choice" (though I'd still argue for vaccinating being the better choice). However, when someone tries to claim that their actions (not vaccinating) that affect other people is their choice, I highly disagree. (I keep waiting for them to claim that it's their right to choose to drive drunk - railing against police enforcing driver sobriety and completely ignoring how many people are killed by drunk drivers.)

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anguirel]

Do we need deaths for a completely preventable outbreak of a disease due to lack of vaccination to count as counter to the "ridiculous claim" that you should get vaccinated? Herd immunity breaks down pretty quickly. We're apparently just barely over the line on it. Every "very, very smart" person making that choice is putting us closer to the loss of that herd immunity, and also one step closer to allowing their child (and every child unable to be vaccinated due to complicating factors that have no other option) to suffer unnecessarily from a potentially devastating disease. Opting not to vaccinate when none of those complicating factors exist is not an "intelligent choice" in any way, shape, or form.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Jason Levine]

As the parent of a child with autism (and someone who is likely on the spectrum as well - albeit undiagnosed), I'm insulted when people imply they'd rather their child get a deadly disease than get autism. Like Penn and Teller said, even if vaccines caused autism - WHICH THEY DON'T - it would be better to get your child vaccinated and risk autism than go unvaccinated.

The real reason for the "rise" in autism is better detection. When I was a kid, I was pegged as "shy", "weird", and my parents were told (while I was in elementary school, mind you) "he won't feel comfortable socially until he is in college." There was no diagnosis as to what was going on with me and definitely no help. I was just not like the other kids and that was it. With my son, we had a doctor spend six hours observing him (3 hours in class and 3 hours one-on-one observation) before getting the Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis. Once we had that, there were a lot of resources for us to draw upon to help him out. (Adults can get diagnosed too, but in my case money is tight and a diagnosis wouldn't help me or my son.)

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Wootery]

No. You were factually wrong, and AC corrected you. You clearly do not understand herd immunity. Your immune system does not exist in a vacuum.

These two comments make the same correction, and quite rightly.

If John Doe decides not to get vaccinated and you get vaccinated, how are you at risk? John gets polio and you do not, there is no issue.

This is wrong. You absolutely are affected by an increased number of potential carriers. I don't care to be the fourth person to try to explain herd immunity, though - please, just go and read the Wikipedia article.

If you wish to argue that it is a real dilemma lets see your arguments. If you can't, then I am correct.

Now that's just beautiful.

Took me a bit to find this

[rsilvergun]

Operation Whitecoat it was called. If you were a Conscientious Objector you did this instead of shooting people.

There's lots and lots of conspiracies out there. All a conspiracy means is that two or more people get together to do something. Banking is rife with them. So is the software industry (and the hardware, anyone remember when flat panels suddenly got cheap? Conspiracy among vendors to keep prices high...).

Yes, there are crack pots out there. But that doesn't mean organized groups of people aren't doing bad things...

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[ShadowRangerRIT]

They weren't deliberately infected, they weren't soldiers, (they were sharecroppers, and they were provided with free medical cares, meals and burial insurance as compensation), and for the first decade of the study, there was no verified cure for syphilis (the efficacy of penicillin wasn't verified until the 1940s; the study began in 1932). It's hard to blame the architects of the study for studying an incurable disease to chart its progress, though obviously their successors lacked any moral compass.

The facts of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment were bad enough, but you're making it seem even worse. This is the part of the problem. Actual malfeasance gets exaggerated even further; it changes from failure to take action (treat patients like they should have) to deliberate malevolence (intentionally infecting patients). If you reinterpret the world as one in which everything is explained by deliberate malice, of course you'll believe in conspiracy theories.

Sadly, in this particular case, despite being completely off base about Tuskegee, there were in fact acts of active evil perpetrated in Guatemala. Unlike Tuskegee, the experiments weren't on U.S. citizens, only lasted three years, not forty, and the subjects were treated for the conditions they were infected with (though some still died). Doesn't excuse it, but again, it's not a good basis for proving the existence of long term, actively malevolent policies.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[ShanghaiBill]

Hundreds of Black soldiers at Tuskegee during WWII were deliberately infected with Syphilis

No they weren't. What acutally happened is bad enough. You don't have to embellish it with made up nonsense. No one was deliberately infected. They were just left untreated. They were mostly sharecroppers (farmers). They were not soldiers. The study began in 1932, nearly a decade before WWII. At the time, penicillin was still experimental, and not used to treat syphilis. There was no effective treatment before antibiotics became available after 1943, so at least when the study was conceived, it was not quite as unethical as it appears in hindsight, since there weren't a lot of good treatment options at the time anyway. Leaving the subjects untreated until 1972 was, of course, appallingly unethical.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[ShadowRangerRIT]

They weren't deliberately infected, they weren't soldiers,

Everyone knows the Tuskegee Blacks were in the military. They were airmen.

You're confusing the Tuskegee airmen with the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. They have nothing in common besides being trained (the airmen) and conducted (the experiments) in proximity to Tuskegee, AL. Tuskegee is an almost exclusively Black/African American city, so most things that are associated with Tuskegee are also associated with black people.

(they were sharecroppers, and they were provided with free medical cares,

What good is "medical care" when there's a deliberate lie about the care?

If you read another sentence or two, you'd note that there was no verified treatment for syphilis for the first decade of the experiments. Providing palliative care to those with incurable diseases is a net good; there are legitimate philosophical arguments over how much information a doctor should provide when the information cannot be understood or acted upon in a meaningful way.

Clearly this was unethical, but recall, this was Jim Crow era. A lot of people considered black people sub-human. Sure, the doctors didn't tell them they had syphilis. But the South made it nigh impossible for them to vote, hold elected office, get a meaningful education, buy property, use public services, receive a fair trial, etc. We were kind of awful in general; the Tuskegee experiments weren't that much more awful when compared to everything else we did.

Conspiracy or act of legislature?

[GodInHell]

In fact, in addition to the 37 percent of respondents who fully agreed that U.S. regulators are suppressing access to natural cures, less than a third were willing to say they actively disagreed with the theory.

Marijuana is still illegal, right? I mean, it's it a conspiracy theory if I can point to the status and rules at issue?

my thoughts on conspiracy's

[the simurgh]

"Lesson number one: trust no one. The minute God crapped out the third caveman, a conspiracy was hatched against one of them. Welcome to earth, watch your back no one else will.

Re:my thoughts on conspiracy's

[ScentCone]

my thoughts on conspiracy's

I'm still trying to figure out what the Trilateral Commission, the Rothschilds, the Masons, and George Soros hope to gain by tricking people into being so actively bad at understanding the difference between the plural and possessive uses of the apostrophe. There must be some money in it, somewhere.

Re:my thoughts on conspiracy's

[HornWumpus]

I think they stuff coal up the butts of grammar pedants and come back later harvesting diamonds.

"conspiracy theory" is loaded language

[globaljustin]

Researchers messed up from the start using the "conspiracy theory" contextualization.

Operation Northwoods would certainly **sound** like a conspiracy theory, a US gov't plan investigating the use of false-flag actions on US population to manufacture consent, but follow the link to the official documents, declassified, proving the plan existed

Or how about The Gulf of Tonkin Incident which was a **all fake** and used to justify Vietnam intervention. Again...follow the link...the documents are declassified and it's true.

Today's conspiracy "theory" is tomorrows class action settlement!

By using the "conspiracy theory" contextualization, the researchers then biased **what theories they chose** and to go deeper **which variation of the theory to use**

ex: Flouride. Some say flouride in the water table is for dumping toxic chemicals to cause their Pineal Gland to calcify...others don't think it's so devious...just a way to make money off of industrial waste (selling something uneccesary on decades-long contracts w/ governments) not actually ***hurt people***

from TFA, here's the **versions** of various theories they chose:

They include the theory that the government knows cell phones cause cancer but does nothing about it, that genetically modified organisms are being used to shrink the world's population, that routine vaccinations cause autism and that water fluoridation is a way for companies to dump dangerous chemicals into the environment.

Notice that ****corporate conspiracies**** are not mentioned!!!

The health care industry profits from **artificial scarcity**...and lobbying to get unsafe, easily abusable drugs approved by the FDA over objections (see: Rudy Guilianni's early career as an attorney ;)

Artificial Scarcity & corporate cronyism is not a "conspiracy theory"...in fact, if you toss out the craziness, just about all "conspiracy theories" can be explained by unscrupulous people doing criminal behavior on a large scale.

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[hedgemage]

Cite sources please. Reputable journals only.

Problem is that the US has made it nearly impossible to research the effects of marijuana/THC so there is a real lack of good data. Facing this lack of evidence, too many people are stating outrageous claims that pot will do everything from cure the common cold to cancer and everything in between.

Vocabulary Tar-pit

[Tablizer]

"Conspiracy" is a vague word. In an industry as large and complex as medical care, I can almost guarantee that underhanded manipulation is going on, and have heard about such directly from acquaintances who worked or are working in it.

Whether one can label underhanded manipulation a "conspiracy" is tricky one. Multiple people of power work together to manipulate for selfish reasons. But often they use "gray lies" so that they have a fall-back argument such as "It's a matter of interpretation".

I'd generally call such "coordinated bullshit" and reserve "conspiracy" for outright coordinated lies or clear-cut criminal acts.

The largest volume of BS in the world is done at the grey borders of "truth", not so much dead people in car trunks or planted microscope slides. If you want to clean up corruption and BS, then going after manipulation of grey areas is probably the biggest bang for the buck.

The word "conspiracy" has kind of been diluted similar to how we use "robbed" to mean "burglarized". "Robbed" technically usually means you were approached and threatened in person by the thief. Taking your TV while you are on vacation doesn't count. That's "burglarized", not "robbed". But humans like to add drama to their speech such that the embellishment causes a kind of "severity deflation" of meaning over time. Thus "robbed" grew weaker in perceived meaning.

Maybe because there are real medical conspiracies?

[rs79]

Revealed: secret plan to push'happy' pills
http://www.theguardian.com/soc...

Big Pharma Could Win International Price Monopoly, Unlimited Profits in 'Free Trade' Deal
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

US patent moves are 'profoundly bad' in leaked TPP treaty
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a proposed free trade agreement under negotiation between Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam. Leaked documents show the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) is pressuring TPP countries to expand pharmaceutical monopoly protections and trade away access to medicines.
http://www.citizen.org/TPPA

The medical industry the third-leading cause of death in the United States; after heart disease and cancer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Big Pharma Shamelessly Shills Dangerous Bone Drugs You Don't Need
http://www.alternet.org/story/...

The H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic: Manipulating the Data to Justify a Worldwide Public Health Emergency
http://www.globalresearch.ca/t...

"Somewhere in Rayong or Chon Buri on the coast of Thailand, a young woman may at this very moment be baring her arm for a shot of an experimental Aids vaccine that many of the leading scientists in the field say categorically has no hope at all of working.

She will be one of 16,000 volunteers recruited for the second large-scale Aids vaccine trial, a $119m exercise many scientists believe is a farce."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/scie...

Fraud has become so endemic in this country that it's woven its way into America’s DNA. 2). Big Pharma Fraud.
http://www.alternet.org/story/...

Drug Makers New Targets for U.S. Fraud Inquiries, Report Says
http://prescriptions.blogs.nyt...

Merck drew up a "hit list" of doctors that needed to be "neutralized" because they criticized the now banned drug Vioxx.
http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Merck invents its own journal to publish bogus research findings to promote it's own products.
http://blog.bioethics.net/2009...

Why Aren't These Fraudulent Papers Retracted?
http://truth-out.org/news/item...

Doubts about Johns Hopkins research have gone unanswered, scientist says
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

A National Survey of Physician–Industry Relationships
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[nine-times]

And though they're not a medical conspiracies, quite a few 'conspiracy theories' have turned out to be true in the past few decades. We've found out in recent years that our government *does* have secret prisons where they torture people. The NSA *does* read your email and tap your phone. People within the finance industry *do* apparently help to torpedo the economy so that they can make money from the collapse. Private prisons *do* raise money for candidates who support excessive prison terms and mandatory sentencing. The Republican party *does* have meetings where rich funders talk to the presidential nominee about how poor people are parasites and rich people deserve more money. Wasn't there something about the CIA selling crack?

All of these conspiracy theories have turned out to be more or less real. It doesn't seem to crazy to think that the pharmaceutical industry has engaged in some kinds of similarly insane shenanigans.