Seeking reliable information is a critical step in avoiding dead-ends in your path to health.
While I endeavor to link only to reliable information on this website, the purpose of the information is educational. It is not a substitute for personal medical advice that you receive from a health professional such as your physician, nurse practitioner, physical therapist, or registered dietician.
Blog posts about specific evidenced-based articles on the Reset and Renew website will include a link to the original article or actual study, so that you can dig deeper and evaluate for yourself, or so that you can take the information to your health care professional.
Blog posts that are opinion will be clearly labeled as “opinion” on this website.
But what are some criteria for determining whether a source of information is reliable or not?
1.Does the author have credentials in the area she or he is writing about? (This is important, but not sufficient. There are several medical doctors and PhD’s promoting theories and programs that don’t stand up to scrutiny.)
2. What kind of studies is this information based on?
- A well-done meta-analysis gives you the best overview of the current state of research because a meta-analysis considers multiple studies, identifies the best ones, and runs an analysis essentially combining the insights of all the studies as a whole.
- A randomized control study (RCT) is the gold-standard of scientific studies. In an RCT, there is an intervention group and a control group. There are 2 important aspects of the this type of study: 1) The people in each group are assigned randomly. 2) The control group often gets a placebo or a similar intervention that is not expected to be as potent. (E.g. the intervention group may get three 40 min sessions of aerobic exercise and the control group gets stretching exercises.) A randomized control study can therefore show causation.
- Many longitudinal studies give us valuable data, but can only show association, not causation. For instance, research involving people’s eating patterns may follow a large group of people over a number of years. They may find that there is an association between x pattern of eating and a health outcome such as cardiovascular disease. This gives us strong reason to take x pattern of eating into account, but it doesn’t prove that x pattern of eating caused the outcomes.
3.People who rely on sound, scientific evidence will admit that they were wrong if the evidence changes. (And the evidence does change as scientists learn more. Think of the progress in treating cancer, heart disease, etc.) They are more likely to be comfortable acknowledging what they don’t know.
How to spot unreliable information:
Some red flags:
1. They use certain techniques to draw you in.
- They draw you in with a “secret.” Remember when you found out in school that someone had a secret and you wanted to be one of the ones “in the know” not one of the ones “on the outside?” This seems to be a trait of human nature that people can use to entice people to believe their spiel.
- They may add to the power of the “secret” by identifying an “enemy” that is trying to “keep this information from you.”
- They promise “fast” results
These techniques are based on known psychological patterns of human beings. In other words, they use psychological manipulation to draw you in.
2.They may say that you can’t trust “big pharma” or “medical doctors” because they are only out to make money off you, but be selling you something themselves: supplements, a book, or even just getting a lot of followers on You-tube.
3. They present unreliable or less-reliable evidence to back up what they are saying.
- They may also quote scientific studies to make themselves sound more legitimate. Watch out for theories or programs based solely on research on rodents, for citations that seem to be “cherry-picked” without regard for other research that may show something different, or for reliance on single studies with a very small number of participants.
- They may rely on “anecdotal evidence”: a story of what happened to a person or people as a result of following their plan, taking their supplement, etc. Human beings are wired to tune into stories and they can seem very compelling! There are many problems with anecdotal evidence however: 1) It would be very rare that you could actually verify the accuracy of someone’s story. 2)The placebo effect is actually quite potent. When scientific studies are done to test a drug, for instance, the drug has to do better than a “sugar” pill. Why? Because a certain number of people will actually improve on a placebo because they think it is something that will help. So someone’s story might be true, but they may have experienced improvement due to the placebo effect, not the supplement, program, etc. 3) You don’t know what other factors in a person’s life may have resulted in the change and it is actually coincidence that they were taking the supplement, etc.
4. They offer solutions to things that people might feel helpless about such as weight loss or a disease.
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