Thread

1. mattmaroon · 1790561684 · focus · HN ↗

   “Linked to” is a keyword indicating pseudoscience. Everything is “linked to cancer”.

   1. rdiddly · 1790562707 · focus · HN ↗

      "Linked to" by having been studied and shown to increase tumor rates in rodent testing. That not good enough for ya? Too pseudo-sciencey?

      1. timr · 1790562881 · focus · HN ↗

         Yes, that’s not good enough. Rodents are not humans. Then you have to deal with the dose, the setting, the difference in healthy lifespan, and a million other factors that differ from actual people in the real world.

         On top of all of that, this paper did no actual research - it just mined existing literature for any chemicals with at least one paper saying that it did something cancer-related in mice or other assays.

         Based on prior experience, almost certainly a substantial proportion of these papers are crap, but they don’t make any effort to figure that out (because that would be science, and therefore hard.)

         1. Insanity · 1790572546 · focus · HN ↗

            +1. On the opposite side of cancer research - We're already pretty good at eliminating cancer in rodents, it just doesn't translate well to humans. Animal testing might have done more harm than good for human healthcare in the long run. People stick to animal models out of a "we've done it this way forever" way of thinking, not because it still makes sense.

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