Rotary speaker: Examine evidence to help make health choices

Speaking to the Rotary Club of Wallowa County on Wednesday, Feb. 22, McFall urged members and guests to rely on evidence-based research findings to determine whether products advertised to improve health are actually good for you.

McFall, professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, illustrated his message by saying that only 23% of Americans follow public health guidelines to engage in moderate intensity physical activity, contributing to 400,000 deaths annually. Only 15% are up-to-date with a COVID-19 vaccination and only 50% get annual flu shots, leading to tens of thousands of preventable deaths.

Products and therapies claimed to be healthful have been rolled out to the public before proven to be so. Bloodletting and prefrontal lobotomies for the mentally ill are dramatic examples from decades past. As recently as the 1950s, over half of Americans smoked tobacco, a product not uncommonly recommended by medical practitioners at the time. Pharmaceutical companies marketed opiate narcotics as having low addictive potential for chronic pain. The horse dewormer ivermectin is touted and used as a treatment for COVID-19 symptoms. Many Americans avoid COVID vaccinations because of unfounded fears of fatal side effects. About half of Americans take over-the-counter vitamins and supplements to improve their health.

The reality is that bloodletting and prelobotomies were grotesque failures; smoking was never healthful and now kills 500,000 Americans annually; inappropriate use of opiates for cancer-unrelated chronic spurred an epidemic of addiction and preventable deaths; ivermectin is no more effective than placebo in treating COVID-19 symptoms; death associated with, but not necessarily caused by, 67 million doses of COVID vaccinations is only .0028%; and dietary supplements not prescribed by medical professionals do not prevent cancer or cardiovascular disease or prolong longevity.

The core problem, according to McFall, is that bogus products and therapeutics have been disseminated to the public before proven to be safe and effective through the rigorous process of clinical-trial research. Key ingredients of this process include randomized controlled studies comparing a proposed innovation against a placebo or the usual standard of care. Confidence in the safety and effectiveness of a new treatment or product relies on replication of findings using large numbers of participants measured over long periods and reporting of adverse events.

McFall discussed reasons why we use products and treatments that don’t work or can harm us and why we don’t embrace preventatives and treatments scientifically proven to improve our health. Misinformation, disinformation, the human propensity for “confirmation bias,” mistaking association for causation, and distrust of government and medical science were discussed as drivers that obscure the public’s understanding of fact-based evidence.

McFall urged the audience to make decisions about affecting their health informed by evidence from rigorous clinical research trials. Unquestioned strongly held beliefs about what works to improve our health can sometimes lead us astray, a point driven home by the folklore quotation, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”