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Doubt Is Their Product · Truth in Motion with Dr. Jocelyn

0:02
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Truth in Motion with Dr.
0:05
SPEAKER_00: Jocelyn, where insight, clarity, and wisdom help you thrive.
0:09
SPEAKER_00: We made it back to another Monday.
0:12
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining me.
0:14
SPEAKER_00: Last time we asked a question about the ladder of evidence.
0:18
SPEAKER_00: Who gets to do the observing?
0:20
SPEAKER_00: Most of the time, it's a small group of researchers, and the rest of us are asked to trust their numbers.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: And we saw that some of the oldest evidence in medicine is evidence anyone can see.
0:34
SPEAKER_00: Right in their own body.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: This week we look at the numbers themselves.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: And I'll be honest with you, getting here stirred up a lot in me, and I'll share that with you today.
0:45
SPEAKER_00: In 1969, a tobacco company called Brown and Williamson wrote an internal proposal about how to answer the growing evidence that smoking causes disease.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: One line in it has become famous.
1:01
SPEAKER_00: Quote, doubt is our product, unquote.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: Read that again.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: Doubt is our product.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: The memo explained that doubt was the best way to compete with the body of fact that existed in the public's mind.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: They didn't need to prove that cigarettes were safe.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: They only needed to keep the question open.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: And numbers, it turned out, are a wonderful way to keep a question open.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: Why does this matter?
1:32
SPEAKER_00: Because every day we're told what the research says on the news, in ads, in the doctor's office.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: Studies show risk cut in half, clinically proven, 90% of people agree.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: And we make real decisions based on those numbers.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: What we eat, what we take, whether we say yes to a procedure for ourselves or for someone we love.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: Most of us were never taught how to look behind a number.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: So we either trust every statistic or we stop trusting any of them.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: Both leave us powerless.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: This week is about a third way, understanding numbers well enough to use them and well enough to see when they're being used on us.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: Let me tell you where I stand.
2:25
SPEAKER_00: I believe that numbers are tools.
2:27
SPEAKER_00: In honest hands, they reveal things no single person could ever see.
2:33
SPEAKER_00: In paid hands, they persuade.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: And we can't trust a claim simply because it comes wrapped in research.
2:40
SPEAKER_00: That isn't cynicism.
2:42
SPEAKER_00: It's maturity.
2:43
SPEAKER_00: The research isn't the enemy, blind trust is.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: First, let's honor what numbers do well, because they are powerful.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: Remember Dahl and Hill from two weeks ago?
2:55
SPEAKER_00: They asked patients in 20 London hospitals about their smoking.
3:00
SPEAKER_00: Of 649 men with lung cancer, only two had never smoked.
3:07
SPEAKER_00: No single doctor seeing one patient at a time could have seen that pattern.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: The numbers saw it.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: And those numbers and the studies that followed eventually helped save millions of people from a habit that was killing them.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: And the numbers kept coming.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: In 1951, researchers began following 40,000 British doctors.
3:29
SPEAKER_00: Fifty years later, the results were stark.
3:33
SPEAKER_00: Smokers who kept smoking died about 10 years earlier than those who never smoked.
3:39
SPEAKER_00: And those who quit at 30 gained back almost all of those years.
3:44
SPEAKER_00: Quit at 40 about 9 years.
3:47
SPEAKER_00: At 50, about six.
3:49
SPEAKER_00: And even at age 60, you would gain three years back.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: Think about what that number gives a person.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: Not fear, but hope.
3:59
SPEAKER_00: It's never too late to gain something back.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: That's what honest numbers do.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: They let us see what's too big, too slow, or too spread out for any one person to notice.
4:12
SPEAKER_00: And they can hand us real choices.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly why the tobacco industry needed to fight them.
4:19
SPEAKER_00: On January 4th, 1954, Americans opened their newspapers to a full-page message from the tobacco companies.
4:27
SPEAKER_00: It was called a frank statement to cigarette smokers.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: It ran in more than 400 newspapers and reached an estimated 43 million people.
4:39
SPEAKER_00: It sounded caring, it sounded reasonable.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: It said that recent research pointed to many possible causes of lung cancer, that the authorities didn't agree on what the cause was, and that there was no proof that smoking was one of them.
4:55
SPEAKER_00: And it announced a new research group, paid for by the industry to study the question.
5:01
SPEAKER_00: But much of the research that group funded wasn't about smoking at all.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: It looked at other questions about cancer, genetics, and the immune system.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: Real science, real numbers, pointed in a different direction.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: And for decades, neither that group nor the one that replaced it ever admitted a proven link between smoking and serious disease.
5:24
SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, the evidence kept growing.
5:26
SPEAKER_00: In January of 1964, the Surgeon General of the United States, Dr.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: Luther Terry, announced the conclusion of a 14-month review.
5:36
SPEAKER_00: Cigarette smoking was a major cause of lung cancer.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: The next year, 42% of American adults still smoked.
5:45
SPEAKER_00: That's how doubt works.
5:47
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have to win the argument.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: It only has to slow us down.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: And every year of doubt was a year that millions of people kept smoking.
5:57
SPEAKER_00: Notice the pattern because we'll see it again and again.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: Fund research, point it somewhere else.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: Remind everyone that more study is needed, and let time do the rest.
6:10
SPEAKER_00: Now here's a twist in the story.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: In 1954, a journalist named Daryl Huff wrote a little book called How to Lie with Statistics.
6:20
SPEAKER_00: It's short, funny, and sharp.
6:22
SPEAKER_00: It shows how a graph can be stretched to look dramatic, how an average can be chosen to flatter, and how a sample can be picked to give the answer someone wanted.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: It became one of the best-selling statistic books in history, with more than a million and a half copies sold in English.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: I own a copy and it's guiding us through this week.
6:44
SPEAKER_00: But here's what most readers never knew.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: In the 1960s, after the Surgeon General's report linking smoking with lung cancer, the tobacco industry commissioned Huff to write another book.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: Its working title was How to Lie with Smoking Statistics.
7:02
SPEAKER_00: Industry records show he was paid thousands of dollars for it.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: A publisher even agreed to print it in 1968.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: It never reached print.
7:11
SPEAKER_00: But think about that.
7:13
SPEAKER_00: The man who taught a generation how numbers can deceive was hired to turn those very tricks against the evidence on smoking.
7:22
SPEAKER_00: That's tobacco science.
7:24
SPEAKER_00: Not always fake data, often real numbers chosen and framed to keep the doubt alive.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes it goes further than framing.
7:35
SPEAKER_00: Over 13 years, an anesthesiologist named Scott Rubin published 21 studies on pain drugs.
7:43
SPEAKER_00: Some of the trials never happened at all.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: He invented the data.
7:49
SPEAKER_00: Those papers shaped how surgeons managed pain.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: In 2010, he was sentenced to six months in federal prison.
7:57
SPEAKER_00: And it isn't only one man.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: When researchers pooled anonymous surveys of scientists, about two in every hundred admitted to fabricating or altering data at least once.
8:10
SPEAKER_00: About 14 in a hundred said they knew a colleague who had.
8:15
SPEAKER_00: Medical researchers reported it most often.
8:19
SPEAKER_00: And then there's the quieter version.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: In 2008, a study of court documents from the VIAX lawsuits found that the drugs maker had staff write research papers and then recruited outside doctors to put their names on them.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: When it came to review articles, paid writing firms did the drafting.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: Only half of those reviews told readers who was behind them.
8:44
SPEAKER_00: So when we read a study showed, it's fair to ask who wrote it, who paid for it, and who was counting.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: I'll be honest, learning this stirs up sadness in me and anger.
8:57
SPEAKER_00: I spent years in training learning to respect the research, and I still do.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: So it hurts to see how often the numbers have been bent, bought, or simply made up.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: It can leave a person disillusioned.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: But I don't want to stay there.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: I want better, and I believe better starts with people like us who know how to ask good questions and won't settle for a headline.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: This is part of why it care so much about the kind of evidence we talked about last week.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: When the observation is your own, your tongue in the mirror, your pulse under your fingers, your sleep, your energy, no one can ghostwrite it.
9:35
SPEAKER_00: No one can choose which mornings to leave out.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: No one is paid to frame it.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean we throw out research.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: It means we bring our eyes open.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: We let honest numbers inform us and we don't let dishonest ones steer us.
9:52
SPEAKER_00: So how do we tell the difference?
9:55
SPEAKER_00: We'll spend all week on it.
9:57
SPEAKER_00: But here's where it starts.
9:59
SPEAKER_00: Honest numbers tend to share a few traits.
10:01
SPEAKER_00: They show their counts, not just the risk was cut in half, but how many people out of how many?
10:08
SPEAKER_00: Two out of six hundred and forty-nine is a number you can picture.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: Significantly reduced isn't.
10:15
SPEAKER_00: They tell you who paid.
10:17
SPEAKER_00: Funding doesn't automatically make a study wrong, but it's a fact we deserve to know.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: The same way we'd want to know if the person recommending a car was paid by the dealer.
10:28
SPEAKER_00: They compare fairly.
10:30
SPEAKER_00: Compared with what?
10:31
SPEAKER_00: With nothing?
10:32
SPEAKER_00: With a sugar pill, with the best treatment we already have?
10:37
SPEAKER_00: The answer can change the whole story.
10:40
SPEAKER_00: They admit their limits.
10:42
SPEAKER_00: Honest researchers tell you what their study couldn't see, how long it lasted, who was left out, what they didn't measure.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: A study that claims to have no weaknesses is telling you something about itself.
10:56
SPEAKER_00: And they hold up.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: When different people in different places using different methods keep finding the same thing, that's a number we can lean on.
11:06
SPEAKER_00: Dalin Hill looked back.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: The British Doctor study followed forward.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: Others ran their own studies, and they all pointed in the same way.
11:15
SPEAKER_00: Numbers that hide their counts, hide their funding, compare unfairly, deny any weaknesses, and can't be repeated deserve a much harder look.
11:27
SPEAKER_00: So here's the week ahead.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: We'll use Huff's book as our guide and we'll keep asking who benefits.
11:33
SPEAKER_00: Tomorrow we ask who is counted, because a number is only as good as the people behind it.
11:40
SPEAKER_00: On Wednesday, we look at averages and risk.
11:43
SPEAKER_00: Here's a taste.
11:45
SPEAKER_00: Suppose a problem strikes two people out of a hundred.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: A treatment brings it down to one out of a hundred.
11:52
SPEAKER_00: A headline can honestly say the risk was cut in half.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: It's also one person out of a hundred.
11:59
SPEAKER_00: Same numbers, very different feeling.
12:02
SPEAKER_00: We'll learn to hear the difference.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: On Thursday, we'll talk about pictures that persuade, graphs and charts that stretch the truth without telling a single lie.
12:13
SPEAKER_00: And on Friday, we learn to talk back to a number.
12:16
SPEAKER_00: A few simple questions that put the power back in our hands.
12:21
SPEAKER_00: This week we looked behind the numbers.
12:24
SPEAKER_00: Here's today's practice.
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SPEAKER_00: Find one number in a health headline, an ad or a label, doctors recommended, reduces risk, clinically proven.
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SPEAKER_00: Write it down.
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SPEAKER_00: Then ask three things.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: Who is telling me this?
12:40
SPEAKER_00: Who paid for it?
12:41
SPEAKER_00: And what would they gain if I believed it?
12:44
SPEAKER_00: Here's an example.
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SPEAKER_00: A supplement label says clinically proven to support immune health.
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SPEAKER_00: Who's telling me?
12:52
SPEAKER_00: The company that sells it?
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SPEAKER_00: Who paid for the study?
12:56
SPEAKER_00: Often the same company.
12:58
SPEAKER_00: What would they gain if I believed it?
13:00
SPEAKER_00: A sale?
13:02
SPEAKER_00: None of that means the product doesn't work.
13:05
SPEAKER_00: It means the claim hasn't earned my trust yet.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: You don't need to know the answers yet.
13:10
SPEAKER_00: Just noticing that you can ask is the beginning of your power.
13:16
SPEAKER_00: Today we saw that numbers can reveal what no single person could see, the way Dalyn Hill revealed the danger of smoking.
13:24
SPEAKER_00: And we saw that the same tools can be turned to manufacture doubt.
13:28
SPEAKER_00: The way one industry wrote that doubt was its product, and even hired the author of the best known book on statistical tricks.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: We saw that some research is framed to persuade and some is simply false.
13:43
SPEAKER_00: And we saw why our own careful observation and a willingness to ask who's counting protects us.
13:51
SPEAKER_00: Tomorrow we start with the most basic question behind any number who was counted and who is left out.
13:58
SPEAKER_00: I'll meet you there.
14:01
SPEAKER_00: Keep the conversation going.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: Find your next steps in notes from a fellow traveler, my blog.