About half of all American adults believe in one of the many medical conspiracy theories, according to a study from researchers at the University of Chicago in Illinois and published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Conspiracy theories such as flying saucers, 9/11, the Kennedy assassination, and others are abundant in our pop-culture today. Conspiracy theories have now sprouted up around several public health concerns.
Water fluoridation, vaccines, cell phones and alternative medicine, for instance, are all subjects of conspiracy-based speculation. But, how many Americans are consumed with these issues?
University of Chicago’s Prof. J. Eric Oliver and his colleagues conducted an online survey between August and September 2013. Their results appeared as a letter published online this week in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
In the survey, participants were presented with popular medical conspiracy theories and asked if they had heard of them and if they agreed with them.
Some of the theories included:
- Are US regulators preventing people from getting natural cures?
- Did a US spy agency infect a large number of black Americans with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)?
- Does the government knowingly give autism-causing vaccines to children?
- Does the government know that cell phones cause cancer but does nothing about it?
- Do companies dump dangerous chemicals into the environment under the guise of water fluoridation?
What did they find? Misinformation about health and medicine are now widespread and popular!
Overall, 49% of participants agreed with at least one of the theories.
More than one-third of people believe the Food and Drug Administration is deliberately keeping natural cures for cancer off the market because of pressure from drug companies.
Twenty percent of people said that cellphones cause cancer, and health officials do nothing about it – again, due to influence from corporations. And, another 20 percent think doctors and the government want to vaccinate children despite knowing that vaccines cause autism.
“One of the things that struck us is that people who embrace these beliefs are not less health conscious,” says, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who led the study. “They’re just less likely to embrace traditional medicine.”
People who backed the conspiracy theories were less likely to rely on a family doctor. Rather, they rely more on family and friends, the Internet, and celebrity doctors for their health information. People who relied on celebrity doctors such as Dr. Mehmet Oz were most likely to favor conspiracy, with more than 80 percent agreeing with at least one of the theories.
More than half of the study participants did not believe the conspiracy theory that a US spy agency had infected black Americans with HIV. However, 12% actually did believe, and 37% would commit to an answer.
Genetically Modified Foods (GMOs) now appear to be the latest conspiracy theory trend. A recent New York Times poll found that 93% of Americans favor labeling of GM food illustrating overwhelming distrust in this science (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/science/strong-support-for-labeling-modified-foods.html?_r=1&). In the NYT survey, half said they would not eat GM vegetables and fruits, and three-quarters said they would not eat GMO fish.
But it gets worse…In the University of Chicago survey, 12% of respondents actually agreed with a theory that genetically modified foods have been disseminated by Monsanto Inc. as part of a secret program called Agenda 21, launched by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation to shrink the world’s population. While 42% disagreed, fully 46% would not state they thought it was an incredible assertion.
For me, this controversy over GMOs represents what could be one of the greatest science communications failures of the past century. Millions of people have come to believe this conspiracy theory, generating fear and misunderstanding about a whole class of technologies on a global scale. These technologies are clearly some of our most important tools for addressing food security, and can’t be taken lightly.
History shows numerous examples of how when public misunderstanding and superstition becomes widespread on an issue, irrational policymaking is the inevitable consequence. Allowing anti-GMO activists to dictate policymaking on biotechnology is like putting homeopaths in charge of the health service, or asking anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists to take the lead in eradicating polio.
The authors of the letter, J. Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood, said the conspiracy believers spanned the political spectrum and tended to espouse conspiracy theories outside of medicine as well. But, given that medical conspiracy theories are so widely embraced, said Oliver and Wood, it would be unwise to dismiss all those who believe them as a “delusional fringe of paranoid cranks.” Instead, they suggested, “we can recognize that most individuals who endorse these narratives are otherwise normal” but use a sort of cognitive shortcut to explain complex and confusing events.
Perhaps science, and health, officials need to look deeper into public relations to avert issues down the road. As with economic issues, American consumers can collectively create their own problems via critical mass.
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