Thread: Indian man 'survives without food or water for decades'

Like I said, I just did a quick search, and found a lot of stuff saying that.

Well you've at least included the sources which is something. However, I took a look at them and they are extremely dubious (ZOMG SCIENCE COVERUP).

I was only able to take a very quick glance at the first link but the figures given out are comletely at odds with those gleaned from far more reliable sources such as the CDC or WHO. The tone is also not impartial which you would expect from a legitimate scientific publication, and the cited "Nutrition Institute of America" on page 2 does not appear to have any credibility. Indeed there is some reference to it being a questionable organisation, though I've yet to be able to find out on what basis this claim is made.

The citations are extremely sparse and does not provide adequate references for the figures, which would result in the publication being rejected in any serious scientific journal. Furthermore I did notice that the one citation I checked was published in PubMed but also had a rebuttal written criticising the study. I haven't been able to check the papers myself yet but the credibility of the study would appear to be under some doubt.

Additionally the journalism was very bad, swapping between figures and sources, and failing to reference them. For example

"The most stunning statistic, however, is that the total number of deaths caused by conventional medicine is an astounding 783,936 per year"
Easily falsified; see more reliable figures from WHO for example.

"It is now evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the US. (By contrast, the number of deaths attributable to heart disease in 2001 was 699,697)"
Again, completely false.

"This fully referenced report shows the number of people having in-hospital, adverse reactions to prescribed drugs to be 2.2 million per year"
No reference for what these reactions were is given. These could be very common but mild side-effects such as nausea or headaches, but the implication is that these are serious reactions.

To top it all off, you even end up with the site claiming that about 40% of all deaths are due to medical error. Approximately 2 out of 5 people in the U.S. dying of medical errors? No one can seriously believe that ... right? Those figures are so at odds with ones from credible sources that it's laughable.

So she isn't just pulling it out of her ass, apparently there are a lot of articles saying things like that.

There may well be many articles saying that, but quantity has no bearing on facts. As I said, many people claim Elvis is still alive, or they've been visited by UFOs, or any number of experiences. That doesn't make them true. The number of people making a claim is irrelevant, it's only the evidence behind the claims that carries weight.

The problem here is basically, people who don't know about science are unable to understand what is a good source and what is a bad one. It's easy to use (or misuse) terminology to give the impression of knowing what you're talking about. It's very understandable why people get confused over this, but unfortunately such people lack the expertise to realise why these sources are rejected by science, leading to the conspiracy theories bullshit.

Essentially this why people ignorant of science should not criticise the methodology. You don't know good science from bad science. You don't understand the methodology by which real scientists separate the two (or even the basic premises behind science, despite what juroara mistakenly believes she knows). You don't know how to tell someone who appears to be a scientist (like 'Dr' Kent Hovind) from a real scientist who knows what they are talking about. And this is why such opinions on scientific matters are useless.

Intelligent people would realise if they don't know much about science, they are best keeping quiet on the subject instead of accusing an entire domain of coverups because they read something else somewhere, instead leaving it to actual scientists to figure out what is true from what is false, which they have a very good record of doing. There is a reason why becoming a scientist involves a large amount of training.

Edit: This stuff isn't a problem in the scientific domain simply because it won't be taken seriously due to the massive flaws. It is however a huge pain when someone has to explain to those who do not understand science why the article is bad and not taken seriously, It is a waste of time because science has already done the hard part of figuring out what is accurate or not.

Edit: It's also far harder to debunk this than it is to link to or write this crap in the first place.