In November 2008, I was eight months pregnant, watching the election returns roll in. Somehow, I’d found a way to make myself even more uncomfortable: I was upside down on my couch. My head was on the cushions.
My feet dangled above me. I strained to balance myself while trying to keep something called mugwort near my toes. My daughter was breech, and I was willing to try anything to help her flip, even if it meant turning the world upside-down.
I’d seen from a Google search that “moxibustion” with the smoldering herb might help with turning a breech baby. As a physician and scientist, I was well aware there was limited peer-reviewed evidence for what I was doing. I’d never heard of anyone prescribing moxibustion.
But with the window narrowing for the birth I had hoped for, I was more willing to believe there might be something to it. Although I was skeptical, I thought, “It couldn’t hurt! Why not?” My impulse to seek out and use unproven health information is not uncommon.
New research released by the Edelman Trust Institute and our team at the Yale School of Public Health, where I serve as dean, shows that many of us are willing to look for health guidance in unreliable places. In a world where information comes at us in fragments and trust in institutions is crumbling, it’s worth understanding what we believe and why. Our new analysis tested views on six unfounded health claims about subjects like childhood vaccines, raw milk, fluoride in drinking water, and so on.
Huge majorities of the 13,000+ people surveyed, 70% globally, believed at least one of these claims. And the people who believed these claims weren’t simply those without exposure to science; most of them had taken a university-level or higher science course. Nor did susceptibility fall neatly along partisan or generational lines.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
