Movies attacked again!

WASHINGTON — A comprehensive report released today from the National Cancer Institute – the leading federal agency on cancer research – provides the government’s strongest conclusion to date on the media’s powerful and causal effect on tobacco use.

The report, Monograph 19 – The Role of the Media in Promoting and Reducing Tobacco Use, concluded what we in public health have known for many years: depictions of smoking in movies and tobacco marketing promote youth smoking.These facts are nonetheless illuminating because they are now recognized for the first time as fact by our federal government.

The report provides the ammunition to tobacco control advocates around the world who are fighting to keep movies smoke-free. While the entertainment industry has taken positive steps to respond to the growing international Smoke-Free Movies movement, there is still some skepticism on the part of many influencers in the entertainment industry as to the magnitude of the effect movie smoking has on youth smoking initiation.

Where have we heard agenda driven reports like this before.  Could it be Swing bands in my grandparents generation.  Rock and Roll in my generation.  Or could it be Pot leading to hard drug use, video games causing violence??? Agenda driven reports like this have always been around and they always look ridiculous to future generations.  I envision a new cast iron pan-egg commercials.  Here is your brain . . . . here is your brain on agenda driven reports . . . .SMUCK!

The big problem is that you pretty much can make a study say anything you want. Ask a question enough ways until you get the results you want and print only those results.

Why does this happen?

Young believes there’s something fundamentally wrong with the method of observational studies – something that goes way beyond that thorny little issue of confounding factors. It’s about another habit of epidemiology some call data-mining.

Most epidemiological studies, according to Young, don’t account for the fact that they often check many different things in one study. “They think it is fine to ask many questions of the same data set,” Young says. And the more things you check, the more likely it becomes that you’ll find something that’s statistically significant – just by chance, luck, nothing more.

It’s like rolling a pair of dice many times without anyone looking until you get snake eyes and then claiming you’d only rolled it once. Often, epidemiological researchers ask dozens, maybe hundreds of questions in the questionnaires they send to the people they study. They ask so many questions that something, eventually, is bound to come out positive.

That’s where the Canadian star sign study comes into play, Young says. It was only because the authors deliberately asked a lot of questions – to prove a point – that it was able to come up with significant results for something that couldn’t be true.

The study’s lead author, statistician Peter Austin of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto, says that once he cleaned up his methodology (by adding a statistical correction for the large number of questions he asked) the association between Leos and internal bleeding and Sagittarians and leg-breaks disappeared.