Interesting Things, Week 6 - Medical Errors, Misdiagnosis, Research Integrity and Ethics, Drinking Borax, and more
Yet another week in SCIENCE
It’s the weekend, which at this point in my life is a wonderful time to both tell you all about the science of the week and clean up cat vomit from the couch because Luna has decided that this is her new throwing up spot. It was so much easier when she liked to regurgitate in the bathroom.
There are quite a few interesting things to go over for the last week, which has been a very busy one. We’ve got two entirely different stories of research integrity issues that have been talked about across the world, and a whole host of weird stuff that’s been picked up from Tiktok.
As ever, a reminder that if you like my writing please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It really helps to make this whole writing thing more of a job than a hobby, which means that I can spend more time on you and less time on everything else.
And with that, let’s get to the SCIENCE.
Drinking Borax
There’s a new trend where people on Tiktok are telling each other to drink borax, a common household product that has no health benefits whatsoever. It’s the new Tide pods craze, except for some reason people think that borax will help their health in some way.
Obviously, it won’t. While borax isn’t that toxic - you can drink a fair bit before you have to be rushed to hospital, unlike Tide pods - it’s still not great for you. Please don’t drink borax.
Long COVID and Cognitive Health
There’s a new and quite interesting study out looking at Long COVID and cognitive health. This particular piece of research followed up a very selected group of participants for up to 2.5 years, and found that there were relatively few differences in terms of cognitive ability between people who had a prior infection and reported Long COVID symptoms and those who didn’t.
There were some issues remaining for people who had particularly severe initial COVID-19 infections, but on the whole I think these results are quite reassuring. While the data is quite limited, and certainly not conclusive, it shows that for the vast majority of people any impacts on this measure of cognitive ability from COVID-19 is likely to be quite short-lived unless you have a severe initial infection or have already suffered symptoms for a very long time.
Research Integrity and Problematic Ethics
This week there is actually a story that is partly my own work! If you remember, hydroxychloroquine was famously one of the biggest promoted treatments in the early pandemic. There were millions of people online saying it would work, and even Donald Trump was promoting it at one point.
This all came from a very famous French research lab in Marseilles. This lab conducted a tiny, awful study showing some possible benefits for hydroxychloroquine. The original study was so shockingly bad that an independent review commissioned by the publisher concluded that it should never have been published in the first place.
However, it turns out that there are bigger issues in this particular lab. Along with a group of French researchers, we looked into ethical approvals that the lab cited in their studies, and found some truly shocking problems. Many studies conducted in low-income nations appear to have no ethics approval from that country. Some may have had no ethics approval at all. The same single ethics approval number was used more than 200 times for completely unrelated studies, calling into question whether these papers were actually approved by an ethics committee. Many of these articles were published in a journal which was controlled by the lab itself - the editor-in-chief was a senior member of the Marseilles group.
The full story is worth reading.
Misdiagnosis and Medical Error
How many people die each year due to medical errors? The question has been in the news yet again because of another new study which has estimated a truly ludicrously high number in the hundreds of thousands for the US. I covered this study in a free piece and then revisited the more general question in a piece for paid subscribers, because it’s both fascinating and important.
There are certainly people who die every year due to medical errors, but that number is FAR lower than the headlines might have made you believe.
Dishonest Honesty Research
There’s been a huge scandal in the behavioural sciences community for a while after a team of sleuths found impossible numbers in a group of psychological studies back in 2021. This was a huge deal because the studies were extremely impactful in the research world, and it was also quite ironic because they were literally studies of how to make people more honest.
Now, the scandal has grown even bigger. One of the researchers behind these studies, who has lost their position after several retractions and an investigation by Harvard, is suing the university and the original sleuths for $25million. The entire story is worth a read, Stephanie Lee from the Chronicle of Higher Education has done a brilliant job covering the entire saga.
And that’s it for this week of Interesting Things. Remember to subscribe if you haven’t, share my newsletter with your friends, and have a fantastic week!