Caution - Snake Oil!: How Statistical Thinking Can Help Us Expose Misinformation about Our Health

The headlines keep coming. Every day, we meet new health-related stories about prescription and over-the-counter drugs, medical devices and procedures, the lifestyle we should adopt, foods we should favor, and dietary supplements that would surely add years to our lives. Rightly, we dismiss much of this as pure snake oil. Mayonnaise prevents Alzheimer's? Chelation therapy blasts away arterial plaque? Food coloring lowers bad cholesterol? Cinnamon clobbers diabetes? Grapefruit erases breast cancer? Watermelon slashes prostate cancer? Come on! But what about more serious-sounding claims? True enough, reports about ACE inhibitors and beta blockers, Advil and Motrin, 64-slice CT scans and PSA tests, drug-coated stents and the DASH diet appear to be far removed from snake oil, but false claims about any of these, this book asserts, are snake oil no less than absurd and fantastic claims about mayonnaise and Alzheimer's. Consider how glowing press releases of one time, even by renowned medica