If we can’t point to any studies to support the idea of flossing your teeth, does this mean we shouldn’t bother doing it? 📨 Read StuartJRitchie's latest newslette:
If we can’t point to any studies – or any high-quality studies, at least – to support the idea of flossing your teeth, does this mean we shouldn’t bother doing it?I thought back to the dental floss debate this week as I got into repeated Twitter arguments about the value of scientific studies to answer important practical questions.
At the weekend I hadabout the claim that social media is causing mental health problems in children and young people. Once I dug into the studies that are often cited in this debate, I found that they were generally quite weak. A few people disagreed with some of the statistical points I’d made, which is all good and worthwhile. But others took issue with the whole framing. “This isn’t something you can study,” they said . “Why would you expect there to be good studies on an issue like this? It’s just crashingly obvious from talking to young people and their parents that something has gone very wrong and that social media is at the root of it.”on the NHS advice to put your baby in the “tummy time” position to help develop their muscles, some people said : “Well, we don’t need studies to recommend this – we have good logical,reasons to think that allowing your baby to exercise a variety of muscles would be beneficial.” The first thing to say is that there’s a double standard in these kinds of arguments. In the social media debate, proponents of the idea that social media harms children often shout about new studies from the rooftops, so long as the results support their position. The case is largelyon the back of studies, and the entire reason I wrote my article was that Jonathan Haidt and others hadabout how they were convinced by the studies that social media had a negative causal effect on the mental health of young people . So if you use scientific studies to make a case, it seems more than a little odd, when someone comes along and criticises those studies, to say “guess what,, we’re moving the goalposts – we don’t need studies to know we’re right”. Sorry, but you brought up the studies – you started it. Live by the study, die by it too.we need scientific studies – or, more specifically, randomised controlled trials – to answer a question? When are we justified in making up our mind without completely unassailable causal evidence?The idea that we can just do a randomised trial for everything was famously satirised in thefor preventing “death and major trauma” when jumping out of aeroplanes. The trial found no effect of parachutes – but that might’ve been because the plane was a small two-seater propeller plane… and it was stationary… and it was parked on the ground at the time. Okay, point taken: sometimes a randomised trial, which happens under highly controlled conditions, can’t be expected to accurately represent reality . You would be being very misleading – actually, you’d be giving lethally wrong advice – if you told people to stop using parachutes on the basis of this highly unrepresentative study.do a randomised trial. Most obviously, there’s never been a randomised trial of smoking and lung cancer, where we deliberately give a randomly-selected group of people cigarettes and wait a number of years to see how many cancer diagnoses there are compared to a control group. Morality completely rules this out, so we have to rely on other forms of evidence. That might be taking a little too limited a view of randomised trials. There are more pragmatic ways of doing the trial: you don’t need to force one randomised group to stop doing something entirely; instead, you can encourage another group to do it more often than they would have otherwise . For smoking and lung cancer, you could do a study where you tried to get randomly-selected people to smoke
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