 Welcome to Thinking Out Loud, 30 minutes of thought-provoking conversation with UW-Shabuigan faculty. I'm Jackie Joseph Silverstein, campus executive officer and dean here at UW-Shabuigan and the host of today's show. I have with me Dr. James Cabral, who's been with us before and who you might know through his cool chemistry presentations that he does for kids each year. James is an associate professor in the chemistry department who came to us with a PhD from the University of Minnesota. James' thesis work focused on the biosynthesis of a putative anti-tumor agent. He's currently doing research though in the area of teaching and learning, making contributions to the field of teaching excellence as it relates to the teaching of chemistry. Today James will be talking to us about pseudoscience and how he uses that to instill students with a sense of the importance of scientific literacy. And then we'll explore a specific example of the insidiousness of pseudoscience and that is one that is a really important issue today. That's the issue around vaccines and their safety and the importance to public health. So to start with James, we talk about scientific literacy. What does that mean and why is it so important in today's world? Because we are so inundated with science and technology in this culture. It's very important for every individual citizen to have some basic level of scientific understanding. And I don't necessarily mean go to college and take a chemistry class but be aware of a lot of the scientific information is out there and at least be able to go to places where you can trust the information that you're getting. We have the entirety of the internet as a resource but there's a lot of places where you can get good information and a lot of places where you can get bad information. So it's important to be able to know exactly where to go to get the right information. Okay so pseudoscience we're going to talk about pseudoscience and I have a feeling most people don't know what that term means. It might sound to some people like it's got something to do with science fiction. Well a lot of times it does. I mean if you think about all the science fiction aspects the media that we have the shows you know a lot of information is presented as scientific. You know just just take Star Trek you know a lot of all that interesting future scientific technology how much of that is actually developed into facts. So you go back all the way you know we first had things like cell phones or things like tablets and now we have them today. But pseudoscience is more something that looks scientific or sounds scientific but is not necessarily based in scientific facts. So one of the big major situations that sort of referenced in pseudoscience is astrology. So you know thinking about how star signs relate to our everyday lives and people think okay movements of the planets are going to affect our day-to-day lives but really it doesn't. You know and there are a lot of other things like creation science you know which are meant to are presented as scientific fact but really are not based on the scientific method. What's a bigger issue these days is companies particularly that are in the idea of getting a profit for a product are going to take a little bit of cherry-picked scientific information as presented as these big grand studies and say well there's this we can use this as a basis to make a scientifically based product scientifically based product in quotes because it sounds like they're providing scientific information but it's really not correct scientifically supported information. So it's really their ability to put a spin on their product that's based on perhaps one study but the broad knowledge base in that field doesn't really provide weight to that one study. Right. The cliche for me is you know four out of five dentists support this particular you know I don't want to give a particular product but you know one of these toothpaste well a lot of times you see these companies taking oh we'll take that one the one that disagreed and then we'll base a product on that and say well here's the one guy that disagreed then we'll use that to sell a product rather than the majority that supported the other product. I see and I think another example that you and I might have talked a little bit about in the past is this whole thing with supplements. Oh yes. Everybody's taking fish oil, chondraton, sulfate. So it's important to know that that the FDA, Federal Drug Administration, does only do scientific testing for pharmaceutical drugs. They do not do any testing for supplements. So there are some private companies that do testing for supplements but other than that there is no rigorous studies done on these and so recently we've seen studies come out in relationship to things like fish oil to say there's really no benefit to taking these but we have all of these marketed supplements going back years that say oh if you take this particular supplement you're going to get this beneficial effect where the studies do not simply support those things. You know going back to my past we're talking about St. John's wort which had a vote you know 20 or 30 years ago or something like echinacea which also had a similar vote and it was oh if you take echinacea you won't have to worry about getting a cold except that there's no evidence that echinacea ever had any benefits. Same thing with St. John's wort in effecting mood. You know it's sort of hit or miss and you don't know whether or not it's anything more beneficial than the placebo effect. So that's interesting and this is something we hadn't talked about. Are were those based on any piece of scientific evidence or were they based on extrapolation of saying this contains this active ingredient so therefore it must have an effect. Well sometimes these are based on like local herbal medicine so if you go back to like ancient Chinese medicine or you know any part of the world this particular herb was thought to have this particular beneficial effect and sometimes they're marketed without studies sometimes there are studies that show there may be something you know and it often depends on the size of the study so if you test it on 100 people you could get one result but if then you test it on 10,000 people you could get something very different right and you don't know if the proper controls were used you don't know if there are multiple things you know most multiple chemicals within those herbs that are actually doing what they're supposed to do. There's a lot of different levels of this that we could get into if we wanted to but the idea is that if there are studies that tend to support it they're really not sure whether or not this particular herb is actually beneficial or not. Okay okay so going back now to scientific literacy a little bit how much knowledge does someone need to have to be able to make an informed decision around their own health or other science related issues and to be able to separate the science from the pseudo-science? I think a lot of it has to do with sort of basic understanding not just of science because you could have a little bit of scientific information you know whether it's self-read or you've taken a class a long time ago but because there are so many other aspects to this because you have the economics of this when you're talking about products you have the psychology you know a lot of these are going through a lot of these companies are going through advertisers so you know they can prey on specific language so it's also language so you have your English so there are different pieces of this that sort of come together so you don't necessarily need to have a PhD in science to understand this or even a BS you know a little bit of little bit of light reading can get you a lot of information in terms of okay I know what a chemical is I know what an atom and an element is I know certain things do certain reactions you know and that's that's all you really need to know and then you can as long as you have that basis then you can read and process the information properly but it's not simply and this is what I tell to my students it's not simply about the science you have to understand all the different aspects that come into play to sell a product you know and how people react to that and so there's you know particularly the psychological aspects of things are very important and gets back to the critical thinking skills that we try to um get our get our students up to speed on yeah yeah so you know and it's and it's sometimes strange for my students I think you know they're expecting to come in general chemistry or organic and just get all of the scientific information that's in the textbook but to me I don't think that's enough you know we're training citizens here you know it's critical thinking it's a liberal arts education they need to know more because if they're just going out with the scientific information and don't know how to process it properly and recognize it properly they're not going to be able they'll be taken advantage of just like anyone else so it isn't just about the scientific information it's a sort of greater understanding of how the world works really interesting so how you started talking a little bit about your classroom and what your students expect how do you incorporate this stuff into your classroom what kinds of activities do you do with your your students so that they really get to understand um this scientific literacy well in the very beginning when I first started teaching I always wanted to include a lot of different media so I was showing youtube videos and internet articles and then I sort of gravitated towards well there's a lot of junk science or pseudoscience being talked about this is a way to get students engaged in topics that are outside necessarily all the information that I'm presenting them and so now now that a lot of students if not all the students have some kind of device that they can do internet searching we actually do um projects in class where I have them say okay find some student science for me and if they're having trouble well I'll provide them a topic like the anti-vax movement or climate change you know or something else that sort of generates a lot of skeptics you know and so now they'll know okay a lot of the websites that you bring up when you do a search a lot of them are going to be giving you a lot of false information where can you go to get good information so that's sort of a basic um activity that we start off with and then it usually builds to some kind of major project these days for me it's a video project where then they either need to create a product that they have to sell or they have to take a product or some other situation a situation that's out there and debunk it and say okay this is what you're being told this is what the actual science is do those things match you know because it's entirely possible well this product does what it's supposed to do even though it does sounds kind of it landed outlandish maybe it does what it's supposed to do that's not usually the case you know and we've had products like uh spray sealers you know where you they spray them over a grading and say nothing goes through well it doesn't actually work that way and my students actually did some experiments to prove it so that's the kind of thing that i want to train them to do is to think about what kind of bs if you allow me to say it right is out there and so be able to see past it and see what's really happening i see so you're really engaging them and in the in science at that time i would hope so yeah yeah that's that's great that's great um and in terms of the websites do you do a lot of um do you talk a lot about you know now this website is likely not to be a good one because it's sponsored by x versus this that's the nyh sponsored website or the fda sponsored website i try to do that i have to be a little bit careful because there's a lot of anti-government sentiment out there you know even among our students so even when you tell them oh this is the fda this is the nyh oh but wait that's the government you know so i do tend to come across some anti-government sentiment and i say well look one of the things that you can trust is is it based on peer reviewed scientific information you know and a lot of them are not really sure exactly what that means so then i have to go back and say okay this is these are peer reviewed papers this is the say american chemical society um or a journal like the journal the american medical association and say this is peer reviewed science this is what peer reviewed means if you can find references on websites whether they're government or not this is something that you should be able to trust and because you can bring up those papers and actually read the basic scientific information i think your audience might not all be aware of what the term peer reviewed means before we go on that's i think in light of some of what you're going to talk about later it's important for people to understand that so um you mentioned my graduate work right at the very beginning and so um when i was in in graduate school it's all about papers publishing papers so you do your work you do your research you know and you talk to your advisor you're about it and you want to write a paper and you submit it to a journal so journal the american chemical society you submit it and then they have peers what would be experts on that particular subject and so it's a group of three to five to ten people who read the work and are able to analyze it based on their own expertise and see whether or not the science is good whether procedures were followed has there been any plagiarism which is often a problem and then you know that is part of the publishing process and then they will recommend if it's if it's good science if they think it's good science they'll recommend to the publisher saying this is good science we should publish this and let the world know of this good science work so and it's really specific in terms of experts so if you're if you're doing research on the oak leaf then your paper will submit be submitted to experts on the oak leaf so it's you know peer reviewed really peers not just a chemist and another chemist it's a chemist who is an expert on the reaction that you are working right so a panel of experts are vetting your research yes or what you've written in your paper yes and that that is going to be really important i think as we continue talking so now let's get to that topic that i know you're passionate about and it really helps us to understand why scientific literacy is so important and how pseudoscience can actually impact people's thinking and actions there's this big national conversation around vaccines to vaccinate your children or not how did this conversation begin where did it come from there was a medical doctor in the uk in the late 90s who published a paper that suggested a connection between the m mr vaccine and autism and it instantly created a firestorm and ever since there has been people who have thought there was a link between vaccines and autism or vaccines and other diseases also it was none the only one it turns out that this particular doctor falsified a lot of information he was paid and not from the typical sources so it's important to note that scientists also get grants you know from private or public sources but he was getting sort of paid under the table he was going to be developing a company that was going to take advantage of this connection and it was also a very small study as i recall it was only a dozen or two people children that he was following and so that really doesn't represent a large group so but even so the paper was published you know and you know i will say the peer review process does have its flaws and again you know and this was before the 24 really 24 hour news media so again it created a firestorm people said well we needed we can't take vaccines because they'll cause autism well it turns out studies since then have shown that there is no connection between vaccines and autism we don't understand what autism comes from where autism comes from you know it's an ongoing process and the psychology is people who have autistic children they want they want to know what happened they want to cure you know and and and that's a natural aspect of this and so they when they see information presented like this they immediately say okay we have a reason except that isn't there's no connection so they're really that wasn't the cause but even you know once you know it's kind of like a virus once you once you put that into the system it's very difficult to get it to stop and so even now 70 years later we have huge pockets of people not only in the united states but other parts of the world that are not vaccinating their children based on this one study interesting so a faulty study led to the idea that vaccines are dangerous even though there have been other studies that have shown that is not the case people are still holding on to this i think you address this a little but it goes back to your your earlier comment about scientific literacy including understanding some of the psychology and that sort of thing so do you think that's why people are holding on to these studies this whole idea of they want a reason which of course happens when any of us have children or siblings who have a disease or we do we want to know why we have it because if we understand why maybe they can fix it for us that's only really one psychology you know there are there are those people that want blame but you know that's more of an emotional response you know you have a lot of people that are very much into the green organic natural roots you know and that's a different psychology and will refuse not only vaccines but pretty much all western medicine you have people that are very much the anti-government you know anti-control aspect to say you know and there's there's conspiracy theories out there that say well the government wants us vaccinated not to make sure that we don't get polio or smallpox or other things like that it's because they're actually injecting us with micro recording devices you know there's there's those kinds of people out there too you know so there are a lot of different reasons why someone may maintain an anti-vaccine psychology so it's not it's not you know if you if we were trying to sort of counteract these psychologies there's not one silver bullet you know right something released from the american chemical society recently was how do you argue with an anti-vaxxer and there's really not one way because there are all these different psychologies that are at play you know so you really have to understand what where the person is coming from in order to talk to them and then there are just the people who contradict you just because right you know and then those are the people that if you present them with the scientific information will just dig in their heels and resist you further right so what is it about vaccines that people think are harmful is it the the deactivated virus itself or is it something else well there are there are people who believe that you know you are going to get sick because it's still the virus or bacteria or toxin present but a lot of the a lot of the mince information has gone towards some of the other materials that they add in you know because this is a biologic you have preservatives there are there are preservatives there's a preservative called thio merisol that contains a mercury atom you know and if you don't have that basic scientific understanding you might equate it with the silvery metal that you know scientists have always played with it's not the same thing there is a mercury atom but when that thio merisol is broken down in the body it is passed through and does not bioaccumulate like other mercury compounds can there are adjuvants which help the immune response that are based in aluminum again people have targeted that but none of these compounds have been shown to affect anything related to autism or any other disease it's important to note that thio merisol after this all happened in the early 2000s was removed from most vaccines as a preventative measure by the FDA even though there was no reason they needed to do so so most vaccines don't even have it anymore so anyone who actually brings that up again their their information is flawed because it's not in most vaccines interesting and there probably is also an aspect of the quantity of these additives that are in the vaccine that's also that you know that's also but again they're typically in such small amounts that there really couldn't have any effect you know there's there's a lot of discussion about are there any toxic materials out there well everything has the potential to be toxic it's about the dosage you know water can be toxic whether you drink too much or you drown you know so it's about how much your body has the ability to process and what we're injecting the body has the ability to process and excrete out so there's a really important element to all this that that we've talked about and that is the public health aspect and the public health threatened some ways that the anti-vaccine group is is really bringing forward in some ways the whole talk about the herd mental the herd aspect of vaccination so there's the idea of herd immunity so you know if there are there are certain people because of their immune systems that cannot be vaccinated they don't wouldn't have the ability to process the vaccine properly they would get sick and that's understandable however those people are protected based on the people that are surrounded are also vaccinated so if you build up a wall of people around a sensitive person who are vaccinated it greatly diminishes the possibility of being infected and so the more people you have a society that are vaccinated against any particular disease the less likely you're going to have infections but if you have huge pockets of people that are not vaccinated and somehow that disease gets introduced immediately you're going to have a lot of people coming down being sick and that was the case last winter with the measles and so there was that outbreak that was based in disneyland in california where unfortunately in california you do have a wide area pockets of pockets of places where people are not vaccinating their children and so when you were exposed to a lot of kids in a small space like a daycare or an amusement park someone has it and there's not kids that are vaccinated around them they're all going to be exposed and a lot of them are going to get sick and that's what happened you know a huge group of people were not vaccinated against the measles and a lot of people were sick and I think it's interesting to note that people might say hey the measles you have them and then it's done but there can be serious outcomes of having the measles yeah and it's not just the measles we could think about smallpox too small it's not smallpox chickenpox well smallpox too but chickenpox now it remains in your body and so now we have all these advertisements now for shingles later on measles can be mild it has the potential to be mild but it also has a lot of side effects and one of them can be encephalitis swelling of the brain which can lead to death you know and the incidence rates the incidence rates of encephalitis is not minimal it's one in a thousand I believe you know so that's not a small risk to take you know but but there are people who think well that's not even a big risk you know I'll just get sick and I'll get better but that's not always the case so what do you think it's going to take you said that there are going to be people who will dig in their heels people believe these things for lots of reasons if it was your job if the public health service hired you to go around the country to educate people about this what do you think you could tell them that could change the mind of at least some of them I think some people will be willing to listen to reason if you present them with the scientific information I think at least a few people would be willing to listen and say well maybe I was wrong I was listening to the wrong sources if I'm presented with the the proper scientific information I know that it's better to be vaccinated there are some people you're just not going to reach whether you are kind or aggressive some people will just not come along to your way of thinking so you have to try to reach out to the people who you may believe can change their opinion you know and it takes listening to people and I think that's one of the things that we have we are not doing a very good job of these days in society there's a lot of people talking but not a lot of people who are listening properly and if we could be better listeners we could find the right words to say to those people and say look it's okay that you were thinking this way but here's the proper information I want you to rethink what you have done previously and maybe you'll change so let's go back you talked about people who just can't be immunized some of it may have to do with some illness that they might have that they just can't take a vaccine but there are other reasons that we from a public health perspective we want as many people as possible to be vaccinated well I again it goes back to herd immunity we want to make sure that we we want to eliminate these viruses because you know the more diseases that are spread the greater the pressure it is on the health system you know and if people are coming down with with diseases that we should have been eradicated or minimized again one we might have lost the ability to treat those you know sometimes those things are forgotten but again we want it's better when people aren't sick you know we don't want to be sending people to the hospital so doctors it's add pressure to the health care system you know so there there are a lot of those sort of economic reasons that we want to have vaccines out there because well people don't put pressure on the health care system so keep them healthy you know it's better for everyone you know we don't want people getting sick so that's just you know it's not just a health aspect this is the economy too you know we all these things sort of mixed together so well I think another example recently is whooping vaccine for whooping cough and there's been some resurgence of that we have about a minute and a half left can you talk a little bit about this whole idea of resurgence well there's a couple of aspects to that there there are some there are some scientists who think that we're developing sort of an immunity to the immunity you know that our bodies need a booster and there are vaccines out there that require boosters so whooping cough is not one of those that's been thought to need a booster so now we're seeing more outbreaks so now in the teenage years it's suggested of getting whooping cough also parents of or caregivers for small children you know because small children can't get that vaccine right away so getting getting again the herd immunity around those children to make sure that they're they're not getting they're getting protected from anyone who might have it you know so and there are there are going to be other diseases out there that are related to vaccines that will constantly be studied and say well maybe we need a booster maybe maybe we need a better vaccine you know so there's a lot of ongoing studies being done here so you know again we should be having these conversations but positive conversations not necessarily dealing with a movement that is causing so many problems right so in the last minute i'm going to ask you a question i know you have a two and a half year old son has he been vaccinated yes he has followed the full vaccination schedule so another thing is don't give all these vaccines at once again there's no evidence to support that that's a bad thing he's fully vaccinated and so are my wife and i and your wife and you so that you're not bringing illnesses home to him right including the flu vaccine uh-huh uh-huh and you're a little young to be getting the flu back based on what they yeah what the indications are for the flu vaccine better safe than sorry yeah any last words in the last few seconds i'm not here to tell you to get vaccinated i'm here to tell you just to get the proper information and be educated so i am not a medical doctor i just want people to be able to get the right kind of information read the right information and use your critical thinking skills exactly okay thank you james this was really really interesting and i hope explains this issue and gives people a better understanding of it my pleasure