 In the beginning of the course, we asked people a bunch of questions in episode one in a section called About You. And one of the questions in particular we asked was, do you think that there are health practices, for example, herbal remedies, spiritual harmony, dietary practices, traditional healing, that aren't being investigated either because the medicine and drug companies don't like them or because they don't fit current scientific theories? Now we had tens of thousands of people respond to this question and 85% of people said yes, that is, said that there are practices, alternative practices that aren't being investigated. Now why? That's a really big number. And again, we're interested in this episode as to why people believe these sorts of things. And the reason in this case is that I think a couple of things are going on. But one is just the information that people are exposed to when deciding whether there's actually something to these treatments. And if you think about it in terms of the media, television, movies, most of the sort of exposure that we have seems to be that there are definitely effective alternative treatments that aren't being investigated. And there seems to be a bias against traditional sorts of scientific medicine, evidence-based medicine. And some of the examples that our students on campus provided seem to suggest that. They mentioned things like traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, aromatherapy, homeopathy, a lot of the things we're talking about in this episode. And again, the second thing I think might be going on is that you don't really notice non-occurrences exactly as we heard about in the last episode. So if something isn't effective, if one of these treatments have been tested adequately using traditional evidence-based medicine and it came out negative, you wouldn't hear about it, would you? You would never see in the headlines in the news about a non-event. The fact that the placebo is no better than the active drug in this case. So you're not going to hear about those particular treatments. And so they won't factor into your rating as to whether these things are actually happening or not. Yep. I think the availability heuristic is operating very strongly here. So when you're trying to ask, when you're trying to answer that question, the experiments that have been done about traditional or alternative therapies don't come to mind very easily. You said, yep, there might not be reported in the media. But where do you get this information? How would you even assess if you're curious about a particular treatment? Where would you look to find out if it had been investigated and what the outcomes were? Well, one excellent resource is called the Cochrane Library. And it summarizes and interprets the really good scientific experiments that have been done on a wide range of treatments. For example, there's an entire section on complementary and alternative medicine. You can find treatments for everything from blood disorders to infectious disease or tobacco drugs and alcohol dependence. If you look at something like mental health and then depression, now here there are all sorts of alternative therapies that have been tested like acupuncture, light therapy, St. John's Wart. And for each treatment, they actually list the experiments and analysis that have been conducted. And what I like about it is they provide a plain language summary at the end of each of the articles. Now, in this particular case, there were 30 trials. There were 2,812 participants that were included in the review and big meta-analysis and analysis of analyses. But there was insufficient evidence that acupuncture can assist with the management of depression. So it's a great resource. I really think it can help with your everyday medical and health decision making. That's right. As an example, when we were traveling around the world doing these sort of conversations with people, I was suffering jet lag big time. And one of my colleagues recommended that I try melatonin, right, yeah, maybe. I didn't take his advice in this case, but maybe I should have. I got back home and plugged it into the Cochrane Library. And sure enough, it turns out that there have been dozens and dozens of experiments. And they've all come out really positively. So there really seems to be quite a benefit of melatonin in combating jet lag, which I had no idea about. So I think next time I might actually try it as a result. But this idea, I mean, this idea of the Cochrane Library, people really don't know where to find information, but this is such a good resource. If you want to know if there's anything to a lot of these treatments, and people I think are going to be very surprised by the sort of things that are included in that database. Like you said, from light therapy to herbal remedies to acupuncture and all sorts of things. And you can see whether there is anything to these treatments. The experiments that have been conducted are by people who are looking to find effects. They're not by a biased sample of scientists who are trying to demonstrate that they're not there. I mean, often they're done by drug companies who want to make money. If there's money to be found, then these alternative medicines will be regarded as medicine. They won't be alternative anymore, and people are going to profit from them if that were the case. So I think it's a great resource, and I think people ought to make use of it. But there's another really interesting claim or topic that I want to discuss, and that is vaccinations, immunization. And there's a real tendency, at least at the moment, we're seeing outbreaks of measles in Canada and Australia and throughout the United States and all over the world. And it turns out that a lot of parents are deciding not to vaccinate their children for one reason or another. And so I had an opportunity to chat with Ian Fraser, who's from the University of Queensland, and he's developed the cervical cancer vaccine, which is proving to be really quite useful.