In the post Alzheimer’s/CellPhones/Turmeric–Call me and let’s do curry RichardH discussed a study that found:

Cell phone exposure may be helpful in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease, a new study shows. The study, involving mice, provides evidence that long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves associated with cell phone use may protect against, and even reverse, Alzheimer’s disease. The study is published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

I just saw an article that mentioned a study that corroborated this result.

I started to imagine how a cell phone company could cause such publicity.

If you were a cell phone company, you could fund a study in which the mice were deprived of enough heat to be healthy.  In the study the researchers could then subject some of the mice to enough cell phone radiation to provide the heat they were missing.  The result would be mice that were healthier for the application of cell phone radiation.

Now everyone knows that you should not take a single scientific study as proof of anything.  You need some independent entity to replicate the study to see if they get the same results.  So as a cell phone company, you fund a second study that uses the same methods as the first.  Then you issue press releases about the study that corroborates the first one.

I am not saying that I have any information that this is exactly what happened or is anything like what happened.  It is not out of the realm of possibility, though.  The tobacco companies were notorious for funding studies like these.

This is why we need to know who funded the studies and we need to know the exact methodology of the study.  We also need a study by a truly independent group of scientists to corroborate or refute these results.  Of course, how do you know that the people refuting the study haven’t pulled some trick whereas the original study was completely honest?

To protect myself against these kinds of possibilities, I have decided that the amount of attention you need to pay to these studies depends on the seriousness of the consequences of any decision you make that depends on this knowledge.  If you make no decision or the decision is not very important, then who really cares.  If you are making a life changing decision, then you need to be a lot more sure of what you think you know.