Country music causes suicide. Turkeys can be sexually aroused by sticks. Breast-fed children are nicer. Stress gives you cancer and restless-leg syndrome.

You’ve read these headlines. Yeah, that makes sense, you probably thought. These are high-octane studies, after all, carefully conducted according to strict statistical standards, peer-reviewed and published in respectable scientific journals. And there’s no way to test their accuracy beyond buying a turkey — I presume they mean a live one — finding a stick and doing your own research, although try telling that to the cops when they show up in your backyard.

So you believe the studies.

There are more than 24,000 academic journals out there, publishing 1.3 million papers each year. So writes Ben Goldacre, doctor, journalist and creator of the Bad Science website, which analyzes studies solemnly reported in the media and exposes them as the scientific equivalent of mulch.

I love Goldacre mainly because I used to read “study reveals” stories and marvel that I didn’t yet have The Cancer, given that I secretly love embittered Waylon Jennings ballads and my legs do jump about a bit. I cannot summon the courage to ask my mother if I was breast-fed, we aren’t that sort of family.

What Goldacre does is take a headline, go to the study, unwrap the technique and the numbers, and explain why the conclusion is nonsense. You can do this too, as long as reporters link to the actual study online, which they tend not to. It matters not, the scientist having already waved the newspaper in front of the grants committee. “I have brought glory to the university, I have justified my salary,” he will say, and in a way he has. But the study is still a hill of beans.

Take that recent study claiming that two to three per cent of South Korean children have autism, or 1 in 38, much higher than the alleged American rate of 1 in 150. The study, as reported in The New York Times, “stunned experts and is likely to influence the way the disorder’s prevalence is measured around the world.” In a Goldacre state of mind, you link to the study and see flaws immediately.

The study “sought to screen” 55,000 children. Sounds good. But they reached only 36,000 children (less good), and from then on, the number of children covered, screened and sampled dwindles to 1,111 (not good at all). Some parents agreed to follow-up assessments for their children and some parents didn’t.

And there’s the problem. As one pediatrics professor pointed out (only the Boston Globe took time to ask him), the study assumed that autism rates were the same among both groups of children, those whose parents agreed or didn’t agree. But wouldn’t the parents who agreed be more likely to have been concerned about their kids in the first place?

The study was flawed in its design and likely to produce higher autism rates by its very nature. Self-selected groups don’t produce reliable numbers.

Here’s the odd part. I suspect autism rates are higher than we think and this study happily confirms my worst fears about a cause I am devoted to. But that’s another problem: we like studies that confirm our gut instincts.

Take the recent Canadian studies that link childhood physical abuse to, well, everything. According to them, people who suffered such abuse are more likely to have heart disease, osteoarthritis, ulcers, migraines, chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia and multiple chemical sensitivities.

These studies are published in places like the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma (I didn’t know Don Cherry viewers had their own magazine). They’re based on chunks of a Canadian Community Health Survey, which is StatsCan phoning people at random and asking them 288 pages of questions about their health, including if they felt tired a lot, which I bet they did after the survey. Would you tell a total stranger about your childhood, gonorrhea and whether you’ve considered suicide? I’m trying to imagine how skewed a sample of Canadians this would be.

The studies I mentioned are based on one survey question, “Were you ever physically abused by someone close to you?”

But “physical abuse” could mean anything, including gym class. Equally, doctors don’t agree on whether chronic fatigue syndrome and multiple chemical allergies even exist. The studies required people to self-diagnose. They asked, “Did a class of event maybe lead to an unwellness?” carefully fudged on what “linked” means, and answered their own question with “Further study is needed.” This does people in pain no favours.

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So why does bad science exist? There are millions of researchers — often in the fuzzy, hard-to-measure social sciences — looking for grants, and something has to fill the maw. The victim is you, a busy person watching a headline flashing at you as you wait on the subway platform.

It’s the tip of a huge iceberg, the industrial quantities of junk science generated by academics trying to justify their existence and often sponsored by corporations or those with an axe to grind. Goldacre, the man who helped kill the idiotic Brain Gym for children, thinks it’s appalling. “People get a peculiar thrill from health scares,” he writes. It makes us vulnerable to casual stupidity.