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Alcohol is the root of 62 diseases and a partial cause of dozens more (hsph.harvard.edu)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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[–] -4 points 1 month ago (1 child)

« Could » is the word. It literally means: we don’t know. It stays an assumption.

BTW, was Paracelsus considered in the study?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    If you get a disease that you wouldn't have gotten had you not consumed alcohol, then the alcohol consumption is the root cause of your disease. The study found 61 diseases for which this is the case for different people

    As I said, the root cause of many people's heart stopping has been a bullet passing through it - those people's hearts wouldn't have otherwise developed massive holes and would have gone on ticking had it not been for the bullet - but that doesn't mean that bullets piercing hearts is the exclusive reason that hearts stop.

    I'm not sure if the point you're trying to make is that not everyone who consumes alcohol gets these diseases or that alcohol consumption isn't the only cause of these diseases. Both of those statements are correct but neither are contrary to the study's conclusion.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    You cannot compare a bullet passing through a heart - an entirely physical process - with diseases from cancer - complex biochemical processes. This is statistically and logically wrong - like comparing apples and oranges, although your example is even more wrong. Apples and oranges are at least fruits, but heart and cancer?

    The entire field of ontology is complex in itself. I agree that alcohol CAN (!) increase the chance to get cancer, but - again - Paracelsus plays an imminent role, which is even not considered! Also possible interactions with all the other environmental, psychological etc variables are missing. This diminishes considerably the value of this study.

    If I have time and the motivation, I could dig deeper into the design. But it seems to have remarkable flaws and thus makes it in the context of medicine and science a pub, which should be considered with caution!

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  • [+] 1 point 1 month ago* (1 child)
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  • [–] -1 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    The more you write about science, statistics, and causality, the more obvious it becomes that your confidence is doing the heavy lifting where methodological understanding should be.

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  • [+] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago

    Discouraging is only that there are still people like you around who think they have a clue, while after just a few comments it becomes obvious that they know very little about the subject they are talking about. Mentioning Occam's Razor, a basic concept, which you even managed to misinterpret, was clear evidence of that. Even worse, instead of engaging in a technical discussion like someone genuinely interested in science would do, you increasingly turned the conversation into amateur psychoanalysis about my ego. That told me everything I needed to know. You are free to continue writing comments, but I won't be answering them. If you consider that a win, that's entirely up to you.

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