From cancer and cannabis to perverse research incentives, we’ve been busy confronting nonsense. Here’s a roundup of recent media appearances and pickups featuring ACSH experts across the web, including coverage in Yahoo News, RealClearHealth, RealClearScience, and Science and Culture.
Yahoo News picked up an editorial from Connecticut’s Republican-American examining the mounting public health concerns surrounding legal, high-potency cannabis. As retail prices tumble and consumption surges, the editorial highlighted analysis by ACSH Director of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Science Dr. Josh Bloom on the potential link between heavy marijuana smoking and lung cancer. While cannabis smoke doesn’t contain every single carcinogen found in tobacco, it contains many of the very same toxins—and potentially others unique to the plant.
RealClearScience featured Dr. Barbara Billauer's deep dive into the high-stakes legal and medical controversy surrounding Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS). The piece examines the fierce debate between biomechanical engineers and pediatric specialists over whether violent shaking alone can generate enough force to cause the classic “triad” of subdural hematoma, retinal hemorrhages, and brain swelling. With criminal convictions hanging on medical testimony, Billauer scrutinized the limits of biomechanical models, the difficulty of establishing rigorous clinical controls and why diagnostic criteria continue to face scrutiny in the courtroom.
RealClearHealth (and Science) ran Arielle Selya's examination of the structural dysfunction plaguing academic publishing. The piece pulls back the curtain on the modern "publish or perish" model, showing how institutional reliance on citation counts, impact factors and grant overhead has transformed scientific inquiry into a volume game. When career survival hinges on landing flashy positive results, researchers face heavy pressure to publish their research—even if it's junk.
Science and Culture highlighted two separate ACSH reports in a post on the proliferation of shoddy medical advice. The piece cited Mauro Proença's breakdown of a recent study where researchers tricked commercial AI chatbots into diagnosing a fabricated disease (“bixonimania”), despite the bogus source paper citing a lab aboard the USS Enterprise and stating it was made up. The article also spotlighted a piece by new ACSH contributor Adriana Torossian showing that 57% of young American women rely on social media influencers for health and wellness information. Torossian emphasized that platform algorithms prioritize viral engagement over clinical efficacy, often funneling users toward dubious alternative therapies.
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