Interview: Matthew Facciani on fighting healthcare misinformation

0:02Matthew Facciani: This is TED Health, a podcast from TED, and I'm your host, Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter. Today, we're talking about something that's at the heart of essentially every debate that we have about science, society, and what's true. And that's why do we believe what we believe? And why is it so hard to change those beliefs? My guest today, Dr. Matthew Facciani, is a researcher at the University of Notre Dame in the Computer Science and Engineering Department. He's an interdisciplinary social scientist who studies political polarization and moral reasoning across neuroscience, psychology, and sociology.

0:36Matthew Facciani: His new book, Misguided, digs into the psychology behind our most deeply held views, why they feel so personal, and why evidence often isn't enough to shift our perspectives, especially in an age when misinformation spreads faster and farther than ever. I find it so valuable to understand how our beliefs shape how we interpret information. And what I love about Matthew's work is that it doesn't stop at diagnosing the problem. He offers a practical and research-driven framework for how we can communicate science more clearly, listen more generously, and engage across lines of difference with curiosity instead of combat.

1:16Matthew Facciani: After my interview with Matthew, stick around for a TEDx talk by Karen Daw, who explains why so many scientific findings we encounter in the media can be misleading and how anyone, not just doctors and scientists, can learn to judge the reliability of health research more confidently. But before we dive in, a quick break to hear from our sponsors. Thank you.

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7:11Matthew Facciani: And now here's my conversation with Dr. Matthew Facciani. Matthew, you study why our brains latch onto certain stories and then reject other ones. What do you think is the human side of misinformation? Like what's happening in our heads and our hearts when we believe something that isn't quite true?

7:31Dr. Karen Dawe: So my background is in social science, and I think a lot about the social structures we interact with. So when I think about how we process information, I often think about it through a lens of how does this connect me with my own group or distance me from my own group? So when we think about different beliefs, sometimes beliefs that are not rooted in the best available evidence, we can think, oh, maybe that person's, you know, misled by not hearing the right facts or something. But I think that only tells part of the story because we also have to consider, is this belief helping that person connect with their group?

8:07And if it is connecting with their group, then they may be more motivated to protect it and maintain it.

8:14Dr. Karen Dawe: And when you think about someone's day-to-day life, an abstract belief, such as even something like the earth being round or flat, that doesn't impact your day-to-day life every day so much. But if all of your friends believe that the earth is flat, for example, and that gives you a lot of community and emotional support, then rejecting that belief and removing that community can be much more impactful in your day-to-day life.

8:40Matthew Facciani: I find that so fascinating. And I think that really opens the door to a deeper truth that you point out often is that believing misinformation isn't a flaw of character, but actually part of being human. I think most of us believe misinformation is something that other people fall for. But your research suggests that it's a universal vulnerability. What are some subtle signs that any of us might be consuming information that's misleading or incomplete?

9:09Dr. Karen Dawe: Yeah, so I think there's a few different layers we can approach this. One can be thinking about our own identities, being mindful of how much our own identities overlap with each other. and if we are deriving so much of our self-esteem and social support from a narrow set of identities and meanings because we know from social science that we're motivated to act in certain ways that are consistent with the meanings of our identities. So ideally you'd want a really broad set of diverse identities so you're not over-reliant on this narrow lens of meanings that give you all of your self-esteem and support.

9:42Dr. Karen Dawe: So you can think of just an extreme example of only having a few identities, and all of those identities completely overlap with each other. Let's say you have a religious identity, a political identity. It doesn't matter what they are, but let's pretend they completely align and share 100 % of their meanings. And then also your friends and community also are among that place of worship or your church, wherever you go to meet those people. So then any information that challenges your politics, for example, is attacking your 100 % sense of self, and it can feel very personally threatening, and then you're extremely motivated to reject information that challenges it.

10:20Dr. Karen Dawe: Conversely, if you have a broader set of identities, then any piece of information that challenges just one of those identities is not completely attacking your overall sense of self. It's only attacking a small piece of that. So I think being mindful of how our identities are organized and how we're getting our self-esteem and social support can be a good first step.

10:41Matthew Facciani: You know, hearing that, it makes me think about how the public conversation sometimes oversimplifies all of this. When you step back, what feels most misunderstood about misinformation in the public conversation? And what nuance do you wish more people knew?

10:57Dr. Karen Dawe: I think there's still a lot of emphasis on just sharing the facts as a way to try and reduce misinformation. And as I mentioned, we're all vulnerable to misinformation based on the types of communities we belong to and the identity structures that we have. So I think just understanding that emotional and social component would help advance the conversation in a way that I think is more complete. And then even the word misinformation, I think, can be challenging because it is also incomplete sometimes. Sometimes there is a kernel of truth to what someone believes, even if it's mostly untrue. And I think that's a challenge of using these terms like misinformation, where it suggests that it's this binary of true versus false, and you're misinformed, I have the facts, and there's not really a lot of room for discourse.

11:49Dr. Karen Dawe: Where in reality, a lot of these claims, and a lot of just beliefs in general are pretty messy. A lot of times they exist in more gray areas. So I think we have to be careful about how we approach these topics when we're having one-on-one conversations, because it can really be unhelpful to immediately put someone on the defensive by saying, you're misinformed, you fall for misinformation. That sounds like a personal attack, and a lot of times it is. So I think just being mindful of how we use these terms in our conversations can be helpful too.

12:21Matthew Facciani: That nuance is so important, especially because the topic gets tied to some of the biggest challenges I think that we face socially and politically in this moment. And so on that note, polarization is the word of the day, right? From your vantage point as an interdisciplinary researcher, what role does misinformation play in fostering polarization?

12:46Dr. Karen Dawe: So when you think about polarization, the reason that it's linked to misinformation is because we're in such different information environments. We're getting information from very different sources than someone else. So it can make it really challenging to have productive dialogue with someone who's on a different political aisle than us. And I think that's why I often talk about politics in my book and in my work, because it provides such a salient and clean example of how identities can motivate us to process information differently. Especially in the United States, we have this very clear in-group and out-group effect of political polarization.

13:22Matthew Facciani: Your research looks at social networks, digital and real life. Can strong offline relationships actually buffer us against misinformation, polarization?

13:33Dr. Karen Dawe: So when we think about social media, we know that whenever you click on something, you're more likely to see that type of content more often. That's the algorithm trying to keep you engaged online. And that makes it really easy to find communities and people that think just like you do. And now with artificial intelligence, you can find your own chatbot that aligns with your beliefs more and can validate what you already believe. So it really accelerates this process of maintaining the existing identity structures that we have, and it can make it more challenging to meet people who think differently than we do.

14:06Dr. Karen Dawe: Some of my research has found that just having one meaningful connection that has a different political background than you can significantly reduce your political polarization and your political bias and how you process information. So all it takes is just having one person in a list of close associates that has different politics than you. And we find that can significantly improve your ability to objectively process information. So there is this idea of how powerful those offline connections can be because you're able to connect with someone who thinks different than you consider their viewpoint and also evaluate your own beliefs too.

14:47Dr. Karen Dawe: I think that's another big part of it is not only are we able to connect with people who think differently than us when we think about how to have more proactive dialogue and consider where they're coming from, but also from our own beliefs, we can be more objective and less biased when we are talking with someone different than us because it forces us to reflect on our own biases and consider how we came to that belief more than just talking to people who already all agree with us.

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19:37you.

19:41Matthew Facciani: On this podcast and in the public discourse, mental health professionals are talking a lot about stress, anxiety, and overwhelm from being online. Do you see a link between information an overload and the way we process or maybe misprocess news and science.

20:00Dr. Karen Dawe: I do. And I feel it in myself, too. I use social media. I'm online a lot. And I can feel it emotionally whenever I'm consuming a lot of political content. I really like this term, the conflict entrepreneur. But I think it really sums up a lot of the information we can consume online where there are people who are profiting from spreading outrage and trying to keep us engaged. And it can be really exhausting to constantly consume that. So I think that also does connect to some of this research finding that when people do take breaks from social media, they tend to improve their overall well being because they're just not as exposed to that stream of information overload, a lot of which is very emotionally taxing.

20:45Matthew Facciani: I'd love to ask you, Matthew, you spend so much time translating research for the public from where you sit, what's one thing that you wish doctors and scientists were better at communicating with everyday people? I do this. I go on TV or on podcasts and talk about public health and science. So what could I be doing better?

21:05Dr. Karen Dawe: I think addressing uncertainty too in the research as well as the scientific process. There's some research finding now that when scientists communicate in a way that showcases that uncertainty or explains the scientific process more, their messages are perceived as more trustworthy, as opposed to just confidently saying, here's the answer, it's 100 % true. And this is something that you absolutely don't have to worry about, or you absolutely do have to worry about or something like that. So speaking too confidently can lose trust, especially as the evidence changes. And again, it's challenging because the algorithms, again, rewarding more sensationalist content.

21:46So I think it's important

21:48Dr. Karen Dawe: for us to try to constantly balance that. I know as I'm saying this, I know there's a bunch of caveats to it, and there's no perfect way to communicate because there's going to be trade offs. So ultimately, you have to be mindful of those trade offs and try to speak with as much directness, but also as much integrity as you can.

22:07Matthew Facciani: I think that piece around uncertainty is a huge one and something that those of us in the science community really felt during the pandemic when many people spoke with so much certainty. And in reality, there was, and there always is, uncertainty all the time. We often talk about checking sources, right? But I think that can feel unrealistic when people are exhausted or they're short on time or just don't know how to do that. What are some simpler everyday habits that the average person can do to become more resilient to misleading content?

22:42Dr. Karen Dawe: We often talk about media literacy as far as the ability to fact check. And one term that's often thrown around is this term of lateral reading, which is instead of looking vertically within the article that you see online, you open a tab, look laterally and say who the author is, who is funding them, what is their background, what could their target audience be? Is the media outlet platforming them? Do they offer corrections? Do they disclose funding? And that could be a guide to seeing how credible this particular source is, as opposed to even diving into the nuances of that article. Like maybe that person is writing in a very charismatic, convincing way, but you can look further on what their background is and see that they have a clear conflict of interest.

23:28Dr. Karen Dawe: So that falls into the media literacy bubble that I think can be really helpful. And then the psychological literacy is another pillar that I have discussed, and that is focused more on our identities and our networks. And then also, I think another component that can be applied to everyday people, even if they're not scientists, is scientific literacy. So understanding some basics of how the scientific process works, some basic research methods, some basic statistics. Sometimes the message in a headline is not actually what the study found. How the study is framed in the headline might not actually be what was found.

24:06Dr. Karen Dawe: So there was a recent study about melatonin and heart failure. So there was this abstract that was a conference abstract that was coming out that found this link between melatonin use and higher risks of heart failure. But there was a lot of confounding variables that didn't account for, such as the different lifestyle factors, the amount of melatonin, and maybe people that were having more sleep difficulties reported taking melatonin more than those who didn't. So there's a lot of things that were left off in the nuances and the limitations. And then also some of the headlines were like taking melatonin nearly doubles your risk of heart failure.

24:42Dr. Karen Dawe: That sounds really scary. But when you look at the data, the most important thing is what does that nearly doubles actually mean?

24:50Matthew Facciani: From two to four out of millions?

24:53Dr. Karen Dawe: There's an increase of about 2 % between the two groups. So the no melatonin group had this 2 % risk and the melatonin group had a 4 % risk. You might just see that headline of melatonin doubles heart failure risk. And it sounds really scary. But then just checking a couple things, like what was the absolute difference between the two groups, a nice way to check what the study was actually meaning.

25:18Matthew Facciani: 100%. And I actually think, you know, some of that burden should fall on the news organizations too, to do their job. I spent a lot of my time working with news because I feel so strongly that we got to be doing better all the way around.

25:31Dr. Karen Dawe: Yeah. So, I mean, that is a challenge because ultimately you're asking people to do more work. Even if it's a little bit more work, you're still asking people to add in something to their busy lives. So I think that places the importance on science communicators to try and share their information in a way that can reach people. So developing that network of trusted messengers is really important.

25:54Matthew Facciani: And for families, that everyday resilience starts even earlier. So I I want to talk about kids and teens for a minute. Parents often ask how to raise media literate kids without shutting them off from the world. Based on your research, what practical guidance would you give families trying to help young people build healthy information habits?

26:16Dr. Karen Dawe: Ideally, we would have that in schools. That's the short answer. And there are a few states in the US that have media literacy programs. And there are free resources available. Like the News Literacy Project, I think is one that has a lot of free online resources specifically for kids and teens. And sometimes they're even in more engaging formats like games. That's something that I've been studying and I think can be really effective is developing these media literacy games themselves, which teach these skills as the kid is learning it. There's a game called Bad Vax for vaccine misinformation, the Bad News Game, Harmony Square.

26:54Dr. Karen Dawe: There's a whole bunch of them that are free and available that anyone can go and play and share with their kids. And a lot of these games are really cool because again, they're nonpartisan and they teach you to identify manipulation techniques out in the wild before you're exposed to them. So trying to understand, okay, this headline is going to be misleading me. And I remember reading about that in this game that I played. So I think those are very useful. But again, I think at a higher level, ideally, we would have some of those media literacy skills built in the classroom.

27:27Matthew Facciani: So let's talk about high pressure situations for a minute. During moments of crisis, public health emergencies, a natural disaster, maybe heightened community stress, misinformation tends to spike. What can people do in the moment to stay grounded and avoid being swept up in emotionally charged or misleading narratives?

27:50Dr. Karen Dawe: I think the first thing is to just take a step back and be mindful of our own emotions. So if we see something that makes us feel very emotional online, that to me is a good indicator to pause and reflect on what we're seeing. Is this verified by other sources? Is this person trying to keep me outraged so they can profit off of my emotion and attention. And I think that's one thing that we all can do before clicking reshare, trying to pause and think, is this actually true? Or is this trying to manipulate me is a good step that we all can do better at.

28:25Matthew Facciani: So Matthew, we may feel ashamed when we realize that we've shared something inaccurate, but shame can shut down learning, right? So what are healthier, more compassionate ways for people to correct themselves or others without damaging changing relationships?

28:41Dr. Karen Dawe: When I talk about it, I don't speak about them in terms of changing someone's mind. I don't think it should be the goal of how we enter in any of these types of conversations. Personally, I talk about it in terms of how can we at least turn down the heat of polarization and increase our odds of being heard. So then the person can absorb what we're saying and then make their own decision later on if they want to update their belief. But once we develop a trusted relationship with them and we know them, I think then there's certain techniques that can be helpful. So the first thing, you have to have that baseline mutual respect.

29:13Dr. Karen Dawe: So that's really critical. And that's why it can be very hard to have productive offline conversations with strangers. So that's why it's really challenging and often unproductive to try and debate someone online that you don't know. So assuming you're having a one-on-one conversation with someone who you have this mutual respect with, you can try to relate to shared identities that you both have. What do we have in common? I think focusing on that can be really helpful. So maybe we live in the same neighborhood, so we care about the well-being of that neighborhood. Or maybe we have the same interests in raising healthy children or keeping our community safe, or even just broader things like connecting on shared interests even can be helpful.

29:58Dr. Karen Dawe: and trying to basically show that person that you're on the same team. I mean, so much of our conversations, I think, can be boiled down to, does this person think I have their best interests at heart? And that can be shown by displaying how much you're on the same team with them. Do you share common interests? Do you share common values? And do you share common identities? And then also when we're actually having the discussion about the particular claim that we are disagreeing about, we can try to reframe it in a way that fits their background and their values more. So maybe we care about a particular thing because of the justice side of it that really resonates with us.

30:41Dr. Karen Dawe: But maybe they might care more about the economic side of it, and we can present that case to them as the economic side of it. And this requires to really have a conversation and understand where they're coming from. So you can reframe it in a way where they can hear it and hear, oh, this connects with something that I care about. Maybe they're not going to change their mind on the spot, but they'll at least hear what you're saying more. And then again, later on, maybe they can update their beliefs if they want. Another big thing is to ask how they came to that particular belief and try to have them explain that particular mechanism.

31:14Dr. Karen Dawe: So that can be helpful for them and also for you to understand where they're coming from. And again, all of these things also apply to ourselves. We should be constantly trying to be mindful of how we know what we know is true. All of those are helpful ways to try and increase our odds of being heard and reduce polarization. But one conversation is going to be challenging to get all of that in. So often requires multiple times for our perspective to be listened to and heard if it's being presented to someone who thinks very differently than we do.

31:46Matthew Facciani: And all this comes back to a core theme in your work, trust, right? We've talked about fostering trust here, but what about healing it after it's been broken? What are some steps individuals or communities can take to rebuild trust in a healthy and sustainable way?

32:03Dr. Karen Dawe: It's a tough question because it requires a lot of time and resources, but I think it's doable. So if we think again about medical institutions, for example, they have lost some trust. Institutions broadly have lost trust. And what we've seen through different social science studies is this lack of trust can be reduced somewhat if people feel more connected to those institutions. So we're actually reducing what is called the psychological distance between the institution and the person. So if you are not trusting scientists, for example, it could help if you actually meet some scientists and work with them to solve a common issue.

32:44Dr. Karen Dawe: So in your community, Maybe you want to measure air pollution. So you work with some scientists and you measure air quality with them and understand, one, how the scientific process works and how it works at a institutional level, too. But also you actually meet scientists personally. And that's really the big thing that's important is connecting institutions with their local communities. So more people get to meet people from universities, hospital systems, different scientific institutions. so they can realize, oh, these people are not just what I see presented to me online that might showcase them in a very negative way for someone that is motivated to profit off of outrage.

33:25Dr. Karen Dawe: But instead, they are just everyday people trying their best to help their own communities. So reducing psychological distance, I think, is a big one. You're not just speaking at them. You're trying to listen to what their concerns are, address them, and work with them, and developing those social relationships that will rebuild trust over time. But again, it's not something that can be done very quickly or very easily. There needs to be a lot of resources and time poured into this. But if we're really serious about rebuilding trust, then it does require people to spend resources on reaching out to the local communities.

34:01Matthew Facciani: Wonderful. Matthew, thank you for this thoughtful conversation. I've been very encouraged by your work. It gives us the language and the hope for navigating the world a little more wisely. So I'm really grateful you could be here.

34:14Dr. Karen Dawe: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It was great to speak with you.

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36:00Matthew Facciani: My conversation with Matthew Facciani really illuminated how vulnerable we all are to stories that feel true, especially when they speak to our identities or our fears. It's a reminder that misinformation isn't just a problem out there. It seeps into our lives because we're all human. And building on our conversation about why misinformation sticks, I'm excited to share a TEDx talk by health scientist Dr. Karen Daw, who offers another toolkit for recognizing reliable research when we see it. Dr. Karen Daw invites us into the messy and fascinating world of medical evidence. The studies we hear about, the claims that wash over our feeds, and the hidden reasons some of them simply don't hold up.

36:42Matthew Facciani: She shows how easily our excitement, our hopes, and even our fears can nudge us toward health advice that sounds convincing, but isn't built on solid ground. Her talk is a thoughtful reminder that caring for our bodies in a noisy world means learning to pause and get curious and then ask a few smart questions before we trust what we're told. And now here's Karen Daw.

37:09Matthew Facciani: Why most public research findings are false. That's the title of a paper that came out when I was roughly halfway through my PhD. I spent about 18 months failing to get any of my experiments to work and I was ready to give up. But then I realised to an extent that's just how science works. Science investigates things nobody has investigated before. It's trial and error. So studies start small, maybe too small, and what looked like a really interesting finding was actually just a fluke. Most is maybe an exaggeration, but certainly some published scientific findings are wrong. What does that mean for you?

38:00Matthew Facciani: You currently have access to more health science information than ever before and more ways to consume it by TikTok, Facebook, YouTube. and I love that. So what's the problem? Well the problem is it might just be wrong. We all know that feeling of seeing a headline that really resonates but maybe sounds a bit too good to be true. How can you tell? I'm a scientist and health technologist. What I do is help companies compile scientific evidence to support their product and then figure out how reliable that evidence is. I work with medical devices for drug delivery. I work with software to help you get better sleep.

38:45Matthew Facciani: I work with medicines for the most rare and severe types of seizures. I am not an expert in any of those fields and you don't need to be either. What I do is the science of science. The science of science is a thing and its principles can help you judge health science information in the media. So some scientific findings are wrong. What do we do about it? Well, science self-corrects. And one of the main ways it does that is through something called a systematic review. Now, the origins of the systematic review are maybe not what you'd expect. In the early 1930s, a young medical student called Archie Cochran had a problem.

39:39Matthew Facciani: In interviews, he refers to it as a sexual dysfunction. What Archie didn't know then was that he had a genetic condition, not a psychological one. Psychoanalysis didn't help and he became very frustrated. He was seeing one of Freud's students and he says he believed strongly in intuition. Well, I couldn't help asking, why? What's the evidence for what you are saying? This experience in Vienna really got Archie thinking about evidence and by the time he returned to medical school, he was kind of a troll. He says, we started a sort of a club of individuals who would ask consultants, what's the evidence that your treatment has any effect?

40:28Matthew Facciani: We found this great fun. There was so little evidence available. By the time he left medical school, he was obsessed with evidence and it came to define his medical career. Among his many great contributions was the idea that single studies can't be relied upon to make healthcare decisions. He called for research summaries to be produced that compile all the available evidence on a specific question. This is what we now know as a systematic review. The most robust type of systematic review is called the Cochrane review. you um cochran reviewers judge how good the evidence is using a tool which is essentially a huge technical questionnaire and no big deal but it was developed right here in bristol used globally not just for cochran reviews and it was co-created by the team that i used to work for So I kind of felt that I was okay to mess with it a little bit.

41:39Matthew Facciani: What I wanted to do was take it out of the hands of the professionals and turn it into something anyone can use to judge health science information in the media. So what I did was take the core principles of Cochrane and boil them down to just three questions. three questions that I want you to remember and think about the next time don't worry I remember them if they go it's fine and you're going to remember them too I want you to remember them because I want you to think about them the next time you see a too good to be true headline or a weirdly compelling TikTok okay so has there been a study done in humans are we sure it's not a red herring?

42:29Matthew Facciani: Has there been a randomised controlled trial? If the answer to any of these questions is no, then it's not bad science, not by any means, but it does mean there's a high risk that in time it'll turn out that the findings weren't reliable. Before we get into it, we need to be aware that it will take conscious effort because we want to believe. I want to believe. I have an autoimmune disease. I'm sick a lot. I'm on immunosuppressant medication. There's no cure. And the plan is for me to be on immunosuppressant medication for the rest of my life. So when I see a TikTok that says it's definitely going to cure me, I want to believe.

43:15Matthew Facciani: I want it to be true. I don't want to question it. So it takes conscious effort But to stop, think and ask, has there been a study done in humans? Are we sure it's not a red herring? Has there been a randomised controlled trial? This first one is super easy and a real killer question. And once you start asking this question and listening out for the answer, it will filter out a lot of health claims. All medical breakthroughs have to start somewhere. and a lot of them start by growing cells in petri dishes in a lab. But that doesn't mean that all cells in petri dishes are destined to become great medical breakthroughs.

43:58Matthew Facciani: A really good way to remember this is that cancer cells grown in a dish in a lab can be very effectively killed with a hammer. All kinds of things will kill cancer cells in petri dishes but that doesn't make them a viable cure for cancer. And we know this because 90 % of candidate drugs will fail when they get to the clinical trial stage. Mostly, this is because once we put them in real life humans, they just don't work in the way the evidence suggested they would. So if we ask this question, has there been a study done in humans? and the answer is no, we can say, OK, that's super interesting, but maybe it'll turn out to not be a reliable finding.

44:49Matthew Facciani: If we ask this question, has there been a study done in humans? And the answer is yes. We're going to take it up a notch. We're going to say, are we sure it's not a red herring? In the context of medical research, what we're talking about here is confounding. Confounding happens when something is related to both the health factor that we're interested in and the health outcome, causally related to both those things. Now, we know what firefighters do. We understand that system. We often don't know what health factors do and we don't necessarily understand the underlying system. this is why it's so important to ask how was the study done what was the study design so what study design would avoid red herrings confounding that would be randomized controlled trials last question has there been a randomized controlled trial randomization is the key to getting rid of red herrings because then the red herrings occur as much in the treatment group as they do in the control group.

46:07Matthew Facciani: World War II. Archie Cochran found himself as a prisoner of war. As a medical officer, he was in charge of the health of around 8 ,000 British prisoners. Their diet was awful. Archie noticed everyone, including himself, was beginning to swell. They were getting very, very sick indeed. Archie suspected it was thiamine deficiency. But Archie is a prisoner of war. He is not a doctor in a hospital. He can't just order up a bunch of yeast, which is what they need. Archie needs to convince the guards beyond all doubt that yeast is the treatment they need Archie manages to get a small amount of yeast on the black market he numbers the soldiers and he sends the odd numbers off to the treatment group the even numbers off to the control group the treatment group get yeast the control group get a placebo but it was vitamin C he might have been tempted to give the sicker patients the yeast but then they're not randomized and then yeast isn't the only difference between the groups what if the yeast doesn't help because the sicker patients are too sick and what if the sicker patients are sick because they also smoke what if the sicker patients are more sick because of some fundamental genetic difference When you're a prisoner of war trying to convince guards to buy you yeast, there can be no what-ifs.

47:51Matthew Facciani: And when we are spending money and resource on thousands of very sick patients in clinical trials, there can be no what-ifs. Within three days, there was a noticeable difference between the groups. Archie wrote up his findings and told the guards. The next day, he woke up to heaps of yeast. The whole camp got better because of what was essentially one of the first ever randomized controlled trials. It was even blinded. The patients didn't know if they were getting the treatment or the placebo. And this is another really important thing about randomized controlled trials. the expectations and hopes of both the patients and the researchers impact results.

48:47Matthew Facciani: In trials that aren't double-blinded, the treatment effect can be exaggerated by as much as 17%. Archie Cochran changed the face of medicine by not accepting what he was being told, by asking tough questions, even of people of authority and experience. Ask tough questions. Even if people are wearing a white coat in their video, even if they have the word doctor in their username, even if they are stood on a red dot giving a TEDx tool.

49:26Matthew Facciani: ask tough questions the best advice I can give you is that if you see a too good to be true headline or a compelling tiktok go to the cochrane online database I'm not affiliated by with cochrane by the way I should just say but at this time they are considered the gold standard in healthcare evidence and they are used globally to make policy and healthcare decisions. They may have already asked the tough questions for you but if there isn't a review already on what you're interested in we can all be more like Archie by asking the tough questions ourself. Has there been a study done in humans? Are we sure it's not a red herring?

50:15Matthew Facciani: Has there been a randomised controlled trial?

50:20Matthew Facciani: change how you listen to this information because if you're listening to something really interesting and the answer to all these questions is yes then you might want to pay attention thank you very much that was karen da at tedx bristol in 2024 for.

50:46Matthew Facciani: And that's it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. TED Health is a podcast from TED, and I'd love to hear your thoughts about this episode. Send me a message on Instagram at ShoshanaMD. This episode was produced by me, Shoshana Ungerleiter, and Jess Shane, Edited by Alejandra Salazar and fact-checked by Vanessa Garcia-Woodworth. Special thanks to Maria Lages, Farrah Degrange, Daniela Balarezo, Constanza Gallardo, Tansika Sangmarniwang, and Roxanne Highlash. Thank you.

51:48Matthew Facciani: Katrina Church-Chimelowski, who set to graduate January of 2026, is using the program to shape her next chapter. When I applied, people said that I was crazy. They're like, what are you doing? Why are you supposed to be retired and taking it easy? I'm like, that's boring. I am Katrina Church-Chimelowski, and I am a student at the University of Illinois Geese College of Business, and I am in the IMBA program. After 30 years, I went back to school because we were empty nesters, and I needed something to do, and I needed some focus, and I thought this would be a great opportunity because it would help us in our businesses.

52:27Matthew Facciani: It could potentially help some of our children who are looking at starting businesses, and it was something that I've wanted to do for 30 years. My current role is a chief of staff in the Alaska State Legislature for District 36, which is the largest district in the United States. So Geese has offered me quite a bit, actually. I live in a really rural community in Alaska. We are on the road system, but it takes me 150 miles to get to the first stoplight. I wanted to have interaction and I needed to have interaction. And so the live sessions that they have, you can see the speakers, you can see the instructors, you can see your fellow classmates.

53:09Matthew Facciani: This summer, I was chosen to attend the immersion in Brazil. We went to Brazil and we presented our project and solved the problem for a real live company. The company wanted to expand. And so we came up with two different scenarios. And we did a short term and a long term vision for that expansion. The feedback that we got from that program is that it was brilliant. and this is coming from a really tough professor and to have the company actually say that it was valid and that it was something that they could pursue in the future was was a great feeling yeah it's been really fun because I've been able to meet people you know in all different stages of their life all stages of their careers I think what surprised me the most is everybody's willing to help you.

54:05Matthew Facciani: I have two classes left in order to graduate from GEES, so I'm super excited that I'm very, very close. Right on. No matter your career path, the GEES College of Business Online MBA fits your schedule while helping you grow the skills to reach your goals. Explore the ever-evolving coursework designed to keep pace with today's business challenges at geeseonline.illinois.edu.

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55:11Dr. Karen Dawe: If you've got a teenager, it's time to have the talk. You know, about investing. With the new Schwab Teen Investor account, teens can gain hands-on investing experience and build positive money habits. It's an account co-owned by you and your teen, so you can monitor and engage with the account

55:27Matthew Facciani: while your teen learns how to invest and manage money. Learn more at schwab.com slash teen.