HP Denier Preaches To Choir, Choir Says "Amen"

Sometimes the behavior of a preacher and his believers is disturbing:

Here's a recent video in which Dr. Jerry Cuttler addresses the right-wing, science deniers Doctors For Disaster Preparedness (DFDP) regarding Fukushima.  We've come across the DFDP many times before and they're disturbing:

If you've been reading this blog for more than a few weeks, you know that the George C. Marshall Institute (mostly right-wing physicists) has a long history of science denial propaganda.  Their medical ideological ally is the DFDP, and they work closely together to generate confusion amongst the general public.  See the video within my recent post Skepticism vs. Denialism (S v D), which describes their tactics generally.  If you watch it first (and it's about global warming denialism), you'll see Cuttler behave exactly as other science denialists are described in that video.

This latest video takes you (once again) into the disturbing world of health physics denialism.

But first a bit of hilarity....excuse me......

Ah hem, what's really hilarious is that Cuttler mentions a guy named Pollycove.  Pollycove said that LNT theory (a large portion of the science of health physics) was DEAD IN 1997 TO THE VERY SAME GROUP!  If LNT was dead in 1997, what is Cuttler doing still denying it in 2012?   (See the first 6 minutes here.)  Add collective amnesia to the list of disturbing behaviors of this bunch.

NOTICE the BIG PICTURE when you watch this video...Cuttler doesn't provide any NEW evidence of anything.  Exactly as described in the S v D video.

NOTICE, he just cherry picks old stuff to string a line of nonsense (kinda like the preacher in the first video).  Yikes!  He is the "maverick" described in the S v D video!

Cuttler says he doesn't understand p-values.  If only that were all.......

He's regurgitating the most recent anti-hp cult trend of going way back to Muller to discredit LNT, just like Cannara did.  No real scientist studying advances on food safety, would highlight anything wrong Pasteur did...that's absurd.  Even if Pasteur did something wrong it has no relevance today.  It's grasping for fodder in order to play to the believers.

He goes into the tired old oxidative damage versus radiation damage fallacy.  Not only doesn't he understand p-values or health physics, he doesn't understand math.  If oxidative damage is bad (give it a number of 100,000) and radiation damage is small (1), then the overall damage is 100,001, NOT 0.

He plays the immune system response card which has little to do with DNA damage.  See my separate page on that, upper right hand side of page.

He (intentionally?) confuses cancer treatment with cancer incidence risk.   Radiation could have been (or not) one of the contributors to some of the peoples' cancers he described.  We medically irradiate them because high radiation doses kill cells.  Medical radiation poses additional future cancer risk, but that won't be realized for decades into the future.  Hello?????

He brings up the old (of course!) Cohen radon study which suffered from the ecologic fallacy.  Add epidemiology to the list of things that Cuttler doesn't understand.  He says students measured the radon in people's homes...no they didn't.  It was an ecological study (as Cuttler had just said) and they just used average county radon levels.  I addressed Cohen long ago when someone showed me a video of him giving a talk to....guess who?  The DFDP!

By this time any doubts of in-breeding are gone.

Anyway, I've ranted on long enough.

One final irony...he says radiation myths are not being debunked by anyone.

Here I am.....wrong again!

Excuse me, I need a cool shower after that.