I started a thread yesterday about an IFL Science column on a very questionable Italian medical study linking extreme physical attractiveness to a specific type of endometriosis. The core of my question was, can extreme physical attractiveness ever be a valid factor in a medical study?
Many of the responses (mostly made by two or three very persistent posters) rejected the question out of hand and suggested the thread be locked immediately or moved to the Pit. A couple other posters made some very astute comments about how the medical concerns of very attractive patients might get addressed more seriously than those of less-attractive patients. I was hoping to keep the thread going until an actual doctor weighed in.
Instead, a moderator grossly mischaracterized my question as “‘do hot chicks really get endemetriosis more often’, which is not a discussion that we want to have here on the SDMB.” Well, that wasn’t the discussion. I’d like the moderators to consider re-opening the thread.
By your own admission, the article linked to “looks like some frat boy Italian physicians are using their privileged positions to objectify women in their care”. I don’t think it’s a mischaracterization to call that “do hot chicks really get endometriosis more often”.
The OP then asks if this is quackery or not.
To be fair to the OP, Horatio Hellpop is not the one making the claim. The claim comes from the I Fucking Love Science column, and Horatio Hellpop does criticize the article as having some problems. And again to be fair to the OP, Horatio Hellpop did phrase it much more politely than that, and like I said in the moderation, I don’t believe that Horatio Hellpop was being intentionally misogynistic. However, asking if this is quackery or not is basically asking if there is something to the frat boy doctor’s claim about hot chicks getting endometriosis more often. In other words, at its core, the OP is asking the same misogynistic question. It’s not asking it from the same frat boy point of view, but that is the question being asked.
Took some searching, but I found a press release about the actual study, as opposed to IFL’s article. If we are actually interested in fighting ignorance, the study found self reported information from surgical patients willing to answer some decidedly non medical sounding questions, and some highly subjective observations by unspecified data takers did provide a statistically significant difference among groups with two types of endometriosis, as well as a third group without the disease on the dataset reported. The possibilities of bias introduction by male doctors is problematic, as is the introduction of multiple biases from women refusing to answer before and during the data taking.
The possible negative impact on the patient population was not adequately controlled by those running the study. For a group of women in Italy dealing with at the very least diagnostic procedures for sexual physiology this seems to me to be a nearly criminal disregard for any doctor to have for his patients.
No explanation for any hypothetical alteration of treatment modalities of any sort were either proposed or examined.
I get that there are certain lines of inquiry that decent people simply do not pursue. This isn’t one of them. “Is sexual attractiveness medically relevant or scientifically measurable?” This isn’t Adolf Eichmann or The Bell Curve.
I also get that endometriosis is a hot-button topic, especially if the person who brought it up (in this case, me) isn’t subject to it and appears to some readers to be using it as a punchline to some kind of joke. Frankly, it’s not central to what I’m curious about. I kind of wish the IFL column I linked to had been about Italian supermodels’ disproportionate susceptibility to ringworm or toe fungus, but that’s not what was available.
“Is sexual attractiveness medically relevant or scientifically measurable?” Is just a fancy way of asking, “do hot chicks really get [sick] more often”.
What if they do get sick more often? We wont know unless someone investigates. Asking uncomfortable questions and questioning majority beliefs is what propelled free thought and the scientific revolution. If these questions make some people uncomfortable, so what? To paraphrase, the antidote to bad speech is more speech.
What if WHO gets sick more often? “Hot Women”? What does that even mean? Either you’re asking “Do women I/some researchers subjectively find “hot” somehow correlate with sickness?” Which is a ridiculous and unscientific question; or you’re trying to ask “does some objective characteristic such as [insert “hot” characteristic here] correlate with sickness?” In which case, why aren’t you asking that question? Your phrasing reveals you to be asking from a place of bias instead of objectively and scientifically.
The study did not involve not even examine possible changes in treatment, nor examinations of final outcomes. Only which type of condition the patient was being treated for. and the questions on attractiveness.
I was under the (possibly incorrect) impression that there are some links between physical and non-physical attributes. For example a while back I read (or maybe saw it on TV) an experiment where someone had pictures of men’s faces. They showed each of the faces to each participant and asked the participant to pick out which of those faces appeared to be someone ‘mean’. I don’t recall what the tester’s metric was for defining mean, but the participants where able pick correctly a statistically significant percentage of the time. They went on to explain that people with [certain facial features] tend to also have [certain biological features] that relate to aggressive behaviors. In other words, the participants were able to pick out the mean people because they looked like people that they’ve known in their own lives to be mean.
Having said that is it at all possible that there could be some genetic link between endometriosis and physical features. Physical features that we, presently, consider attractive? Maybe there is a link, maybe if no one noticed it for 200 years they would have been looking at a link between endometriosis and unattractive women.
I haven’t looked at IFLS for few years now, as it’s more click bait than actual science, so I haven’t read the article, but I hate for people to be dismissing something because the first person to notice it used less than professional terminology. Luckily, even just the mention of it will likely get researchers, somewhere, curious and hopefully a real study can be done if they think there’s any merit to it.
So get past the “hot chick” part of the question, pretend like it was phrased as “Is there a link between endometriosis and physical features”. Assuming that’s a fair question, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
What if the first person to notice that a lot of the people complaining about being tired and thirsty all the time were also “fat”, but no one looked into a link between obesity and diabetes because it’s not nice to call someone fat.
Based on the facebook posts I see from a few friends with endometriosis I’d guess that they’re not going to be concerned if someone studies a link between it and “hotness” if there’s any chance at all of it meaning they might not have to spend the rest of their lives in pain.
That was certainly a thread that needed to be killed. I was pretty dismayed at first when I saw the content of the first reply by an actual moderator here after all of the discussions that we’ve had recently. In the end though, the correct decision was made and I appreciate that.
I’m not gonna get past the “hot chick” part of the question because that’s precisely the part that’s problematic. If this was a study that was phrased as you suggest, it would not be objectionable. If a study asked, “is there a link between [specific physical feature] and endometriosis” that would be a valid inquiry. But instead this study asks, “is there a link between a vague and subjective group of characteristics that I choose not to define rigorously but will instead call “hot”?”. That’s not a scientific question, and beyond that it also happens to be offensive.
Imagine two studies on this topic. One is titled, “Mechanisms linking obesity with cardiovascular disease”. The other is titled, “Are fatties more likely to suffer heart attacks?”.
In the first study, the effects of elevated levels of certain hormones (which have previously been linked to obesity) in people within a specific range of BMIs are studied to determine if this can lead to heart disease.
In the second study, the researchers looks through a series of pictures of men in their 50s and rates them on a scale of 1 to 10 based on how fat he thinks they are. He then looks through these men’s health records for evidence of heart disease.
You appear to be defending the first case, but what the OP linked was definitely the second.
Horatio, whether or not it needed closing, surely it wasn’t a GQ question, was it? The GQ question, “Is sexual attractiveness scientifically measurable,” asks whether a subject that is unambiguously a matter of opinion can be treated as a matter of fact. The only GQ part of the question is trivially answered with “no.”
As an aside, I think some folks didn’t read the IFLScience link. It’s not in any way supporting the study, but is extremely critical of it.
I believe that a small number of people shouted repeatedly for the original discussion to be shut down for their discomfort with the topic, not with its actual merits.