I’ve a dear friend who has been in poor health for many years. What, exactly, is wrong is unclear. Over the decades, diagnoses have come and gone, as have various treatments—and the value of some seems far-fetched. When a new treatment is particularly odd and I raise an eyebrow, she invariably informs me that the research supporting the intervention is quite sound. She’s a bright woman and is well educated—in fact, she’s a registered nurse. Yet I suspect that if I reviewed the “research,” I would find that the study linking, say, concentrated pomegranate tea to the cure of psoriasis relied on only five subjects, or was performed in a research laboratory no one has heard of before or since, or was conducted by the PGA (Pomegranate Growers Association—quit thinking about golf and read my column), or that the finding is based on 54 of 100 psoriasis sufferers having been cured (hardly persuasive), or that the result came from a massive statistical study correlating 250 conditions and 1,235 environmental/lifestyle factors (some of which will appear to be associated just by chance).

Or consider coffee. Ubiquitous in lists of lifestyle factors, it seems that coffee is found to be alternately bad for you, neutral, or good for you in each successive year. (The latest news being good, I choose to regard the matter as settled.)

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