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Comment by y0ssar1an | Hacker News Reader

In this case, the doctors really do know better. Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to just about every disease. That's because it's a marker of frailty, not a direct cause for most of these diseases. In other words, correlation does not imply causation.

It sounds like you have too much confidence in published research and not enough confidence in your local health officials.

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> too much confidence in published research and not enough confidence in your local health officials

I can't figure out if you're being sarcastic, or if you really do think that a local politician knows more about medicine than is contained in actual medical research.

He's been talking with "the local health department", not some local politician. I trust health departments a lot more than I trust techies grepping PubMed. Techies don't have the context to understand and filter bogus research. Studies that correlate Vitamin D deficiency with X goes straight to the mental spam filter for experienced people in public health. If Vitamin D deficiency actually caused all this disease we would be living in a golden age of progress on cancer, heart disease, infectious disease, mental health, etc. because Vitamin D deficiency is easy and cheap to treat.

> That's because it's a marker of frailty, not a direct cause for most of these diseases.

Do you actually know that?

> In other words, correlation does not imply causation.

Sorry, but just because correlation does not imply causation doesn't mean that Vitamin D deficiency isn't a cause.

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