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By Root 776 0

The New England Journal of Medicine to support their claim that real human growth hormone has been “clinically proven” to have all sorts of anti-aging properties. But they generally don’t provide a link to that article, and for good reason. Find it for yourself: search the Web for “New England Journal” plus “human growth,” and up will come a warning that “this article has been cited in potentially misleading” advertising. You find that the original study involved only a dozen men who actually got injections of the hormone, all over sixty years old and all with unusually low levels of the insulin-like “growth factor 1.” They got injections of real, prescription-only hormone three times per week. This is no proof that younger people, or persons with normal levels of the substance, would see any benefit. The online article now includes a link to a 2003 editorial in which the Journal calls that study “biologically interesting” but “not sufficient to serve as a basis for treatment recommendations.” In other words, a closer look shows the hucksters are simply misrepresenting the published research. President Ronald Reagan once said famously of the Soviet Union, “Trust, but verify.” When it comes to the Internet, we advise an even tougher attitude: don’t trust unless you can verify.

• Who’s behind it? If you’re unfamiliar with the organization sponsoring a website, start with the “About Us” link and learn what the group says about its mission, political leanings, and finances. An anonymous website should be treated just like an anonymous e-mail: don’t believe a word you find there unless it’s verified independently. If you are looking for information about whether raising the federal minimum wage benefits workers or costs jobs, you quickly find that torrents of information pour out of two organizations with the same initials and very similar names, the Economic Policy Institute and the Employment Policies Institute. One EPI is pro-labor; it cites statistics about how inflation chips away at the buying power of a minimum-wage paycheck and how many families would benefit from an increase. The other EPI is pro-business; it posts studies estimating the number of low-wage workers who will be laid off, or not hired in the first place, if businesses are forced to pay more. The Economic Policy Institute says of itself that it “stresses…a concern for the living standards of working people,” and it lists as its chairman Gerald W. McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The other EPI is less forthcoming, calling itself “a nonprofit research organization dedicated to studying public policy issues surrounding employment growth.” The word “growth” is a tip-off, however. It’s a favorite buzzword among free-market groups. And the group’s executive director is Richard Berman, who (we can discover by plugging his name into our search engine) is a Washington public relations man who was once an executive vice president of the Pillsbury Restaurant Group, owner of the Burger King chain, which employs thousands of low-wage workers. The fact that one of the EPIs is labor-backed and the other is business-backed doesn’t make either of them right or wrong, but it does mean that neither is a neutral source. Knowing which is which helps us evaluate their one-sided information and arguments. In general, the less a website tells you about itself in its “About Us” section, the less you should trust it.

• Who’s paying? Where an organization gets its money can tell you a lot about its leanings. The Progress and Freedom Foundation, for example, describes itself straightforwardly as a “market-oriented think tank” studying the “digital revolution,” and it openly lists the many corporations that support it financially, including Apple, Microsoft, Comcast, and other computer, cable TV, and Internet companies. The Clean and Safe Energy Coalition was launched in April 2006 by a co-founder of Greenpeace; it argues that more nuclear reactors would be good for the environment because they don’t put out smoke or greenhouse