Do you know someone old who takes proton pump inhibitors and got Dementia? Lawyers are standing by to sue, thanks to epidemiologists who can "correlate" anything to anything. If an emotional appeal to a jury is made - 'we need to hold these corporations accountable!' - they are sure to win.
And then lose on appeal, as has happened with weedkillers, because a jury can believe anything they want but an appeals court uses science. And science says plants are not tiny green people so they cannot cause human cancer, and science says epidemiology is only over in the EXPLORATORY pile, with claims about mice and cell cultures. No drug has ever gone to market based on correlation or a mouse study, and none ever will.
Nor should products be banned unless actual science can confirm an overwhelming amount of statistical correlation, as happened with cigarettes, alcohol, and plutonium. But not bacon or tea or aspartame or any other suspect claim made by epidemiologists who may secretly be in contractual negotiations with lawyers waiting to sue over a product.
The claim about PPIs is in a Danish cohort of elderly people and nothing special, 9,000 epidemiology papers are produced each month, all by people hoping to use statistics to claim some industry is The Next Big Tobacco. The confounders are numerous - if you took PPIs but had a higher education somehow they didn't cause Dementia than if you were less educated - which shows you it is not science.
But when coupled with more breezy correlation - Indians get less Alzheimer's and eat more spices - a supplements sales miracle can happen. Sure, it makes no sense, Danish people have good medical care while 700,000,000 Indian people have such poor medical care it means their Dementia or other disease is undiagnosed. Not that they never had it. But nearly everyone eats turmeric. So less Alzheimer's and more curcumin and *presto* you make more money selling to gullible rich people in the US, who think organic food is healthier, cell phone towers give you cancer, and the COVID-19 vaccine needs to be mandatory while the MMR one causes autism.
But it if you must. If you are lucky, it is just a tasty placebo. If you are unlucky, the lead it has been poisoned with will cause the cognitive defects you think Eastern Alternatives To Medicine are preventing.
