Correlation does not equal causation

I am not a biostatistican, but I can play on on Blogger. Attention science news writers: "Correlation does not equal causation." Can we institute a simple electroshock penalty for those who cite such fraudulent statistics?

Check this out:

"new study finds that older women who use multivitamins may be more likely than non-users to develop breast cancer"

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62S4F520100329

Is there any chance of a sampling bias in this study? Any chance at all that the population of elderly women who take multivitamins may be different in any health parameters from the population that finds no need for such supplements? Furthermore, is there any chance that the study subjects taking the vitamins are more likely to be examined more frequently and therefore more likely to have cancer detected?

This reminds me of the brilliant study (cited from the grocery store tabloids by my sister-in-law) that diet soda makes you fat, because a study found that people who drink diet soda were more likely to be overweight than those who do not drink it.

Esther Dyson disrespects geneticists

I was reading the NY Times on Sunday (3/21/2010). I do that. In the Business section there was an article about the relatively poor sales of the direct-to-consumer genetic tests offered by the startup company 23andMe. Other competitors in this market have done even worse. Several scientists interviewed in the article said basically that there is very little predictive medical value to these SNP profile tests. Then they interviewed Esther Dyson, who is apparently on the board of directors of 23andMe. She provided this clunker of a quote:

Ms. Dyson called it “appallingly paternalistic,” to think consumers could not interpret genetic information without help of a doctor. “People can understand statistics about baseball,” she said, “and I think they ought to understand statistics about genetics.”

Does this not trivialize all of the work of medical geneticists, biostatisticians, and bioinformaticians. Is our work really no more challenging than interpreting baseball statistics? Gee thanks Ms. Dyson.