Correlation vs. Causation

Does it matter? Not really.

A few days ago, I developed a rash on my neck and chest. I didn’t know where it came from or what caused it, but I needed some relief from the swelling and itchiness, so I went to the pharmacy and picked up some hydrocortisone cream. 

On my way out of the pharmacy, I bumped into an acquaintance. Commenting on my rash, she told me her story of having had shingles, and how it first appeared in a similar fashion to how my skin looked. 

Slightly panicked, I went on Google. I looked up shingles. It didn’t look like shingles, but still, maybe it was shingles. 

I went to another pharmacy, and got a different cream. Maybe this would help. The pharmacist explained how shingles appears, and that it didn’t look like I had shingles. I breathed a sigh of relief and ruled it out. 

I alternated between the creams, getting some short-term relief. I took some anti-allergy medication during the day, and Benadryl at night. It knocked me out, but when I woke up, the rash was still there. Painful and red. It had calmed slightly, but was not gone. 

I tried to figure out what was going on. I thought about the new face cream I had recently purchased and applied. Perhaps this was the cause of my skin distress? I stopped applying it, just in case. I hoped it wasn’t the cream — I had just dropped a good amount of money on it, and I didn’t want it to go to waste. 

I recalled seeing something float by on Facebook about brown water. I looked it up. Indeed, the municipality had flushed the fire hydrants the other day, warning locals not to use their hot water if they noticed any discolouration. I remembered that when I had given my son a bath a couple nights ago, the water did look a little yellowish. 

Thankfully, he had no skin irritations. Neither did my husband. But I have always had sensitive skin, and when I was a little girl, I used to get skin rashes from swimming in the lake at our family cottage. I had done lots of tests, but the paediatrician could never figure out what it was. I wasn’t allergic to anything on paper. She hypothesized that it was something in the lake water that caused my skin to react. Or maybe, a combination of the water and my sunscreen. 

My mother tried every single sunscreen brand out there on me, to see if I could avoid the seasonal skin irritation. But I got it nevertheless, every year, after spending hours in the lake (and sunscreen).

So what was happening now? Was I experiencing the same kind of acute dermatitis caused by some unknown allergen in the water? I decided that was the most likely cause. I continued treating my rash, and it was improving every day, but intermittently flaring up.

Since I had ruled out my new expensive moisturizer, I decided to put some on after washing my skin one morning. My face started flaring up, and a rash appeared there too.

It was the cream. It wasn’t the water.

Or maybe it was the cream, and the water. A bad combination for my skin. But I could no longer deny that the cream was causing a reaction in my skin, no matter how much I did not want to accept the sunk costs, and have to buy a new cream, and spend more money. Even if I was disappointed because I had high expectations from this cream, that it would smooth and hydrate my skin, and that I would be happy with the results. 

Was the cream correlated or causing my rash? Did it matter? Not really.

We hear a lot about correlation vs. causation, especially nowadays. Fact-checkers will tell you that they are not the same thing, and just because a long list of what looks like adverse events to the MRNA shots are exploding in the vaccinated population, including myocarditis, clots, strokes, cancer, and “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome”, that this is not proof of causation.

But does it matter? Not really.

Whatever you want to call it, correlation or causation, the fact is, a whole host of medical pathologies are exponentially increasing in overwhelming numbers. This information should be shared, not censored. Correlation is part of the process that leads researchers to determine causation. Anecdotal evidence, when combined, creates statistics, and statistics allow people to crunch numbers, and decide if there is a pattern. 

The crazy thing is, statisticians already know there is a pattern. They have the data. Most are choosing to ignore it, and at best, slap it with a ‘correlation’ label. 

Just like many people might use the same facial moisturizer as I did and not get any kind of reaction, it is possible that some people won’t see any (immediate) adverse reactions to the shots. But a topical face cream and novel injections are not in the same category, and in medicine, the precautionary principle states that when an intervention is given, if there is any kind of adverse event that follows, you must assume the intervention was the cause first, and then work backwards to deduce that in fact, it may have been something else, or a combination of things. 

Ethical medicine means the words correlation and causation are arbitrary. If there is even a possibility that a medicine or intervention is causing harm, it should be stopped, to see if the results change. Sunk costs must be accepted, and you must remove the variable that is potentially causing harm.

I will stop using my cream. I could even write a review about it, if I wanted to warn others with sensitive skin to proceed with caution. And if enough consumers experienced something similar, the product would stop selling, and it would be taken off the shelves. That’s partly how markets determine the value and demand of a product, when they are not heavily subsidized by government. 

I am sure no independent fact-checkers would take a bad review down, censor it, or go on a smear campaign against me. I would just be another customer, in a long list of customers who made a choice, and then made a different choice based on my personal experience.

Bodily autonomy is fundamental to making choices. If I was coerced to continue using this cream or face social stigma, isolation, banishment, segregation, loss of job or career, we would call that absurd.

Absurdities and unethical medicine, however, have come to define our new, abnormal world. Many of the people who have taken the shots and have experienced adverse events, or seen others experience adverse events, even death, are in complete denial. They don’t want to accept the sunk costs. They don’t want to admit that their expectations were not fulfilled, that what they expected to be some kind of miracle medicine, is in fact, toxic, and potentially lethal. 

Bob Moran.

We can blame Big Government, Big Media and Big Pharma, but in the end, it is in the mind of the consumers, or the ‘patients’, who don’t want to accept reality. Correlation and causation be damned, the scientific process has nothing to do with ‘the Science’, and true believers will dig their heels in deeper in order to avoid the radical acceptance required for them to come to terms with what has been done to us all.