Cancer leads to the purchase of mobile phones!

There's an abundance of scientific studies that can be roughly summarized as: "People who own mobile phones more often have cancer than people without mobile phones, which means that mobile phones do cause cancer." Based on those studies I want to prove today that cancer leads to the purchase of mobile phones.

Let the rectangle below represent the population of the country/region where such a study was conducted, separated into owners of mobile phones (M) and people who don't own or use mobile phones (nM).


The abovementioned studies now say that among M, a higher percentage of the people has cancer than among nM. We draw two lines to represent this. The only important thing is that the line in the M-rectangle is higher than the line in the other one.


Let's now compare the percentage of people with cancer who own mobile phones to the same percentage among people without cancer. We label the distances as shown below.


Among cancer patients, the percentage of people who own mobile phones is:


Among peope without cancer, this percentage is:


Under the assumption that a > b, it can easily be shown that
holds true (for all positive values for x and y).

(This can also be easily shown with more words and less formulas: If a = b holds, it's obvious that the two compared percentages are equal. Let now the line for b "move downwards", then we see that the first percentage grows, whereas the second one shrinks.)

Thus it is shown that people who have cancer more often own mobile phones than people who don't have cancer.

With the same argumentation as in the beforementioned studies, we can therefore conclude that cancer leads to the purchase of mobile phones.

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Wondering where's the catch? It's simply not legal to infer from "A and B often occur together" that "A leads to B". Sadly, many so-called "scientific" studies about cancer and mobile phones (and a dozen other popular topics) use exactly this train of thought.

Birgit Vera Schmidt

P.S.: I'll have another article about this topic some day.