World News

Ok. I read the article. My tldr response is that my gut instinct was correct and this is a bullshit article. However, I will walk you through my findings and explain why this is bullshit.

1- The article's hosting site "Medical Xpress" is not a peer reviewed journal. It is a news aggregate. This means that what you see represented MIGHT have legitimate medical content but it is DEFINITELY profit based. Meaning- someone can pay to have the algorithm enhance engagement in the topic of your choice. This will be important information later.

2- the article itself points out to this being a "retroactive study". This means that their data was part of an existing database. What this actually means is that a medical intern fresh from university fed a bunch of data to chat gpt and got his attending to put his name on it.

The "marijuana user" sample size was 97k people. The "healthy" sample size was 4.1 million people. After removing people from the study that failed to fit their criteria the marijuana population was reduced to 2k and the healthy population was reduced to 518. After all of their statistical gymnastics they found their marijuana population was 1.6% more likely to develop diabetes than the control group.

So out of 97,000 people they found 32 people who smoked marijuana and also developed diabetes who MIGHT not have otherwise, but again this wasn't a peer reviewed article. The article itself says:

"The authors acknowledge that the inherent limitations of real-world data often result from inconsistent patient reporting in electronic medical records.

They also note that there is a risk of bias because of imprecise measures of cannabis exposure and the reliance on participants to accurately report any cannabis use, even when they lived in places where the drug is illegal."

So why does this article exist? The source of the article is the European association for the study of diabetes, based on Dusseldorf Germany. It bears mentioning that in February of this year the Christian conservative CDU/CSU party was narrowly elected and maintains a slim hold on power. Last year before the Christians were elected Germany legalized recreational marijuana. No surprise, one of the biggest political goals of the current administration is to repeal this legislation.

So we have medical information produced by Ai, published by a general practitioner (not a specialist) to a German diabetes think-tank that was picked up by a news website that could absolutely be a propaganda mouthpiece of German Christians who are politically motivated to spread disinformation about one of their most important dog whistle issues.

So like I said, it's bullshit.