Jonathan Jarry

@jonathanjarry.bsky.social

5662 Followers 151 Following

Science communicator with McGill University's Office for Science and Society. Separating sense from nonsense. Not all studies are created equal. McGill.ca/OSS

And with the Petersons, we are far from influencers who sell us health products because they look like the picture of health and we want to buy their secret. Mikhaila Peterson speaks of “violent, intrusive thoughts” she experienced as a teenager and again after moving into a mould-infested house as an adult. The example she gives is of looking at a knife and her mind going “KNIFE!” She has become her dad’s fiercest health advocate and influencer, and yet an enumeration of Jordan’s woes in the last decade alone is stupefying and is always framed as the worst possible version of the condition. Anxiety, depression, benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome (for which Russian doctors put him in an eight-day coma followed by a month-long stay in an ICU), bilateral pneumonia, sepsis, temporary loss of motor skills, COVID-19 infection, chronic inflammatory response syndrome (which is not at the moment an accepted medical diagnosis), polyneuropathy, myopathy, akathisia, pulmonary hypertension, severe reactions to most medications, an “overwhelming sense of impending doom” and complete sleeplessness for a month due to drinking apple cider and, according to Mikhaila, spiritual attacks. It seems like the all-beef diet was not exactly the bee’s knees.
I need to make one thing clear: Mikhaila Peterson should try to figure out what is making her sick. I am not advocating for her to snuff out her inquisitiveness. Dealing with strange symptoms for which no cause is identified is immensely frustrating. The problem arises when you don’t understand the all-too-important winnowing process that early, exciting scientific findings must go through before new therapies are approved. What looks good in mice rarely pans out in humans. “Eureka!” is most often followed by a disappointed “... oh.” When you do not understand this crucial fact about scientific research and you have a large platform, you end up misinforming your audience.
Jon Hernandez of CBC reporting from the field using a CBC microphone and Apple AirPods.
Patreon banner of the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, which shows Jay, Steven, Bob, and Cara.... Evan has been deleted.
Thumbnail of Mikhaila Peterson and Ben Greenfield, and in between them is an AI-generated image of a suitcase filled to the brim with vials and sciencey stuff, with a plane in the background. "PEPTIDES I TAKE ON EVERY FLIGHT" reads the caption.
Dear Mr. Harrington, While I appreciate your rebuttal, these are arguments we have all heard before. Yes, the opioid crisis has been devastating and its architects needed to be denounced and punished, and yes, Vioxx was taken off the market. But to quote Dr. Ben Goldacre—who wrote an entire book constructively denouncing the pharmaceutical industry without embracing pseudomedicine—just because there are flaws in aircraft design doesn’t mean flying carpets exist. Shortcomings in biomedical research and drug approval won’t be resolved by leaning on magical thinking but by improving these processes. More rigour is how we improve, not less. You also invoke the powerful placebo. This is a story whose apocryphal origin can be traced back to Dr. Henry Beecher (I have looked into this in two separate articles: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-health-and-nutrition-history/legend-wartime-placebo & https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-critical-thinking-pseudoscience-history/placebo-myth-picked-wrong-war). But even Beecher’s claims of a powerful placebo effect in his post-war studies were shown to be artefacts of bad study design and statistical analyses (see https://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(97)00203-5/abstract). Whenever a beneficial placebo effect is claimed (especially outside of two very subjective symptoms, pain and nausea), we need to be *very skeptical* and look at how the study was conducted and its results analyzed. Skepticism is not a bad word; it’s how we avoid falling for things that don’t work and financing them within a limited public health system. As for placebos working in animals, yeah, we used to believe that initially, but when more stringent studies were done, we realized it was the owner or the researcher who was reporting improvements in the animal knowing that they had received the placebo, not the animal itself. Here’s a short text about this phenomenon, known as the “caregiver placebo effect,” here: https://skeptve…
o Jesse Brown, (12:35): “Julian [the journalist hired by Canadaland and covering this story], it seems like such a small thing, but when that [“the mystery illness” phrasing] becomes what this is called, and it gets repeated and repeated, and the whole story becomes known as ‘the mystery illness story,’ and what we’re going to say, and what we’ve said before is, the mystery is not ‘what’s this illness?’ We’ve known for a long time that this is a bunch of known illnesses: Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, etc. The mystery is and has always been what is causing these illnesses.”
"Bombshell after bombshell"
Jeffery makes it sound like we all live and die in LED boxes, never seeing any other form of light. But we don’t. We spend time in parking lots walking to and from our cars. We drive with the windows down. We walk to the pharmacy. We mow the lawn and work on our garden. We walk our dog. If red light is so potent that very little of it is needed for a very short amount of time, we’re already getting it. There’d be no need to panic people about the harms of LEDs if they could be reversed by a homeopathic dose of red light, which is way less than what almost all of us get on a daily basis. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that LED lights are so damaging that they are an important cause of every illness… and also claim that red light is a cure-all in tiny doses for a few minutes at a time, even reversing diseases baked into our genes!
A man has a pair of VR goggles plopped over his eyes by hands (Trump's?) and the lens reads "AI SLOP." Bubble: "Here, keep yourself entertained with this... while we destroy everything else."
Blue light versus red light
An elongated brown turd--I believe that is the scientific name for it--said to be from a baboon but recreated by human hands and computer graphics and featuring at its head, like the ship figureheads of old, the distinct face of an orange fascist dictator
YouTube thumbnail: The antibiotic your doctor keeps prescribing is destroying your mitochondria
Odo from Deep Space Nine
Brunet was keen to remind me that different peptideins will have different reasons for existing—much like, I would add, how different guests staying at the same hotel have their own reason for being there: work, vacation, an unexpected holdup from a delayed flight. One peptidein will be shown to behave like a protein. The next one will turn out to be a temporary artefact from a cancer cell whose biology is out of whack. The next one still will be an artefact of normal biology, where a bit of DNA is translated by the ribosome and then immediately degraded. Yet others will carry unknown functions for a while as scientists puzzle over them. It’s a spectrum.
You're Invited: Join Us LIVE Tomorrow Morning! The Human Microbiome, Homeopathy, and Cancer with Ronald Whitmont, MD LIVE on Saturday, May 23rd 9am PT / 12pm ET A special 2-hour session!
You can't even read it.
A core part of Clark’s origin story as a wellness influencer is the issue of birth control. Just before her rebranding, she moderated a panel at a TPUSA summit aimed at conservative women, where one of her panelists called oral contraceptives “a group 1 carcinogen,” also responsible for brain aneurysms and blood clots. On Culture Apothecary, one of Clark’s guests alleged that women on the pill are “attracted to genetically someone who’s more like their cousin,” and that while the pill is not “outright poison,” it does deplete a woman’s vitamins and minerals. Clark herself was said by Fox News to encourage her audience to “get off birth control,” and it’s no wonder why: if you too believed the pill caused cancer, clots, scurvy, and inbreeding, you’d stay away from it.
I am not typing all of this out. it is fucking long.
Thumbnail for the Jubilee video "1 Psychiatrist & 20 Depressed People: Surrounded"
"[On peptides] There’s a massive graveyard of experimental drugs that failed to show benefits or to be safe in our bodies."
Why? ‘People are looking for simple answers to complicated questions, and biology is extremely complex,’ says Jonathan Jarry, a molecular-biologist-turned-science-communicator at McGill University. ‘Simple, neat stories,’ he suggests, ‘will appeal to a lot of desperate people, even if real healing is a complicated process.’
Poster that says "Nominate Joe Mercola as Head of the FDA" * He will ensure everyone has access to clean CO2 up their butt * Submitted drug approvals will be reviewed by a panel of 1,501 spiritual guides, including his own dead parents! * Every decision he makes will come from Bahlon, an entity channelled by a former marketing guru
AI Use in Homeopathy - Fugheddaboudit with Alastair Gray PhD, MSc, ADH, PCH, AIH AFHom, Board Certified CHP and Licensed LHP Homeopath LIVE on Tuesday, May 12th 5pm PT / 8pm ET In this insightful session, Alastair Gray will examine the growing interest in artificial intelligence within homeopathic practice and evaluate its clinical reliability. Drawing on research conducted at the Institute for the Advancement of Homeopathy, he compares algorithm-generated remedy suggestions with outcomes from skilled practitioners. The session highlights the limitations, risks, and practical implications of AI-assisted prescribing.
His interview on PragerU (view count: 3.4 million) is filled with preposterous falsehoods meant to reveal him to be a singular freethinker who asks questions no one has dared to ask before. On the topic of diabetes—and keep in mind that he is a doctor who specializes in a surgical intervention for type 1 diabetes—he boldly states that diabetics are simply given insulin and that no one tells them to try lowering their sugar levels by watching what they eat. Has he been living under a rock for most of his life? Earlier, he rhetorically asked how to even teach ethics to doctors in training. The interviewer turned the question back at him: “Are they even taught these things?” His incredible answer? “I’m not aware of it.” The School of Medicine at his own university, Johns Hopkins, has a first-year course for its medical students literally called “Foundations of Public Health: Epidemiology, Ethics & Health Care.” To claim that medical students are not taught ethics is either a gonzo lie or a sign of a disqualifying lack of knowledge.
It’s astrology. My copy of the Old Farmer’s Almanac even has astrological charts that are completely nonsensical. There are specific dates in each month that are best for cutting your hair to discourage growth, to lay shingles, to get married, and to castrate animals. The same goes for planting seeds according to the moon’s phase: in Quebec, planting lettuce is recommended for the entire month of June, but the moon apparently prefers the latter half of that month.
Graph followed by this text: "As you can see, it’s a pretty good fit… except for February. We all remember the “forever winter” we just survived. Average temperatures in February for Southern Quebec were -9.3ºC, but the almanac predicted a much warmer -2ºC."
FREEDOM TRUCKER HAT. RED. "FREEDOM." $56.00
Cover of The Old Farmer’s Almanac 2026 Canadian Edition
Over the last several months, prices for both consumer level and enterprise solid state drives, hard drives, and other types of storage have skyrocketed. As an example, a 2TB external Samsung SSD I purchased last fall for $159 now costs $575. PC Part Picker, a website that tracks the average price of different types of drives, shows a universal increase in storage prices starting in about October of last year. Prices of many of the drives it tracks have doubled or increased by more than 150 percent, and at some stores SSDs and hard drives are simply sold out. There is now even a secondary market for some SSDs, with people scalping them on eBay and elsewhere.
Agenda The Independent Sci-Commer Experience. Presented by Roxi S (@hydroxide.foodscience), Rohin Francis MD PhD (Medlife Crisis), Esther Olu (@themelaninchemist) and Mo Kanadil PharmD (@moskinlab). The Science of a Prebunk. Presented by Jess Stokes-Parish PhD The Science of a Debunk. Presented by Stephan Lewandowsky PhD Finding and Communicating Truth in Science. Presented by Jonathan Jarry Social Identities, Beliefs and Trusted Messengers. Presented by Matthew Facciani PhD Sci-Comm on Social Media and the Attention Economy. Presented by Stephanie Castillo PhD and Reyhaneh Maktoufi PhD Women in Sci-Comm. Presented by Emily Graslie, Jen Gunter MD, Michelle Wong PhD Sycophantic AI Increases Attitude Extremity and Overconfidence. Presented by Jay Van Bavel PhD Why Sci-Comm Training is Essential. Presented by Kirsten Sanford PhD Branded Science Communications: A Two-Way Conversation with P&G Beauty. Presented by Jeni Thomas PhD and Rolanda Wilkerson PhD *sponsored session - Thank you P&G! The Issue of Snowballing Misinformation in Beauty. Presented by Jen Novakovich STAY TUNED FOR MORE!
Mike Tyson with his face tattoo. RFK Jr with the same face tattoo.
I asked about the reason for the mandatory alarm bell to the organizations responsible for the broadcasting of Amber alerts in Quebec and Canada. The CRTC, which works at the national level, told me that Public Safety Canada was better placed to answer my question. The CRTC, which works at the national level, told me that Public Safety Canada (PSC) was better placed to answer my question. In the latter’s answer to me, a spokesperson highlighted that these alerts had been the result of extensive consultation and agreement, and that the noise was intentional: “In the case of AMBER alerts, timely public awareness can play a crucial role in locating a child quickly and safely.” When asked if PSC had considered emitting Amber alerts without sound, I was only told that the overall alert group that Amber alerts belong to—which also includes tornado warnings and wildfire evacuations—were of “critical importance” to alert Canadians of “imminent threats to life and property.”
And screening is not the panacea we may think it is. Only one in every 10 moderately sized colon polyps—growths in the colon that are usually benign and that can be found and removed during a scoping procedure—is expected to progress to an invasive cancer. Finally, even though the U.S. lowered their screening age to 45, their task force in charge of evaluating evidence for primary care and health prevention estimated that this change would actually only prevent one or two additional death(s) per year. No one should die from cancer; but when managing limited resources (doctors, nurses, laboratory personnel), all of these considerations must be tallied up.
Agencies in charge of Amber alerts will often tout very high success rates; these victories, however, can be built on a fallacy. If a child is safely found after an Amber alert, it can too easily be argued that the child was found because of the Amber alert. It’s important to remind ourselves that police officers do not sit idly by as soon as an Amber alert is declared. They continue investigating (possibly with renewed gusto inspired by the urgency of the alert), and this mundane police work can lead to the localization of the missing child.
Screenshot from the website of the Medical Journal of Dr. DY Patil Vidyapeeth.
Man holding on two massive, twin, compact fluorescent light bulbs and applying one of them to his head.
Telegram post featuring AI Nikola Tesla and a long list of "testimonies" that feed into a single URL: TZLA.club.
Ben Shapiro is coming to UATX on April 26.
Banner image featuring a compact fluorescent light bulb on top of an anarchy symbol on top of the emergency medical services blue cross, and in the background is a drawing of Nikola Tesla
Ad for body & science featuring a toned woman wearing very little clothing and a buff dude only wearing shorts. Behind them is a forest and mountain peaks, as well as some sort of planetary ring in the sky. In front of them, anonymous bottles that look like a hotel bathroom moisturizing kit.
A colourful, English-language ad that says "Hello Québec! Premium research compounds. Fast shipping from Canada! Order Now! Discreet & Local. Quality Assured." It features the Château Frontenac and a bowl of poutine. Dead centre are three vials of injectable liquids with "RESEARCH COMPOUND" on the label.
Headline from Variety about how the Spider-Man: Brand New Day trailer got 1 billion views.
Screenshot of a man giving himself a head massage with twin compact fluorescent light bulbs.