Medical conspiracy theories believed by half of Americans

About half of U.S. adults believe at least one medical conspiracy theory, a new study says.

The attraction to these conspiracy theories is, according to lead author of the survey J. Eric Oliver, that they are much more simple and far easier to comprehend than the scientific, jargon-heavy actual reports.

"Science in general - medicine in particular - is complicated and cognitively challenging because you have to carry around a lot of uncertainty," Oliver, from the University of Chicago, told Reuters.

"To talk about epidemiology and probability theories is difficult to understand as opposed to 'if you put this substance in your body, it's going to be bad,'" he said.

For the new study, Oliver and his team had more than 1,300 adults read six popular medical conspiracies and then report whether they had heard of them before and whether or not they agreed with them.

Examples of some of these theories are: that the government knows cell phones cause cancer but does nothing about it, that genetically modified organisms are being used to shrink the world's population, that routine vaccinations cause autism and that water fluoridation is a way for companies to dump dangerous chemicals into the environment.

About 49 percent of survey participants agreed with at least one of the theories.

Many of these theories had to do with mistrust of the government, and 37 percent of respondents believe that U.S. regulators are suppressing access to natural cures.

The findings suggest that those who believe in medical conspiracies approach their health differently.

For example, while 13 percent of people who did not believe in any conspiracies took herbal supplements, 35 percent of those who believed in three or more theories took supplements.

Researchers say that people who believed in conspiracies were more likely to take alternative medicine and avoid traditional medicine, and that's an important distinction for doctors to consider when treating patients.

"It's important to increase information about health and science to the public," he said. "I think scientific thinking is not a very intuitive way to see the world. For people who don't have a lot of education, it's relatively easy to reject the scientific way of thinking about things."