Hi. I finally, with the help of yáll and also by examining the article by Bill Sardi, have come up with the correct solution to my initial question...! The answer is; when my neighbour the next time brings up this study over a casual dinner-talk, or in some other circumstance hints at that there was a study which was talked about on national-TV the other day that says that vitaminC-users run a "double" risk of getting kidneystones, I can easily and logically prove him wrong, in a way that he understands, by saying that he has not yet understood the fact that what they were talking about on the news was the RELATIVE!!! risk that the people in the survey ran, but what he is trying to argue for is the ABSOLUTE risk for him or me...I didn´t know the difference between these two terms myself, until I tried to find the answer to my initial question, and my neighbour for sure doesn´t know the difference between them either...and obviously there are a whole host of news-reporters, writers on the Internet and reporters from all walks of life who reports on health-issues who don´t understand or use these terms, not the least of which are the very people writing on the Karolinska Institutes own web-site, where they write, quote:"The results of the study indicate that men who take vitamin C supplements (typically 1000 mg per tablet) are twice as likely to develop kidney stones as men who do not take any dietary supplements.", unquote, which simply is not true, because the fact of the matter is that "the results of the study indicates that men IN THE STUDY who take vitamin C supplements (typically 1000 mg per tablet) are twice as likely to develop AN INCREASED RELATIVE RISK FOR kidney stones as men IN THE STUDY who do not take any dietary supplements." The ABSOLUTE risk that the study might indicate for someone like me or my neighbour would probably be something like Bill Sardi says on his blog, 0.310%, or something in the neighbourhood of 1/6th of 1% or 1/3rd of 1%, I don´t know ...but the numbers aint the point here, the point is that for me to manage to discuss with my neighbour, or anyone else for that matter about scientific research and megadoses of vitamins and minerals, it is of vital importance for me to be able to explain the difference between what the scientists talks and writes about and sometimes manages to scare people off with, is the RELATIVE risk...and what concerns me healthwise, and also should concern my neighbour healthwise, is the ABSOLUTE risk...big difference, and one which mostly is obscure from written language, and certainly not talked about, because few people talk about it, I guess...
but I will from here on, that´s for sure...
...thankyou all for participating on this issue...it helped me a lot, and I got my question answered to my satisfaction...very good...
One more thing...the "scientific lying" that I suspected was going on...?
Lying by omission, it´s called...when one reports a scientific study, and fails to clearly state the relations between RELATIVE and ABSOLUTE risks, one will for sure run the very high risk of being accused of
LYING BY OMISSION...
http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/the-risk-numbers-1128/"Relative risk is the ideal measure for statistical analysis, for addressing scientific questions," says Don Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. "But it is irrelevant for individual decision-making."
I´ll have a look at the book "Tarnished Gold" also...it seems as if this book is "right up my alley" at the moment...