Strong. Lean. Fit.

Thirteen High School football players in Oregon were diagnosed with a very rare condition called Compartment Syndrome several days ago. It involves intense pressure on blood vessels in muscles and leads to severe pain and swelling.

Now usually when a rare condition strikes such a closely connected group of people, doctors and experts look for the cause in order to prevent such a thing from occurring again. I get that; people want answers. However, what I don’t get is the reckless jumps in logic taken and the apparent intent to deter people from taking a safe supplement. I was casually browsing through the news yesterday and I came across this article. I was in complete disbelief. ABC News was singling out creatine, one of the most widely used and most research supplements in existence, as the leading cause for this odd medical mystery in Oregon.

Just to make something very clear, causation (i.e. when one variable directly leads to an outcome) is NOT the same as correlation (i.e. when two variables have a discernable relationship). As per our football player example, ABC is suggesting that since some of the football players used creatine (only three who had surgery were known to definitely have elevated levels), that creatine is the likely culprit in this case. Does anyone else see this as misleading? Yes, some of them used creatine. But ALL were teenage football players from the same geographical area, drinking and eating food that likely came from the same sources and went through the same practices and shared the same locker room. What I’m saying is the cause could have been literally anything they had in common. Those relationships look a little stronger than the creatine correlation, huh? Creatine looks like one of the few factors that was not even constant in all the cases. The most likely cause of the condition, in my opinion and several other expert’s, is an overly intense practice schedule coupled with a lack of preparation on the athletes’ parts, not a supplement used by so many people who have never ended up in such serious condition.

So why was this article written? That is the first question I ask when I read something. It clearly was not written for pure news reporting, nor was it supposed to entertain. The article was meant to incite controversy. If I were to read a story that said “too much practice, too little preparation is likely to blame for odd condition”, I would think to myself, “of course it is! That’s common sense.” No one could really counter that explanation. However, if ABC tries to demonize a very popular supplement (which is also naturally occurring, and impossible to detect whether the creatine in your body came from food or supplement, as one of the experts in the article duly noted) that has thus far been shown to be completely safe, they would generate much more site traffic and interest, regardless of the veracity of the content. I think this article is just another example of the media’s fascination with taking an unfounded and slanted viewpoint on the health industry (see this Time Magazine hack job). That’s fine, as it is their prerogative. However, I draw the line when news organizations blur the line between propaganda and news reporting. Articles which are purposely written to lack clarity or quality information is utter garbage, and I could only hope more people took issue with this style of “reporting”.