Each Individual Is the Best Expert on His Own Taste for Risk

Raw milk crusader Michael Schmidt finally got to meet with Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty in early November, 2011 after a 37-day hunger strike.  However, the premier told him the government had no plans to change the law to legalize raw milk sales, and that it would rely on the best advice of medical experts. 

But what is the best advice of medical experts?  And which experts, consulted when?  As a high school student forty years ago, I was instructed to do a breast self-examination every month without fail, to detect cancer.   That advice survived until about three weeks ago, when experts suddenly retracted it and announced that breast self-exams “have no benefit and should not be used.”

Dramatic reversals of expert opinion like this are not unusual.  Decades ago, approximately 90 percent of children underwent tonsillectomies; now, only 20 percent do.  Today tonsils are recognized as important organs in children’s immune systems.  There is even evidence suggesting that unnecessary tonsil removal during the first half of the 20th century may have rendered children more susceptible to the paralytic form of polio.

Prior to 1994, experts at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) forbade health-food marketers Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw from putting this statement on fish oil supplements: “Consumption of omega-3 fatty acids may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease.”   Pearson and Shaw challenged the FDA’s ruling in court.  After seven years of litigation, the FDA finally capitulated.   During those seven years, a million Americans suffered sudden-death heart attacks, some of which might have been prevented if consumers had been given the information that is now considered established science.  Health Canada’s website, for instance, now says consuming omega-3 fatty acids may have not only cardiovascular benefits but also beneficial effects on diabetes, depression, cancer, lupus, asthma and rheumatoid arthritis.

Sometimes the about-face comes much more quickly.  The drug Avastin was approved by Health Canada for treating breast cancer in February, 2009 but approval was withdrawn in November, 2011 because its side effects include the increased risk of death from heart attacks and strokes.

Politicians may find it convenient to sidestep difficult issues by deferring to “the experts”.  But nobody on earth is more expert than the individual at answering the crucial question that arises repeatedly in every person’s life: what risks am I willing to accept?

Statisticians can tell us the risk associated with skydiving, smoking cigarettes, travelling by airplane, or driving a car.  What they cannot tell us is whether any particular individual should prefer to accept or reject the risk of those activities.  Each individual has to throw into his own mental hopper questions such as:  How pleasurable will this be?  How frightened will I be?  How necessary is this?  How much will it cost?  What alternatives are there?  Only the individual is sufficiently expert at weighing his own values and preferences to decide which risks he is willing to take.   If one person decides to travel by airplane while another decides to travel by car, neither of them is wrong.  Their values and preferences simply lead them to accept different risks.

Government experts testified at Michael Schmidt’s trial that drinking raw milk can expose people to the risk of sickness or death from various pathogens.  The people who wish to drink raw milk, or to feed it to their children, are well aware of these risks—the publicity surrounding Mr. Schmidt’s prosecution guaranteed that.  But the risk of death is actually quite low:  no-one has died from drinking raw milk in the United States in the past 11 years, even though sales are legal in 26 states.

On the other hand, a study of 8,334 school-aged children in Germany, Austria and Switzerland was published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology in August, 2011.  It stated:  “Reported raw milk consumption was inversely associated to asthma,…atopy…and hay fever.”  In plain language, the children who drank raw milk were less likely to have asthma and allergies than those who drank pasteurized.

Asthma kills approximately 500 Canadians annually.  It is not irrational for parents to want to minimize the risk of asthma for their children.  And many people have observed from personal experience that they or their children cannot digest pasteurized milk but have no trouble digesting raw. 

So every individual can weigh the risks:  which would he prefer to accept?   Some will choose pasteurized, some will choose raw.  Neither group is wrong.

What premier McGuinty fails to understand is that the real experts will speak for themselves, one by one.  If expert opinion is to govern, individuals should be free to implement the advice prescribed by their own unique expertise about their own unique circumstances and risk tolerance.   

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