Imagine you are told there is a 99% chance you have a fatal disease that will kill you on your 50th birthday, and that the only cure has a 100% chance of leaving you completely paralyzed, but must be done before you turn 25. Would it be unreasonable to take your chances without treatment?

Now imagine the doctor stands to gain tremendous financial wealth from this treatment in the form of grants and whole departments at universities. In fact, the more people these doctors diagnose, and the more certain they are, the more money and prestige they and the politicians that proselytize their research get. And the doctors making the diagnoses try desperately to discredit the doctors that dispute them, going so far as to call them 'crank doctors'. Despite the fact that no one will know for sure if the diagnosis is correct for several more decades, at which point the people advocating the existence of the disease will all be dead or retired.

Would you paralyze yourself for that? What about the whole world?