A Willful Ignorance of Science

I am more annoyed by people who blindly trust the so-called "experts" without doing any of their own research too. In my opinion, there are more of these type of people out there

 

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There is no reason whatsoever not to question an "expert". Sometimes they are flat-out wrong, but pontificating as if they are correct. This includes medical experts who supposedly have great medical expertise, greater than their patients.

A prime example was when I trusted a Pediatrician to tell me what might have caused a small skull fracture in my daughter when she was only 1. I had found a small bump on her skull some two days after she'd taken a short fall from a couch. She had fallen from a couch upon which she was standing on onto a carpeted floor. I strongly suspected that was the cause. The fracture itself was sufficiently minor that it required no treatment, and healed completely on its own with no adverse effects. Babies are, surprisingly, built to take it to a degree. But I was not aware of that at that time.

The Pediatrician (with several years of pediatric experience under his belt, while I only had general medical knowledge, not having worked directly in pediatrics at that time) repeatedly assured me that a short fall from a couch as my daughter had experienced could not cause a skull fracture, and that there must be some other cause. I racked my brain trying to figure out what that might have been, questioned a care-giver who'd had a 1-hour custody of her (who became terrified she might be deemed a 'suspect'), underwent a polygraph exam to assure the hospital staff that I was not an abusive parent, and otherwise was unable to come up with any cause. When that occurred, the Pediatrican, against the law, ordered our daughter removed from us for forced medical whole-body X-ray to search for past abuse (which, of course, was non-existent). It was not until a few days later that, in searching medical literature, I discovered that short-falls of under 3 feet (the couch fall was about 2 feet) was the most common source of light skull fractures, and that they almost always healed satisfactorily with no ill consequences, and with no treatment.

Indeed, I would now believe that most every baby obtains a least one minor skull fracture during infancy, but that they routinely heal without consequence, and most parents never even know about it. I learned about my daughter's bump simply because I was giving her a bath. It was not noticeable when her hair was dry. She had no other outward physical symptoms or behavior changes. Had I delayed 12 hours in giving her a bath, it would also not have been noticeable, because it was already reducing in size at that time, and was almost entirely gone 24 hours later.

So much for implicitly trusting "experts", even those with 4 years of college, 4 years of graduate school, years of internship, and years of practice in their field.

And that still exists today (the incident with my daughter was 10 years ago). Witness the "expert" cardiologists who prescribe Plavix and related 'blood-thinners' for people with clogged-up arteries. Not only is Plavix not any better than aspirin, it's barely better than placebos, for preventing heart-attacks and stroke. That's not me saying it - that's the Plavix literature itself saying it. Yet the pharmaceutical companies push Plavix on doctors by two main methods -- telling patients (via extensive media campaigns) to "Ask their Doctor if Plavix is Right for You", and then sending pharmaceutical reps to doctors' offices promoting the 'benefits' of Plavix. It's no wonder that Plavix has become the #2 drug of choice for cardiologists - yet it is killing people, and there are other, non-pharmaceutical [read - the pharmaceutical companies can't make a dime off of them, so don't push them on people at all] medications that are far more effective at actually reversing cardiology disease and removing plaque build-up; rather than trying to get the blood to flow through narrowly restricted arteries without clotting. [Plavix is called a "platelet aggregation inhibitor"].

Many other examples abound where the professionals are led astray without even being aware of it. Why do you think Pfizer was recently fined $2.3 BILLION for criminal fraud?

And please don't get me going on the LHC. If everyone there agrees that strangelets would be perfectly safe, that doesn't necessarily make it so. Physics is physics, as you know, and just because a whole lot of physicists speculate along the same lines does not dictate what the laws of physics will necessarily be. Look at the RHIC. Numerous persons there speculated that the RHIC fireball would be short-lived. That was their prediction. Mine was the opposite. The result was that they were "surprised" when it was long-lived. Now many of those same people are predicting the LHC fireball will be shorter-lived. Will we be equally surprised?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying distrust everything. But if you happen to have strong or potentially superior knowledge in a field than the "expert", don't hesitate to question. The people who question their vet might actually be more knowledgable, with respect to their own pet's needs, than the vet, and are looking to the vet for additional input (medical opinion), nothing more. Though I suspect that most of them are simply toying with information for the fun of it, and aren't necessarily serious. They enjoy spending money simply so they can tell people how much money they spend, and not because they think they're getting their money's worth. Same applies to sports cars.

 

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Presumably the latter would be true of any juvenile skull, Fraggle.

 

But that isn't relative to their tolerance of trauma. I'd be hard-pressed to say what mammalian species has the best rate of trauma healing.

 

link

excellent

if a deafening silence is the only response i get, i take it that ben and other scientists of his ilk, in cahoots with their corporate and govt overlords, are guilty of crimes against humanity

i see A Willful Abuse of Science

 

Then where's my fucking corporate overlord cheque?

 

What I always wondered is does the vaccine actually CAUSE the autism. Or is the autism just dormant and the stress of the bodies immune system playing target practice with the dead virus triggers the autism?

 

what time does your mailman make his drops?

children are dying while you wonder
click the goddamn links

 

My parents were always against any form of vaccinations. The only one I've ever received was against Tetanus and polio.
I really wonder if it's any good for people to get a vaccine against influenza.

Edit: I completely agree with what Walter L. Wagner said.

 

With the new vaccines for the swine flu we have a whole new array of adjuvants - read: highly toxic experimental substances - so that the vaccine can have low doses of viral components. These adjuvants and of course things like a dash of Mercury in a highly toxic form will have long term effects, many having to do with immune suppression. Not even sure why the companies bother to get immunity from litigation, but they have it in any case. I'm sure their lawyers could play ciggarrette company games for decades, long past when currect execs have wandered off into blissful carribean retirements.

If anyone googles around the big names in vaccination production you find things like

Baxter Ltd. supplied the Czech Republic with LIVE VIRUS

http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2009/02/27/8560781.html

and if it hadn't been for some mid level techie who on his own initiative tested the vaccine, a large % percentage of the population would have been given the virus + seasonal virus which was also in the vaccines. Thus making each recipient a wonderful vector for the pandemic.

Or that Glaxo is charged right now with
illegal experiments on children - US and Russia
tax crimes
bribery
covering up negative research - causes suicide - on one of their products - see Prozac and then lying about this covering up.

But we don't hear about the immoral and illegal and unbelievable incompetent - one hopes that's all it was - activities of these companies. Or that the panels of expert consultants that WHO listens to are ex adn current scientists and execs from the very companies standing to make BILLIONS of dollars.

I won't ever bother to mention that Baxter, the company that supplied an entire nation with live virus instead of vaccinations - something that makes other researchers shake their heads since this would require so many errors it is miracle level bad coincidence this happened or.... - has a factory not too far from Mexico city.

 

Well, in the global sense, there is no correlation between vaccination and autism, whatever the mechanism might be. It's possible that such a relationship might be obscured by individual thresholds, of course.

 

The premise of the OP is something we all struggle with. I agree that (1) "people distrust experts when they don't reinforce their own preconceived notions" and would add that experts distrust people when they don't reinforce what was shown to them as the best way to go about things. I find the second point ("People willfully disregard conclusions reached by science if those conclusions conflict with their own opinions") to be a bit overreaching. The reference to "knuckle dragging creationists" is a good case in point but you will be hard pressed to find anyone who hadn't disregarded a scientific conclusion based on preconditioned bias. Let us take the example of the "unscientific" bias toward organic food based on nutritional content. I believe the quote was "there is no evidence that organic foods are any more nutritious than foods grown by conventional means" or was it "there is no evidence to support the contention that organic foods are more nutritious". This is a true statement in regards to the measurement of nutrition. If we substitute the word nutritious for healthy (which is the pretext for nutrition) then this statement is no longer true. Most conventional products on the market use nutritional fillers. For example until 2007 the chemical melamine was added to everything from pet food to powdered baby milk because it increased the protein content putting the product in line with nutritional standards. It took the death of hundreds of animals and babies before this substance was considered toxic. There is no such risk (supposedly) when consuming organic foods. The point I'm trying to make here is that if organic and conventional foods register the same nutritional values this does not mean one is as healthy as the other hence the public lean toward organic. Scientific evidence is only as valid as our understanding which is less than any of us would like to believe. I should also add that some of the most well educated people I know are also the dumbest.

 

Isn't this what physicians are doing when they prescribe pharmaceuticals for off-label uses? Given that a sizable percentage of drugs are prescribed for off-label uses, and they seem to work in spite of the absence of extensive and sanctioned studies which have "proven" their efficacy for treating various ailments (other than those for which their use is "approved" of course), I would think that many would be grateful to their iconoclastic physicians for, well, saving their lives.


Edit: Likewise, there's always the physicians who prescribe the newer--and purportedly better--drug, with so much research behind it --because that's where the money is (for the researchers, the pharmaceutical companies, and the physicians even). An older drug may very well have been a better choice, but the research dollars aren't going into that and generic products generate less capital. When politics and capital drive science, I think it's not unreasonable for people to maintain a certain level of skepticism regarding science.

 

But deceptive, since the comparative measurement of nutrition has not been done well enough or thoroughly enough that negative or null results would have conclusive import.

And: That was the significantly modified version of the contention. The original contention was that there was conclusive evidence of equivalent nutritional value in conventional vs organic food. The evidence was held to be so conclusive that those acting on doubts about it, or reasoning from other evidence than official "measurements", were listed among the willfully ignorant of science.

And that is a very common kind of situation in which that label is applied.

 

This reminds of a French study I ran across several years ago which purported to determine whether or not "heavy smokers," who were also schizophrenic, experienced any significant reduction in the positive and/or negative attributes of psychosis. The study group included schizophrenics who were non-smokers, moderate smokers, and heavy smokers (I don't recall the specific criterion for the distinctions). All other factors aside--none of these individuals were medicated and they experienced varying degrees of psychosis--the study found there to be no significant variation between the non-smokers and the heavy smokers, but the moderate smokers showed a significant reduction in the symptoms of negative psychoses (nothing significant with respect to positive psychosis). The value of such a study for really concluding much of anything is irrelevant here, but the conclusion they did reach is interesting: there is no correlation between heavy smoking and the abatement of symptoms of psychosis. They did not seem to find the data regarding moderate smokers to be of much import, as such was not the focus of the study.

 

Ahh right. I forgot about your post.

At any rate, certainly judges and juries aren't composed of scientists. This is readily apparent in cases such as these. So I wouldn't make any conclusions about the safety of vaccines based on the fact that some rich kid had a good lawyer.

One thing to take into account is the increased rate at which people are diagnosed with autism, and the fact that the definition of autism has been broadened over the past several years.

ice corrected me in a previous post, so I will be careful here: there are several large studies which have been preformed which don't find any link between autism and MMR vaccines. Most of the hoopla centers around a study published in 1997, which has since been dismissed by most of the community, including one of the authors of the original study.

Anyway, the status is more or less summed up by the following:

This, of course, doesn't mean that and MMR vaccine can't cause autism in some special set of circumstances. As the source points out, it is impossible to say that MMR doesn't cause autism, however, by virtue of the large number of studies conducted on this matter in the past 12 years (since the original study), it makes such a correlation extremely unlikely.

So you'd deal with the increased mortality rates due to measles, mumps and rubella, instead? And, who's dying?

 

if it was otherwise, the notion of type I and type II errors cropping up in scientific assertions wouldn't be such a phenomena.

Even if there is a consensus on what constitutes evidence, it really requires some hard yards to get a consensus on what the evidence indicates.

Rubella immunizations and autism is one.

Tomatoes or linseed oil and prostrate cancer is another.

Organic vs chemical agriculture is another.

:shrug:

 

Bill Clinton loved science, he used to speak fondly of it in the white house.