Kiran K Karthikeyan wrote on 2/3/19 2:44 AM February 3, 2019:
This leads me to the point I'm trying to make - the reason to accept
science and its findings, warts and all, is simply because we are human and
the scientific method is the best method of enquiry we have at our
disposal. This obviously doesn't mean blind acceptance, but it does mean we
ask for a preponderance of evidence which peer review (sometimes) supplies.
The system is not perfect but that is a problem with actors in it who are
unfortunately human. Add to this the last para of Heather's response on
whether we can ever truly know something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision
It's also the reason to question science and its findings, warts and
all. It's the scientific method all the way down. Checking past work and
assumptions is part of it.
"Measure three times and cut once" is from carpentry, not science, but
it's a valid practice when making any irreversible change. New evidence
comes in all the time. It's worth taking a breath to ask whether we are
on course.
This gets muddier when you have interested actors (and we always do) on
both sides of the scientific equation. There are always people who try
to force-map available data to get the conclusions they want, and it can
be very difficult to tell when they're doing so.
Pharmaceutical companies have a long history of massaging, suppressing,
and manufacturing results so they can bring drugs profitably to market.
I did my vaccine research after my daughter had a life-threatening
reaction to the whole-cell pertussis vaccine.
I discovered that vaccines are not a monolithic issue. The tetanus
vaccine, for example, is a safe and effective preventative of a horrible
disease that lies in wait in the soil everywhere around us. It's usually
quite long-lasting as well. WWII soldiers who were vaccinated against
tetanus exhibited immunity over 50 years later.
The crowd disease vaccines, on the other hand, share the distinction of
being much less effective at conferring immunity, shorter-lived, and
with more side effects. Many of the crowd diseases are largely benign in
healthy children and confer lifelong immunity. The diseases are bad news
for pregnant women and people with immune disorders, but it's not clear
that vaccinating healthy children against these diseases is our best
public health option.
Some public health officials agree that it might be better policy to
vaccinate against many diseases at puberty and again in early adulthood,
but they can't enforce vaccination of teens and adults. Young children
are a captive audience, though, so they are repeatedly vaccinated
against the crowd diseases, which don't pose a particular threat to
their health, and also against hepatitis B and HPV, which they are
extremely unlikely to contract. Meanwhile the adults who should be
vaccinated against those diseases mostly aren't.
We don't yet have longterm data on the effects of our current aggressive
vaccine policy. How do repeated doses of a wide variety of vaccines
affect the health of individuals over 50, 75, 100 years? How long do the
vaccines confer immunity? What percentage of the population remains
susceptible to the disease after aggressive vaccination as opposed to
after natural immunity to the endemic disease?
About 15 years ago, we discovered a bat colony inside our chimney as
well as a bat bite on my shoulder. The rabies vaccine is not
particularly safe. It requires 6 doses that cause flu-like symptoms over
the course of a month. Rabies was then invariably fatal. The whole
family received all six doses of the rabies vaccine, and we were
grateful for it, flu-like symptoms and all.
When I was a child, doctors ordered up x-rays for every minor mishap and
handed out antibiotics like candy. "Better safe than sorry," they'd say,
completely unaware of the effects of overindulgence in those particular
kinds of medical technology.
So let's see, what is the experiment and what is the control? In
adopting a new medical technology, should we err on the side of over- or
under-prescribing it? How much data do we need before we decide that a
technology is safe and effective? How long do we need to follow patients
to determine whether there are deleterious side effects?
These aren't easy questions to answer.
It's not unscientific to want new medical technologies to prove
themselves before submitting one's self and one's children as
experimental animals. We do our research and make the best choices we
can, knowing that Mother Nature always bats last.
--hmm
