Doug Winter channels Victor Meldrew
Apparently, It is unscientific to pour wholesale scorn on complementary medicine. Catchy title, you have to agree. After you’ve read the article you might find it’s URL amusing too.
Of course pouring scorn, wholesale or retail, isn’t directly a scientific activity. “It is unscientific to eat poached salmon” is as true a statement, but I guess rather less encouraging if you’ve got a word limit and a deadline.
The thrust of this offering is pretty startlingly original. The author’s premise is that complementary medicine is getting a really bad press from scientists, and that this is unscientific. She goes on at some length to say that the reason it’s unscientific to criticise complementary medicine is that complementary medicine is a load of rubbish. Yep, apparently complementary medicine has no evidence to support it, and most rational people would agree that it’s nonsense and therefore it’s unscientific to criticise it.
This is a use of the word ‘unscientific’ I’ve not been previously acquainted with.
The author, reasonably, says that lots of people have been treated successfully using complementary medicine and that this is due to the placebo effect. If you’ve seen the same claims made about Prozac, you’ll know that the placebo effect can be massive.
Not only can placebos induce things like reduction in pain, which seems obviously possible, but it can induce strong physical changes in the way the body behaves. The placebo effect can do all sorts of startling things, and this has been validated by experiment.
She also says that complementary medicine works because it’s pleasant. Reflexology, for example, involves having your feet massaged. This is nice. Having nice things done to you makes you feel better. This sounds pretty reasonable to me too - having your feet massaged is indeed very nice, and if you are unwell you are likely to appreciate it.
So, she says, complementary medicine works because it exploits the placebo effect and it makes you feel good.
Do either of these things make it unscientific to criticise it for being wrong? No, of course not. The purpose of science is to determine the truth as far as it can be tested experimentally. Is the author really suggesting that science should see that having your feet massaged is pleasant and back off? Or even, seeing the placebo effect deployed successfully that they should retire and investigate something else? That’s just bizarre.
Surely those being treated deserve more than this. I am rather less certain than the author that all complementary medicine is rubbish. Some of it is clearly transparent nonsense (homeopathy, I’m looking at you), but some of it could have more to it, and deserves further study.
Furthermore, there are some clear dangers in ignoring complementary therapy. I don’t see any aromatherapists in ambulances, and you shouldn’t see them anywhere near primary cancer care either. If people choose complementary therapy instead of science-based medicine in areas where they have a treatable problem then they could die or suffer completely unnecessarily.
Finally It’s quite possible these treatments have side-effects. The pat claims by some that complementary treatments can’t have side effects is a bizarre admission from those touting them that they probably do nothing. Certainly homeopathy is unlikely to have any side effects, but some herbal treatments use powerful drugs that can be dangerous. Patients deserve to know the facts about these treatments.
If you want to treat people with placebos, then do so. That’s fine - it works even if you tell people it’s a placebo (although it works better if you tell them it was expensive). But to claim that it is unscientific to investigate something is just dumb. What the author really means is that it is morally reprehensible to discourage people from treatments that might help them.
There is more grounding to this argument, even if she doesn’t understand that’s what she’s really saying. But even here I have to disagree. This is the same claim that’s often made about religious faith - that it’s good for you, and therefore that you should have faith. Faith makes you a better, happier person. I’m not going to debate this, or even draw your attention to the bizarre logical flaws in it, because it’s completely irrelevant. If it is a pack of lies it deserves to be exposed as such whether it makes you a better person or not. There are many practices and beliefs that might be beneficial, but how do we ever progress if we accept this as sufficient?
Believing the sun only comes up each morning because the king does a magic dance is probably quite good for you but IT IS NOT TRUE. Sorry. It just isn’t.
Throughout history conservatives have used this argument to defend the status quo, that even if it’s wrong it’s good for you, and it’s just plain unacceptable. Not only that, it’s incredibly patronising - the idea that somehow we know it’s rubbish but we’d better keep it quiet from them, the unwashed masses who are unable to cope with the truth.
UPDATE: I think I must be telepathic: PhD girl is killed by Chinese treatment
This is really funny. Go on, read all the way to the end.
Gary Pugh, director of forensic services at Scotland Yard has suggested putting kids who look likely to become criminals in later life on the national DNA register. My natural reaction to this, like most people’s, is revulsion. It really is “like something from a science fiction novel”, and really dark science fiction at that.
The DNA register has some serious problems as it stands, and I haven’t seen these discussed anywhere. The problem is one I have written about before: how hard it is to understand odds when they work at the sorts of levels you encounter with large populations. This sounds really boring but is vitally important to justice.
It is very common now in criminal trial reports to hear that forensic evidence has been a critical part of the conviction. Sometimes a matching DNA sample is the only real evidence, with every other piece of evidence being circumstantial. Odds are quoted by the forensic expert on the stand as being “one in a million” or even a “one in ten million” chance of the sample matching someone else.
These odds sound pretty convincing, and juries certainly find them so. I’ve not heard of any case anywhere where DNA evidence was produced in this manner and the jury found not guilty.
The problem is that these odds are actually not quite so convincing as all that on their own. The argument I’m about to put forward is sometimes called “The Defense Attorney’s Fallacy” because it presumes the only evidence available is the DNA evidence, and that nothing else is available. In most countries there is no such thing as a national register, so the DNA match was found after the suspect was identified by other means. This does make DNA evidence extremely convincing even at quite low odds. This isn’t the case here though - if people are identified by routine DNA sweeps through the database this is most definitely not a fallacy.
Right now anyone who passes through a police station gets their DNA sample taken. Whether they are charged or released that sample is then kept forever. Whenever a serious crime is committed the database is searched for a match. If a match comes up, the police pop over to the home of whoever matches and arrest them.
You’d have to be very lucky not to be charged at this point. A cast-iron alibi would possibly do the job, as would, perhaps, being a High Court Judge or an MP. But perhaps not even then. You are definitely prime suspect, and will probably end up in court, especially if it’s a high profile case with a lot of pressure on the police to arrest someone.
Right now the DNA register has nearly five million records, approaching ten percent of the population. Lets see how well those odds work.
A DNA sample has a “one in ten million” chance of matching someone, say. That means a given sample will match 6 people in the UK, which has a population of sixty million. Ten percent of the population are on the register, roughly, which means that of these 6 the chances are pretty good that one of them is on the register.
This means that for any sample at any crime scene, there will probably be a match with the register - but only a one in six chance that the person who matched actually committed the crime.
This has some pretty far-reaching implications. Imagine if a forensic expert witness instead of quoting a “one in ten million” chance of it being someone else instead said there was an eighty percent chance it was somebody else who did it.
Doesn’t sound so hot now does it?
This is an artifact of the sampling method - if you only sample a random portion of the population your quoted odds have to be modified by the sample rate. This is being completely ignored by everyone in the justice system. They have good reasons for this of course - the police are widely distrusted by juries, and with good reason, since they have such a vested interest in obtaining a conviction. They have finally found a weapon that convinces juries instantly, and the last thing they want to do is undermine it.
Perversely requiring everyone in the country to go on the register might have precisely this effect. For every sample they’d have half a dozen matches, and it might become a lot clearer just how poor odds one in ten million really is, when dealing with populations of the size we are dealing with.
Remember this story that ran about six weeks ago? The News intro says:
More than 70 people have been killed by two bombs in Baghdad, attached to two mentally disabled women and detonated remotely, says a security official.
I was very suspicious of this at the time, since none of the press printed their source, except for a “security official”.
There is a very long and distinguished history for lying about your enemy. In the middle ages in Europe mostly armies were demonised by “security officials” claiming the armies had raped nuns, and sometimes even eaten babies. The same sort of demonisation is common today, from all sides in any conflict.
You would hope that the press’ first act here should have been maybe to investigate this story before reporting it as fact.
Depressingly none of our much vaunted press (including the BBC and the Guardian) bothered to check anything at all, nor have I seen any follow up. Right now most people probably believe this story.
So is it true? The reason why the women were reported as being mentally disabled appears to be because their heads were deformed after the blast:
It turns out on the following day, that the evidence for the mentally disabled part was that one of the alleged bombers’ head recovered after the blast was deformed, suggesting Down’s syndrome. Now the AP and The New York Times point out that the severed head may have merely been deformed by the blast.
I was pretty sceptical about this too, since it seemed unlikely anyone could be this dumb. However, it’s been six weeks now and the press haven’t turned up any relatives of these women - which they must have tried. “My disabled daughter blown up by evil muslims” has such a lovely ring to it.
I think we can reasonably conclude the disabled part of this story was complete, and transparent, fiction. Which doesn’t speak too well of our press.
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