Science-based anything still requires integrity

Harriet Hall posted a commentary this week on her blog, Science-based Medicine. The posting, “The One True Cause of All Disease,” is basically a riff against alternative medicine. With a site entitled “Science-based Medicine,” one might have expected a science-based argument. One would have been expecting too much.

So, I commented on her blog, and here’s my response.

For article espousing the benefits of science-based medicine, it sure is full of a lot of its own conjecture, opinion, and unfounded criticisms. You sound just like the alternatives who whine about mainstream.

My experience has led me to different conclusions than yours. After some years of increasingly debilitating health problems, the AMA-style practitioners finally gave me a blank stare and another bottle of narcotic pain killers. I’d been raised with a suspicion of alternative medicine, but I went shopping in that camp for help. It took some time, but I eventually found the talented healers who got me back to a functionable level of health. I now use a fair amount of alternative health techniques with my family along with a fair amount of traditional techniques. That balance is further supported by my wife, an R.N.

For a few years, I espoused the “mainstream are idiots” viewpoint, but eventually have landed in the middle, using each kind of medicine for what it’s good at. I’ve seen talented, sincere healers in both camps, and I’ve seen the best of quacks in both camps. It’s no more valid to claim that chiropractors are one-trick, back-adjustment ponies than it is to claim that the AMA types are fully enlightened and use all manner of treatments. Each of those views is an utter and dishonest deception.

Seems to me any absolutist view in this space is foolish. And it’s worth questioning the talent and sincerity of any practitioner on either side of the argument who can’t see any benefits of the other camp’s approaches.

The validity of the practice of science is as dependent on the integrity of its practitioners as any other discipline or profession is. Recent revelations of data tampering and the rule of dogma in the Global Warmism camps demonstrates the deception that is possible and that exists now, even with a certain bravado, in the current scientific community. It is not better or worse than in any other profession or philosophy. Integrity is required. Where integrity is lacking, all bets are off.