Look at this: a measles outbreak in Disneyland, probably because some idiot brought their pustulent, disease-spreading child to the Happiest Place on Earth.
How could this happen?
Read this paean to self-righteous ignorance and maybe you’ll understand.
Rejecting modern science might sound crazy. Science has done so much for us, hasn’t it? Yes and no. I find that a lot of modern scientists have blinders on, and cling just as strongly to beliefs that don’t make any sense as they say we — religious people — do. The more research I’ve done, the more flawed I’ve come to think modern science really is. Now, just in case you still think I’m crazy, I’ll explain why I do not believe in modern science.
Why I Do Not Believe In Modern Science
First — I’ll tell you what I do believe in. I believe that trauma medicine is great. If we had a car accident and had horrible injuries, I’d be in the hospital getting stitched up. I think our trauma doctors do an awesome job of saving people who otherwise surely would have died, and experienced great pain. I also believe in the scientific method in general — that we can look at an issue openly and examine the evidence to come to a true conclusion.
However, I think doctors have overstepped their bounds (especially in obstetrics, an issue I’ll be discussing more in a few weeks). They have dogmatic beliefs in drugs, vaccines, and interventions. They have overly simplistic explanations for the way the human body works, and they don’t look for reasons WHY or for underlying causes. They only observe and assume. I also think that the scientific method is rarely used anymore. Researchers start out with a question, and they know what answer they would like or what they expect to see. Research is conducted in such a way as to provide the expected answer most of the time. This is then called peer-reviewed research and is published in medical journals, and is the foundation for “evidence-based medicine,” which I entirely reject. Using these two phrases, “peer-reviewed medical journals” and “evidence-based medicine,” dogmatic scientists try to make people like me look like we are stark raving lunatics with no knowledge or brain function whatsoever. It’s rude, and it’s wrong.
Scientists don’t do that. You do that to yourself.
The funny part of that essay is that it almost sounds like it could be reasonable, then breaks out into anti-vax and cherry pickinge Trauma medicine good, drug-based treatments bad. Scientists point out that changes in diet have made us fatter, but they overlook that our diets have changed. Sigh.
at least she’s not entirely rejecting the last 500 years of scientific progress …
But then goes on to say:
If researchers didn’t think or hope the result would be fruitive then they wouldn’t bother with the research. It’s called ‘hypothesis’, not ‘a wild stab in the dark.’
Ah yes, so the whole “publishing in a peer-reviewed journal” is just a pointless exercise in simply establishing what we would all like to be the case. This is why modern medicine is stagnating in a time-vortex where we’re as ignorant of new methods or corrected procedures as a Tennessee pig-farmer.
So, in case she has a car accident she wants to be stiched up, but without using drugs and antibiotics?
Have fun dying of an infection in your still perfectly attached limbs.
This poor benighted woman has powerful data filters to ensure nothing penetrates her mind except random bits of apparently confirming information, “proving” to her that GMO foods cause cancer and microwave “irradiated” water kills plants. (She didn’t bother to provide sources for any of these claims, but that’s probably okay because “evidence” and “peer-review” are toxic!)
I was particularly fascinated by her statement that skin cancer was unknown in the halcyon days of yeoman farmers, when most of the population labored under the sun yet never suffered from melanoma. Has she ever bothered to read actual medical history and the identification of skin cancer over the centuries (or millennia?). That would be too much trouble, I imagine, for someone who is already in such smug possession of “the truth.”
First she claims that doctors “have overly simplistic explanations for the way the human body works”, and then finishes the article with
@@aarrgghh, #2:
Read your link.
This is frickin’ classic:
Satan’s ONE blue ribbon lie is that the earth moves, and that Kepler was a scientist.
Um, wait. Satan’s TWO blue ribbon lies are that the earth moves, and that Kepler was a scientist, and that it’s okay to eat from the Tree of Knowledge.
Uh…
Seriously: there was a time when I thought of Monty Python, “Where do they come up with this stuff?” Nowadays I begin to think that they were just clever with disguising their sources of inspiration. Need proof? Well, this department’s names aren’t consistently “Bruce” but there is something Python-esque going on with the first professor listed…
Well, she’s right about one thing.
Oh great, new age, alt-mec, and po-mo bullshit all covered up in Christian venieer. Pass the barf bag please.
Edit: alt-med
RE: the argument quoted in #6:
Sure! That’s why God made everyone Chinese, amirite?
Reminds me of the woman who toured Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History and tried to debunk whatever the exhibits said about natural history. Except the fossils. She loved the fossils. Said that was real science.
An acquaintance has many of the same reservations about medical science. He has no qualms with science that brings him the stock market on the internet and his big flat screen TV, or the car he drives but anything having to do with studying the human body is all the “Big Pharma Conspiracy”. He and his wife will buy thousands of dollars worth of potions online for health reasons but only go to their annual physical to maintain their medicare coverage. Thankfully, he laid down the law with his adult children when one of them started going to a faith healing church. His grandkids will be treated by proper physicians or the authorities will be involved. And yes, the particular church I’m talking about is one that has been in the national media several times over the past decade, namely from members being convicted and sentenced to prison terms for killing their kids through medical neglect.
In my mind, i’m slapping that stupid face…with glee…in meatspace i’m just crying for the future of humanity…
I…I don’t understand the problem. I saw my doctor earlier this week. In discussing some of my health issues, I asked why I was suffering them, and he responded with “God works in mysterious ways.”
Now we’re being told that isn’t a perfectly satisfying answer to all of life’s biggest questions?
I am, of course kidding. My doctor didn’t say “God works in mysterious ways.” He said it was because of the Fall. Adam and Eve and all that. If that’s not the very spirit of inquiry, then I don’t know what is.
crip dyke: “Where do they come up with this stuff?”
and it took rudy only 80 hours of intensive study to confirm all of his biases. so it’s not like he’s pulling it all out of his ass …
Christ on a crutch this woman is dumb. PZ Meyers you owe me the 5 minutes out of my life that it took me to read it and not punch my laptop’s screen. Its amazing how some can be so dumb and still be alive.
I’m sure Kate’s BA in ‘music teacher’ makes her entirely qualified to reject modern science. It also seems strange that her christian god gave the gift of medicine that she claims actually works to heathens on the other side of the world. So much for the jewish people being the chosen people I guess.
Why trauma medicine as the exception? If medicine is full of evil greedy people bent on taking over the world or making a profit off your body or whatever, how did trauma medicine happen to get the only exceptions? I’m so confused.
dianne @19
Trauma medicine is good because all the TV shows and movies show the hardworking doctors and nurses stitching cuts, casting broken bones, using defibrillators on heart attacks, and that sort of thing. You know, real medicine with real results you can really see. Little Jimmy had his leg gnawed off by an itinerant tiger and half an hour later he’s dancing with the stars, thanks to trauma medicine. It’s that nasty stuff, giving people pills with weird sounding chemical names or injecting them with liquid autism, done solely to enrich Big Pharma, that bad medicine.
Damnit. I read the comments on that Measles story, where I was informed that this was all cause by . Fucking racists…
Well, speaking as a physician, sometimes we DO used simplified models of how the human body works. Because sometimes those simplified models are the ones that provide the results we need in the time frame we need it in. An imperfect but workable treatment plan that would work in most people most of the time, and provide a high probability of saving the patient’s life that we can figure out and implement now is sometimes preferable to a perfect, indivualized treatment plan that *would* have had a 100% probability of saving the patient, if the patient had not expired 6hs before we were able to figure out the plan using the more complicated and complete model.
Trauma medicine provides instant gratification. You’ll know, usually within the hour, whether or not your treatment worked.
Vaccination requires delayed gratification. You can live your whole life without ever getting to know, for sure, if your vaccines actually helped you, individually.
Medical science has always been tricky, when you try to compare it with drier sciences like physics where you have the luxury of having the choice to wait for those additional observations to get your 6 sigma significance without someone dropping dead at your feet.
Sometimes we have to make decisions on treatments without good evidence, with only expert opinion, or conflicting, unsettled evidence, or evidence where significance is only “trend”. (It doesn’t help that many of the clinicians involved in medical science don’t get the same level of training in statistics that researchers in the drier sciences often have)
And the influence of pharmaceutical companies on the validity of the results of even the biggest randomized controlled trials is a very real problem (perhaps especially the big trials, since those cost a lot of money, and the lion’s share of the funding comes from the pharmaceuticals trying to test their own creations against those of their direct competitors)
Liquid autism is now the name of my imaginary band.
I’d say more often the problem is that the pharmaceutical companies are unwilling to test their own creations against those of their competitors. So we’re often left with no real answer to the question of whether treatment A or treatment B works better.
Well, all those evil medicine men have their own strange rituals. For example the rite of the double blind study where only the chosen ones get (statistically) slightly better (maybe). Sanctified liquids are injected with holy syringes, sacred tablets distributed to the faithful. These ceremonial proceedings can drag on for years and are recorded in every detail. Canonical records are sometimes published to show the Great Works done by the Church of Modern Medicine.
The clergy is subdivided into many classes, typically identified with their own types of vestments. Some cover themselves from head to toe by wearing masks, caps and gloves during a service. Others wear white coats and only rarley don the gloves. Some items are discarded after the service while others may be cleansed and used again. Religious totems and icons are also common; the stethoscope draped around the neck and the pen worn on the chest are but two examples.
Sick worshippers go on pilgrimages and may sometimes stay in a temple for weeks on end while priests minister to them. In extreme cases the temple dispatches messengers with thundering chariot to rush a stricken follower to the nearest temple. Much like monks the patients are often confined to small cells, which they may have to share with others. They are made to observe uncomfortable rituals, strictly enforced by attendants, while they hope for their condition to improve – mercy granted by the powers that be. As with any church, the attendants by far outnumber the clergy and work around the clock to keep the temple running smoothly. After all, mass never ends in a a medical church.
And like any decent cult there’s a huge bill at the end.
—
I guess if you really want to it’s easy to see medicine and science as cults. I’ll even add that it’s much easier having been to church. It’s all so familiar and anything can be seen as empty ritual if you don’t know (or ignore) why it’s being done. The Catholics bless wine and bread gathered around the altar. Doctors and nurses gather around patients’ beds and administer the aforementioned liquids and tablets. Never mind that they’ve been diagnosing the patient and looking at test results to figure out what to do next while relying on a huge body of knowledge systematically gathered by millions of people over a few hundred years.
Translation:
I am a liar. I am lying to you.
ours is:
Dangerously Undercaffeinated
I know of few engineers that would use quantum mechanics to design a roadway.
Poe’s Law.
It’s not like there aren’t doctors who would indeed tell their patients this. Some because they actually believed it, and some just because it shuts their patients up.
Oh my gosh it’s even written in Comic Sans.
Man, this hits all the usual suspects; vaccines, GMOs, pasteurized milk, sunscreen, even fucking microwaves! (Bring forth the Highlander plants!) And she doesn’t seem to be aware of the irony of being able to write all this nonsense on the web thanks to the modern science she rejects–but who knows, maybe her computer could be doing something to her!
I guess I wouldn’t have a problem if she was just keeping her raw milk, microwave-free, feel-good bullshit to herself, but this could involve her own children on some level and that’s scary. Maybe the CDC can fund a program for virologists and ballistic engineers to come up with long range vaccinations for such people, and then define it as “trauma medicine” so she’ll be okay with it.
the whole website is just another one of the thousands of ad sites invented by those who work for the naturopathic industry.
seriously, there are literally thousands of sites just like this.
90% of them are fake; just advertisements, like this one.
This pretty much goes along with all of their other assertions that anything that isn’t 100% right must be 100% wrong, and can therefore be substituted with any flavor of BS.
Modern medicine doesn’t work 100% of the time? It must all be bunk and we should start rubbing tiger balls all over ourselves.
Current models of physics don’t yet account for every property of the universe? They must all be wrong, and we can just as readily assume we’re all living in God’s snow globe.
Evolution doesn’t explain how life first began? Well, then how can you say it’s any more wrong to insist we were all magically poofed into existence in our present forms?
Mythbusters busted that one. So can anyone with a microwave and a few plants. If she’s “skeptical” about scientific claims, why doesn’t she investigate them herself?
Why I Do Not Believe In Modern Science
Anyone who uses a computer to type that into the internet needs a new brain.
dianne@25:
Mine’s Microwave Death Water.
@ 2 aarrgghh
Poor engineers: so many among them like this guy, it must be embarrassing for the smart ones. And yes, I believe his claim to be one: I’ve known some like him.
There’s a paper or two in it for psychological researchers who want to study why some people can master such complex, arcane crafts yet be unable to think their way out of a wet paper bag.
If the Republicans want to make an actual, positive difference in America while still shrieking about terrorists, how about they raise the issue of contagious disease as a national security matter? It wouldn’t be a far stretch to say that someone with terrorist intent had deliberately infected themselves and went to a very crowded amusement park, so the only way to fight back is to GET VACCINATED, IT IS YOUR PATRIOTIC DUTY!
Yeah, yeah. I’m not going to hold my breath, either.
MAM’s site couldn’t process my comment. May be because of words like “ridiculous,” “ignorance,” etc.
As with #33; she’s a fountain – no, sewer – of every woo-woo medical conspiracy theory rolled into a short spurt of insanity.
I’m pretty sure if I watered plants with microwaved water they’d die. But they die when I water them from the tap too.
Tasty bit at the end of her post:
And there’s more when you click the link:
In other words, “It’s ok for me to lie to you because I’m not claiming to know what I’m talking about. You can’t sue me if you get sick and die. Believe me at your own risk.”
HolyPinkUnicorn @33:
–>I think you have hit on the perfect solution! We should tell all these alt-med doofuses that their computers are spewing radiation onto them. (Hey, it’s technically true!)
If we’re lucky, that will frighten most of them off the internet and their ability to spread the Stupid will be curtailed.
(Alas, it won’t work. But I can hope, right?)
@ U Frood:
I read this
and was all, “WTF? U Frood is buying into that shit?”
and then I got to:
and was all, “Oh. Yeah. Mine would die too.”
Thus after my moment of shock, I must concede you have the right of it, U Frood. Of course the writer of the original sentence still gets thrown out of the Reality Rocker 3 or 4 times a day by kicking too hard.
This bubblehead needs to be informed that her computer display actually gives off radiation[*].
Maybe that would keep her from viewing and posting unadulterated willfully ignorant crap on the
intertubes.
*NOTE: Photons, how she actually “sees” things.
Let’s keep it simple. Anti-vaxxers are terrorists.
Gregory in Seattle wrote:
They already do. However, they’ve chosen to blame the damn
dirty immigrantsillegals instead. Anti-vaxxers have some money, and therefore are above criticism. Poor illegal immigrants, however…To be (overly) fair, we do have serious issues in the practice of medicine. However, those problems are caused by a lack of science – doctors recommending woo treatments or common practices that are based on historical practice that never actually had a scientific basis (or was the result of some badly designed/executed studies). Need moar science in medicine, not less.
Hello PZ I met You briefly at Zeteticon I’ve made some efforts to find Your blog since and have succeeded finally. You’d be correct if You made the assumption that I don’t make My living in the computer science field. I actually looked for Your blog today because of the billboard in Fargo which I glanced at with out actually being able to read yet. I’ll plan on attending. On the blog subject, years ago when My two Adult Daughters were two and four My Wife had not allowed them to get vaccinated I think She mentioned it to Me and I let Her make the decision with out giving it to much thought really no thought that is until They both came down with whooping cough. Let Me tell You Whooping cough is nothing to be trifled with. Since then I’ve given the issue a little more thought and have taken advantage of vaccinations for Myself and My Family and have become aware that when We refuse vaccinations We put the vulnerable in our communities at risk. I’d say it would be like going out in the woods and being told not to have a campfire as it would put others camping at risk and going ahead and having a fire anyway the fact that I probably wouldn’t start a wildfire does not mean I am not acting irresponsibly.
“But they die when I water them from the tap too.”
That’s because of the flouride!!!!!!11!!!1
Uhm, no, you do a perfectly good job of that all by yourself.
So, reality not only has a liberal bias but now it has bad manners too?
@ Amphiox #24
Time constraints are the work of the devil, you servant of Satan! [/sarcasm]
I highly recommend Ben Goldacre’s book Big Pharma which has already provoked changes in Britain (the creation of a trials registry). Although the title sounds like one of the conspiracy books Goldacre is a wonderful educator and skeptic.
@ Marcus Ramum #37
Why I Do Not Believe In Modern Science
Thank you for that one, you made my day.
Will you be performing your smash hit “Death Before Decaf” on your first album?
Specifically, the Hungarian language. :-)
I know you’re joking, but fluoride can be quite toxic to plants and animals at high concentrations, The amount in drinking water is not even close to the concentrations that cause problems. Eating toothpaste is the most common method of fluoride poisoning. If your water is treated with chloramine, it does kill some plants and fish. I sent several fancy begonias to the big hothouse in the sky before I figured out that my tap water was killing them. Aquarium water treatments solve the problem.
Oh, you’ve finally discovered Modern Alternative Mama. Actually I only just discovered her a couple of months ago.
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2014/12/22/how-is-it-that-i-hadnt-heard-of-this-antivaccine-warrior-before/
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2014/12/23/15-complaints-about-pro-science-skeptics-from-an-antivaccine-activist/
And to top it all off, her site tried to download some malware to my computer. Apparently anti-virus software is one of those parts of modern science she rejects.
Exactly!
sorry that was a reply to notruescott on fluoride 52
So she doesn’t have a medical degree, or much commom sense. But she loves tea, deep conversations, and soft blankets. Aww. I wonder if she loves walks on the beach and stargazing, too.
A while ago my mother, when in a grouchy mood, complained about all the pills she was taking. She said, “I don’t remember old people taking all these pills when I was a kid.” I told her she was right. They didn’t take all those pills, and most of them died a hell of a lot younger than she is now (well into her 80s with a few problems but basically going strong). I know I would have died long ago without modern medicine.
If that woman sticks to her guns and is no more lucky or health conscious than the average human in the US she will probably not make it out of her 60s. That actually makes me sad. Especially since she will have passed all that ignorance and arrogance on to her kids by then.
dianne @ 25:
There’s already a band called The Vaccines. ;-)