Article, The Times (London), 06/04/2024, How rogue concussion doctor is still damaging our trust in the science

[JohnTheJack]

How rogue concussion doctor is still damaging our trust in the science
Paul McCrory was an influence on paper published in Alzheimer’s journal in March despite having been widely discredited
Owen Slot
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/sport/ru...l-damaging-our-trust-in-the-science-wp2fgn2vn


'McCrory hasn’t passed that test. In The Times last year, we described him as being “as responsible as anyone for rugby becoming as dangerous as it is”. Elsewhere, Steve Thompson, the England 2003 World Cup winner, has publicly labelled McCrory as “little better than a murderer”. Stevie Ward, the former Leeds Rhinos captain who retired after multiple concussions, has said that “McCrory has played puppet master with our lives”.

McCrory started as a consultant to Aussie rules; he received his first research grant from the AFL, worth A$15,000 (now about £7,800) in 1994. From there, he rose to global prominence in the field of concussion, notably as editor of the British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM) from 2001 to 2008 and as editor-at-large until 2019. Also, for most of this century, he was the chairman of the Concussion In Sport Group, which is made up of specialists from 40 different sports from around the world, and whose position on concussion was taken as gospel.'


Real echoes of what has happened in ME, I think.

 

[rvallee]

It's rarely the case that individuals have such power. Their power comes from a wider acceptance of their ideas, to the point where opposition is nearly non-existent. If there wasn't broad support within the medical community for those ideas, they would have never taken hold. I'd say the same about the PACE gang. Even Wessely only had so much power as what the medical culture wanted his ideas to be manifested into reality, and especially how much financial incentives there are to cover this all up, no different than what the tobacco and asbestos or any other industry out there doing harm.

It's the same thing with dictators. There is a great video on this by CGP Grey: The rules for rulers. Even absolute dictators rule only as much as there are people willing to support their rule, who want the spoils of that rule. There are no dictators in this case, or in anything having to do with why women health care is so much worse, or anything to do with chronic illness. There is a wide cultural hunger for disbelief in medical problems, especially in illness, that makes those ideas appealing, and although it usually takes individuals to be the flag-bearers, they are largely interchangeable. If it wasn't them it'd be others, the outcome would be the same.

Long Covid provides the best example of this. Instead of a small handful of ideologues, we are seeing hundreds of small coteries of ideologues pushing the exact same ideas with the exact same intent and purpose, doing it exactly the same way, which they would have done this way whether or not others had paved the way for it. And it wasn't them, it'd be others. All this does is push the blame away from the systems that are supposed to safeguard people from this kind of nonsense, and pretending that they can't do anything about it lest they anger the aristocracy. There are technically laws against this, but the enforcement mechanism is nonexistent.

It takes systems to fail this miserably, individuals almost never have the power to do this. Systems are made up of people, and it's the balance of support that determines which ideas succeed and fail. Those same ideas are taught and parroted all over the place, and would likely be if it were anyone else leading the charge, or even if no one really managed to. Humans have a general problem with corruption, this is just one manifestation of it.