BMJ Opinion: Peter Brindley and Matt Morgan: It’s time to be super heroes for scientific truth

Andy

Andy

Retired committee member
Recently, Simon Stevens, the NHS chief executive, criticised celebrities and wellness companies for promoting unproven and potentially harmful therapies. He spoke about the impact of fake health news and criticised Gwyneth Paltrow’s company, GOOP. Because Paltrow has previously gone as far as to claim that women are so “unclean” that they should vaginally insert a jade egg, we understand if clinicians and scientists feel tempted to throw up their arms and give in. However, rather than despairing about the apparent elasticity of inelastic facts, we are issuing a rallying call: it’s time to fight back. It’s time to be super heroes for scientific truth.

Step one is to engage the public and stat. Get out there and mingle because grumbling at conferences surrounded by like-minded others will not save the day. This is why medical caped-crusaders such as US obstetrician Jennifer Gunter deserve high praise. She started the popular podcast “Jensplaining” and wrote the Vagina Bible. Her noble, simple, and profound goal is to empower the average person/patient. Ask yourself, is there anything that matters more? Others have initiated a “Pint of Science”, where scientists communicate their ideas with the public in pubs, cafés, and anywhere else where people will listen. Another strategy is for our universities (and professional societies) to support more professorships (and sabbaticals) that focus on the public understanding of science. The point is that public opinion matters, not just published opinion.
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https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/02/0...time-to-be-super-heroes-for-scientific-truth/
 
Good science delivers just as bad science hurts
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While we point smug fingers at celebrities and wellness experts we academic allopaths should accept where we have erred.
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Moreover, even if a scientific publication is eventually discredited, it presumably once passed our lauded peer review process. “Dodgy academics”—again we’re trying to be charitable here—have shown that the pen is as mighty as the syringe
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what's that saying about people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones(?)

time that the good biomedical scientists took a good look at what their psych peers have been churning out as 'evidence'.
 
The BMJ is a major cheerleader of the BPS model, which is an alternative medicine model based on pseudoscience. You can't criticize pseudoscience you don't believe in while pushing for pseudoscience you believe in. If you criticize pseudoscience you have to criticize all pseudoscience, otherwise this will end up spectacularly blowing up in your faces.

If your message is "trust us, we're experts" and you promote blatant pseudoscience, you will do far more to damage the credibility of expertise than even the worst pseudoscience out there.
 
The problem I have with this and the practise of "science communication" in general is that it seems to be unidirectional, namely focused on whether the public believes the one true gospel of contemporary scientific thought. So it seems to be more concerned with "science promotion" and measuring public opinion on scientific phenomena, rather than communication in the broad sense. Science is often promoted as something that smart experts think, something the rest of us just have to believe. I think this alienates many people as they see scientists as "other".

Calling it communication invokes ideas of bidirectionality, namely allowing the general public participate in shaping what is investigated scientifically and performing experiments.
 
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