Critiques of science, medicine, academe

A request for information led me to update my bibliography of books and articles describing deficiencies and flaws in present-day science, medicine, and academe. It’s posted on my personal homepage and also here.

Science has become another Bubble

Too many would-be researchers at too many would-be research universities are competing ever-less-successfully for grants and publishing less-and-less significant stuff. Science has expanded far beyond sensible limits and has become dysfunctional. Sooner or later, there must come a reckoning as the Bubble bursts.

See my just-published essay, The Science Bubble (EdgeScience, #17, February 2014, 3-6), which draws on several of my blog posts.

Climate change is responsible for everything, as everyone knows (but what everyone knows is usually wrong)

Part of a sentence in a story in one of the nation’s leading newspapers speaks volumes about what’s wrong with the media, with established science, with public discourse, with government policy-making:

“parts of the country are experiencing increasing severe weather events and pest invasions, which scientists have tied to the affects of climate change”

No source given, of course, for “scientists”, as is the common habit nowadays in what passes for journalism.
As everyone knows, “climate change” in common contemporary usage means “climate change brought on by human activities, in particular generation of carbon dioxide”.
As everyone should know, there’s not a shred of reputable evidence to support the view that human activities are responsible for the historically inevitable increase in global temperatures, eventually by about 5-6°C over the next 100,000 years or so, as Earth rebounds from the last Ice Age (A politically liberal global-warming skeptic?; Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth, McFarland, 2012: 18-26).
Nor is there a shred of reputable evidence to support the increasingly common assertion that rising temperatures are associated with an increased frequency of “unusual” climatic events.

The story’s header is “White House to unveil ‘climate hubs’ to aid farmers across country” (David Nakamura, Washington Post, 5 February 2014), illustrating how our government has swallowed the Big Lie pushed by a small proportion of self-interested careerist “scientists”, who have even managed to divert attention from the fact that their vaunted computer models have been wrong for the last 15 years or so — “Climate Scientist: 73 UN climate models wrong, no global warming in 17 years”; note also “NASA study proves CO2 cools atmosphere”.

I relished the “affects” instead of the presumably intended “effects”, since it reminds that all the bullshit * about “climate change” is a matter of emotions (affects) and not facts or good objective science. If it’s a typo, it illustrates the lack of good editing at a leading newspaper. If it is the author’s mistake, it illustrates the condition of our education system.

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* Bullshit is now a perfectly respectable as well as useful term, thanks to philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 2005. He defines it as assertions made without regard to whether or not they have any truth value, a very apt description of public shibboleths about global warming, HIV/AIDS, and any number of other topics where hordes of people, including journalists and public pundits, say things without thinking about them or actually knowing anything about them other than that “everyone knows” them; and “what everyone knows” is just what “authorities” have told them, authorities who understand that “Saying so, makes it so” (big file, loads slowly, sorry).

Crimes of the Drug Industry

By which I mean the Prescription Drug Industry, not the illegal drugs business.

Here are some of the main evils perpetrated by the mainstream pharmaceutical industry (“Big Pharma”):
1. Many new drugs are not effective — they don’t do what they’re claimed to do.
2. Many new drugs are not safe. Their “side” effects can outweigh any possible benefits.
3. Many new drugs are not as good as, but are more expensive than the ones they replace.
4. New drugs are approved without proper assessment of the evidence. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is paid by the drug manufacturers for the costs of approval, which introduces a conflict of interest. FDA administrators have sometimes overruled their technical staff to approve a drug found wanting on the evidence.
5. Clinical trials are biased in favor of finding drugs apparently safe and effective even when they may be neither.
6. The industry pays for clinical trials and controls the data, some or all of which are then withheld from regulators and researchers. Negative results are not divulged.
7. PR spin by the drug industry is dishonest. Twice as much is spent on marketing than on drug development.
8. The drug industry buys influence with (i.e. bribes) doctors and hospital administrators under the guise of consultantships, sponsored research, lecture fees, medical education.
9. The drug industry buys influence with (bribes) medical journals by paying large sums for advertisements and by buying reprints of favorable articles for enormous sums, as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars for reprints of a single article which is then distributed to physicians by sales people.
10. The drug industry uses incessant propaganda to persuade the public that perfectly natural, normal conditions are really illnesses that can be vanquished by medication; e.g. seasonal affective disorder, erectile dysfunction, low testosterone, female sexual dysphoria, etc., etc.

None of this is secret. Many books and articles by industry insiders and medical professionals give chapter and verse with innumerable examples and illustrations about all this — see my sample bibliography. Most recent and perhaps most trenchant is Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime (Radcliffe, 2013) by Peter Gøtzsche.

Gøtzsche charges Big Pharma with literally criminal behavior, and makes a good case, in particular by comparing Big Pharma to Big Tobacco, which hid and denied for decades its knowledge of the dangers of smoking and the addictiveness of cigarettes; top executives perjured themselves.
But Gøtzsche acknowledges that most of the people who work in Big Pharma are not being deliberately dishonest, they’re just doing their jobs and not asking difficult questions. The whole system is dysfunctional, and blame for that is very widely shared. For example, government regulators and justice departments allow companies to pay fines without acknowledging guilt and without criminal charges being laid against the responsible individuals, so that companies regard the fines as a small part of the costs of doing business and they continue their illegal tactics, for instance using indirect means to lobby physicians to prescribe drugs “off label”.
Deliberately intended or not, the result has been a huge number of deaths from approval of unsafe drugs that offered no benefit over existing ones and from inappropriate use of prescription drugs:

In the United States and Europe,
drugs are the third leading cause of death
after heart disease and cancer
(Gøtzsche, p. 1)

One contributing factor is the misnomer “side effect”. As Frank Ofner, MD, used to say:

“Side” effects are MAIN effects that doctors don’t want to talk about.

As a result, many people are now being made ill, sometimes to the point of death, from so-called “side” effects of prescription drugs whose potential benefits have never been soundly established, for example, statins:
Cholesterol is good for you
 STATINS are VERY BAD for you, especially FOR YOUR MUSCLES
Statins weaken muscles by design
Statins are very bad also for your brain

Society’s addiction to prescription drugs may stem ultimately from the mistaken notion that because drugs have been effective against infectious diseases, therefore they can be effective against other ailments including the natural consequences of aging.

The dangers of prescription drugs and the criminal or near-criminal actions of Big Pharma are becoming ever more widely known, but the enormous political will required to do something about it remains lacking. In the meantime, not only technical books describe the horrors but also fiction and films. Recently I came across the French movie, “The New Protocol” (2008; original title “Le nouveau protocole”). It features a man investigating his son’s death who learns some horrific truths about Big Pharma, including the use of Africa as a venue for testing a new vaccine. Among the highlights for me was a recalling of the Tuskegee syphilis “trial”, for which President Clinton apologized 45 years later, and repetition of which is avoided in the First World by holding clinical trials in the Third World, principally Africa. The film points out that Big Pharma is now Capitalism’s biggest money-maker. It persuades us that we are all ill and in need of medication — for sleep disorder, take a pill. For creeping baldness, for weight gain, there are pills to take. Pills can be a miracle cure for all our ills.
Depressed? There are pills against that.
Afraid of aging? Estrogen for her, testosterone for him.
Too cheerful? Let’s call it “Gaiety Disorder”.
Rich but nevertheless sad? “Paradise Syndrome”, a bankable disease, administer serotonin to the idle rich.

Perhaps the only defense against such Big Pharma-induced social insanity is laughter, and a personal resolve not to take any prescription drug without doing personal research into its supposed benefits and its down-played toxic “side” effects.