Health First Principles: When "Following the Science" Is NOT Science
Lose the language, lose the debate. Restore integrity to language, restore constructive debate.
Everybody in public debate these days seems to accept that the word “science” describes what happens in medicine and some other technical areas. It seems perfectly reasonable to a large number of people to “follow the science” and follow where “the science is settled;” BUT there is a very big difference between real science and disciplined studies (let alone con jobs and fraud masquerading as science).
For most people, “science” means established, unchanging facts, with reliable and predictable results, such as with the physics of electricity and gravity, laws of chemistry, and facts of engineering. These became facts only because rigorously controlled experiments were done multiple times by independent scientists and produced the exact same results each and every time, within only insignificant margins of error. This is the first stage in the scientific method.
Disciplined studies can use scientific facts in elements of the field, but they can’t run rigorously controlled experiments on the whole subject. They are, at best, good educated guesses, but with much larger room for error and unpredictability than science. Examples include astronomy and medicine.
This last point was stunningly brought home to me by a fellow physics major at Penn when he asked me why I was taking astronomy courses. “It’s not science,” he said. When I said it was science, he replied “No, you can’t do experiments on stars.” Bingo. Of course I had always known that, yet I hadn’t seen it that way. Of course astronomy uses physics and chemistry and engineering to look at stars and analyze the results. But alter stars at will to see what will happen? Of course not.
As a graduate student in Princeton University’s Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences Department, I designed and ran an experiment on liquid crystals, with a published (insignificant) paper resulting, and with an MA degree in 1970. The experiment required strictly controlling temperature, direction and wavelength of ultrasonic waves, and lesser matters. You can’t do that with people or planets (more on the latter in this post, climate-change alarmists).
In medicine, people are just too varied for any study to apply with utterly reliable results to each and every person on the face of the earth. “Nazi” experiments fail for several other reasons as well: illegal and immoral; too narrow anyway; and the force used changes the very people under compulsion—which I consider to be a “medical uncertainty principle” analogous to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics.
In medicine, the best that can be done are randomized, double-blind, placebo- controlled studies, often called “the gold standard.” They can produce useful and valuable results sometimes—not to be dismissed or underrated—but they often produce confusing or conflicting results too. And interpretations can run very far afield in any or all directions.
For instance, blood pressure drugs have been studied and used for a very long time. You would think it is one of the most “cut and dried” aspects of medicine. After all, there must be dozens of drugs to choose from—Yes, there are, but mainly because there have to be; the results are just too unpredictable for any given drug for any given person.
For example, amlodipine, a drug on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines, was slowly killing me until I stopped using it, and it left me with some permanent injuries. Another drug that seemed perfectly suited for me wound up softening my teeth; discontinued that too. An ARB did nothing. A “water pill” (hydrochlorothiazide) produced dangerously erratic effects. An ACE inhibiter worked well, but my insurance company (since discarded) so terrorized my doctor that he refused to raise my dose to what I needed, even though he had initially prescribed that dose, and even though that dose was fully approved by the FDA; that’s how I got stuck using amlodipine in the first place. Meanwhile, a neighbor had the exact opposite effect. Amlodipine worked; the ACE drug caused trouble.
That is not science. It is nowhere near science in any way, shape, or form, no matter how disciplined, well intentioned, technical, and sometimes successful it may be.
That’s why medicine used to be called a “practice,” owing to the huge variability among people, practices, and results.
But recently, we have seen medical totalitarians using the false claim of “science” to imprison us, which I call “gulag in place” when it forces us to “shelter in place,” a practice still being forced with great harm as of this writing on the people of Shanghai and other cities in Communist China.
Worse: Lockdowns are openly said to be kept in reserve to be used again in various Western countries and U.S. states and cities when health emergencies are declared.
Never mind that lockdowns have been shown in many examples to have had no good effects—the virus kept spreading—and to have had some horribly bad effects such as bankrupt businesses, lost jobs, harms to children, and increased suicides. Plus government money that was printed and distributed as compensation for the lost income, while fewer products were made due to supply disruptions, have been one important cause of the inflation raging today; that is, too much money chasing too few goods. (Another major cause: shutting down and discouraging fossil-fuel energy production in the U.S.)
Still worse, the U.S. and European governments are moving to give The World Health Organization (WHO) the power to declare and enforce international health emergencies, which could mean new lockdowns and even forced relocations of infected people, even if asymptomatic, to—gulags?
AND the WHO is heavily influenced by Communist China.
Links to sources about WHO:
World Council for Health May 10
Peter Breggin MD and Ginger Ross Breggin May 4:
https://www.americaoutloud.com/biden-handing-over-u-s-sovereignty-to-who/
Dr. Tess Laurie April 13, and April 26
Organized medicine’s departure from “practice,” and the move into compulsion under the mantle of “science,” is increasingly enforced in daily life in the U.S. as ever more doctors have sold their private practices (in part due to law-enforced bureaucratic hassles), are employed by large institutions, and/or depend on those large institutions for service. So they must obey those institutions’ self-serving orders (including insurance companies’ decisions) or be cut off. For example, see the disgraceful—harmful to us all—treatment of Drs. Paul E. Marik and Pierre Kory of the FLCCC Front Line Covid19 Critical Care Alliance. In other words, the doctor you see probably isn’t working for you, and is very much constrained even if he or she is.
In short, medicine is not science and We the People shouldn’t give it the creditability and social power of real science, let alone give it legal power to totally control our lives. Nor should we give such power to real scientists, for Power corrupts. That is why I write things you can use for yourself —to defend your liberty—to improve your life.