Cameron Neylon posted a nice video about how scientists may use Google Wave in the future. I saw it myself in action at this year’s Science Foo Camp in San Francisco, but it would be nice to have a really huge base of early adopters soon.
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
I just wrote about a new feature at ResearchGATE that helps us determine which journal we should choose for publication. Now Bill Hooker from the Open Reading Frame shared JANE with me.
Have you recently written a paper, but you’re not sure to which journal you should submit it? Or maybe you want to find relevant articles to cite in your paper? Or are you an editor, and do you need to find reviewers for a particular paper? Jane can help!
Just enter the title and/or abstract of the paper in the box, and click on ‘Find journals’, ‘Find authors’ or ‘Find Articles’. Jane will then compare your document to millions of documents in Medline to find the best matching journals, authors or articles.
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
It might seem a bit undemocratic, but science, like medicine or dentistry, is a profession. One doesn’t become a scientist by fiat but by education and training. I am not a scientist. I apply science. My colleague Dr. Gorski is a scientist (as well as physician). He understands in a way that I never will the practical process of science—funding, experimental design, statistics. While I can read and understand scientific studies in my field, I cannot design and run them (but I probably could in a limited way with some additional training). Even reading and understanding journal articles is difficult, and actually takes training (which can be terribly boring, but I sometimes teach it anyway).
So when I read a newspaper article about science or medicine, I usually end up disappointed—sometimes with the science, and sometimes with the reporting. A recent newspaper article made me weep for both. Local newspapers serve an important role in covering news in smaller communities, and are often jumping off points for young, talented journalists. Or sometimes, not so much.
The article was in the Darien (CT) Times. The headline reads, in part, “surveys refute national Lyme disease findings.” Epidemiologic studies, such as surveys, are very tricky. They require a firm grounding in statistics, among other things. You must know what kind of question to ask, how many people to ask, how to choose these people, etc, etc, etc. So what institution conducted this groundbreaking survey on Lyme disease?
Actually, they are quoting the famous work of one Kent Haydock, chairman of the Deer Management Committee. But I’m sure he outlined his methods carefully. Or not.
Haydock conducted:
[T]wo surveys — which polled 41 Darien households after a showing of the Lyme Disease film, Under Our Skin, at the Darien Library last month… . In the 41 households that completed the questionnaire, 47 total Lyme disease cases were reported. In 64 percent of those cases, the patient had relapses after an initial Lyme treatment, which required additional treatment for a chronic or long-term conditions.
So, Haydock showed the agitprop chronic Lyme advocacy film Under Our Skin to local families, presumably not selected at random, and then asked them if they had signs of Lyme disease and if it was ruining their lives. Not surprisingly, the answers to both questions were “yes” a remarkably high percentage of the time.
His conclusion: the surveys “show that Lyme not only exists in great numbers, but also in debilitating, chronic and long-term cases.”
This is not epidemiology. This is not science. This is an uninformed opinion dressed up with meaningless numbers. If you get together a group of people who are interested in Lyme disease, show them a propaganda film, and query them about it, the only thing you’ve “measured” is your ability to count people who come to a movie and hold a certain belief. If there were any valid conclusions to be drawn (and with these numbers, there probably aren’t) it’s that many people in this small group think they have Lyme disease—and even that’s over-reaching.
It’s bad enough that the deer commissioner did this. But arguably, it’s much worse that the reporter and editor published it. The only thing this accomplishes is fanning the fears of the readers.
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
An audience member at a recent NYC Skeptics meeting asked me how I handled conflict surrounding strongly held beliefs that are not supported by conclusive evidence. As a dentist, he argued, he often witnessed professionals touting procedure A over procedure B as the “best way” to do X, when in reality there are no controlled clinical trials comparing A and B. “How am I to know what’s right in these circumstances?” He asked.
And this is more-or-less what I said:
The truth is, you probably can’t know which procedure is better. At least, not at this point in history. The beauty of science is that it’s evolving. We are constantly learning more about our bodies and our environment, so that we are getting an ever-clearer degree of resolution on what we see and experience.
It’s like having a blurry camera lens at a farm. At first we can only perceive that there are living things moving around on the other side of the lens – but as we begin to focus the camera, we begin to make out that the animals are in the horse or cattle family. With further focus we might be able to differentiate a horse from a cow… and eventually we’ll be able to tell if the horse has a saddle on it, and maybe one day we’ll be able to see what brand of saddle it is. Each scientific conundrum that we approach is often quite blurry at the onset. People get very invested in their theories of the presence or absence of cows, and whether or not the moving objects could in fact be horses. Others say that those looking through the camera contradict one another too much to be trusted – that they must be offering false ideas or willfully misleading people about the picture they’re describing.
In fact, we just have different degrees of clarity on issues at any given point in time. This is not cause for alarm, nor is it a reason to abandon our cameras. No, it just gives us more reason to continue to review, analyze, and revise our understanding of the picture at hand. We should try not to make more out of photo than we can at a given resolution – and understand that contradicting opinions are more likely to be evidence of insufficient information than a fundamental flaw of the scientific method.
***
I have noticed that impatient photo-gazers have a propensity to demand answers before accurate ones are available. And this leads to all manner of passionately held, but misguided beliefs both in the scientific community and beyond. We must somehow find a way to make peace with limited information, eagerly seeking more, without being dogmatic about premature conclusions. My dentist colleague should not feel pressured into choosing sides on an issue that cannot be fully evaluated yet – and will have to wrestle with ambivalence as he waits patiently for more data.
But far more worrisome than living with ambivalence is living with stagnation. I would argue that one of the greatest red flags in the scientific world is an unwillingness to learn – an unyielding commitment to a set of beliefs, despite increasing evidence that they are not accurate. I think of homeopathy and acupuncture as good examples of this phenomenon – since they have not evolved significantly since their inception, their proponents therefore must admit that they have learned almost nothing new since the dawn of their use. The lack of refinement of treatment protocol is evidence of the system’s belief-based (or placebo-based) nature. As John Cage, US composer of avant-garde music, once said,
“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.”
***
As I mulled over my fuzzy image analogy, an even better one came to mind: the game of 20 questions. For those of you who didn’t play this game growing up, its rules are simple: one person must think of a person, place, or thing and the other(s) have 20 questions that they can ask in order to guess who/what the first person had in mind. The challenge is that the questions have to be asked so that the response is either yes or no. If the questioners can’t devine the name of the person, place or thing within 20 questions, the respondent wins. If the questioners guess the identity of the object within 20 questions they win.
Science is a little bit like 20 questions (of course we have unlimited questions that we can ask) in that we constrain our research to answer a very specific question under a very specific set of circumstances (formulating a “yes” or “no” type question). No one question or answer is likely to unlock the solution to the larger puzzle – it’s the collection of questions, taken in context of one another, that leads to meaningful understanding. When we don’t understand the best path forward, it’s likely that we are early on in the game of 20 questions, with little information to guide us. Occasionally we get lucky and ask the right question early – but more often than not we’re left to scratch our heads and ponder yet another question to help unlock the “mysteries” that face us.
That is the beauty and the pain of science – it’s slow, it’s methodical, it leaves the honest participant in a state of ambivalence with some degree of frequency, but in the end it yields real answers if we wait for the clarity that can come from careful analysis. Without it we are left with magical beliefs and misguided explanations… we’re left with Jenny McCarthyism.
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*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
On May 9th I had the pleasure of lecturing to an audience of critical thinkers at the NYC Skeptics meeting. The topic of discussion was pseudoscience on the Internet – and I spent about 50 minutes talking about all the misleading health information and websites available to (and frequented by) patients. The common denominator for most of these well-intentioned but misguided efforts is a fundamental lack of understanding of the scientific method, and the myriad ways that humans can fool ourselves into perceiving a cause and effect relationship between unrelated phenomena.
But most importantly, we had the chance to touch upon a theme that has been troubling me greatly over the past couple of years: the rise in influence of those untrained in science on matters of medicine. I have been astonished by the ability of “thought leaders” like Jenny McCarthy to gain a broad platform of influence (i.e. Oprah Winfrey’s TV network) despite her obviously flawed beliefs about the pathophysiology of autism. Why is it so hard to find a medical voice of reason in mainstream media?
The answer is probably related to two issues: first, good science makes bad television, and second, physicians are going about PR and communications in the wrong way. We are taught to put emotions aside as we carefully weigh evidence to get to the bottom of things. But we are not taught to reinfuse the subject with emotion once we’ve come to an impartial consensus. Instead, we tend to bicker about statistical analyses, and alienate John Q. Public with what appears to him as academic minutiae and hair-splitting.
I’m not sure what we can or should offer in place of our “business as usual” behavior – but I’ve noticed that being right isn’t the same as being influential. I wonder how we can better advance the cause of science (for the sake of public health at a minimum) to an audience drawn more to passion than to substance?
I would really enjoy your input, dear readers, because I’m at a loss as to what we should do next to reach people in our current culture, and with new communications platforms. What would you recommend?
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
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