Bad Science

I really enjoy Ben Goldacre's thoughts on the medical profession and the state of contemporary health science. His latest article is good as usual. To me, a terrible part of health care is becoming aware of the worst of life in poignant, unique ways. People will always be sufferring and dying while health science attempts to police itself, albeit inefficiently, through IRBs and ethics committees. I think that will always be unavoidable, and as painful as it is for me to admit, I don't think that abnegates the need for detailed, time consuming ethical review. Of course, I don't really think that Ben is espousing that either. His article almost indignantly points out that these committees lack any sense of circumspection, which is now a characteristic fault of the medical community as a whole and doctors in particular. He's right to be almost indignant.

The thing that is truly unfortuate is the need for an outside policing agency to begin with. Tuskegee is a badge of shame that every American physician must rightly wear on their faux-pristine white coats. We like to believe that the medical experiments conducted in WWII concentration camps are so far beyond our pale as Americans, as modern humans, but Tuskegee ended only 36 years ago. 36. Obviously, no doctor or scientist, and these are often vehement humanists, is beyond any misuse of scientific knowledge though the classical mantra is, ironically, "first do no harm." Hippocrates prophesizes straight to us as discovers of natural law, coining an oath he knew would be necessary as knowledge grew under the feet of a humankind historically inept if not pernicious in its application of technology. Perhaps the first step along the slippery slope is the arbitrainess that takes account of no history and assumes the sins of the father can't be revisited by his very own sons and daughters.

You can find Ben's article via the BAD Science link to the right. I never even knew about Tuskegee until I started med school and a rather boisterous, socialistic doc told me about it. Here's a link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Study_of_Untreated_Syphilis_in_the_Negro_Male

Of note are Ben's closing remarks about the APAs involvement in interrogation of US suspects. I'm sure there's a lot to that story from several different angles, but even the idea that the APA would use their body of knowledge in such a way is appalling. Governments do horrible things to secure themselves or advance a particular agenda. Ours, like any other in the history time, is surely no exception. However, to have a group of people who ipso facto ask for the trust of a populace use their knowledge to make interrogees mentally unstable is the very stuff of Tuskegee, not to mention the Nuremburg Code