THINK before you make that bet.
Well, *I* believe in SCIENCE!
Heard that before? It’s certainly nothing new – it goes back at least to Voltaire.
Scientism is an expression in use for most of the 20th Century and is often used to refer to science applied in excess – or applied unreasonably. The term scientism can generally apply in either of three ways:
- To indicate the improper usage of science or of scientific claims,
- To refer to a belief that methods of natural science form the only proper elements in any inquiry.
- To make science into one’s religion.
In this third and broader sense, scientism is used to describe the invocation of science as a focus of worship, generally by people who would prefer to describe themselves as atheists. It’s sort of like Methodism, or Daoism, or… you can fill in the blanks here.
Two recent articles, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science” (Freedman, 2010) and “Trouble at the Lab,” (Anonymous, 2013) draw some obvious and frightening conclusions about this approach or life view.
They both reference two extraordinary papers published by John Ioannidis, a physician and mathematician, in 2005 (Ioannidis, 2005a, 2005b). These are among the most-cited papers in all of modern science – and they are incredibly embarrassing to scientists. In the first paper, Ioannidis convincingly showed why 80 percent of non-randomized scientific studies turn out to be wrong. Fully 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard (and thus far more expensive) clinical trials give incorrect results. It is from studies like this that the medical doctors that you and I seek help from base their diagnoses and treatment protocols.
Our lives depend on these studies being correct. Incorrect results include:
- recommendations to use hormone-replacement therapy in post-menopausal women,
- that mammograms and PSA tests are critical for extending lives,
- that anti-depressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil can stop depression,
- that doing puzzles will ward off Alzheimer’s disease, and
- that drinking lots of water during intense exercise is helpful.
Not one of these turns out to be true. THOUSANDS of stories in magazine articles have been written based on these published studies. Just the propagation of the hoary old “8 glasses of water a day” is astounding. The number of studies that contradict other studies of the same thing are so high that The Week magazine actually has a section called “Health Scare of the Week.”
Many physicians on their own (including one of our sons), have discovered that just taking a patient off of every drug they are currently taking can improve their health immediately.
The truly glaring problem is that the large majority of these drug-efficacy studies cannot be replicated. This means that other groups cannot repeat the same experiments and get the same results. Amgen, an American drug company, tried to replicate 53 landmark studies in basic research on cancer. They were able to reproduce the results of just 11 percent of these studies (Begley and Mills, 2012). In a separate study done by Bayer, the German pharmaceutical company, only 25% of published results could be reproduced. These analyses aren’t being published by disgruntled scientists, but by editors in the premier of all science journals: Nature. Dr. Ioannidis warns that between one third and one half of medical research results have been shown to be untrustworthy. He suggests that physicians, when faced with all this potentially lethal error and confusion… simply ignore them all!
Ioannidis’ second paper explains why these flawed studies happen and get published in peer-reviewed journals. Without belaboring the details (you can read them yourself if you want to), it comes down to many things – but many things that compound themselves:
- The “publish or perish” ethos for young scientists to get tenure or grants,
- Ignorance of what constitutes statistical significance among most scientists,
- Ego,
- Fear of reprisals by peers or superiors,
- The tendency of scientific journals to publish almost exclusively just the “new” and “exciting” discoveries,
- Bias in research study design, bias in analysis, self-serving interpretation, and
- Fraud.
This last issue is interesting, and when identified firmly (often a difficult and expensive thing to do), it is supposed to lead to retractions of published articles. For example, The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal based in the UK, retracted an article by (no longer Doctor; his medical license has been revoked) mister Andrew Wakefield that used a mere 12 case studies, performed unscientifically, to “prove” that the MMR vaccine causes autism (Eggertson, 2010). Multiple attempts to replicate this explosive claim all failed, and further follow-up showed that the data had been “doctored” (pun intended), and basic ethical practices were ignored.
A University of Edinburgh study of 21 confidential surveys of scientists worldwide (Fanelli, 2009) found that only 2 percent of them admitted to falsifying or fabricating data – but 28 percent said they knew of colleagues who engaged in these practices! If that difference hints to you at a broader problem, then give yourself three stars.
The problem with Scientism is that it falls for the oldest mistake in the Book: it worships at the feet of the Golden Calf; one of several modern versions of the Golden Calf is Science. But like all man-made things, science is not something to be worshiped. It is a faith that is based on something that is fatally flawed, because science is very, very human.
Are we advocating that people not trust science? Absolutely not – just don’t bet your life on it, and certainly don’t pour your faith and belief into it! Science is still far better and more honest than the talking heads and corporate-paid pundits on talk radio or some cable news channels. However, as currently practiced in the majority of cases, science is not Truth, and it is not The Answer we are all looking for.