Eh – excuse me for a second while I get off the fence…
(sounds of scrambling)
…I finally lost my innocence yesterday morning. Unexpectedly, first cup of coffee in my hand, eyes barely open, I came across the first really nasty thread with lots of really stupid misinformation on H1N1 vaccinations on a status update of one of my facebook contacts – yes, you read correctly. Bracing myself, and ignoring the fact that the safe haven of facebook had just been breached, I jumped into the fray and posted some real information. Followed by a full disclosure of having a science PhD, and a link to Jenny’s blog for good measure, in case anyone needed convincing that scientists are real people, and nice ones at that.
Given the choice, I would prefer a world where people are calm, thoughtful and moderate, and don’t raise their voice unless they have something important to say (and, ideally, they actually know what they are talking about). I know that’s just dumb, but a girl can dream, can’t she? Over this last year, however, I learned that there is a scarily large number of people out there who are decidedly not that way – thanks to a brush with some particularly nasty examples and going to places on the internet I had not even thought of going before, I felt shocked, disillusioned, and almost paralyzed for a while.
For the longest time, and very likely also due to the fact that I started working in a (mostly) non-academic environment right after my PhD, where I got lots of corporate indoctrination training on how not to be offensive to my co-workers, I was avoiding ‘trumping the science card’. Of course, whenever someone asked me for my opinion as a scientist – as people do – I gave it, but inside I felt hesitant. What makes me the authority on everything science, being aware of the fact that I know a lot about my subject – which happens to be a little exotic within a, for the vast majority of the people on this planet, exotic discipline – but only ‘basic stuff’ on most other science? I feel more comfortable talking and writing about climate change and stuff like iron fertilization – but that’s not the only topic I get asked about.
The hardest part: discussing alternative medical treatments with my friends. I had foolishly assumed that talking about science should not automatically lead to talking about that topic… but it seems to creep up almost every time. So I have been finding myself very reluctantly having to try and explain why homeopathy cannot work all these things I had been trying to dodge.
For those of you who are hardcore anti-alt-med bloggers: maybe you don’t have any friends that use alternative treatments. Good for you, then this question is redundant. If you do, you must have discussions about this? How do they go? Do those friends read your blog? Are they offended, or do you manage to convince them by telling them that what they are doing is idiotic, and then laughing?
There is a reason people ‘believe’ in alternative treatments, and I suspect (like many others) that this is due to a mixed bag of suspicions against ‘big pharma’, the feeling that ‘tradition is a good thing’, that ‘other cultures may be smarter’ (in the case of e.g. traditional Chinese medicine) and that ‘science can’t explain everything’. I would love to live happily in the conviction that science (read: a systematic, logical approach to figuring things out) will prevail. But not everyone is willing to buy into this, or even spend time thinking about it. Going a step further: the majority of people do not have a real concept of how science works, and they don’t even care(!).
But we can really make a difference when someone who trusts us(!) asks about science.
So here are my ground rules of engagement1:
- Do not be confrontational!
- Try to make it very clear that Science is not ‘just another approach to looking at things’. Science is the one universal way that humans have figured out – in different cultures, at different times, over and over – to systematically study the world around them and find out how it works.
- And, if at all possible, make it very, very clear that science is not something you choose to ‘believe’ in or not.
On that last bullet: saying that science is something one ‘believes’ in or not is not just counterproductive – it’s just wrong, and potentially very damaging considering the currently raging debates and general confusion. Of course science is about doubt, inquiry and all that – doubt is what gets the whole thing going in the first place. But you believe in religion. In science, you can form hypotheses and measure stuff to see whether they hold or not – this has absolutely nothing to do with believing.
Finally, this is not just about how best to communicate science. This is also very much about how we as scientists portray ourselves and are perceived by all the non-scientists out there – and don’t forget for a second that they vastly outnumber us. We can’t screw this up.
Trust me, I’m a scientist…
1 Sadly, I have not found the ideal way of applying these rules. Please do let me know if you’ve figured it out.
Spot-on, Steffi! Excellent post. (Footnote 1: let me know, too!)
I have encountered this many times, partly because I went to a Rudolf Steiner School, which is run by a load of New-Age types who think that homeopathy really works. I have tried, on occasion, to bring science into the mix, but in the main they tend not to even engage with it – they just carry on as if you’d said nothing at all, perhaps by way of glancing at you as if you just farted. If they do engage with you it tends to be in a way that varies between confusion and hostility.
Quite often all you can do, if you want to stay friends, is agree to differ.
they just carry on as if you’d said nothing at all, perhaps by way of glancing at you as if you just farted
{still laughing}
Henry, I actually got a form from my son’s afternoon care program to sign off whether it was ok to give him homeopathic remedies if he hurt himself (bruises/burns). After thinking about it, I signed it and wrote a text below my signature along the lines of ‘this will not work, but I do not want my son to feel left out or treated differently when you hand out the pills’.
You might well have seen this before – it has been posted on holfordwatch
@Henry I remember you mentioning Boothby Graffoe to me, Tim Minchin is reminiscent of him. He (Tim) was on Jonathan Ross last week.
If you have a spare ten minutes I think it is worth listening to (it’s on YouTube but it is only the audio)…
If I might be allowed very brief bragging rights, I was lucky enough to hear this live at the Hammersmith Apollo last Sunday night. It was a fantastic show – great skeptical stuff for the whole family!
@Steffi – Not tempted to teach your son to decline the homeopathic ‘remedy’ with the words “Mummy says it’s just water and no better than a placebo”?
Heh – thank you Erica! :)
Ten minutes well spent.
Stephen – the temptation is there, but I don’t want him to have to ‘fight my battles’. I do make sure I explain stuff to him thoroughly at home, though!
I have friends who swear by all kinds of alternative medicine. Anything non-mainstream. I managed to use their hook to get them interested in personalized medicine: “You know how you said last time that treatments don’t work the same for everyone? Well, here’s something interesting…”
I also had to endure a long rant about measles/autism, after which I carefully said “Well, I don’t know. I mean, just looking at all the studies they did on it, there was only one paper that showed a relation between the vaccine and autism, and most of the authors of that first paper have since agreed that their initial conclusions were incorrect.”
The reply I got was: "What do you mean, “first paper”? "
Because they don’t think like us. They don’t think in terms of data collection, just stories. To them, so many people say that something is going on – it must be true. So I explained the non-linear relation between papers an media.
My children don’t want to hear scientific explanations at all.
They love to call each other scientific names though.
“you are a Mus musculus!”
“No, you are a Patella vulgata!
etc.
I have to admit I might have had some influence here.
This is exactly why science literacy is so important. I know not everyone should/can be a scientist (and that would be no good anyway), but it would be nice if scare tactics of the media wouldn’t work so well (measles/autism as Eva mentioned, or all of the things pregnant women are supposed to avoid these days — lunch meat, any caffeine, soft cheese, tea, scooping the kitty litter….). I often get questions about asteroids hitting the earth, or about global warming, and it is difficult to convince them that the media is wrong some (most) of the time.
mark: yes, I did get a funny look when I tried to explain about genes first thing this morning (my son was asking why a boy in second grade is shorter than he). ‘That doesn’t make sense, mommy’. Maybe my explanation was poo. Or maybe it’s because he’s only six, after all… leading to a whole other topic: are we scientists possibly too hard on our children?…
Eva: I get a nervous twitch in my left eye. I am sure people must see the reaction.
@Stephen, me too, I first came across him when a friend invited me to the show in Bournemouth which was the week before.
He has a few more tracks on a similar theme – as well as others. The show is worth seeing, it’s very amusing.
Steffi> Ah .. it’s hard, isn’t it. Non-confrontational is a good rule but sometimes hard to follow.
I had one of those encounters earlier this fall. And then I read the (Swedish) newspaper one morning and got so upset that I had to do a disclaimer on my fb-status since it all bogus in the paper and everyone talked about it “as it is were the truth”.
I have to admit, this morning I had to fight the urge to post something “educational” in regards to adjuvants (the BIG nexs today in the Swedish papers today were that the H1N1 vaccine the Swedes are offered have adjuvants in them and that the vaccines German government are offered has not and that is so much safer and really, isn’t this a big concern and Swedes will now get much more adverse effects from this horrible vaccine… And then a smaller blurb on cell made vaccines where they qouted the manufacturer on how safe they were, wheras they qouted “someone else” on how the eggmade vaccines are full with adjuvants. Somewhere in all this I would’ve been extatic to read something that stated that Adjuvants and Egg made are not linked, as little as Cell based and non-adjuvanted… since it should be egg vs cell made and adjuvanted vs non adjuvanted.
Obviously I didn’t write any of that there but ranted here instead. I’m sorry Steffi but this is a big source of annoyment for me at the moment. People who state “truths” and then it is so tangled up that it is hard to explain where the original truth is hidden…..) And here I am, just a simple flu researcher, what do I know?! ^^
I tried for a while to convince my mother, who’s into homeopathy, that she should just eat some sugar and alcohol instead. On the other hand, I’m more open to some “alternative” treatments, e.g., herbal supplements. If someone wants to chew on a piece of willow bark instead of taking an aspirin, that’s fine with me.
A case in point is our dog, who has had bone cancer for over a year now. At diagnosis, he was given 3 months to live, even with radiation and chemo. We opted instead to treat him with artemisinin, which is derived from wormwood. It would be considered alternative treatment by most standards, but is currently undergoing a clinical trial at Ohio State.
@Åsa: I hear you. The German government messed up big time PR-wise with the two different vaccines, just throwing oil on the fire!! Predictably followed by some scrambling to make it all good again…
And you’re welcome to rant on my blog any time.
@Ken: sounds like artemisinin might be on the fringe of going from alternative to science-based – so you may be ok ;)
Pregnant women should definitely keep clear of asteroids. Just sayin’.
Oh, and Åsa: I have been posting ‘educational’ stuff on facebook. After taking my sweet time to decide about that fence…
Steffi> very gracious of you, thanks! I can’t understand why noone has tried to correct/explain the whoel adjuvant idea. I mean, there was one sentence from a scientist in today’s paper that said “adjuvants make it possible to make more doese of vaccines since the vaccine parts doesn’t have to be as concentrated”. Somehow I don’t think people necessarily get that?!
I guess we’ll see if I can refrain from posting things tomorrow too :)
I find the most difficult cases to be those where I have some knowledge, but it’s not my precise field (that whole “just enough knowledge to be dangerous” thing again!). For example, two of my good friends had babies this year, and they both wanted to know what I thought about cord blood banking. It’s hard to balance “everyone’s situation is different, you need to make up your own mind” with “this is what I would do”.
@Eva – yes, some good friends of mine, too, with the measles/autism schtick. Facebook, too, fwiw, Steffi. Unfortunately my friends are fairly intelligent reactionaries, and combative at that, so my similar response met with a rather – lively? response. Richard jumped into the thread, guns a-firing, before I told him this was not a battle worth fighting.
Hmm. Obviously a topic close to my heart… some thoughts:
At a personal level I tend to follow the dictum (possibly the best piece of advice I ever got from a Head of Department) that “the only good advice is advice the person actually asked for” – so I don’t mention Alternative Nonsense unless people bring it up. If they do, and especially if they ask me what I think “as a scientist”, then I tell them why I think it is nonsense – but often I would do this by explaining why I think (and why other scientists think) people fool themselves into believing it works (all the usual stuff like placebo, belief, regression to the mean, episodic illness etc). Though in a personal setting I am probably fairly non-confrontational (honest!).
On the blogs is a bit different. Frequently one is debating people who are hardened enthusiasts for Unreality. I think the point of being non-confrontational in the blogosphere is more not to turn off the “sort of uncommitted” who may be watching the argument. Most of the e.g. vocal anti-vaccine or HIV denialist folk who one is actually arguing with – and that is what tends to happen, since they tend to be fanatical posters – are way, way beyond reason. My own attempted line is to give scientific facts and exposition to a point, or where it directly contradicts the nonsense, but to also try and deploy a certain amount of humour or mild sarcasm too. As a precedent for this I like to cite A.V.Hill’s famous line about:
Another relevant point is that the denialists and flat-out nuts will continually shift the goalposts, which makes the purely scientific / exposition / information-based argument very tiring. So if you explain why anti-vaccine argument X (“It’s the thimerosal in the vaccines!” ) is garbage, they simply move to argument Y (“It’s the aluminium!” ). And if you tackle that, to argument Z (“It’s the squalene!” )… and so on essentially ad infinitum. While one can obviously set out the real risk-benefit numbers for vaccination, one also needs to try and tackle the underlying false logic, e.g. by posing the counter question:
Whether I really succeed in balancing all this, I am not the best person to judge. I do fear that the longer I have been blogging and commenting about Unreality, the snarkier I have become, which is perhaps an occupational hazard. Anyway, if you want to see an example of attempting to balance “exposition” (of fairly simple physiology) with a bit of stick-poking at Unreality, try e.g. this post on the health myths surrounding of glugging loads of water.
Austin> that question (“what experiments really would convince you”) is a great suggestion. I’ll try that the next time.
I have to admit I pulled a “vaccines will be enough for all if we add adjuvants” argument today. I got tired of arguing about “why we need to add al into our vaccines etc…” It’s not the best argument but not the worst either. Personally though, I love the influenza mist vaccines :)
Hi Asa
Yes, sometimes you have to tackle the underlying logical inconsistencies. Many of the anti-vaccine people in particular are extraordinarily obsessed – look at any of the mammoth threads on MMR in the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” section.
Some of them have also got extremely well practised in various kinds of sophistry, including moving the goalposts, “can’t prove a negative”, the “Galileo Gambit”, misuse of the “precautionary principle” idea, etc etc. And over all of it hangs the “Pharma Shill Gambit” where anyone arguing for the science routinely gets accused of being a bought and paid for agent of GSK, or whatever.
It is not just really fringe nutters who do this kind of thing – even some well-known media “holistic doctors” do much the same, see e.g. here.
Of all the people I have debated on the blogs, the HIV denialists are the craziest of all, just marginally shading it ahead of the anti-vaccine folk. But there are many other sects too.
Richard jumped into the thread, guns a-firing, before I told him this was not a battle worth fighting.
hah.
Richard – Hi. ¿what happen?
My children don’t want to hear scientific explanations at all
Really my chidren too. I go to the museum of Natural history with Daniela (four year, several year ago) and I said; look this insect! -and she responding: is a Mantis religiosa almost automatically.
@Heather – my friends are fairly intelligent reactionaries, and combative at that there is that, and on top of it is the fact that, normally, you like your friends, so you don’t want to carry the argument to a possible point of no return. As I hinted, I don’t have a good solution yet.
@Austin: I have to admit that my first reaction to a particular denialism scene was wanting to move to an island or into the mountains, and pretend all people are good and reasonable. That is of course not a very sensible approach (albeit a comfortable one that still seems attractive sometimes…), since these people do manage to cause so much confusion, mistrust and damage. I completely see the need to respond to denialist comments and comment on their blogs, but I don’t have the energy and I would only be comfortable doing so on topics I know a lot about.
So I’ll go with what Cath said – one-on-one talks with friends mostly. And Cath: I often take the “this is what I would do/did, and these are the reasons..” approach.
I ran into this very thing the other day. I posted a link to a new site about mental health/mental illness (if you watch morning TV, you probably know the one I’m talking about). Very conventional, get people talking, ease the stigma. Good stuff, in other words. Now I posted it to the discussion group at the Unitarian Universalist church I attend—and I’ll be the first to admit we’ve got some crunchy folks in the fold. But what one member came back with wasn’t just alternative medicine, it was a full-on anti-psychiatry, anti-medicine woo-fest from an array of “psychiatry survivors.” Now, I try very hard to let people have space to believe as they want, but as a mental illness sufferer, I can tell you the last damned thing many, many sufferers need to hear is “Don’t take your meds, don’t trust the doctors!” (Not, of course, that all doctors or medicines are good—and this isn’t just my liberalism talking, some are barely better than laymen or placebos. But most docs are genuinely trying to improve lives and most of the drugs they use help some people.)
I still haven’t really confronted this person about her very unhelpful response. I just don’t know how to do it without telling her she’s a damned fool who needs to stay out of people’s mental health care. But maybe that’s what I need to do.
It’s a tough one, Pierce – so difficult to stay calm. Can you be ‘amusingly ironic’ in your response? What do you think would happen if you were completely blunt?
Excellent post Steffi! I’ve quite a few friends who are into “alternative medicine light”. I usually tell them what I think of it quite straight forwardly – trying to explain that point about collecting data vs listening to stories. Most of them think I’m totally insensitive and un-romantic because I don’t allow for things “beyond our understanding”(so for them to believe in it, it has to be unproven/unprovable? Or?). Still, we remain friends, and they keep asking about scientific things, so it might be ok. Still that’s friends – it’s a lot harder to start that discussion with someone you don’t no so well.
@Åsa – Yesterday every news paper agent around here was covered in the headline “The vaccine WILL make you sick” (Aftonbladet or Expressen, can’t remember, don’t care, got very upset).
For anyone wanting to mug up on Alt. Med., to prepare for future non-confrontational discussions, I can heartily recommend Ernst’s & Singh’s Trick or Treatment!
Heh, Stephen – a timely reminder, just before Halloween! :)
Anna: yes I saw one of those. One of the things where I wanted to write an article explaining what happens when you vaccinates. Not to mention on how many people (children) die each year without access to vaccines. Then again, I don’t think they would listen….
@Åsa
Maybe someone would? I guess we can’t hope for universal success, but if only some people actually listen maybe it would be good for something? But I’m probably being to naive and idealistic again :)
excuse me: Attempt say my children.
@Mark – My children don’t want to hear scientific explanations at all
Really my children too. I go to the Museum of Natural History (Chile) with Daniela (four year, several year ago) and I said- ¡look this insect (Mantis)! – and she responding: is a Mantis religiosa almost automatically.
Typing too fast I forget to put the “L” in children.
no worries Alejandro, we understood :)
Thank you, Steffi.
Anna> I sort of doubt it. I have now read even more misconceptions about adjuvants and the immune response and immuno response, which of course are exchanged to eachother when translated into Swedish by certain journalists…. ahh …
Steffi: The educational stuff on facebook, was it recieved with happy faces by some friends? Let’s hope!
Åsa – since I started doing that, I did get a few unexpected ‘likes’ on some links, and someone posted a status update along the lines of “seeing other perspectives makes life interesting” shortly after I posted something – I would love to think that it was somehow connected to the stuff I was putting up…
oh, and nobody has ‘un-friended’ me so far! :)
But I have a solution, put the contact option in NN.
Richard jumped into the thread, guns a-firing
That will happen when you mention certain foolish celebrities and their stand on autism and vaccination in my presence.
You are talking about me, right? Or has Richard G. been pulling out his artillery again?
excellent post…..!!
Hi Steffi,
Interesting post, I wholeheartedly agree with your first paragraphs and get the same troubles with alt-therapy questions when discussing biomedical stuff with non-(basic)scientists… we had a discussion a while back about possible reasons for this I believe!
I like to be devil’s advocate (apologies in advance for this annoying habit) so I just thought I’d say that although science may be the only way to systematically study the world, it is not the only valid or useful viewpoint. Although I’m pretty sure you’d agree, I always like to make it clear that art, culture and the humanities have often influenced science by bringing in different perspectives and that (as you mentioned) a good scientist will use doubt as their main tool for study. As science is beginning to move into regions tradtionally held by humanities and artistic subjects (neuroscience, psycho-social etc.), will ambiguity and doubt become increasingly important? It is true that many non-scientists often do not realise the importance of unbiased evidence, but then again it must be admitted that some scientists do not realise the importance of doubt. We may not want to show weakness in the face of ignorant attacks, but we should also remember that there are many people who are not in science who agree wholeheartedly with the remit of science but cannot trust (the small minority of scientists) who (like politicians) are only interested in their certainties…
In the same way, I think it is slightly incorrect to say that ‘religion’ is all about belief – lay-religion perhaps – but I think some theologians are also driven by their doubts to study people and the world. Indeed, there is that uncomfortable fact that much early scientific (as well, of course, as superstitious) learning was undertaken by islamic theologians and then monks during the middle ages. For example, I just visited the library in a Czech monastery that had a zoological collection to rival that of my local university – they certainly knew that unicorns didn’t exist as they had travelled to Sweden to hunt and study the narwhal!
Hello Michael – you are mixing a couple of things up:
although science may be the only way to systematically study the world, it is not the only valid or useful viewpoint
I am saying that science is not a viewpoint.
it is slightly incorrect to say that ‘religion’ is all about belief – lay-religion perhaps – but I think some theologians are also driven by their doubts to study people and the world
You are mixing up religion and theology – one might argue that you could be a theologian without believing in any god(s) (although that would probably be very tedious), but religion wouldn’t exist without people believing in a supernatural existence of some sort.
Finally, I’d argue that monks and early theologians were ‘doing science’ because it’s inherent in human nature – and because they had the resources where normal people didn’t! Thankfully, things have changed a lot since those days…
Defining science nicely.Let us be passionate about ‘not believing’ in science.
Heya,
Sorry I think my confusion was that the main impetus of your post was about ‘not believing’ in science – I was only really picking up on a very small aspect of your second bullet point and not the main argument about belief! I just thought they didn’t necessarily equate with one another and whilst I agreed with the final point about belief, I just wanted to query the second point about ‘viewpoints’.
I think for some aspects of science it is a viewpoint – a viewpoint aiming to be unbiased, objective yes, but a viewpoint none the less. Maybe I am mixing things up, but I think there is a difference between the ideals of scientific endeavour and the methods behind science – the ideals are all about investigating mysteries with an open mind, whilst the ideas (methods) are focussed upon reducing inaccuracy and bias through extremely regulated, reviewed and well tested experiments/models. In terms of the ideals, I think it can be a ‘viewpoint’ (whatever that is!), but I think what you are rightly defending is that the use of solid methods and fundamental theory is not a viewpoint (and thus cannot be a belief), it is the closest appromixation to reality that we can get.
To give an example of how science can be a viewpoint, like in physics, it is convenient to think from a classical perspective for some problems and a quantum perspective for others; if we think of the big picture, it is often convenient to think in terms of scientific evidence to understand the natural world whilst at other times it is more efficient to think in, for instance, more humanitarian terms. To reiterate, saying that science can be a viewpoint is not saying it is a belief and indeed I do not think we can do science properly if we cannot see the world from more than one viewpoint.
You are perfectly correct, you don’t even need to argue that theologians may not believe in god(s), I’m sure many don’t. But I still think that the supernatural or purely belief-based definition of religion is somewhat of a caricature and may not represent the views of people (whether theologians or not) who may have more interesting things to say than the usual rhetoric. We all boo-poo the media for not taking a balanced view when communicating scientific research, but are you really sure that we haven’t just been taking our perspective from those religious people who shout the loudest? And I agree that the monks were doing science, but they could have been doing science as part of their theological studies, which in turn would influence religion; I realise this doesn’t sit well with the wish to distance science from religion, but it’s sometimes fun to think outside the box!
Ah well, I think I’ve confused matters even more! Sorry for producing another dense and incomprehensible essay, maybe I’ll write it in french next time. :)