An old classmate of mine posted a link to an article from The Daily Beast. The article was an opinion piece ranting about how frustrating it is to know that certain preventable diseases, which were on the verge of being eradicated, are now reappearing in the United States and United Kingdom because of the decrease in child vaccinations. The author blamed the decrease in child vaccinations on the prevalent cultural fears that vaccinations are somehow more dangerous than the diseases that they help to eradicate.
I read a comment that spoke against the opinion piece, so responded by posting a comment supporting the opinion piece. This rapidly escalated into long posts filled with multiple paragraphs arguing for and against each of our respective positions. =/
At any rate, I found myself rehashing a common argument that I seem to repeatedly have with people who question conclusions made by prominent liberal scientists. I'll break this argument down into its basic form here.
- I learn by repeating something over and over again until I get a predictable result.
- That is the basis of the scientific method
- When other people double-check my work to make sure I didn't make any mistakes, my conclusions are more reliable
- That is the basis of peer-reviewed research
- I trust peer-reviewed research more than I trust anecdotes.
Anecdotes aren't repeated in controlled environments like scientific experiments are. Anecdotes aren't peer-reviewed for mistakes like peer-reviewed papers are. Anecdotes are a single story told from a single point of view in an environment where a multitude of unknown factors could have influenced the result.
(on a side note, treatments like chiropractor treatments tend to lay in the middle, where practitioners learn and grow by applying the scientific method through repetition, but do not allow their work to be peer-reviewed in tightly controlled experimental environments. Which is also highly suspect)
So here's where we differed. I trusted doctors who cite peer-reviewed research. The commenter didn't trust doctors because most of the well-known peer-reviewed research is paid for by pharmaceutical companies which might not have the most noble of agendas. The commenter trusted anecdotal evidence of homeopathic treatments that he found in forums and articles on the internet. But I don't trust anecdotal evidence of homeopathic treatments because they have not been tested in ways that I would trust.
Which got me to thinking...is there a way to crowd-source homeopathic remedy studies? They wouldn't be as trustworthy as rigorous scientific studies performed under tightly controlled conditions. But people who use homeopathic remedies already experiment on themselves all the time. Websites like Livestrong and WorldHealth are chalk-full of forum posters who are all experimenting with all sorts of unregulated supplements and untested treatments. The data is out there, and there are lots of people who would like to access that data. If you were the type of person who preferred supplements over FDA-approved drugs, wouldn't it be great if you could see that one kind of supplement helped 250 people on a website while a different kind of supplement only helped 30 people on that same website?
Plus, if such a website showed a strong correlation between users that took a supplement and users that said that they benefitted from that supplement, that would encourage scientists to study such a supplement. Pharmaceutical companies and PhD students alike would jump at a chance to verify such overwhelming anecdotal evidence with a formalized study in a way they would not jump at a chance to study an obscure urban legend about ginko biloba or apple cider vinegar. After all, that's how all of the studies were spawned that proved that there is no direct causal link between vaccinations and autism.
Alas, this is yet another business idea that I'm rather unqualified for, and am too lazy and disinterested to make myself qualified for. Donated!
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