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M.Ds know things, that's the point! Have we been trained for scientific thinking? Absolutely, totally not. Test your mother on basic statistics and scientific r
by rscho 10y ago
M.Ds know things, that's the point! Have we been trained for scientific thinking? Absolutely, totally not. Test your mother on basic statistics and scientific reasoning, and you will quickly see the limits. This has absolutely nothing to do with being a decent doctor or not. Now, you are going to tell me she can read the scientific literature and make sense of it?
Medicine is caring for patients, meaning applying knowledge. Knowledge applied in the clinics is mostly passed through practical training from generation to generation. Arguably, the decisive factor of change in medicine has up to now always been technology: a stent in an artery, ether anesthesia, organ transplant, etc. A certain base of irrefutable knowledge is present, of course, but it is proportionally small compared to the amount of downright false information we get from clinical trials.
We could debate for hours on that subject, but I dare say that someone who believes that most M.Ds can do real science is very wrong. Statistics done by M.Ds is akin to a junkie cooking meth. He knows how to make it, but has no idea why sometimes it goes wrong. Moreover, you drastically underestimate the dishonesty of the "experts" you are citing.
- Fomite 10y agoMDs are not the only ones doing medical research.
- rscho 10y agoThat is indeed a valid point. Unfortunately, most of biology can also be qualified of "soft science". I however expect that a new age is coming for medicine: the age of science (the real one, this time). We are already seeing the birth of sizable databases exploited by professional scientists, but this is still a very minor part of the research output, and the signal-to-noise ratio is currently dismal. Additionally, the progress of medicine is somewhat parallel to the progress of hard science. What is lacking the most, is solid data and the methods to collect them.
- Fomite 10y agoIronically enough though, "hard scientists" wandering into biology and medicine and going "Right, time to show you lot how real science is done..." are notorious for producing really awful research.
- ploxiln 10y agoShe doesn't do statistical studies, no. But I think she has good sense of the relative confidence she can have in "new discoveries" and older institutional knowledge (which also isn't 100%). And sometimes she puts in more time and attention than a few previous doctors did, considering all the symptoms and previous attempted treatments, to come up with an accurate diagnosis and effective treatment. By not being dogmatic, and spending a bit more time, she can fix some things. I don't usually "do science" the statistical way either, I usually come up with a plausible theory for a bug, fix it, and use the results to confirm or refute my theory of that one bug. Usually it's something dumb, simple, and obvious in hindsight, not a whole new algorithm or technique.