Wednesday
Jan262011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Science hype and overprescribing
Jan 26, 2011 Climate: other Royal Society I was pondering my post yesterday about all the senior members of the scientific establishment who agree with us in the sceptic blogosphere that the science of global warming suffers from a problem of overhyping of the size of the problem. I think it is fair to say that this is probably a relatively uncontroversial observation these days.
It is interesting to have this new consensus in mind when one thinks about the analogy Sir Paul Nurse used in his encounter with James Delingpole on Horizon last night - that of a visit to a cancer specialist. One wonders if a more accurate analogy would have been a visit to a cancer specialist whose hospital has been found to be regularly guilty of operating when there is no medical need.
Reader Comments (47)
Delingpole raised the valid point that medicine advances by running drug and clinical trials. Climate modeling is all about projecting decades into the future, with no immediate way to verify the models.
Nurse's analogy was poor, in my view.
The premise from Sir Paul Nurse is flawed in that it assumes the consensus view is always correct. If we want a medical analogy a recent one would be the treatment of stomach ulcers - The medical profession for a long time assumed that Stress caused excess acid was the problem and they successfully treated patients with drugs that "switched off" the acid production. Then some researchers found a bacteria growing in the stomach of patients suffering with "acid" and the resulting ulcers.
These researchers were treated badly by the main stream medics until finally they were able to prove that there was a causal link between the bacteria and the ulcers.
"It was not until the early 1980s, when two young Australian physicians, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren of the Royal Perth Hospital in Perth, Western Australia, again raised the possibility that bacteria caused ulcers. Fuelled by their own persistence and enthusiasm–and initially ridiculed by their colleagues–Marshall and Warren established beyond any doubt that H. pylori plays a critical role in creating gastritis and ulcers."
http://science.education.nih.gov/home2.nsf/Educational+ResourcesResource+FormatsOnline+Resources+High+School/928BAB9A176A71B585256CCD00634489
So here we have another classic example of the "consensus" being wrong and the "consenting" ridiculing those that were ultimately proved to be correct.
Another example from the past that JD could have thrown back at Sir Paul Nurse is how in the past leeches were used to bleed a patient. Sometimes this worked well with an injury to reduce swelling. But the "consensus" of the time had it that a red complexion was not fashionable whereas a white, very pale complexion was. So bleeding became fashionable despite the negative effect it often had on the patient.
Excellent analogy here with the concept of mans effect on climate as being a "nose bleed" and the Alarmists solution being a tourniquet round the neck!
I seem to recall that those who don’t learn from hysteria, are doomed to repeat it.
This silly stunt, pulled by the combined resources of our Unbiased National Broadcaster, the Guardian newspaper and the President of the Royal Society, has backfired horribly.
Nurse set out 'on a mission to discover why the public is losing faith in scientists'.
He achieved three things, he destroyed what last bit of integrity and gravitas that might have been attached to his historic post, he forced people who heretofore might have had 'faith' in scientists into the ranks of the sceptics and he added several hundred (maybe thousands) of new visitors to the site of a popular and erudite blogger.
the writer is fully with the "program", however:
26 Jan: Western Mail, Wales: Chris Kelsey: Another disappointment at climate talks
The writer and journalist George Monbiot said that Cancun showed that the whole attempt to produce an international agreement on climate change was now dead. In a lecture at the Centre for Alternative Technology at Machynlleth this month he said that the faith people like him had put in the international process had been misplaced.
“In the past 19 years since the Rio summit in 1992 it’s not just that nothing has happened, we’ve actually gone backwards,” he said...
“Once governments see that a treaty has the taint of failure they don’t want to be associated with it. They don’t want to put time and money into a process they know is going nowhere.
“My certainty about what best needed to be done has crumbled in the face of the complete ineptitude and uselessness of the world’s governments.”...
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/go-green/go-green-climate/2011/01/26/another-disappointment-at-climate-talks-91466-28053012/
Nurse obviously doesn't know the history of the medical profession very well to ask questions about treatments. I have posted about Helicobacter pylori and Ulcers, discovered in the 80s by Warren and Marshall eventually leading to a Nobel Prize in 2005. If memory serves the theory was that bacteria couldn't survive in the acidic (car battery strength?) environment of the stomach and so couldn't possibly cause ulcers.
The Leeches good -> Leeches bad-> Leeches good for somethings story is worth bringing up
In the question about specific treatment issue, was the consensus treatment 10 years ago the same as now, will it be the same in 10 years time probably not in both cases.
Medics just guess on the basis of experience, education and biases just like the rest of really. We should bear that in mind when dealing with experts and not treat them as infallible.
My first reaction to Nurse's run at Delingpole was to recall Hippocrates:
Medicine is of all the arts the most noble; but, owing to the ignorance of those who practice it, and of those who, inconsiderately, form a judgment of them, it is at present far behind all the other arts. Their mistake appears to me to arise principally from this, that in the cities there is no punishment connected with the practice of medicine (and with it alone) except disgrace, and that does not hurt those who are familiar with it. Such persons are the figures which are introduced in tragedies, for as they have the shape, and dress, and personal appearance of an actor, but are not actors, so also physicians are many in title but very few in reality.
Nurse's comments invoke a substitution of Hippocrates' "physicians" for modern "scientists". No punishment but shame. And what is shame?
Sir, we need to remove your lung because our models show that you might get cancer in 50 to 300 years time...
More OTT predictions, gulf stream is doomed (maybe, never can stand by their opinions 100% can they, but as they say they are opinions and its not science)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/8281655/Climate-change-means-we-will-be-skiing-in-Yorkshire-rather-than-sunbathing-under-palm-trees-experts-warn.html#dsq-content
SandyS. Don't forget thalidomide.
The real answer to the question is it depends. If the consensious medical opinion involved removing both legs, an arm and an eye - I might wonder to listen to other opinions!
I would like toad to be right but I fear he isn't and we are all in danger of making some unwarranted assumptions.
It's not just climate scientists who hear what they want to hear!
For a start the overwhelming majority of the British population did not watch the programme.
Of those that did an overwhelming majority will have concluded that Nurse was correct because he is the President of the Royal Society. The NASA comment about the relative amount of CO2 emitted by humanity vis-a-vis any other source will already be doing the rounds of the bars and water-coolers. "It was a guy from NASA who said it so it must be right."
The already sceptical will not have been impressed but they're already sceptical so they can be discounted.
Seriously, toad, how many people do you honestly believe will have been made more sceptical by that programme?
There's still an awful long way to the top of the hill, people.
I thought a better response might have been to look at sample sizes. Billions of people from birth to death and billions of medical interventions vs. 1 planet for a minute fraction of it's existance and zero intentional interventions.
Another medical example: antidepressants. In particular SSRIs. Once hailed by a consensus in the psychiatric profession as being very effective (prozac even being called a wonder drug) now revealed to be nothing more than placebo (with super-placebo added extras). I think this is a shocker of an example of medical/pharmaceutical corruption of science.
"...the analogy Sir Paul Nurse used ....that of a visit to a cancer specialist"
What if your local specialist recommends some costly and onerous treatment. On the other hand you discover that another specialist flatly disagrees. Perhaps the latter is the holder of one of the most prestigious posts in that field in the world. I'm thinking here of the cancer equivalent of, say, the atmospheric physicist, warming sceptic, and Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Richard Lindzen.
How does Sir Paul Nurse's epistemology of "consensus" and respect for Science handle that?
For over a hundred years the consensus of all doctors, nurses, midwives, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, etc. was to lay newborn babies on their belly to sleep!! Then in the mid eighties the whole thing changed and research showed that just by placing the babies on their back, the sudden death syndrome dropped by over 50%!! So mister Nurse, be very careful using such silly analogies!!
Regards Freddie from Davos, in the snowy and cold Swiss mountains.
Indeed the appropriate analogy would be a medical proposal to operate when it is not clear the patient has cancer, when the operation is guaranteed to make no discernible difference and where the price of the operation will bankrupt the entire family. That's the correct climate change analogy. And Paul Nurse should be ashamed at his demonstration of intellectual deficiency.
Hilaire Belloc had a famous salutory message :
"Never leave a'hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse"
In that poem, slipping the Nurse's hand led to being eaten by a lion.
With Sir Paul Nurse - I'd rather let go of his hand, he appears not to really understand any aspects of the debate on climate change, gets important facts wrong, blusters and browbeats us, makes false analogies. This Nurse is trying to give us nasty medicine when there appears to be no need for it.
There are plenty of examples of the "orthodoxy" - the "consensus" - being validly challenged and overturned. Often it takes quite a while - continental drift theory for example, where Wegener's claims were dismissed by "the experts".
Truth will out in the end. Especially now the Internet allows much freer debate and analysis, allows us hoi polloi to see alternative views and evidence.
Same is true of the precautionary principle. Unless we spend trillions decarbonising, bad things may happen. No evidence showing that they're happening yet, but we can't be too careful. In medicine, the leading cause of death by far is heart or brain failure, which may or may not be linked to other complications. So by researching and fitting everyone with an artificial heart and brain, the leading cause of death may be prevented. Additional complications may still remain for the patient, and some climate alarmists may have already opted for the brain transplant.
So Delingpole was wrong-footed for a minute. Not many people will get through a three-hour interview, with context switches, without a couple of "huh"? moments. As Ben Goldacre, whom I like and read regularly(*), pointed out, the gotcha was weak and unimpressive. I'm sure that if James was the one choosing which two of the hundred and eighty minutes of film to include, the effect would have been quite different.
I do, though, find reading other responses, from people who aren't being ambushed on camera, interesting.
Me, I'd go straight to the experimental vs. observational science split.
Experimental science has a massive advantage in certainty over observational. When you can repeat the same experiment many times, with different experimenters, different labs, in controlled conditions, varying possible interactions in specified ways, you can gain a higher degree of certainty much more quickly than speculating about uncontrolled observations. In fact, one might find it hard to think that both can be covered by the same word "science" - but I'd hate to leave the astronomers out in the cold.
Nurse's cancer treatment would have had years of lab tests, followed by human trials, and the experience of thousands of patients as a background to the decision. There would be still no guarantees, of course, but it would be a lot more solid than anything coming out of "climate science".
(*) Yes, I think Ben is wrong on AGW, but I tried confining myself to reading only people who were right about everything, and found that a mental diet of Aristotle and Delingpole lacked variety.
Many have repeated that cancer therapy and computer modelling are very far from each other. This is not entirely accurate, and to the detriment of folks like Paul Nurse. Much of the -omics stuff goes in this category.
For example, take the Potti trial. A gene expression 'signature' is derived from cancer cell lines w.r.t to a drug. This is compared against the signature of tumor tissue from a patient. The drug with the best match for sensitivity for the cell line is then given to the patient with the tumor.
Method sounds attractive no doubt, but there are two problems :
Firstly, the number of genes studied runs into the hundreds - the mind cannot simply wrap around and grasp meaningfully what's going on. You'll simply have to 'believe' what the data says; in other words, you cannot say to any result -hey that doesn't 'look' right (or wrong).
Secondly, genes are simply correlated to cure. Why should this or that gene correlate with chemoresistance? Who cares!! There is no mechanistic or predictive understanding. While medicine is full of such things, you don't pretend that they are science.
But the mathematical correlation models provide a bridge and make scientists/doctors/patients think something deeply scientific is going on, helping us to paper over the above two fundamental problems.
Caveat to above: It mainly applies to the -omics based planned and ongoing clinical work.
Re: Paul Nurse & Delingpole
Louis Pasteur is acknowledged as the founder of modern medicine, but his findings about the link of microbes and disease were questioned in his time by many of the medical profession. One objection was that Pasteur was a chemist, a layman unqualified for any say in medicine, a matter best left to the experts, the medical doctors. This shows that when matters are complex or subject to intractable uncertainty, an appeal to the higher authority of a consensus of experts can be just as wrong as anybody else. Acceptance of the Precautionary Principle, that it is better to act with the guidance of experts than to regret, has always led to the next step: Orwell’ s ministry of truth. Such a power structure in the Soviet Union placed Lysenko as head of agricultural policy for thirty years with authority to overrule contrary genetic research in the West. Paul Nurse should know what followed. He won the 2001 Nobel Prize for original research into the fine points of genetics. In climate matters, Paul Nurse, not Delingpole, should learn from Alexander Pope:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.
No, I think Nurse probably does know it was a stupid analogy. If he doesn't know then he's not fit to be head of the Royal Society and picking up Nobel prizes; if he does know, then it's unprofessional behaviour playing to the gallery.
I've several times mentioned his predecessor Martin Rees who used the fallacy of petitio principii (begging the question), and had the same observation: if he knew he was doing it, he shouldn't have done it; and if he didn't know then he's unfit to be in his position. Prominent scientists such as Rees and Nurse destroy all credibility in their ability to do science if they can't see what are false comparisons and fallacious arguments. Any scientist who knowingly engages in such behaviour is a bad scientist, both ethically and practically. Quite apart from what Rees did in the public forum, my opinion is that he behaved unethically throughout his astronomy career, so he was true to type when he ascended the presidency at the RS.
I think that whichever way you look at this, the Royal Society comes out really, really badly. Don't they expect their fellows to be ethical in the public forum and show a good example? It's OK to make cheap shots, and have thinking people consider you a fool is it? Fancy colluding with BBC propagandists to do that.
In the early 1980's I left school in the UK and spent the summer working on an American summer camp. I would estimate that 1 in 20 of my UK school colleagues had dental braces, wheress about 1 in 4 of the US kids did.
Both my UK school, and the US summer camp were at the expensive end of the private sector.
Any dentists like to comment?
I well remember the day in March 2008 that the cancer specialist from Guys Hospital gave my father three months to live. The correct figure, as it turned out, was three days.
A day and a half after the prognosis I spoke to my step mother and she was very concerned about the symptoms and pain Dad was experiencing. So I called another expert - not an oncologist but a specialist in care for the dying whom I knew personally. We were all assuming Dad had a month or two to go at this point and I wanted help with how to organise various visits different members of the family were planning to make to see him, some from the other side of the world. Rob shocked me by saying "Tell them to get to him right away. It sounds as if his system is shutting down."
And so I was with Dad on the last day he was on this planet, something I wouldn't have missed for the world, gruelling though it was. (Very sadly others could not possibly make it. Nobody could really be blamed for that.)
If I had been James Delingpole I would have said "If a cancer expert told me something about someone I love very much, I might well seek a second opinion. In fact, make that a definite."
A famous bloke by the name of James Prescott Joule was another person the RS didn't take seriously because he was a brewer, not an academic. History is littered with examples of lay-scientists challenging the scientific unions of their day. Perhaps Nurse should spend more time in his vaults looking at examples of where sceptics like Joule challenged the consensus of his body, or where his body had been sceptical and proven wrong.
Sam the Skeptic. 'How many people will have been made more sceptical by that programme ?'
I've spoken to no-one who thought Nurse 'did a good job', but plenty who saw 'entrapment' and judicious editing.
A populace who have been told for 7 or more years by the 'Chief Scientist' of the Royal Horticultural Society that we are about to enjoy the climate of South West Portugal, is told this morning in the DT by Richard Alleyne that 'Global Warming will freeze Britain'.
These people will now be thoroughly confused. They might expect the august President of the Royal Society to provide some solace or relief from their confusion, but when they see him involved in a shabby little trick, unworthy of even an undergraduate of the University of East Anglia, their 'scepticism' might tend to increase.
@ toad
It seems fairly clear in that example that the decline-hiders have noticed "warming" doesn't really worry anyone, so they've changed the message to one that does. The fact that this entails asserting that global warming will make things colder is not a problem, because the whole message is fundamentally mendacious anyway.
As a lay person only having basic qualifications in science but a very open mind I feel Mr Nurse has made a big mistake The analogy was badly thought out and a bit childish in my eyes ! shame as I always hoped that the rarefied air of academia was a breeding ground of knowledge and questions! .
Not just a backdrop to launching your TV career.
jim:
I very much doubt that would convince the unaligned viewer. People accept, quite rightly in my view, that scientists include geologists and astrophysicists. And climate scientists. The last one is a problem for me - but that is a hard sell, understandably.
Still, Richard Lindzen is a scientist. What else would one call him? Having listened to the debate for many years Lindzen is the scientist I find most convincing in this field. He says explicly that the field has become corrupted. And that's where it gets hard for someone like Delingpole faced with Paul Nurse.
I made a point of watching the programme - on the iPlayer - with someone with little interest in science who is unaligned on AGW but tends to trust the consensus more than the sceptics. I made a vow to myself not to comment or throw anything at the screen on my second viewing! She found Paul Nurse very convincing and James Delingpole not at all so. I have to say that I agree with her - or at least I sympathise with her. Delingpole didn't convince. When Nurse turned to an area where he is a world expert Delingpole should have been warm and relaxed rather than looking like a cornered rat.
Fred Singer she did think was quite convincing - but the NASA guy more so. Phil Jones just seemed pathetic. But Paul Nurse was the standout - because of his obvious love for what he does.
I strongly agreed with this. Paul Nurse loves science. When he said it amazes him he gets paid for something he enjoys so much it genuinely moved me - in a way I have never felt with May, Rees, King and co. It bothers me that on sceptical blogs nobody has mentioned this. The common ground we have with Paul Nurse is, surely, our love for science. He needs not Delingpole (who I thought he listened to and didn't patronise) nor Singer (who was unwise to try and convince him of a solar theory which was easily knocked down by the NASA guy) but Lindzen - who always argues against any unicausal explanation for the vagaries of the strange statistic best called the globally averaged temperature anomaly. (And who ever apart from Lindzen emphasizes that it's an anomaly that is averaged - because averaging temperature is a nonsense. We didn't get anywhere near this level on this Horizon - though Ben Miller was of course on the right lines in his in tying it all back to energy.)
Anyway, just my halfpenny worth. We can't know what goes on in the heart of another human being. Nurse may be a despicable deceiver but I can only go on what I've seen. There is something to work with here.
Semmelweis (if I have spelled it right) eliminated chidbirth feaver by insisting that doctors wash up before delivery. The consensus has rejected thist and has almost drivene him to suiside.
[Snip - namecalling]
As a scientist I was embarrassed by the Horizon program. I felt that Nurse shamed science. If anything discredits science and undermines it's public standing it is dishonesty and partisan propoganda displacing scientific method and informed debate.
Nurse's analogy and the Bishop's suggested modified version both fail. Beware of analogies - they usually involve a pea shifting under a thimble.
Nurse begins his analogy with "Say you had cancer and you went to be treated - there would be a consensual position on your treatment..."
To be a good analogy, Delingpole would already accept the position that he has catastrophic global warming and is simply deciding upon a possible cure.
Delingpole recognises the analogy doesn't fit and stops it by saying "I don't accept your analogy" (and asks Nurse to return to the topic he had agreed to discuss - Climategate).
When using a medical analogy, AGW proponents should also remember the Hippocratic tradition of "first do no harm".
toad ..
I'm certain you have but I don't think it changes my argument. How many of those were already minded to accept the sceptical case against climate change before the programme?You and I are probably moving in broadly similar intellectual circles and quite possibly in broadly similar social circles as well. We have visits to this blog in common. We are as susceptible to confirmation bias as anyone. The actual number of converts that Nurse will have made for the sceptical side of this argument by (what we see as) his cack-handed approach will be vanishingly small.
We keep rubbing our hands in glee each time the "warmists" make what we take to be a major blunder, forgetting that Joe Public is watching videos of "drowning" polar bears, floods in Pakistan and Australia and heatwaves in Russia and being told that all these things are down to CO2 and global warming. And he believes it because "scientists" are saying it.
How many times have experts argued that wind farms are a waste of time and money and have proved it? How many times have the energy companies admitted that they only build these things because of government subsidy (read extra taxation)? Yet that same Joe Public is still convinced that "green" or "renewable" energy is the way forward.
We keep chipping away at the wall but we would do well to realise that at the moment "chipping" is all we are doing.
Sir Paul Nurse arrived at the RS as a new broom and had his chance to sweep clean. He chose not to. In fact, one of his first actions was to involve himself with the Horizon programme which was clearly a piece in support of climate scientists when not even his field. It is this action more than his on-screen words that puzzle me. What was the motivation? The nearest we got to an answer was his declared love of science which is odd given that the main criticism he was trying to dispel is the perceived lack of scientific rigour.
We live in interesting times.
simpleseekeraftertruth. Nurse's motivation ? This entry on Wikipedia might be a clue -'and his PhD degree in 1973 from the School of Biology at the University of EAST ANGLIA', might be a pssible clue.
Doing a favour for some old mates ?
@Mat
"Not just a backdrop to launching your TV career."
I haven't seen the program, except for a few minutes of teaser.
To me, it looked Paul Nurse was acting like some of those big ego rock stars who want to be a movie star.
Sir Paul of Royal Society reckons he can be as great as Sir Robert Winston or Sir David Attenborough, the people that tended to represent scientific authority on popular TV shows. Neither of the latter two have won Nobel, and one of them isn't even a scientist. Sir Paul, the scientist and Nobel Laureate, and the incoming president of the Royal Society, will now be the new TV star to show how scientific authority is established without losing public trust.
Attenborough, of course, is a good story-teller. He has a great voice and he doesn't mind talking risque. As for Winston, well, think about it, who wouldn't like a guy that looked like Groucho Marx? These two guys have pizzazz.
Paul Nurse has no quality that could endear him to TV-viewing public, other than his Nobel Prize, the authority of the RS, and his MBE. He thinks he can be more than that, but he has no pizzazz. According to Ben Goldacre, it felt like it was a duty to watch him. This might well mean Nurse's TV career is still-born.
Sam the Skeptic. You and I are in total agreement about the problems we sceptics face, but as Nurse says early on in his 'programme' - 'Recent polls show that nearly half of Americans and more than a third of Brits believe climate change is being exaggerated'. I see little hope for any improvement in this country in the near future, with all 4 party leaders in the H of C being committed 'AGW Alarmists', but the departure of Carol Browner from the White House and other heartening news from across the pond must give us hope. Indeed as I sit here watching Fox News, with further heavy snow over there, I can only see the sceptic percentage improving.
I trust you saw the other headline in the DT 'Polar bear swims for nine days to reach new ice floe'.
I thought they were all 'drowning'.
Joe Public may be stupid, but is he that stupid ?
Sam the sceptic, et al. From the Grauniad. 'Obama made no mention of Climate Change in his State of the Union speech, appearing to signal a shift in the White House. The omission was in stark contrast to the presidential candidate who campaigned in 2008, warning of the existential threat posed by climate change'.
Does Obama know something we don't?
Jim and Richard Drake have both mentioned the 'experimental / observational split' and this is something that I feel is significant. When I read that the warming effect of CO2 on the atmosphere had been proven in the laboratory I looked up info on the kind of experiments that were used to show this. I found a description of an experiment that was aimed at schools that involved two fish-tanks, one of which contained added CO2, and two heat lamps. Thermometers were placed in both tanks and the temperature rises were plotted on graphs and compared. I would assume that climate scientists would use a more sophisticated set up but that the basic principle behind the experiment was sound and that this experiment is the cornerstone that all AGW theory depends on.
The first question that I would ask is, has the experiment been carried out using samples designed to be as close as possible to pre-industrial and current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere? if so was there a meaningful difference between the rate of temperature rise in the two samples?
Secondly, even if a difference was shown, isn't it absurdly simplistic to simply assume that the demonstrated effect would totally override all the other factors that have an effect on the climate? In any case, observations must have very limited value for proving the effect because you have no control planet to compare your results with. We know that the Earth has been warming and cooling for millions of years, how do you seperate natural warming that would have happened anyway from warming that is caused by fossil fuel burning?
It is always easy after the event to think of the best riposte. Perhaps James could have said " I would be happy to accept the opinions of the cancer specialists, safe in the knowledge that if they had ever behaved like certain climate scientists, they would have been struck off years ago".
@ Neal
"Sir, we need to remove your lung because our models show that you might get cancer in 50 to 300 years time..."
no, your descendants might,maybe,could, prove me wrong then, see, not as simple as you thought.
being an expert is tricky dontyouknow.
I'm medical and work with experts all the time. I'm something of one myself. Experience has taught me to define "expert" as "someone who is marginally less likely to be wrong than anyone else." The warm-mongers would do well to ponder that.
What struck me about the question was that in medicine, consensus isn't the issue right now. There is indeed a lot of quackery, which extends into the government, civil service, research commissioned by the civil service and the NHS. If you'll forgive a self-referential link, I looked at an example here. A sample of the gibberish I found:
"Departing from biomedical notions of being ‘cured’, ‘healthy’ or ‘disease-free’, wellbeing encapsulates notions of authenticity, recognition and self-determination; restructuring ‘health’ as a subjective and individualised process (Bishop & Yardley, 2004; Sointu, 2005; Sointu, 2005a)"
Note the reference, as though the fact that this gibberish had been published lent it credibility. (And Sointu has a lot to answer for.)
The catch phrases used by the quacks are "biomedicine" (which I adore as an example of prefixitis: as with "neo-" and "paleo-" the prefix is considered to be effective refutation) and "evidence-based" medicine, with "evidence-based" being - incredibly - pejorative.
I wouldn't want consensus-based medicine if I were threatened by a serious illness, though I wouldn't mind if it were a matter of consensus (unless I had a stomach ulcer a decade or two ago). What I'd want would be evidence-based medicine.
Just as I want evidence-based climate science, with the evidence available for scrutiny - just as it is in medicine.
Richard Drake: Thank you for the reality check. You're quite right; parsing the differences in the levels of certainty achieved from observations with and without control of conditions would not be convincing to the average viewer. If it were, it would have ended up on the cutting-room floor in that Horizon production anyway. I'm developing quite a bee in my bonnet about the repurposing of the word "science" as a synonym for "stuff" with a veneer of authoritiness. I'm clearly reading too much climate stuff, er, science.
Perhaps Richard R. has the right idea, but I fear that any snappy comeback would also have joined the other 178 minutes in the burn-bin.
I wasn't as impressed by Paul Nurse as you and your guest were, but thinking back on it, that may be because the whole programme was so light. He came across to me more as a presenter than an investigator. If I see him again in some programme with more depth, and I hope I do, I'll certainly remember to re-evaluate.