Big pharma also has a business model where they can outspend chiropractors by a huge margin when it comes to lobbying and PR to establish memes in society.
Big pharma versus big placebo: one of these is constrained by expectations of evidence, the other to people opposed to joined-up thinking.
Are you seriously claiming the medical opposition to chiropractic is a big pharma conspiracy? If so, do you have actual evidence rather than merely asserting it’s possible?
Are you seriously claiming the medical opposition to chiropractic is a big pharma conspiracy?
I make a claim that’s more complex than that.
Conspiracy assumes not being open.
It has nothing to do with a university rather funding research that produces patents that a pharma company can use than the university doing research that’s beneficial for individuals doing various kind of manual therapy.
As far as real conspiracy goes, there plenty of evidence of pharma companies having to pay huge fines because they bribe doctors in various ways to do what’s good for the pharma company.
If a doctor gives his patients a drug from a big pharma company that company invites him to a fancy all-costs payed luxury vacation conference.
It’s not as bad as it used to be, but it was bad over decades and that made certain memes win memetic competition.
Chiropractors don’t have similar systems for paying doctors who refer clients kickbacks.
In the 20st century big corporations very often won conflicts because the have more power than a bunch of individual practitioners.
It also seems to me more and more silly to believe that the blind man sees more and that blinding in general is the key to knowledge gathering.
It’s one of those things, were a kid in a hundred years will have a hard time understanding history because the idea is just so silly. Just like we today have a hard time understanding what people in the middle ages used to believe.
It’s also interesting that the ideal of blindness is so strong in the medical field and not as strong in any other domain.
A medical professor usually teaches the “evidence-based method” with teaching methods for which he as no evidence that they work. Somehow they succeed to do this without feeling weird. It’s quite remarkable.
I don’t think you can solve the puzzle of why that double standard exists without acknowledging that well-funded parties have an interest in things being that way.
Nobody makes money based on a platform of “evidence-based teaching” so we don’t have it in our society but we do have “evidence-based medicine” because a coalition lead by big pharma payed to establish that meme.
I think it’s a defensible position to argue that everything should be evidence-based but I see no intellectual reason to have it concentrated into one domain. The best way to explain the status quo is through analyzing the interests of those in power for meme generation.
1) You don’t give any figures for how common it is for doctors to get invited to a conference that is an excuse for a vacation. And I suspect you don’t have any.
2) Even if it’s true, there is a limit to how you much you can influence a doctor with such things. You might get a doctor to adopt some new drug which isn’t as good as it should be, but you can’t, for instance, get the doctor to oppose vaccination or convince him that saturated fats are healthy. It would be impossible to get doctors to oppose chiropractic this way unless there was already obvious reason to believe it’s pseudoscience.
Cigarette companies had plenty of money and tried to buy as many experts as they could. The best they could do was get an occasional scientist or doctor on their side; they came nowhere near convincing the whole medical profession that cigarette smoking is safe.
Well as we know now they are healthier than trans-unsaturated fats. Nevertheless, for decades doctors would advise their patients to switch from butter (saturated) to margarine (trans).
It also seems to me more and more silly to believe that the blind man sees more and that blinding in general is the key to knowledge gathering. It’s one of those things, were a kid in a hundred years will have a hard time understanding history because the idea is just so silly. Just like we today have a hard time understanding what people in the middle ages used to believe.
This is a straw man. Blinding is used where it can be used. It’s not necessary for doing medical science, and nonblinded trials are definitely accepted by doctors as a weaker form of evidence in cases where blinding isn’t possible. Many surgical procedures can’t be blinded for example. Blinding doesn’t mean not observing patients, it has a much more specific meaning than that. Because of your background in bioinformatics I think you know this, and are stretching the meaning on purpose.
A medical professor usually teaches the “evidence-based method” with teaching methods for which he as no evidence that they work.
You’re making sweeping generalizations with nothing to back them up.
If a doctor gives his patients a drug from a big pharma company that company invites him to a fancy all-costs payed luxury vacation conference. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but it was bad over decades and that made certain memes win memetic competition.
This is strictly illegal in many (most?) countries.
Blinding doesn’t mean not observing patients, it has a much more specific meaning than that.
Blinding is used where it can be used.
I can cross the street with a blindfold. That doesn’t mean that’s a good idea.
The general idea of blinding in medical science is that on average the human pattern matching ability produces more harm than good.
Good medical treatment in the evidence-based paradigm is supposed to be treatment by the book.
People do things like putting box-plots in their scientific papers instead of providing plots of raw data to hide the messiness of real world data from their eyes. That happens in a culture that values blindness.
That culture of blindness leads to many unknowns unknowns that mess with your process in complex ways.
There are many assumption about how learning and how knowledge work that are just assumed to be true.
One example is measure lung function. I have seen papers on Asthma medication that use FEV1 as metric of success.
I have measured FEV1 daily for over a year and one day before I got the flu I felt restricted breathing. My FEV1 was
still at the normal value.
That’s a reference experience that increases my knowledge about the subject. Involved interaction with the subject matter
leads to knowledge. You don’t get reference experiences by reading journal papers and text books.
You usually also don’t learn new phenomenological primitives that way.
Oscar Wilde wrote: “Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”
“Nothing” might be an exaggeration but certain knowledge is just really really hard to transfer.
But you can set up conditions that are conductive to learning.
You’re making sweeping generalizations with nothing to back them up.
Are you arguing that professors are using teaching methods for whom they have published evidence that those teaching methods work?
This is strictly illegal in many (most?) countries.
Today yes. 20 years ago no. Today Big Pharma can’t bribe as much doctors anymore, their business model is in crisis and they have to lay of a lot of workers. Of course it might just be correlation and no causation between the separate observations.
I have seen papers on Asthma medication that use FEV1 as metric of success. I have measured FEV1 daily for over a year and one day before I got the flu I felt restricted breathing. My FEV1 was still at the normal value.
A measure that is wrong in one particular case may still be the best measure available on a statistical level. I highly doubt that doctors would get better ideas of which therapies are good if they discarded this measure and instead used “does the patient claim to feel restricted breathing”.
Furthermore, you haven’t convinced me the measure was wrong even in your case. Measurements are rarely yes or no things; most measurements fall within a range and there is not a sharp cutoff between healthy and unhealthy on the end of the range. You could have been at some point that was far enough within the range to be considered okay, yet still not be 100% okay.
You could have been at some point that was far enough within the range to be considered okay, yet still not be 100% okay.
It’s a measurement I did every day I know how the value fluctuates and it was in the middle of the normal range.
A measure that is wrong in one particular case may still be the best measure available on a statistical level. I highly doubt that doctors would get better ideas of which therapies are good if they discarded this measure and instead used “does the patient claim to feel restricted breathing”.
I don’t claim that doctors should just replace FEV1 with “does the patient claim to feel restricted breathing”.
That’s the kind of thing that doesn’t need any reference experiences and is easily communicable via text.
I claim that the actual experience of interacting with a measurement in a involved way is important to train your intuition to be able to understand a measurement. If you don’t have that understanding you are going to make mistakes.
If someone would give me a million dollars I might also produce a device that measures something better than FEV1 but that’s not the main point of the argument. But that would be me wearing a bioinformatics hat and that’s not the main hat I’m wearing in this discussion.
As far as real conspiracy goes, there plenty of evidence of pharma companies having to pay huge fines because they bribe doctors in various ways to do what’s good for the pharma company.
No, my claim is about the process in which memes succeed. As such it’s not invalid ad hominem to analyse that process.
If you forbid all kinds of ad hominems than you basically say that it’s in general a fallacy to call out someone who’s suffering from bias. To stay in the overall argument, there no reason to blind yourself and ignore features of the process that produces memes.
You’ve made a claim and aren’t supplying evidence for it, formal or even non-negligible Bayesian.
I haven’t made a claim that includes the word “conspiracy”. You used that word. There no reason for my to provide evidence for claims I haven’t made.
Given the kind of claims I’m arguing there no reason to attack straw mans.
The database shows Pfizer has made at least $538,200,000 in side payments to doctors, while Eli Lily comes in a close second having paid out $490,600,000.
That are two companies paying together a billion in bribes and it only counts the bribes of doctors.
Whether or not you want to call a billion in bribes a conspiracy is semantics which doesn’t have much to do with Bayesian reasoning and I specifically didn’t use the word ‘conspiracy’ because I don’t think it’s very helpful in this case.
Do you doubt that big pharma has a bunch of lobbyists that have a lot of influence on the medical system? Is that a claim for which you want proof?
Do you want me to search of the marketing budget of various big pharma companies and for the amount of money that the chiropractor associating can afford to spend on similar activities?
You haven’t advanced a dot of evidence relating to chiropracty, which is the subject of this subthread. You’ve advanced evidence of lobbyists, but not that the lobbyists are destroying a deserved good reputation of chiropracty. Do you have any evidence to this effect? (Both of the lobbying and of the good reputation.)
I claim that certain views are hold by a certain group of people for reason that have to do with the actions of certain organisations.
You claim that’s I’m engaging into a logical fallacy if I look at the way beliefs are formed. As humans don’t form their beliefs through logic, that’s besides the point.
Even if you form your beliefs through logic, it’s still an interesting discussion to discuss why the medical profession believes what it believes.
That fact that you are unable to make that distinction makes you unable to follow the argument I’m making.
I didn’t argue in this thread that chiropractors deserve a good reputation or for that matter recommended to someone that he should go to a chiropractor.
I don’t think in terms of black and white but make statements that are much more nuanced.
Big pharma versus big placebo: one of these is constrained by expectations of evidence, the other to people opposed to joined-up thinking.
Are you seriously claiming the medical opposition to chiropractic is a big pharma conspiracy? If so, do you have actual evidence rather than merely asserting it’s possible?
I make a claim that’s more complex than that.
Conspiracy assumes not being open. It has nothing to do with a university rather funding research that produces patents that a pharma company can use than the university doing research that’s beneficial for individuals doing various kind of manual therapy.
As far as real conspiracy goes, there plenty of evidence of pharma companies having to pay huge fines because they bribe doctors in various ways to do what’s good for the pharma company.
If a doctor gives his patients a drug from a big pharma company that company invites him to a fancy all-costs payed luxury vacation conference. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but it was bad over decades and that made certain memes win memetic competition.
Chiropractors don’t have similar systems for paying doctors who refer clients kickbacks.
In the 20st century big corporations very often won conflicts because the have more power than a bunch of individual practitioners.
It also seems to me more and more silly to believe that the blind man sees more and that blinding in general is the key to knowledge gathering. It’s one of those things, were a kid in a hundred years will have a hard time understanding history because the idea is just so silly. Just like we today have a hard time understanding what people in the middle ages used to believe.
It’s also interesting that the ideal of blindness is so strong in the medical field and not as strong in any other domain.
A medical professor usually teaches the “evidence-based method” with teaching methods for which he as no evidence that they work. Somehow they succeed to do this without feeling weird. It’s quite remarkable. I don’t think you can solve the puzzle of why that double standard exists without acknowledging that well-funded parties have an interest in things being that way.
Nobody makes money based on a platform of “evidence-based teaching” so we don’t have it in our society but we do have “evidence-based medicine” because a coalition lead by big pharma payed to establish that meme.
I think it’s a defensible position to argue that everything should be evidence-based but I see no intellectual reason to have it concentrated into one domain. The best way to explain the status quo is through analyzing the interests of those in power for meme generation.
1) You don’t give any figures for how common it is for doctors to get invited to a conference that is an excuse for a vacation. And I suspect you don’t have any.
2) Even if it’s true, there is a limit to how you much you can influence a doctor with such things. You might get a doctor to adopt some new drug which isn’t as good as it should be, but you can’t, for instance, get the doctor to oppose vaccination or convince him that saturated fats are healthy. It would be impossible to get doctors to oppose chiropractic this way unless there was already obvious reason to believe it’s pseudoscience.
Cigarette companies had plenty of money and tried to buy as many experts as they could. The best they could do was get an occasional scientist or doctor on their side; they came nowhere near convincing the whole medical profession that cigarette smoking is safe.
Well as we know now they are healthier than trans-unsaturated fats. Nevertheless, for decades doctors would advise their patients to switch from butter (saturated) to margarine (trans).
This is a straw man. Blinding is used where it can be used. It’s not necessary for doing medical science, and nonblinded trials are definitely accepted by doctors as a weaker form of evidence in cases where blinding isn’t possible. Many surgical procedures can’t be blinded for example. Blinding doesn’t mean not observing patients, it has a much more specific meaning than that. Because of your background in bioinformatics I think you know this, and are stretching the meaning on purpose.
You’re making sweeping generalizations with nothing to back them up.
This is strictly illegal in many (most?) countries.
I can cross the street with a blindfold. That doesn’t mean that’s a good idea.
The general idea of blinding in medical science is that on average the human pattern matching ability produces more harm than good. Good medical treatment in the evidence-based paradigm is supposed to be treatment by the book.
People do things like putting box-plots in their scientific papers instead of providing plots of raw data to hide the messiness of real world data from their eyes. That happens in a culture that values blindness.
That culture of blindness leads to many unknowns unknowns that mess with your process in complex ways.
There are many assumption about how learning and how knowledge work that are just assumed to be true.
One example is measure lung function. I have seen papers on Asthma medication that use FEV1 as metric of success. I have measured FEV1 daily for over a year and one day before I got the flu I felt restricted breathing. My FEV1 was still at the normal value.
That’s a reference experience that increases my knowledge about the subject. Involved interaction with the subject matter leads to knowledge. You don’t get reference experiences by reading journal papers and text books. You usually also don’t learn new phenomenological primitives that way.
Oscar Wilde wrote: “Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” “Nothing” might be an exaggeration but certain knowledge is just really really hard to transfer. But you can set up conditions that are conductive to learning.
Are you arguing that professors are using teaching methods for whom they have published evidence that those teaching methods work?
Today yes. 20 years ago no. Today Big Pharma can’t bribe as much doctors anymore, their business model is in crisis and they have to lay of a lot of workers. Of course it might just be correlation and no causation between the separate observations.
A measure that is wrong in one particular case may still be the best measure available on a statistical level. I highly doubt that doctors would get better ideas of which therapies are good if they discarded this measure and instead used “does the patient claim to feel restricted breathing”.
Furthermore, you haven’t convinced me the measure was wrong even in your case. Measurements are rarely yes or no things; most measurements fall within a range and there is not a sharp cutoff between healthy and unhealthy on the end of the range. You could have been at some point that was far enough within the range to be considered okay, yet still not be 100% okay.
It’s a measurement I did every day I know how the value fluctuates and it was in the middle of the normal range.
I don’t claim that doctors should just replace FEV1 with “does the patient claim to feel restricted breathing”. That’s the kind of thing that doesn’t need any reference experiences and is easily communicable via text.
I claim that the actual experience of interacting with a measurement in a involved way is important to train your intuition to be able to understand a measurement. If you don’t have that understanding you are going to make mistakes.
If someone would give me a million dollars I might also produce a device that measures something better than FEV1 but that’s not the main point of the argument. But that would be me wearing a bioinformatics hat and that’s not the main hat I’m wearing in this discussion.
Your fallacy is: tu quoque.
You’ve made a claim and aren’t supplying evidence for it, formal or even non-negligible Bayesian.
No, my claim is about the process in which memes succeed. As such it’s not invalid ad hominem to analyse that process.
If you forbid all kinds of ad hominems than you basically say that it’s in general a fallacy to call out someone who’s suffering from bias. To stay in the overall argument, there no reason to blind yourself and ignore features of the process that produces memes.
I haven’t made a claim that includes the word “conspiracy”. You used that word. There no reason for my to provide evidence for claims I haven’t made. Given the kind of claims I’m arguing there no reason to attack straw mans.
If you want evidence for big pharma paying kickbacks to promote drugs : http://www.whiteoutpress.com/articles/q22013/feds-sue-novartis-pharma-for-paying-kickbacks/
That are two companies paying together a billion in bribes and it only counts the bribes of doctors. Whether or not you want to call a billion in bribes a conspiracy is semantics which doesn’t have much to do with Bayesian reasoning and I specifically didn’t use the word ‘conspiracy’ because I don’t think it’s very helpful in this case.
Do you doubt that big pharma has a bunch of lobbyists that have a lot of influence on the medical system? Is that a claim for which you want proof?
Do you want me to search of the marketing budget of various big pharma companies and for the amount of money that the chiropractor associating can afford to spend on similar activities?
You haven’t advanced a dot of evidence relating to chiropracty, which is the subject of this subthread. You’ve advanced evidence of lobbyists, but not that the lobbyists are destroying a deserved good reputation of chiropracty. Do you have any evidence to this effect? (Both of the lobbying and of the good reputation.)
I claim that certain views are hold by a certain group of people for reason that have to do with the actions of certain organisations.
You claim that’s I’m engaging into a logical fallacy if I look at the way beliefs are formed. As humans don’t form their beliefs through logic, that’s besides the point. Even if you form your beliefs through logic, it’s still an interesting discussion to discuss why the medical profession believes what it believes.
That fact that you are unable to make that distinction makes you unable to follow the argument I’m making.
I didn’t argue in this thread that chiropractors deserve a good reputation or for that matter recommended to someone that he should go to a chiropractor. I don’t think in terms of black and white but make statements that are much more nuanced.