

Cancer Survivor or Victim of Overdiagnosis? - tokenadult
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/opinion/cancer-survivor-or-victim-of-overdiagnosis.html

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jerrya
This is an interesting article for several reasons.

One is the immediate - more knowledge about mammography leads to scientists
telling us to rely on it less -- and that will be a message that flies in the
face of what women's organizations may want to hear.

Second, it's another example of a medical technology or science that upon
further inspection, turned out to be not so scientific. It's something to
consider when you hear or read a "Science, it works, bitches". It's something
to consider when various groups are demanding some form of government action
based on "Science, it works, bitches."

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gruseom
I agree with your main point, but it's ahistorical to say that if something
was wrong then it must not have been scientific. That's a popular and
seductive view that manages to commit both the hindsight and no-true-scotsman
fallacies. The truth is that science (by which I mean the community of
scientific opinion) is often wrong. It's just hard to see this in any given
case until enough time has passed.

For example, in the 1960s scientists told women not to breast-feed their
babies because Science had proven that "formula" was better. That could hardly
seem stupider or more absurd now, but an entire generation was affected by it.
To me, that's a reasonable baseline against which to guard ourselves. It seems
arrogant to suppose that we're smarter or less error-prone than the experts of
40 years ago.

The conclusion I draw from this is that public policy should be skeptical of
scientific opinion — not dismissive of it, of course; that would be silly —
but inclined to err on the side of pluralism and non-intervention. That would
also be an appropriate use of the word "skepticism" as opposed to the
dogmatism that calls itself by that name these days. I'm uncomfortable (as
your comment suggests you are) with the zealotry of the more aggressive pro-
science movements that have arisen in recent years. They speak in the name of
science, but emotionally they are proto-religious. Science, the abstraction,
does not exist. What exists are communities of fallible and corruptible
humans. We need to take that into account, everywhere and deeply.

