The empiricist has no clothes

Share with your friends










Submit

In the Spring of 2021, an Israeli doctor voiced a concern about cases of myocarditis that he was witnessing among young men who had received the Pfizer mRNA COVID vaccine. 

There was no apparent reason to doubt his testimony, and that should have been sufficient to alert physicians around the world to be on the lookout for similar occurrences. If confirmed in the experience of others, the Israeli doctor’s concern could be taken into prudent consideration for medical practice and public health worldwide.

But we live in the age of empiricism and “science-based” recommendations. In this age, the clinical judgment of physicians is not a fact until it has a number attached to it. Also, questions of right and wrong and of what to do can only be decided when “data” have been collected.

So a conflict of numerical facts was quickly entered into.Continue reading “The empiricist has no clothes”

Is myocarditis real?

Share with your friends










Submit

I highly recommend listening to our latest podcast with Dr. Vinay Prasad, an extremely intelligent, articulate, and courageous physician who has been absolutely phenomenal speaking out against the “unscientific” public health policies of the last 20 months. Vinay is an astoundingly prolific writer—publishing in academic journals and in the lay press—and now has an excellent YouTube channel that I turn to daily to get his analysis of the latest scientific and health policy news.

During our conversation with Vinay, and reflecting on some outlandish positions taken by the CDC on the incidence of COVID-induced myocarditis, Anish startled me by mentioning Michel Foucault and his notion of “regimes of truth,” the idea that the dominant political forces essentially set the framework under which a society comes to an understanding of things. “If knowledge is not power, but power is knowledge, then scientific objectivity may be a myth. What do you think about that!?” Anish challenged Vinay.Continue reading “Is myocarditis real?”

The evil absurdity of “brain death”

Share with your friends










Submit

I was invited to participate in a debate on “brain death” at the annual meeting of the Catholic Medical Association in Orlando this past week. The question was: “Are neurological criteria for the determination of death acceptable in Catholic health care?”

On my side was my friend Pete Colosi, and we argued the negative (i.e., that brain death is not true death, and harvesting organs from people who have been declared brain dead is homicide).

This topic is very dear to me. I have published 2 scholarly papers on brain death, refuting some of the more salient philosophical arguments that have been advanced to push the idea that brain death is true biological death. The most accessible of the 2 can be found here.

Below is my opening statement for the debate. I didn’t know if the audience would be familiar with the topic, so I tried to give a simple overview. I am adding a couple of footnotes here to expound on some key points.

Continue reading “The evil absurdity of “brain death””

HCQ, Politics, and Professionalism

Share with your friends










Submit

By now, everyone and their mother has seen the censored Breitbart video of “America’s Frontline Doctors” standing in front of the Supreme Court and vaunting a hydroxychloroquine cocktail as “a cure” for COVID.  To many, the overtly political display seemed over-the-top and proof that the stuff could only be snake oil.  It also didn’t help that the doctor who promoted its benefit with the most swagger had apparently made prior claims about the demonic origin of certain diseases.

But I will take sides here and defend those who wish to prescribe that cocktail, that they may be able to do so without fear of ignominy.  If my arguments are taken to be political, so be it. 

Continue reading “HCQ, Politics, and Professionalism”

COVID herd immunity: At hand or forever elusive?

Share with your friends










Submit

With cases of COVID-19 either disappeared or rapidly diminishing from places like Wuhan, Italy, New York, and Sweden, many voices are speculating that herd immunity may have been reached in those areas and that it may be at hand in the remaining parts of the world that are still struggling with the pandemic.  Lockdowns should end—or may not have been needed to begin with, they conclude. Adding plausibility to their speculation is the discovery of biological evidence suggesting that prior exposure to other coronaviruses may confer some degree of immunity against SARS-CoV2, an immunity not apparent on the basis of antibody seroprevalence studies.Continue reading “COVID herd immunity: At hand or forever elusive?”

Equipoise and its problems

Share with your friends










Submit

I recently participated in a debate opposing me to Professor Adam Cifu on the topic of “Evidence-based medicine in the age of COVID.” The debate took place on an episode of Dr. Chadi Nabhan’s Outspoken Oncology podcast. Dr. Saurabh Jha was the moderator and he did a great job keeping us on point and asking for important clarifications when needed. It was a fun and cordial moment and I found it intellectually fruitful. You can listen to it here or on any podcast platform. The discussion strengthened my conviction that the central issue about EBM is the conflation of the role of the physician with that of the clinical scientist.

That conflation was quite apparent in a recent online editorial published by Robert Yeh and colleagues on the topic of equipoise during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yeh at al. are accomplished academic cardiologists and outcomes researchers (Yeh was a guest on The Accad and Koka Report a couple of years ago).

I’ll get to their editorial in a moment, but equipoise is a term that I became aware of only in the last few years, mainly from mentions on MedTwitter. From those mentions I developed an intuitive sense of what equipoise must mean: a mental state of uncertainty about a treatment that prompts the medical community to seek a more definitive answer by way of a randomized controlled trial. For example, one might say “I’m not sure if hydroxychloroquine works to prevent or treat COVID-19.  Based on the existing collective experience, there is equipoise about it.  We need a clinical trial.” 

That seems reasonably straightforward, but the editorial by Yeh et al. piqued my curiosity so I decided to look into the origin of the term and its introduction in the medical literature. 

Continue reading “Equipoise and its problems”

What’s a diagnosis about? COVID-19 and beyond

Share with your friends










Submit

Last month marked the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Graunt, commonly regarded as the father of epidemiology.  His major published work, Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality, called attention to the death statistics published weekly in London beginning in the late 16th century.  Graunt was skeptical of how causes of death were ascribed, especially in times of plagues.  Evidently, 400 years of scientific advances have done little to lessen his doubts! 

A few days ago, Fox News reported that Colorado governor Jared Polis had “pushed back against recent coronavirus death counts, including those conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”  The Centennial State had previously reported a COVID death count of 1,150 but then revised that number down to 878.  That is but one of many reports raising questions about what counts as a COVID case or a COVID death.  Beyond the raw numbers, many controversies also rage about derivative statistics such as “case fatality rates” and “infection fatality rates,” not just among the general public but between academics as well.  

Of course, a large part of the wrangling is due not only to our unfamiliarity with this new disease but also to profound disagreements about how epidemics should be confronted.  I don’t want to get into the weeds of those disputes here.  Instead, I’d like to call attention to another problem, namely, the somewhat confused way in which we think about medical diagnosis in general, not just COVID diagnoses.Continue reading “What’s a diagnosis about? COVID-19 and beyond”

When scientists know the answer ahead of the experiment

Share with your friends










Submit

On the day that we taped our podcast episode with Brian Nosek about the replication crisis, the renowned statistician Andrew Gelman published an essay in the New York Times on precisely that topic.

Gelman echoes some of the remarks made by Nosek.  In particular, he draws attention to the point we discussed regarding what to believe when the results of an experiment are contrary to what is expected.  Commenting on a recent study (co-authored by Nosek) in which statisticians were asked to predict, ahead of a replication experiment, whether the findings of the original study would be replicated or not, Gelman says:

Here’s where it gets really weird. The lack of replication was predicted ahead of time by a panel of experts using a “prediction market,” in which experts were allowed to bet on which experiments were more or less likely to — well, be real.

We tried to press Brian on that point.  Do certain subjects impose essential limitations on empirical science?  It seems to me that certain questions regarding human behavior are essentially answered by human judgment rather than by “mindless” data analysis, despite the fact that human minds can be prone to bias.  Brian agreed but also brought up some counterpoints.  Don’t miss listening to that episode.

When scientists discover new body parts

Share with your friends










Submit

Soon after publishing our second podcast episode on brain death, this article from Newsweek came into my Twitter feed: “Endorestiform Nucleus: Scientist Just Discovered a New Part of the Human Brain.”

According to the article, an Australian researcher may have discovered an island of neurons heretofore undescribed and which may be involved in important motor activities.

The same article also mentions the “discovery” early this year of a new organ to be called the interstitium.  As in the case of the endorestiform nucleus, the claim for the interstitium is not that scientists have discovered a new material part of the body so far unknown, but that a known part of the body that previously did not attract the attention of physiologists is now found to have a function that is capturing their attention.

These “discoveries” illustrate nicely a philosophical point about body parts.  Continue reading “When scientists discover new body parts”

The case against shared decision-making – part 3

Share with your friends










Submit

(Part 1 and part 2)

To conclude this 3-part series, I will discuss the relationship between shared decision-making (SDM) and evidence-based medicine (EBM), as the two are intimately connected.

As I indicated in part 1, SDM did not attract the attention of academics until the late 1990s.  It is only then that publications on SDM began to appear routinely in the medical literature, and their numbers have exploded since the early 2010s (see chart).  Yet shared decision-making was proposed by the Presidential Commission’s ethicists as far back as 1982.  What accounts for the delay in interest?

The simple answer is that the development of SDM had to wait for the appearance of the evidence-based medicine movement on the healthcare scene in the early 1990s.  And it makes perfect sense that SDM would require EBM to flourish, since EBM was proposed precisely as a scientific and objective antidote to “eminence-based medicine,” which is one expression of the culture of medical paternalism that SDM was supposed to be countering.Continue reading “The case against shared decision-making – part 3”