Polite Dissent

4 Responses to “ Smiling Schadenfreude ”

1. Tim O'Neil
   March 4th, 2006 at 5:28 am
   

   Being a nonmedical person, I must say that “alternative” medicine is also a pet peevoe of mine. In fact, I can even be kind of a dick about it in regular social circles - there are a surprising amount of people who fall for “folk remedy” and herbal crap if it’s packaged correctly. Whenever anyone asks me what I think, I simply ask if the advertised / desired effects are replicable and testible, and ask for the double-blind clinical tests as proof. That usually gets them to call me a stick in the mud, and / or an asshole, but I really have no patience for that shit, just like astrology.

   Hey, tangentially related to this, do you ever read Harpers? There was an extremely fascinating article in there this month about how the well-established moral and ethical framework for drug and treatment research and testing in relation to AIDS / HIV has essentially fallen apart. I’d be interested to hear if there’s any opinions on this kind of stuff from the actual medical community, and not just the folks who make a habit of talking to journalists.

2. Randy
   March 4th, 2006 at 7:07 am
   

   Good. I hate those Smiling Bob commercials. I hope this wipes that stupid grin off his face.

3. M
   March 5th, 2006 at 8:27 pm
   

   I don’t know how much it’s ‘fallen apart’ with respect to HIV & AIDS. It seems, to me, more like the inherently messy unquantifiable moral and ethical complexities of human medical testing have simply been made more starkly evident and uncircumventable.

   It’s the conflicting demands of medical science and medical treatment.
   To simplify:
   Medical treatment depends on medical science to improve, science demands evidence, evidence requires statistics, statistics requires comparisons of clear cut test cases, but ‘unfortunately’ for the statistician or the researcher humans cannot ethically be treated in the coldly calculating manner that would make their work easier and quicker and arguably might save more lives.

   On the downside things have gotten much messier, less controlled and more difficult (in every sense), on the plus side there’s a move to finally try and deal with the fact that human test subjects are heterogenious beings of free will rather than caged lab rats by using more sophisticated statistical techniques.

4. Tim O'Neil
   March 5th, 2006 at 10:56 pm
   

   See, that’s kind of what I was thinking after reading the article - on the one hand, the kind of ethical lapses they describe occurring in African tests are horrible and counter-productive. On the other, I think journalists have a tendency to pillory any specialized group that fails to live up to its own theoretical high standards - they’re hardly hypocrites, because they do it to themselves most often. But they also do it to doctors and lawyers, which is necessary but tends to also breed confusion amond those who care to parse, considering that reporters are not doctors or research scientists. Sometimes, as a layman, its hard to judge what is accurate and what is exaggerated for effect.

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