May Day about Scientific Research

   It is commonly accepted that most of the therapies used by medical doctors today are totally documented and mainly rest on clinical experience, which is a part of that which you might call the "art of medicine."

   Unfortunately, there has been a recent tendency to non-critical acceptance and bowing to the so-called controlled studies that with time have totally substituted for ordinary reasoning and thought processing.

   The person who limits him/herself to this kind of science will have a hard time relating to terms like will-to-live, meridians, homeopathy, healing, mind, and soul. The will to live cannot be measured, therefore it does not exist. Precisely as it is not yet proven how a bumblebee can fly.

   It is important to keep in mind that the most distinguished task of science is to test the intuition, but unfortunately many forget that the intuition should also be testing science! Science must therefore not be seen as a limiting frame where everything inside of it is true and everything outside of it is untrue.

   Therefore, a researcher must always use his reason to build a personally (subjective) clinical experience to test his/her own results. And if the results do not follow the hypothesis, or if they are the same as earlier researchers have achieved, then the researcher must repeat the study.

   If the result is the same, then it must be investigated whether the assumptions are correct or whether something were forgotten. Then the researcher must contact other experts within the same field.

   This is what researchers do within most academic disciplines, medical science unfortunately being an exception. Here, they swear to the controlled, double-blind study for nearly anything.

   The double-blind principle is basically a good one, when there is doubt about the efficacy of a treatment, and it is also suited for the comparison of two treatments for the same disease.

   But this is no guarantee against mistakes - conscious or not. And with the enormous financial investments at stake with scientific research in the treatment of disease, unfortunately one will have to be very attentive to conscious mistakes.

   The achieved results must therefore always be seen in a greater context and be compared with other similar studies. 

   But what does one do when the media tells that "a new study has shown...?"

4 pieces of advice to all from May Day:

   1. First be aware of who made the study and who paid for it.   

   Is it the oil companies who have come up with a study about the efficacy of electrical cars? Or is it surgeons who have come up with a study on a medical treatment of the disease that they have specialized in operating upon? That you must know. Remember: Interests never lie!

   If there are interests at stake, then they will always color the particular study. This is not particularly unnatural; but something you should simply be aware of and something that scientists should take into consideration long before the study is begun.

   2. Take a deep breath and then try to get a general idea and ask yourself: why does this story appear in the media right now?

       Is the patent of a medicine running out, so that it is time to introduce a new one? This is done by writing worried news articles about the side-effects of the old medicine in various press releases that are made to look like journalistic articles.

Or maybe it is the season for the Finance Act debate, which hopefully should be getting some money for exactly this or that new screening of the population? Remember: Interests never lie!

   3. Then you must try to see if the content in a scientific article may justify the conclusion. Quite often you may see a very bombastic conclusion on a rather weak foundation - often supported by an outright misuse of theory of science groundrules and statistics.

   The author is the one who knows his study and its weaknesses the best, and he is often wise enough to be more careful in his conclusion than the referring journalists and "experts."

   Therefore: Always read the writer's own opinion on his results! His reservations are often quite relevant.

   4. Do not let yourself be taken in when you hear that an article is published in "the respected magazine...."  This is a phrase all-too-often used, which may very well be a cover-up for a study with the before-mentioned irregularities. 

   Science is like a chess board. There are black and white squares. But reality is not black/white. It is full of gray squares with small bumblebees sitting there laughing at us thinking: Good Lord, have they not even the poorest concept of the beginning and end of life? How will they then be able to understand all that is in between those two?

   May Day would therefore like to call for a little more humility, especially in medical science, as a compensation for the belief in one's own infallibility. Many tragic fates could be spared by this.

(Inspired) by Claus Hancke, Danish orthomolecular doctor.

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