Science-Based Medicine

This was cross-posted at White Coat Underground, despite the topic having been covered by Dr. Gorski yesterday. The topic is important enough that many of us in the medical blogosphere are going to be talking about this.

Remember when President Obama said something about returning science to it’s rightful place? Well, our new president has a real tough climb ahead of him. The previous administration shoved science aside for political expediency and religious ideology. Now, forces in the president’s own party are trying to insert their own quasi-religious beliefs into health care reform, leaving science in a whole different place altogether.

Here’s the deal. Some years back, Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) helped set up the National Center on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). The whole idea of setting up such an agency is a bit quixotic—after all, the National Institutes of Health already study health science. As my colleagues and I have written many times before, the very idea of the agency seems ridiculous. Many, many studies have been funded which fail basic tests of plausibility and ethical propriety. Also, a huge percentage of the studies funded fail to ever publish their results. Still, some studies have been published, and more often than not, they find that the “alternative” modality being studied fails to behave better than placebo. That’s probably the sole redeeming quality of the agency, but not enough to keep it open, as these studies could have been done under the auspices of the NIH.

It turns out that Senator Harkin agrees with me on one point: NCCAM is failing to validate many alternative modalities. The difference is that I find it heartening and Harkin finds it disturbing:

“One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has fallen short. It think quite frankly that in this center and in the office previously before it, most of its focus has been on disproving things rather than seeking out and approving.”(from last week’s hearings, time marker approx. 17:20)

Well, at least he’s honest. He comes right out and bemoans the fact that science hasn’t upheld his quasi-religious medical beliefs. He just doesn’t get it. If you choose to investigate a scientific question, you have to be prepared for “bad news”. You don’t get to decide the outcome before the fact.

But Harkin makes his goals very clear, from his prepared statement, to the “experts” from whom he took testimony.
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Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.

Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part 3

I hadn’t planned on doing two vaccine posts with such a short interval between them, but all too often, as the they say in the weakest of the Godfather movies, I get pulled back in again. So, after noting last week that 2009 was shaping up–fortunately–to be a very bad year for antivaccinationists, I should have expected a counterattack from the antivaccine fringe. Indeed, the only thing that surprised me after the twin blows of the revelations about scientific fraud on the part of the originator of the claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism, Andrew Wakefield, and the resounding defeat of the first three test cases of the Autism Omnibus proceedings, was that it took longer than I had expected. True, a group had formed, proclaiming that “we support Dr. Andrew Wakefield.” Also true, the antivaccine activists at the Age of Autism have been working overtime to attack the Autism Omnibus as being hopelessly rigged. Indeed, our “old friend” Dr. Jay Gordon has even likened attempts to refute antivaccine pseudoscience to tobacco companies’ P.R. and astroturf campaigns back in the 1950s through 1980s to cast doubt on the strong scientific and epidemiological evidence showing that cigarettes cause lung cancer.

But those contortions of science, epidemiology, law, and logic were merely a warmup for the real counterattack. On February 25, Generation Rescue purchased this full page ad in USA Today:

Unfortunately, the advertisement above was only the beginning. Generation Rescue managed to team up the chief progagandist for the antivaccine movement, David Kirby, along with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whom I have discussed before for his total support of the antivaccine movement. The question then becomes: Where would these two team up to spread their message against vaccines? Do you even have to ask?

Their twin articles appear on that repository of all things antivaccine, The Huffington Post, under the title Vaccine Court: Autism Debate Continues. As I will explain, these twin articles represent yet another example of what I have at times referred to as the “incredibly shrinking vaccine-autism hypothesis.”
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