Faunsdale, AL | David - 7/24/2024 07:16 Real life experiences and observations don’t count.
I’ll give you some examples to show why “real life” doesn’t somehow reveal truth better than a properly designed and conducted scientific study.
Most children get warts at some time in their life. Adults too, but children more commonly have multiple warts. Maybe not as common with kids that wear shoes all the time vs when I was growing up!
The same goes for calves so we can eliminate any possible placebo effect! The calf certainly doesn’t believe that the “treatment” is going to make the warts go away.
I’m sure you can remember several remedies for warts that someone told you absolutely worked every time. My father’s favorite was to take a “seed” from the biggest wart and put it on a grain of corn and feed it to a black hen. There’s lots of others. And the thing is, they all seem to work, eventually!
At some point, especially with kids, they mount an immune response and the warts all disappear. So did the hocus pocus work? Certainly not. Well maybe not…digging around in a wart to get a “seed” out of it might release some antigens into the circulation that trigger an immune response. Maybe! That’s a long shot since the warts are connected to the body and receive good circulation from the blood all while being constantly flexed and knocked around by normal activity.
Another good example is treating ringworm fungus on calves. There’s all kinds of salves and potions that are used and they all work. Usually when the calves grow a little bit and especially when they are turned out of the barn and get out in the sun on pasture. Everything comes together and whatever treatment you applied works real well!
The summary is, real world experience can fool you! And it’s easier to be fooled if you really want something to work. Parents of sick kids are not the best ones to evaluate how well they are responding to treatment. Sure they know their kids better than anybody else, but their perceptions of reality are affected by what they want to happen.
That’s why studies are randomized, placebo controlled and double blinded. Double blinded because even the researchers conducting the testing can let their hopes and prejudices affect their evaluation of results. They may even make decisions that are the equivalent of “putting your thumb on the scale” like selecting patients to be in each arm of a study by different criteria. It doesn’t have to be done with the intention to deceive, though sometimes it is.
The Wakefield paper that “incriminated” the MMR vaccine is a good example of intentional deception. More often than not, it’s unconsciously done because researchers and doctors are humans too. We’re not created to be dispassionate observers. Were created to be empathetic and emotionally involved with other people in our lives. That’s great for care and treatment but gets in the way of objective science.
Real world experience can result in all kinds of quackery and has done for thousands of years. |
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