Comment Re:Sad (Score 1) 147
So I'm all for evidence-based medicine as a starting point, but when you realize it isn't behaving normally, you should adjust accordingly.
The thing about adopting evidence-based policy is that you also need to review and if necessary change policy when more evidence becomes available. The kind of situation you're describing would surely qualify.
They did review and change the policy. Just too late to do any good. The point is that evidence-based medicine has to be treated as a starting point for diagnosis and treatment decisions, not a rigid decision tree.
Of course, none of that makes the CDC's new claims that "vaccines don't cause autism" isn't an evidence-based statement any less absurd. You can't ever realistically prove definitively that X cannot cause Y, because that would require knowing that there exists no combination of recognizable human genetics in which X would cause Y. Evidence-based medicine would mean assuming that X cannot cause Y until evidence exists to prove that it does or can, which has not happened.
What they're doing is rejecting evidence-based medicine based on a belief that the anecdotal information they have should be taken more seriously than the broad evidence to the contrary. This would be fine if that anecdotal information were based on actual brain scans prior to vaccination that showed that the vaccine triggered a change, but it isn't. Rather, involves mistaking correlation for causation, and a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, with a complete lack of any actual plausible explanation for how vaccines could cause autism beyond some vague hand-wavey pseudoscience.
And on top of that, we have a bunch of people who lack enough understanding of the scientific method and/or lack enough understanding of the subject to recognize when it is not being followed properly, and they are getting misled by charlatans with a political or personal agenda, presented in the form of pseudoscientific bulls**t papers that don't hold up to even modest scrutiny by someone with limited understanding of the subject or the scientific method, much less actual scientists in the field.
We also have a bunch of journals that publish papers outside their area of expertise, relying on outside experts that are in league with the papers' authors, and all sorts of other fun scientific fraud, which further contributes to this problem.
I'm not sure how to solve this problem, because it seems like a large percentage of the public simply lacks basic critical thinking skills and the ability to read over a paper and think, "Yes, but did you consider the following twelve common factors that could influence both the proposed cause and effect?" and realize that the paper is garbage. But a good starting point would be to pressure the news media across the political spectrum to hire actual science writers who UNDERSTAND SCIENCE to cover science-based stories.
Another good starting point would be to get more science-based shows on PBS that can talk about these issues and explain them to people and debunk bulls**t every week.