Something Happened – to Science and to Us
In March 2015, the cover of National Geographic featured a picture of the moon-landing with a title The War on Science and a strapline: climate change does not exist; evolution never happened; the moon landing was fake; vaccination can lead to autism; genetically modified food is evil. See Here.
Even before elections in Europe and America in 2016 gave us Fake News, a progressive commentariat had lumped climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers together as a threat to rationality and science. This has now extended to anyone who ends up drug-wrecked or device-wrecked.
There is a deep background here. For science to develop an accommodation had to be reached. God’s truths were revealed in two books not one – The Book (Biblos) and in the Book of Nature. Religion offered a framework for belief. Science operated through doubt.
This doubt spread in the nineteenth century to the Bible itself. We began to doubt the Bible and started believing in science.
The Second World War, the Nazi death camps, and the Atomic Bomb produced a crisis for those who believed in progress. So too did the history of science which pointed to a progressive replacement of the “truths” at the heart of science. Questions arose about whether it is possible to be objective about history.
The mid-century shocks gave rise to post-modernism which contested the claims of scientists to truth. When the history of science showed that much of what scientists swore was truth one year was discarded the next, how could they claim truth for what they were saying now.
Cybernetics also shaped post-modernism, as caught by Marshall McLuhan’s phrase – the medium is the message. Information had begun to hyper-circulate and instant feedback rather than the content of messages would now dictate how we behaved. The signifiers were becoming as important as the signified. Again raising the question that is all too acute now – if so, where does objectivity lie?
Cargo Cults
For some, science lacked an anchor in philosophy, and without this could not be assumed to have a meaning, and certainly not a moral arc bending toward truth. Others noted that “truth” derives from trust and asked if science, especially the human sciences, could flourish in a society that was not true or free?
Postmodernist questioning of the natural sciences triggered the Science Wars. Physicists and physiologists who viewed science as real faced post-modernists, for whom scientific articles had become texts of uncertain truth value. The scientists called post-modernism a Cargo Cult. In World War II, US Air Force planes flying into Pacific islands disgorged all sorts of goods. The islanders were so impressed by these flying cornucopias that, after the military left, they maintained the runways and control huts, and flew the American flag, in the belief the right appearances would lead to the right results. These were the Cargo Cults – see image above.
The scientists turned to the Latin word for truth – Veritas – from which we get verification procedures. For them, verification procedures, the rules of the game, may be added to but are never reversed or undone and it is this that means planes fly. Post-modernism can conjure up airstrips and a flag but can’t get off the ground.
Medicine involves both trust and verification? Medical modernism began in Paris around 1800. From then, slowly at first, there was extraordinary progress, culminating in 1950s advances that seemed very far removed from a Cargo Cult.
But by 1968, Ivan Illich, Michel Foucault and others claimed a new technical medicine was arrogating to itself the right to pronounce on life, death, and disability. Medicalization was alienating us from our true selves rather than liberating us. An apparatus was replacing our natural moral instincts with a bureaucratic morality.
Battle lines were drawn over “the medical gaze” with one side seeing this gaze as a good, and the other as dehumanizing. The rhetoric pitted scientists, physicians and capitalism against post-modernists and socialism. The issues were vigorously contested – up to 1990.
Post-ism
It’s too simple to say the turn to quantification and operationalism in medicine triumphed. But for whatever reason, “critique” fractured into post-ism – post-structuralism, post-modernism, and now post-humanism.
While there had been a growing appreciation of the originality of the historical Marx, around 1990, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the emergence of Prozac, talk of the Human Genome Project, the twentieth century discourse analysis and post-ism spin-offs from Marx’s work seemed an empty sociobabble that matched the psychobabble of psychoanalysis – and just as dispensable.
Just when it became credible to say that what passed for biomedicine offers the appearances of science rather than the real thing, that drugs are obviously being fetished, and the health care planes are stalling in flight, Michel Foucault and his successors bought into a biobabble – or in this case a bio-sociobabble.
Foucault pushed biopower and biopolitics and everyone else starting pushing bio even though those pushing it had little idea what they were saying. This was terribly obvious to anyone who had worked in a lab, or on anything that had a link to real biology.
The last thing any of us needed in the face of a tidal wave of new drugs – statins, osteoporosis drugs, SSRIs, ADHD drugs, hypogylcemics and others – none of which saved lives was to have more babble but that’s what we got. (Googling biobabble turns up the image below with some chinese characters attached to it. I’m not sure what it is but it looks appropriate).
When Guidelines can recommend medicines that are less effective and more expensive than older drugs, when the ability to Care is being replaced by conformity to mission statements that say: “Because our name is on it, We Care”, we need Adults in the Room. We have anything but. Wonderful people like Roy Porter – see What Happened – Nicholas Rose and others diverted into a toothless commentary on what was happening to us.
Any questioning of the changing climate in health is resisted by pro-vaccine and pro-drug climate change denialists from the BMJ and NEJM to the BBC, the NYT and Guardian, co-ordinated by outsourced industry PR groups like Sense about Science or the Science Media Centre, who mobilize the media and politicians to quarantine people with problems that have arisen from the vaccines they have given their children and the drugs they have taken themselves – because they were pro-vaccine and pro-drug.
The 1980s critiques of claims for the reality of diseases and the efficacy of treatments had some basis to them and they forced doctors to justify themselves, which is no bad thing – especially as most drugs are now given for non diseases.
But now pharmaceutical marketers can rewrite the text that is the human body from year to year with afflictions such as osteopenia, erectile dysfunction, and pediatric bipolar disorder conjured up by ghostwriters with not a peep from anyone. By the time anyone catches up, if ever, a new text will be in place. Its straight out of Orwell.
You’d have thought that it would be a simple enough matter to stop ghostwriting and make clinical trial data open to scrutiny but there is not a Minister of Health in the Western World willing to get involved.
The media are good at rotten apple in barrel problems but are unwilling to take on rotten barrel problems and at this point if they make programs about rotten apples they add to the problem by distracting attention from the barrel.
BBC’s File on Four prides itself on taking on the Mafia, the Israeli Secret Service, and all kinds of scary people – but ducked out of tackling NICE and their recommendations about antidepressants given to kids. What is it about NICE that I don’t understand that causes the BBC, Guardian and NY Times to soil their pants?
Google Cults
Through to 2000, we were at risk from a marketing good enough to conjure up air-strips and flags that fooled doctors. Our problems have become dramatically worse since our social media companies came into being on the back of weaponizing behaviourist ideas first put forward by John Locke and Alexander Bain, and later Ivan Pavlov and B.F. Skinner.
Previously it was the natural sciences that kept planes in the air – not the human sciences despite all the hot air they produced. But social media behaviourism has developed into a set of human science techniques good enough to keep planes flying. We and our doctors can now be tracked and manipulated nearly as precisely as the particles in Cern’s Hadron Particle Collider.
Big Panacea can now be confident that even if outcomes on treatment get worse there will be no consumer (medical) concern, because the consumers are so controlled they cannot conceive of alternatives. There is almost no possibility of discrepant data emerging to trigger an unwelcome thought. The control of information in this market is total.
Perhaps the greatest irony of all is this. Friedrich Hayek has been the bete noire for all post-ism practitioners. Faced with The Road to Serfdom, the foundational text of neoliberalism, they reach for the garlic and the crucifix. But no-one has captured the climate within our current totalitarianism as well as Hayek in his description of Eastern European science in 1944:
“The general intellectual climate which this produces, the spirit of complex cynicism as regards truth which it engenders, the loss of the sense of even the meaning of truth, the disappearance of the spirit of independent inquiry and of the belief in the power of rational conviction, the way in which differences of opinion in every branch of knowledge become political issues to be decided by authority are all things which one must personally experience – no short description can convey their extent”.
Rubber Hits Runway
Post-ism failed at a critical moment. It lacked a rubber hits the runway moment.
No-one in the last three decades analyzing the discourse of biomedicine has ever engaged with a drug wreck. None of those now agonizing about the objectivity of history or qualitative research have looked at the history taking or qualitative interviewing critical to caring when someone presents with a problem on treatment. No-one ever steps out of line and says – that drug has caused this person the problem they think it has caused.
Its almost impossible to imagine a mission statement to the effect that – We Care means that if need be we will take on pharmaceutical corporations and governments.
Will anything change now that life expectancy is falling?
Something Happened was Joseph Heller’s follow-up to Catch-22. It sank without trace. Even George Clooney might not know about its existence. Here are some quotes.
I suppose it is just about impossible for someone like me to rebel anymore and produce any kind of lasting effect. I have lost the power to upset things that I had as a child; I can no longer change my environment or even disturb it seriously.
I frequently feel I’m being taken advantage of merely because I’m asked to do the work I’m paid to do.
Some people are born mediocre. Some achieve mediocrity. And some have mediocrity thrust upon them.
Share this:
The Brain-Drain, in all its literal sense …
recovery&renewal Retweeted
Michael P. Hengartner, PhD @HengartnerMP 20m
… Such systems reinforce vicious cycles of stigmatization, discrimination and social exclusion, and may be more detrimental than the mental health conditions they are supposed to treat.” Wow, what a remarkable statement from the UN special rapporteur!
“This would be the best ‘vaccine’ against mental illness and would be much better than the excessive use of psychotropic medication which is happening,” said Pūras, who as the UN’s special rapporteur on health reports back to the UN human rights council in Geneva.
“The best way to invest in the mental health of individuals is to create a supportive environment in all settings, family, the workplace. Then of course [therapeutic] services are needed, but they should not be based on an excessive biomedical model.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jun/24/austerity-and-inequality-fuelling-mental-illness-says-top-un-envoy?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
“We need to target relationships rather than brains.”
We need to target…
The UN report calls for urgent action toward this aim:
“Narrow conceptions of determinants, together with an overreliance on biomedical explanations of emotional distress and mental health conditions, deflect political attention away from rights-based policies and actions that promote health. This grossly neglected human rights issue requires urgent action.”
By
Zenobia Morrill
July 1, 2019
https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/07/un-report-criticizes-biomedical-approach-mental-health/
Steve McCrea July 2, 2019 at 12:29 am
Not much mystery there. Psychiatric intervention appears to make things worse. The only mystery is why those facts don’t seem to make headlines, or why the media continues to make excuses and fail to ask the pointed questions this kind of data suggests.
Oh please do a Sokal Affair style hoax regarding a new wonder drug you, colleagues, and Google are developing based upon solid scientific theory for a worthy publisher and when it was thought the pipeline was running dry.
Perfect also for kids who answer back or too much acting the maggot incarcerated behind desks all day when it is finally ‘just discovered’ that SSRIS may be worse than ‘ineffective’.
And with Google on board may as well put it in embryonic water (also).
In future: life-time customers categorised by the DSM & via Big Brother algorithms;
Google’s Verily Enters Drugs Trials Big Pharma
https://www.healthexec.com/topics/care-delivery/googles-verily-enters-drug-trials-big-pharma?fbclid=IwAR18qxxmcZ_uX3LqxOG_ZrXDK4AnMsTITiz3g91AHy-yJiVut1eZdgEdq8c
David,
There is an aspect to all of this which needs discussion.
And first, yes, I agree with your subtext about politicians. The big players in the drug industry spread so much money around that its akin to the mob buying up politicians judges and the like from Capone to Corleone [Mario Puzo’s biographical novels about the not quite fictional Italian mafia family in the USA].
There is another aspect which is never addressed publicly and people need to start talking about it.
Some years ago I had a telephone conversation with a Conservative health minister about the health problems vaccines are causing. He asked me for my views on the national security implications.
At the time this stumped me. I did not understand what he meant. I was aware that every meeting of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation included a representative of the Ministry of Defence. For a Government advisory committee meant to be addressing disease control public health why that was so seemed a conundrum.
But now it is much clearer.
In the light of the lessons of the history of the past two decades it seems the national security issue is this. Government want us all to line up meekly and take our shots in the event of a full bio alert whether in an all-out war or bio-terrorism.
Government’s security concern is that they want enough of the population to think we will be saved by whatever they claim does work.
This is essential to maintaining control and avoid a collapse in public order and worse.
And its obvious if you look into vaccine safety problems that Government, the security services and the MoD don’t care whether the vaccines work or not.
They may even believe the widespread longstanding often repeated disinformation that vaccines are the greatest innovation ever in medicine. The first mass vaccination programme against small pox lasted around 100 years and never ever worked other than to kill and sometimes more people than small pox did. Other vaccines were introduced when diseases like measles and mumps were attenuating rapidly in the 1960s coupled with rapidly improving nutrition in western nations. If mass vaccine programmes were not introduced at that period then the argument for their need as a public health measure would vanish before it could be done.
It is similar to the small pox vaccine. Its main purpose was to reassure the middle and upper classes that the great unwashed and the disease were under control even though the vaccine did not work at a period when the populations of cities were swelling with the industrialisation of the economy and living conditions were foul with no sanitation poor nutrition and overcrowding and slum conditions.
The same issue applies to the armed forces. The MoD dish stuff out so our forces will engage and do their job believing they will be protected even though it is entirely false.
It is about the same level as voodoo except that maybe voodoo is more effective [LOL].
And of course this helps explain why adverse events are buried by agencies like the MHRA and no politician complains about this serious example of Government corruption.
In other words we are to be starved of hard official information which undermines these products for issues having nothing to do with protecting the health of children.
The rapidly rising autism prevalence is evidence of that. Government does not care about creating a child population which is three or four percent autistic and no politicians are complaining about it.
Mr Miller, it is interesting to consider the impact of the Military-industrial Complex on the development of the burgeoning vaccine industry. Some historical background in this paper for example, that might be worth analysis by a critical eye:
The US Military Commitment to Vaccine Development: A Century of Successes and Challenges
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2018.01397/full
It should also be noted that the origins US government health complex are very different from say the U.K. NHS. The reason why you get people like CDC health official Amy Schuchat parading in a uniform pretending to be an admiral is that the complex is grafted on to the former US naval hospital service.
Google tells us the Emperor do wear a new set of garment, it even has pictures of it.
I believe that the earth is round, but I’m forced to admit that I have never seen it in a far enough perspective to call it my own opinion.
If Google wants to change my mind, they will have to show me enough pictures of the flat earth. Or perhaps that is what they do right now, with the round one?
So why bother claiming Monsanto can kill you?
Why bother casting your vote, when Google, Bilderberg and the Trilateral Comission have so much knowledge and posess such superiority because they can access ‘the truth’.
Why say that your drugdealer is a doctor?
Why say that yesterdays truth was a lie?
Ove2019
David
What is appalling and dismaying about this is that in any real history of our era this would be seen as one of the main themes or dynamics and yet it has not become the subject of professional historians. I noted back in December how J Stephen Morrison ‘Senior Vice-President of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Director of its Global Health Policy Center” (Washington presumably) was lamenting in a BMJ blog the breakdown of the “post-war liberal consensus” without noting the role of US policy and the Global Health Security Agenda in bringing this about:
https://www.ageofautism.com/2018/12/smart-power-reasons-for-disaffection-in-italy-and-the-destruction-of-the-post-war-liberal-order.html
You can actually turn countries like France or Italy upside down over these issues meanwhile pretending all the time that there is nothing going on which should make an ordinary citizen blink. Likewise an ideologue like Jonathan Kennedy (QMUL and Barts) invariably puts the cart before the horse by suggesting that resistance to illiberal policies like vaccine mandates are the result of far right politics, rather than vice versa. Our former liberal democracies are now shored up by medical lies and coercion and we are often left perplexed about what to vote for:
https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l1932/rr-14
https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l1932/rr-5
https://www.bmj.com/content/364/bmj.l981/rr
https://www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.k1378/rr
The Global Health Security Agenda of Barack Obama ought to be seen as a pivotal moment in modern global history, but few contemporary historians would know what you were talking about, I suspect:
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2016-11-09/pdf/2016-27171.pdf
The National Geographic strapline is of course one the most basic bullying techniques – something which is quite plausible is equated with something which is quite preposterous and then larded with sarcasm. The audience is invited as with the emperor’s new clothes ‘not to appear foolish’ (Danny Kaye version). The day after Sunday Times’s original allegations against Andrew Wakefield the London Times published an article by its columnist Tim Hames with the title ‘Elvis lives, MI5 murdered Diana, MMR is dangerous’ (23 February 2004). Fundamentally, any journal or journalist that uses such a technique is suspect. Randi’s gang JREM were very fond of it. There is nothing inherently implausible in a triple vaccine being dangerous – in 2004 the British government running into trouble over the DPT was also a relatively recent memory. I think Mr Hames was pulling our legs.
It’s festival time!
What should we make of the ‘Vaccine Knowledge Project’ -‘ Authoritive Knowledge for All’? Public Health England advises people to check they have been vaccinated against measles before they go to events .There will probably be some scaremongering going in the sort of media which reaches young people rather than this ‘independant’ project . The advice from a contributor to R4 Inside Health was pretty incredible , para phrased – patients come to see me with worries about vaccination – they ask – what would you do doctor? I reply firmly that I have had my own children vaccinated and so should they, The patients say well that’s good enough for me and off they go and get the jabs. Not sure if they, the adults not the children, got the pat on the head or well done badge.
I would rather miss a festival than chance a measles jab as a teenager or older! Shane had an anaphylactic shock to it when he was about 14 – they were doing a blanket jab of teens at the time. He’d had his ‘baby jabs’ without any problems – I therefore suspect that the amount needed to “safeguard” a teenager overwhelmed his system. It was a blue light emergency dash from the High School to the hospital.
I would have expected that incident to be taken into account before he was prescribed the 30mg of Seroxat years later – it wasn’t, although GP stated ” that report is in the files upstairs” when confronted about the adverse reactions to the SSRI!
Did you see the report Mary? The comment was ambiguous – It had obviously stuck in his/her mind. shows how necessary it is to hold our own records isn’t it? but loads of people still won’t ask for them…..
I didn’t see the report. Standing up for ourselves is a must I feel – and yes, certainly, keep a record of as many ‘points of interest/contention’ as possible as we never know when they may come in handy!
Maybe National Geographic will catch up in another 100 years. It was first published in 1888 and it took until 2018 to apologise for the way their ‘editorial gaze’ had focused on depicting non white societies as ‘primitive’ of ‘low intelligence’ etc- articles accompanied by huge numbers of photos of naked Africans. The magazine was used not just to educate but as they must have known,as soft porn back in the day, especially when imperial European women wore skirts down to the floor and men safari shorts down to the knee.
Their elitist attitudes as men of science (nearly all men) may not be as obvious among scientists now, they have learned to soften the message but still hold their claims to superior knowledge and even more scary, rights to do what they want to citizens, such as compulsory vaccinations; compulsory mind training for youngsters in school. Those who have the impudence to question them are vilified
There his still a massive gap between those who end up running the state, whether using private millionaires to fund projects or not, and those on the receiving end , even very intrusive stuff which their ancestors would be astonished by – hand held cameras -to brain scans. Another ‘exciting breakthrough’ to encourage more spending whether through taxes or ‘contributions’ by the grossly wealthy in return for a building named after them or a title.
People identified as more vulnerable have always been more exploitable whether
as used as slaves and servants or subjected to control by such as the welfare systems or by being subjected to ever more health directives by those who were possibly off their heads when drawing them up But when did we start to become so blatantly used as a commodity by the medico-politico gang bang with pharmaceutical companies? When was their disgusting immoral alliance given wings or did it happen so slowly it’s become a jugernaught which is killing and harming ever more people – who are described by MHRA and others as almost collateral. Is health care to be compared with a war – died in action – death by drugs . ‘Progress’, science marches on.
PS I think the image at the top means ‘pissing in the wind’ .
Kristina K. Gehrki @AkathisiaRx 2h
Kristina K. Gehrki Retweeted BOB FIDDAMAN
Gottlieb claimed he left @US_FDA early “to spend more time with his family.” At least he’s honest about being a @pfizer phamily man. This revolving door between FDA & pharma has destroyed thousands American families for decades. #pharmafia kills
Elizabeth Warren blasts former FDA commissioner for joining Pfizer’s board
https://www.statnews.com/2019/07/02/warren-blasts-gottlieb-pfizer-board/?utm_source=STAT+Newsletters&utm_campaign=0407f12584-Pharmalot&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-0407f12584-149674737
WASHINGTON — Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday called for Scott Gottlieb, who resigned as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration in April, to leave Pfizer’s board of directors.
In a letter, the Massachusetts Democrat applauded Gottlieb’s tenure at FDA but suggested his decision to join the drug giant “smacks of corruption.”
Gottlieb’s decision to join a corporation he once regulated, Warren wrote, “makes the American people rightfully cynical and distrustful about whether high-level Trump Administration officials are working for them, or for their future corporate employers.”
Love this. Yes the ineffectual mush that is Britain until actual political leadership is found. Meanwhile in the States we have a first. The first full blown criminal prosecution and conviction of a pharmaceutical CEO – https://michaelzfreeman.org/pharma-ceos-no-longer-untouchable/
Cunning, Cynical And Deceitful’: Sparks Fly In Closing Arguments Of Closely Watched Johnson & Johnson Opioid Trial
https://khn.org/morning-breakout/cunning-cynical-and-deceitful-sparks-fly-in-close-arguments-for-closely-watched-johnson-johnson-opioid-trial/
The six-week trial was the first of many lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies over what role they played in the opioid epidemic, and the outcome is expected to set the bar for the ones that follow. The judge says he anticipates taking about a month to reach a decision in the case.
The WHO (world health organistion) has produced yet another revision of the Internation Classification of Diseases.
There are now 55,000 ‘ever more unique and nuanced codes’ (many refs on google search)
It is planned this should be implemented in 2020, including chapters on mental health which ‘experts by experience’ objected to. ref INCLUDE Study with a very small number of people included from just 3 countries it seems. (India, UK, USA.) Another tokenistic ‘consultation’ supposedly designed to understand and improve mental health diagnosis but actually leaves out the really important experiences which effect the lives of those who were diagnosed.
There is an explicit aim to hugely increase the number of people diagnosed with ‘personality disorder’ suggesting it is seriously underdiagnosed at present.
Another manual they will possibly be referring to is ‘ the handbook of mentalising in mental health practice’ by P Fonagay and D Bateman The book is described as not being approved by psych establishments in USA where it was published or UK. And admits the many failings of a previous versin – which thousands of people by now will have been effected by.
Over on Rxisk.Org the current blog is about transgender TheWHO has decided to remove the chapter on ‘Gender incongruence’ in ICD-11 from mental health disorders to a chapter on sexual health ‘to reduce stigma’
(In Ireland homosexuality is still illegal).
The WHO ‘guidelines’ have helped to cause pain and havoc for so many people and it’s likely to increase when we can hardly avoid being coded , Some codes more dehumanising than others in the way they define identities..
Shall we all be introducing ourselves by our codes in future? ‘Hi , my names Susanne code N11 ‘ Good to meet you I’m Jack code N55,. Maybe a new kind of dating agency to include our codes might be useful – but who really knows and WHO can’t predict ,how they will be mis/used in future as for example in abortion and homsexuality laws.