Edinburgh, 20-22 November

Details here

I’ve noted David Nutt’s unhappy relationship with the government that employed him before now - it was he who was told by erstwhile Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to apologise for having the temerity to point out that Ecstasy is probably safer than equestrianism; apparently facts play, and ought to play, no significant role in discussion of drug policy.

As has been all over the news for the last 24 hours, Nutt has been sacked asked to resign by Home Secretary Alan Johnson, again for pointing out that current drug policy isn’t all that well directed, since a disinterested appraisal of the facts would lead one to the conclusion that Ecstasy, cannabis and LSD are all less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco, the drugs of choice for (ahem) “nice” people.  (There’s a nice little piece in the Indy about this here.)

Meanwhile, Chris Huhne, Lib Dem shadow Home Secretary, has accused Johnson of caring little for independent advice, and that ministers

should save public money by sacking the entire group of experts and instead appointing a committee of tabloid editors.

And this might be amusing, were it not for the fact that it’s not so far away from reality: the Daily Fail is already calling Nutt a “serial offender”, and Amanda Platell, in her sorry excuse for a column in that sorry excuse for a newspaper, proclaims that

One of the objections to the HPV vaccine was that it might encourage promiscuity, and so should not be administered.  There was a number of reasons why the objection failed. more…

If you look at the comments thread in the post about Kerrie Wooltorton, you’ll see that there’s been an interesting debate between me and someone who calls himself “Dr No”.  I don’t think that No and I will ever see eye-to-eye on quite a lot of stuff, but, then again, I don’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of things with the people whose offices are on the same corridor as mine, so there’s no surprise there.

Anyway - there’s a link to No’s own blog in one of the comments, and it, should you follow it, it’ll take you here.  You know the aphorism about pictures being able to represent a thousand words?  Here’s a picture: more…

This looks like it could be interesting…

Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol

This is an informal workshop on topics in the philosophy of medicine.

Everyone is welcome.

•09.45–11.00 Kevin Brosnan (Cambridge) “Does nothing in medicine make sense except in light of evolution?”
•11.15–12.30 Jeremy Howick (UCL) “Defining a role for mechanistic reasoning in EBM”
•13.30–14.45 Havi Carel (UWE) “Phenomenology and its application in clinical medicine”
•15.00–16.15 Alex Broadbent (Cambridge) “Inferring causation in epidemiology: mechanisms, black boxes, and contrasts”

The workshop will take place in the Common Room, Ground Floor, Department of Philosophy, 9 Woodland Road.

There is no need to register—it will be fine if you just turn up on the day. (If you do know that you are coming, it may be helpful to let us know, to ensure that we have a large enough room.) If you have any questions, please contact Alexander.Bird {AT} bristol.ac.uk.

This thought hit me over the weekend in Tesco’s car-park; I was still mulling over the reliability, or lack thereof, of science reporting in the media.  I was also thinking about the PCC and how powerless it is, largely because it’s simply a boys’ club for editors.

However, in my finding-a-trolley reverie, it occurred to me that there could be a solution.  There’s already a couple of papers that run debunk columns - the most high profile of these is obviously Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science” in the The Guardian (with its corresponding blog, to which I’ve linked from here more than is absolutely healthy), but there’s also Tim Harford at the FT whose “Undercover Economist” pieces throw light onto often highly-spun news stories; he also presents Radio 4’s “More or Less”, which does its bit to look behind the headlines.  From the blogosphere, Lay Scientist, Ministry of Truth, and many, many others all provide sterling work evaluating science, the reporting of science, and the integration of science into policy.  (Peter Sinclair’s films on global warming, for example, are wonderful.)  There’s no shortage of people that care about accuracy.

What they have in passion, they lack in organisation.

So here’s the idea: its that there should be convened a panel of independent experts drawn from science, medicine and a few other fields: most importantly, statistics.  Every so often, this panel would meet and give news media a “reliability rating”.  In return for this, each member of the panel would be given a small honorarium - say a couple of grand a year - from a fund supported by the newspapers (rather as they fund the PCC).  Or maybe fewer members would be able to farm out consultancy work to academics.  Whatever - let’s not sweat the details yet.  Newspapers then would be able to print a little logo - say, a test-tube that’s more or less empty - next to their titles, to give readers a sense of the paper’s scientific trustworthiness.  The odd daft story would get through, but over the course of, say, a year, it’d be possible to build a picture of reliability.  The papers themselves would have an incentive to contribute to the scheme, and to be as reliable as possible, because they could use their trustworthiness as a selling point.  Papers that don’t participate in the scheme would, by omission, be flagging their own worthiness for scepticism.  Granted, there’re weaknesses in the picture: my guess is that people buy the Daily Fail for its scientific insight.  But they’d at least have an implicit warning that, if they were going to believe its on-occasion utterly daft health reporting, they’d only have themselves to blame.

There has to be a fatal flaw in this scheme (unless it is, so far, so sketchy right now that there’s nothing in which there could be a flaw).  Tell me what it is.

There’s an illuminating item that’s recently been posted on Enemies of Reason about the way that the press has been handling H1N1, and the way in which the distinction between deaths from and deaths with the illness has been blurred.  And it’s very easy to look at the newspaper stands and laugh at the manner in which they generate health scares from nothing - and the manner in which they then keep them going.  (Need one mention the MMR pseudo-controversy that just seems to keep on running?)

It’s not only in respect of health that journalism gets things wrong or sensationalises the trivial, of course - it happens all the time in science journalism more generally.  There is, the wisdom goes, a terrible lack of understanding about science among journalists and - worse - a perception that they don’t care that they don’t understand.  Ben Goldacre keeps returning to this theme: in the last few days, he has picked up on this particularly egregious example - the same story was noted and demolished by EoR (among others) a little while ago - and PZ Meyers has highlighted another in the recent past.  And, of course, bad science journalism and bad medical journalism come together, since it’s in respect of health that much scientific reserch gets into the papers to begin with.  (It’s either health, dinosaurs or global warming…)

So we can construct an argument about bad journalism.  It’d go something along the lines that lazy or incompetent writing is misleading, and thereby puts people’s health and welbeing in danger.  Parents are not getting their children vaccinated because of HPV and MMR stories that are simply not true, and that’s generating a serious health threat.  Others are making other decisions that have effects ranging from unnecessary anxiety to threats to life based on the way that health stories get reported.  Perhaps this might not be quite so worrisome when we’re talking about the way the mainstream press covers a story about, say, the expression of a gene in zebrafish (assuming that it got any coverage at all), since noone sane is going to change their life on the basis of how that gets reported.  But in respect of matters of health… well, that’s potentially a bit different.  And by “a bit”, I mean “very”.

Or we could construct a rather less consequentialist argument, and say that journalism that distorts the facts is blameable without any appeal to the outcomes at all - it’d still be blameable if it made people do optimific things.

A secondary charge is that the press treats “balance” as demanding equal time for all sides - which means allowing vaccination cranks as much space as people who know of what they speak.  (On which topic, Dara O’Briain is worth a watch…)  Again, this is misleading, and perhaps culpably so.

I’m beginning to wonder whether this is correct, though - or, at least, whether there might be at least a limited case for the defence.  With no small trepidation, here goes… more…

At least the Trolley Problem has been solved.  (Hat-tip to Brian Leiter for the pointer.)

Doubtless many of you will have heard by now of Kerrie Wooltorton, who, apparently depressed by her fertility problems, drank anti-freeze, called an ambulance, and handed a living will to staff at A&E. Her story is reported by the Telegraph under the headline “Suicide woman allowed to die because doctors feared saving her would be assault” more…