Evidence in Scientific Research
Some years ago, I was taking a physiology course. After one class, I talked to my teacher. I heard that cranberry juice was helpful easing gallbladder stone problems. I drank some. It seemed working. I asked him if there is any formal research about it. He said that he was not aware of any such research. In general, there is little incentive to work on something in the public domain, something that is not patentable, something that can’t be turned into a product. Not only you can’t make money off your research, but also you will reduce the value of other drugs by providing cheap alternative remedies. This will harm and therefore offend your colleagues.
Even cranberry juice is truly helpful in easing some health problems, you can’t find scientific evidence for few scientific researchers are interested in finding evidence.
Take ivermectin for example. Many people in places where drug regulations are not very rigid have used ivermectin to treat novel coronavirus diseases. From the reports, the results are very positive. However, ivermectin, an old drug and a successful drug for some other diseases, is very cheap. There is little enthusiasm in the highly paid research community to conduct rigorous research on the effects of ivermectin on novo coronavirus diseases. To do this could serious depreciate the value of vaccines. To this day, there is little attempt to seek rigorous evidence about the effectiveness of ivermectin. Hence there’s little “scientific” evidence about the effectiveness of ivermectin although there are a lot of evidence about the effectiveness of ivermectin.
Evidence in scientific research is also affected by the framing of concepts. I once took a pathophysiology course. At the beginning of the semester, my teacher dutifully copied the definition of health from the government. A student raised a question. Why the definition of health doesn’t include the health of reproduction? It is such a fundamental issue. My teacher paused. Then he told a story.
When he was an undergraduate student, he had a good friend. Her greatest wish was to have a big family, with a lot of kids. Today, she is a successful physician. But she is still a single, with no kid. If we include reproductive health into the definition of health, she would be very sad.
Many highly educated people, especially highly educated women, have few children. The fertility question is carefully avoided in learned societies. The relation between drugs and fertility is rarely examined by researchers. As a result, the impact on fertility of many drugs remain rumors.
Researchers are eager to provide evidence when evidence will enhance their own careers and benefit their profession. Their colleagues will salute their valuable contributions and award them with money and status. Researchers are reluctant to provide evidence when evidence will damage their own careers and harm their profession. Otherwise, their colleagues will punish their treason and banish them from their circle.
On fundamental issues, scientific evidence is overwhelmingly one-sided. Scientific evidence overwhelmingly support the dominant parties. However, this does mean we can not find truth or near truth. The expensive double blind experiment is a recent practice. But living systems have been seeking truth for billions of years. They try to find out what are edible and what are harmful. They try to find out who are friendly and who are dangerous. The elite institutions don’t have the monopoly on truth.
One effective way to seek truth is economic reasoning. Take immune systems for example. If every adaptive system has only benefit and no cost, the antibodies will always be there, they will always be replenished, they will never disappear. The very fact that some antibodies will decline and disappear suggests that there is a cost for adaptive immune systems. The very fact that different adaptive immune system will depreciate at different pace suggests that the cost and benefit of different adaptive immune system is different. However, there is every incentive for researchers to highlight the benefit of their research products and little incentive for researchers to highlight the cost of their research products. We just have to figure them out ourselves.
Information has always been costly and will always be costly. We can only get information by trial and error. We can only filter information through rumors. There is no way around it. To depend on the feeding of the authority is a sure way to be enslaved by the authority.
