Alt. med science caff
at 9:18am on Friday, 17th June 2005
On Wednesday we hosted our second health-based science caff. We had Toby Murcott, author and minstrel science journalist, talking about alternative medicine. Now, we're not the first people to point out that alternative medicine gives us plenty to get our science policy teeth into. But what pleased me was that the discussion was so open, so balanced and so wide ranging.
Debates about unorthodoxy can easily form up around the "It's true!.. No, it's snake oil" axis. That's fine, but a bit dull. And it casts science in the role of a jumped-up filing cabinet, hosing its evidence over fires of irrational public concern. The process of science gets lost. As we saw with MMR, filing cabinet science doesn't do well when up against an untrusting public who are asking new questions.
Our discussion revealed how alternative medicines, with their varying degrees of credibility, ask some important questions of science and medicine. At one level, we have questions about the assumptions of orthodox medicine. At another, we have questions about how we can "make the NHS human again", which is the question asked by Sophie Petit-Zeman from the Association for Medical Research Charities in her recent book.
On Wednesday we hosted our second health-based science caff. We had Toby Murcott, author and minstrel science journalist, talking about alternative medicine. Now, we're not the first people to point out that alternative medicine gives us plenty to get our science policy teeth into. But what pleased me was that the discussion was so open, so balanced and so wide ranging.
Debates about unorthodoxy can easily form up around the "It's true!.. No, it's snake oil" axis. That's fine, but a bit dull. And it casts science in the role of a jumped-up filing cabinet, hosing its evidence over fires of irrational public concern. The process of science gets lost. As we saw with MMR, filing cabinet science doesn't do well when up against an untrusting public who are asking new questions.
Our discussion revealed how alternative medicines, with their varying degrees of credibility, ask some important questions of science and medicine. At one level, we have questions about the assumptions of orthodox medicine. At another, we have questions about how we can "make the NHS human again", which is the question asked by Sophie Petit-Zeman from the Association for Medical Research Charities in her recent book.
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