The Nature of Science

As alluded to in my last post, I do a fair bit of lurking at a site called Science Based Medicine. It's not generally the posts I'm terribly interested in, it's the comments that inevitably follow and the debates that go on that pique my interest. I really enjoy learning how other people think and make judgements.

One thing that comes up over and over again on that site is this theme: those who choose to question/delay/selectively vax, those who choose alternative medicine, and (now) those who choose to natural birth or homebirth are uneducated and making decisions not based in science. As you can probably infer, I take a bit of issue with this broad generalization. As I see it, science, in and of itself, does not dictate which choices should and should not be made. Science is a tool, a process, for gathering information in order to inform the decision that is to be made. Science is amoral - real life, and the application of science, is not amoral, and as such, when making a decision (especially about medicine and intervention), the realities of life and the individual values of those involved, as well as the science, play a part in the eventual decision that is made. For instance, say someone has a terminal condition, and science has shown that there is a treatment that will prolong life by several months, but this treatment also has the side effect of causing significant pain - is it anti-science for an individual to choose not to have the treatment? Is it to be inferred that if the person chooses to decline the treatment, he or she is uneducated?

As someone who is not religious in any way, shape, form, or manner, the amount of smugness that I have observed on websites like Science Based Medicine bothers me, as it seems to come from as much dogmatic fervor as might be observed in a fundamentalist religion: those who do what we do are good, everyone else is silly/stupid/damned. Science is not about being close-minded or entertaining only one theory - it is about exploring the possibilities and gathering as much information as possible.

Making a decision that is not in the mainstream of medicine is not necessarily a rejection of science. And to suggest that different people cannot look at the science and still come to different conclusions about how to treat in medicine betrays the ignorance of the one making that assertion, not the one making the differing decision.