If science knew everything…
When responding to someone’s extraordinary claims with a little bit of critical thinking and perhaps some contradictory science, a common retort is that “science doesn’t know everything”. I believe this stems from a terrible misconception of science and perhaps a mistrust of the scientific establishment. If science did know everything, there would be one very large book called “Science” with all of the answers to all of our questions. As a more concise person than I put it “if science knew everything, it would stop” 1. The reason we have scientists is that there are many many unanswered questions and even more cropping up all the time.
Quackery 2
Someone used this gambit against me the other day when I contradicted their belief in the efficacy of homeopathy by referring to the fact that properly conducted scientific trials have never been able to show that it works †. I had also pointed them to some useful resources where they could find the same lack of supporting evidence. But the tired old statement was dragged out once more, like some reluctant freak led out on a leash in a circus sideshow: “but science doesn’t know everything”.
Science has tested alternative medicines such as homeopathy, despite the fact there there are no apparent mechanisms by which they might possibly work, other than the placebo effect. The results: no therapeutic benefits compared with the placebos in test after test. The scientific method has failed to show that it works; it simply hasn’t been shown to heal people. This doesn’t mean that it cannot possibly work, just that we have no reliable evidence to support the claim that it does.
The fact that science does not prove that it cannot work is to some people a license to say, once again, that “science doesn’t know everything”, and to somehow use that as a justification for prescribing quack medicine to patients and telling them it will make them better. Perhaps these people think science should keep testing their “medicines” until it gives them the answer they want to hear. And for how long should they continue to test? A decade, a century, a millennium? Or should science pursue more reasonable avenues of research with medicines that do appear to work?
Science does not have all the answers and neither is it perfect. Advocates of complimentary and alternative medicine (CAM) often cite the fact that conventional medicine sometimes gets it wrong. I must agree. Despite rigorous testing, conventional medicines are rarely perfect, but we can at least have some faith in the system because it is self correcting. It continually tests and re-examines its drugs and therapies, sometimes reversing long established policies and procedures when mistakes or poor practice are revealed. You can not have the same faith in alternative medicines, which are all too often completely unregulated, especially those whose roots are a couple of hundred years old and whose fundamental principles have not changed in that time. With new evidence, science based medicine adapts, but when tests reveal no evidence for the efficacy of a drug or therapy, there is a point at which the most rational thing to do is to abandon them in favour of pursuing those that appear more worthwhile.
Just because scientific knowledge is incomplete and its medicines far from perfect, does not make it permissible for every form of quackery and nonsense to be put on an equal footing with science based medicine. When the alternatives are shown to work, they might then achieve equal status. Or to put it another way, alternative medicines will simply become known as medicines.
References and notes:
1) Homeopathy & Nutritionists vs Real Science!
2) Image by Maxey (Creative Commons attribution)
† Clinical trials should be double blinded, use control groups and involve a large enough data set to provide statistically significant results. The research should also be peer reviewed and the results reproducible before it has any credibility. Advocacy groups sponsoring such research often fail to conduct trials in the proper manner and will only publish a favourable result which supports their claims. Make sure they are using the scientific method correctly before drawing your own conclusions.
