One problem is, doctors can be sued for following the evidence scientifically instead of following normal practices. Even if the science is well established in respected medical journals.
Sorry, I have no idea what to cite here because I recall no details but I’m betting someone around here knows what I’m talking about.
So? Medical doctors are not scientists. They employ science in their professions, just as chemists do, but only rarely is a doctor also a practicing scientist.
How is a chemist or a medical doctor not a scientist?
BTW, this question isn’t meant to be confrontational or snarky.
You’re misreading Tom’s reply. He is saying that both chemists and doctors use science but while chemists are - by definition - scientists most doctors aren’t.
The bulk of doctors apply medical techniques - diagnostics, drugs, surgery, etc - discovered, tested, and refined but others. Their profession does not **require **them to “do science”. Of course in an ideal world they would be applying scientific methods to deciding what is effective and what isn’t but most of them won’t have the time, skill, or means to do this - they have to rely on what is “accepted” practice.
There are a limited number of physicians and surgeons who are also researchers . These are the one that push the profession along by inventing new surgical techniques and drug regimes. These days they would normally work as part of a much larger team with other types of scientist and have their results peer reviewed like any other branch of science but in the past there was a lot of sloppy science and opinion pretending to be proven fact.
ETA: Should have said, the sloppy science comes easier in medicine because it is hard - human physiology is complicated and what works is not cut and dried.
Plenty of researchers have MDs, but few MDs are researchers. My wife once had a job analyzing data sent by doctors for a clinical trial - many of them had no clue on statistics, thinking it was okay to throw out outliers, for example.
What do you think the words “fact” and “opinion” mean? You seem to be confused about their meanings.
MarcusF got it right. Among all the M.D.s I know, only two are actually engaged in scientific exploration or discovery, collecting information about illnesses or injuries, creating hypotheses regarding the source or best treatment of those illnesses and injuries, and then attempting to test those hypotheses to formulate a theory with predictive value for future diagnosis or treatment.
The rest of the M.D.s I know are very skilled technicians, (not intended as an insult), who read the literature that has been produced by scientists in the medical fields and (attempt to) apply it to individuals whom they see who are suffering from illness or trauma.
Medical doctors are not scientists same as scientists are not medical doctors. The reason behind this promise is that we need to look deeper on the definition of each terms and will surely find something that one is not capable of dong and vice versa.
By the way, Scientific American is a popular science magazine, not a journal. I don’t know if the old SA with long articles would count as a journal, but the current one sure doesn’t. I briefly considered submitting something once, and looked at their website. You query them with a subject, which is the common method you submit articles to popular magazines and not technical journals.
I might be wrong, but from your posts you seem to be someone who has never been involved in scientific publishing. Each field has a pecking order of journals, and someone who gets a paper in a top journal gets a lot more credit than someone with a paper in a lower, easier to get into journal. I doubt an article in SA would count much for tenure.
It’s been touched on before in this thread, but anthropology is a huge discipline. Cultural anth is a wet noodle by nature, and usually run by dens of hippies at that, but physical/biological anth is about as hard as one can get when talking about a variable subject. Archaeology is pretty solid too, as long as the archaeologist in charge doesn’t try and determine what a new type of artifact was used for in the field and present it as fact.
As for medical doctors, a non-snarky question:
Do medical examiners qualify as scientists? What about forensic pathologists? They don’t always discover new things about the field itself, but they do (hopefully) use the scientific method to determine what’s making someone ill, or what killed someone, which helps strengthen or refute theories about the causes of disease, for example.
Discounting pathology researchers.
When did science become an opinion?
I think it started when people started referring to science as a one word authority instead of scientific method.
Science, religion, voodoo, hokum, gibber gabber, whatever. They all have one thing in common. They are based on observation. The beauty of scientific method is that when done properly it takes into account all factors, defines a control group, and gets to the heart of the matter objectively.
Alas, there is bad science out there. There I go doing it myself. Let me rephrase. There are scientists who publish there observations without taking all factors into consideration. They circumvent scientific method under the label of Science, with a capital S. And so trust erodes and questioning abounds.
With proper review, there are scientists who try to publish without taking all factors into account, but get rejected. If they manage to get the paper through, and anyone cares, there will be another paper that corrects it.
When I was in grad school someone just finishing a PhD (not at my school) published a paper in my specialty with a very basic error, and published it in the most prestigious journal. Two issues later there was a spate of short letters correcting it, including one from the author. I don’t know how his adviser or the reviewers let it slip by, but no permanent harm was done.
The problem is when the general public confuses whatever a scientist prattles on about with science.
Ressurrecting this thread. I’m confused on the point of the OP. I thought it was going to be a lament about how people have this confused notion of what science is and how it works. Of how mangled media presentations and agenda driven agencies misrepresenting and fabricating things to serve their purposes has left the public at a large confused to the nature of science and feeling like the results of science are insubstantial, floppy, varying at a whim, or just generally the postmodern interpretation of science as the cummulative belief of scientists rather than an objective notion.
Instead I get a mismash of incoherence, badly typed and presented ideas, and mangled examples that seem opposite the point being made and completely inaccurate in presentation.
Case in point: the example about the Viking lander findings and the reassessment of their results.
This post shows confusion over who the actors are and what they are saying. “NASA” is being held up as the sole actor, when the reality is there are various science teams from various organizations reporting on their different analyses and interpretations of the data.
Originally, Viking landers had 3 experiments designed to look for life on Mars. Two of the experiments on each lander gave negative results. One experiment on each lander gave positive indications, where the soil reacted positively and very significantly in the test case but the sterilized control did not react. Now, from the pre-mission test criteria, this would be considered a positive result and evidence for existing life on Mars. However, after obtaining the results, various scientists determined that the results were more ambiguous than the one test result could answer. There were other possible explanations for the reactions that did not conclude life. Given that only one test was positive, other tests that should have been positive as well were not, and alternate explanations were available, the comprehensive evaluation of the data lead the scientists to conservatively not accept the results as conclusive of life. The tentative result was “no life discovered”, which is not the same thing as “life disproven”.
Yes, the test designer has been a solid advocate that his test was conclusive, and has been arguing continuously and trying to find more evidence to support his claim. Until recently, the evidence was not solid enough for most scientists in the field to concur.
The first article linked does not show “NASA” admitting anything. It discusses a scientist from the University of Geissen proposing an alternate explanation for the reaction that would be consistent with life, and results from the Phoenix lander that would be consistent with that explanation. The premise being that perchlorates in the Martian soil reacted and destroyed the chemical markers from the original biological test results. Thus the soil itself destroyed the evidence that the tests would use to confirm the positive hit, leading to the conflicting results of a positive hit on reaction but negative hits for any trace compounds that should result.
Then it discusses a 2012 study that looked at the original test results statistically and compared to other reaction results on Earth, giving results consistent with biological processes rather than chemical ones. This result is from the University of Southern California. Not NASA.
What all of this demonstrates is the natural scientific process, where scientists obtain data but then analyze and scrutinize the data, offer alternative possible explanations for conflicting results, and then pursue further tests to confirm or deny those alternate explanations.
“Science” is not a monolith. Science is a process that involves collecting data, but also analysing and interpreting data. The analysis and interpretation is where “opinion” naturally enters the science process. Because the opinion is what guides and drives the scientists doing the investigating, giving them the direct to look, the ideas to explore, and the way to make sense of what they find.
It is through the processes in science of peer review, replication, etc that scientific findings become more conclusion than speculation.
This shows how uniformed you are. NASA already made a huge, gigantic press release claiming finding evidence for life on Mars, back in the 1996, when microscopic structures in a Martian meteoritewere interpreted to have been caused by Martian life. The results remain controversial, with scientists in the Lab at NASA being on opposite sides of this debate.
So results in 2012 saying “Oh yeah, the positive hits we had from Viking but explained away might really be positive hits after all” is not a very solid conclusion, and not nearly as Earth-shattering as the episode they already had where they said “We found Martain Life!” and then got told “No you didn’t”.
There’s no conspiracy, no fear the public isn’t ready. It’s a case of scientists being conservative in the results they announce and trying to provide conclusive evidence rather than speculation. The case where they didn’t do that is a good object lesson.
When you are using those examples to demonstrate your point, and the examples you choose show inaccuracies on your part that show the examples counter to your claim, then it is valid to address that. So far, you seem to be a prime example of the methods whereby opinions are being masqueraded as science. Your Viking example is not opinions, it is legitimate scientific scrutiny of findings. Your Climate Change arguments seem to be taking the opinions of the deniers and holding them as equal to the opinions of the scientists who study and the data they have to back them up, and you are looking to a publicizer as a science source (i.e. Gore).
Faulty interpretation. Releasing a captive killer whale into the wild was a policy decision, not a scientific one. Policy is the realm of public opinion moreso than science. Would that science held more merit, but that’s a different lament. The scientists all knew the killer whale was too tame and unprepared for life in the wild, but they didn’t get the final vote. It wasn’t a decision reached scientifically.
False dichotomy. You only allow two possible explanations that do not include the most likely, that the results were ambiguous, that an alternative explanation was proposed that fit the data obtained better than the explanation that life was responsible, and so they chose the best explanation available, that the test design was flawed an therefore the results inconclusive, thus no life was found.
Why the hell would they do that? Wouldn’t it be far easier to obtain new samples and study those from scratch? The only way they could study those samples is send a new test vehicle to the Viking landers, open their sample test chambers, and then try to study the materials. I don’t know that those sample containers were designed to be opened. And apparently the perchlorates in the soil destroyed them anyway.
A hypothesis is an opinion. A theory is a ridiculously well supported opinion. The fallacy the friend of the OP makes is that all opinions are equally likely to be valid models of reality.
A square is a parallelogram. One is a subset of the other. A hypothesis is a subset of opinions, and a theory is a subset of hypotheses, just as a rectangle is a subset of parallelograms, and a square is a subset of rectangles. The OP’s friend, in this analogy, would be saying that all parallelograms are squares, and that’s just not true.
What makes science the best tool humanity has ever developed for expanding human knowledge is the falsification and testability of hypotheses. Opinions like “your favorite band sucks” are not falsifiable. The very nature of scientific inquiry is to disallow opinions like that and to only accept hypotheses/opinions which are testable/falsifiable. “Your favorite band sucks” can not be a scientific hypothesis.
So, while all hypotheses/theories are opinions, it’s not the same as an individual’s untested and unfalsifiable opinion about some subjective matter. The very process by which those opinions are tested and either strengthened or invalidated makes them weightier opinions. They aren’t just backed by one person’s guess as to the mechanism which explains the facts anymore.
But it’s inescapable that a hypothesis, and therefore a theory, are an opinion. They start off as one person’s opinion as to either the nature or the mechanism of an observed phenomenon and then through testing the opinion strengthens or falls. As the experiments are repeated, or more experiments designed to test other aspects of the phenomenon, and the data begins to favor one hypothesis or a refined hypothesis emerges then more and more people may begin to accept it. But a shared opinion doesn’t change it’s nature, it’s still an opinion. c.f the fallacy of argumentem ad populum
It’s the restriction of the properties of a parallelogram that makes one a rectangle, and it’s the restriction on the properties of a rectangle that makes one a square. Similarially it’s the restrictions on an opinion that makes one a hypothesis, and its the restrictions on a hypothesis that makes one a theory. But it’s wrong to say a square isn’t a parallelogram, and it’s inescapable that a theory is an opinion, however well-supported.
This is a FEATURE, not a defect, in the scientific method! Theories MUST be opinions, because they MUST change when required. Science doesn’t produce “TRUTH”, simply very well informed and tested opinions. And that’s by design.
Consider this, if a scientific theory were NOT an opinion, if it were Big-T “Truth” then how could general relativity ever have displaced Newtonian Physics? Newtonian physics had been promoted to “theory”(and in the case of Newtonian gravity, “Law”) status for decades, if not centuries by the time of Einstein. Science produces well-formed and supported opinions, and that makes it better than every other epistemology humanity has ever used to form opinions.
So, OP, if you’re still around, tell your friend “Sure it’s an opinion. One which has been independently tested by hundreds of researchers in thousands of trials. What are the results of the tests of your opinion?”
Enjoy,
Steven
Frylock may not have realized that the samples he was asking about are still on Mars – the whole reason we had ambiguity in the results was that they had to design a test that could be performed on soil samples by an automated laboratory on a rover, as opposed to just preparing a bunch of soil samples for examination with a microscope to see if we could spot any microorganisms.
So, on top of piling onto a zombie thread, I’m going to derail it a tad too.
regarding the Doctors vs Scientist question (and I am not a doctor):
There are MDPhD’s who do research at places like NIH and CoD and those guys are absolutely scientists. However your day-to-day doctors are not. They’re more like engineers - applying the rules of science without making contributions based from hypothesis testing. You just trust that you have to build bridges, roads, and cars based on the tensile strengths, torques, or whatever you’re working with.
Also it’s a bit of an understatement to say that they’re simply technicians that knows pill A cures disease B. That would be a better analogy for nursing. Doctors do understand the root of the problem - a chemical deficiency, etc. and can counter accordingly. Disease B can be countered with a variety of pills and depending on the pre-existing conditions like blood pressure, allergies, risk, effectiveness, etc. the doctor prescribes according because they have a working knowledge of the science behind it.
The only thing is that they don’t advance the knowledge, just utilize it. Hence all the “math is more pure than physics, which is more pure than chemistry, which is more pure than biology” stuff. You can further the analogy to say which is more pure than medicine, which is more pure than nursing, which is more pure than…