This is an interesting article on the 'right' to challenge scientific consensus, as low carbers on this forum we regularly challenge so called nutrition consensus.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org...ific-consensus/

There was a time, not long ago, when scientific consensus did not know that hygiene was an important factor in patient mortality rates, so doctors and nurses didn't bother to wash their hands. For much of human history scientific consensus thought the world was flat. Around about the time I was born, the scientific consensus was that the drug thalidomide was safe and effective in reducing morning sickness in pregnant women. Consequently, in my English neighborhood there were several children born with hands attached to their shoulders because they did not have arms. I went to kindergarten with one of them. He didn't make it to high school.

So, really, the wonder is that more people don't refuse to blindly trust everything they are told by the scientific establishment. Why wouldn't parents be concerned about the effects of vaccines on their children? I'm not coming down on one side or the other, but I do think it's valid to have questions and concerns. Science makes amazing discoveries every year, and if they are sound they will stand up to challenges, even over long periods of time. Equally the "alternative" community makes discoveries too (e.g. homeopathy, herbal cures, vitamin supplementation, low carbohydrate diets) and the ones that work will also stand up over time - provided Big Pharma/Big Food/Big Insurance doesn't legislate them into oblivion to protect their profits.

Yes, the only way progress is made is to challenge the consensus - but can this only come from the scientific community? Is grass roots challenge as valid, or less valid?

Wouldn't it become a much healthier scientific environment from a objective peer review standpoint if the scientific method was actually followed where hypotheses and related trials were actually critiqued to make them better? Unfortunately, many "scientists" or researchers have abrogated their duties of self- and peer-criticism to follow the money trail that rewards popular thinking regardless of merit or facts. It leaves much of the analysis up to the consumers to locate and wade through conventionally unpopular, narrowly published studies that provide the necessary factual balance absent of selection bias in many areas. Nutrition is simply one of those areas.

"Scientific consensus" is an oxymoron. True scientists don't settle for what a bunch of lazy, unquestioning people think (especially when the lazy ones fudge their data to fit their preconceived "consensus"). Galileo was imprisoned because he dared to say that the Earth revolved around the Sun. I never heard the term "scientific consensus" until ~20 years ago, and it seems to be used by people whose theories are not well substantiated. The same is true of people who feel the need to add "evidence-based" to describe their science in attempts to hide the fact that they are really just pulling ideas out of their asses. True scientists base their theories on evidence and see no need to add the qualifier.

Exactly. Anyone can challenge what we think, and successful ones are right.

Dr. Bernstein made his first and formative discoveries when he was an engineer with access to a glucose meter... before he was a diabetes doctor. Gary Taubes used the science of others to change our thinking... as a writer. It's not your title, it's your method.

They are "controversial." I've come to see that word as possible code for "telling a truth someone powerful doesn't like."

Grass-roots consensus can be just as wrong as "scientific" consensus. Sort of an irony when the dangers of one kind of consensus are pointed at as reason to cling to another kind of consensus. On any side, believing ideas because they're associated with "us" instead of "them" has its dangers. A good scientist is not immune to bias. That's supposed to be the ideal, the impartial scientist, but I don't even think it's a good idea. People do good work when they're passionate about their work, this works at cross-purposes to a lack of bias.

Decisions about what kind of science gets funded are not entirely in the hands of the scientific community. It's important that non-scientists who are involved in the decisions made about who and what gets funded be open to reasonable alternatives to mainstream scientific opinion.

What we have here is a pervasive problem that rears its head in every aspect of our society including this one: corporatism, and related maneuvering for power (which certainly exists, and existed, long before our society did this interesting large experiment in corporatism of course).

Higher education in our country is a market. Medicine (as a multi-element genre) is a market. Now, in order to control that market and maximize profitability, it has to seem worth something. The only way this can happen is if the people who have it (paid for it), are officially recognized as more important and more qualified than people don't have it, and if they are recognized as experts period.

(It wasn't enough that the priests read Latin; it was important that they were unquestionable, too. Most Rabbis read Latin too after all.)

Now initially this means that nobody without the qualifier can question, because they must be marginalized fully, as a basic. But eventually this means that even people also with the qualifier cannot question in any way or place where people without the qualifier could, then or later, see or hear it, because that still casts doubt on the integrity or value of the product being sold (in this case "qualification as a scientist"). Even when in the long process of acquiring the end-product, after all, the consumers are still consuming.

The next phase of 'underlying causation' relates to funding. If there was any real desire for science protocol clarity instead of misleading obfuscation and error (by accident or design), it would be a given that all underlying data for any given study be made available either in fine print after the paper or back of journal or on the journal website. So when it says mouse chow you know what's in it. So if they measure 14 things you don't just hear about the 2 (hey, cheerios has more fiber than fruit loops!! -- when for all we know the study compared those two things to two other things that turned out massively better, so if you parse enough data out you eventually find something that the funder is happy with and hence they might be willing to hire you for something else again, as a result). This is a small but obvious thing -- that an appendix should have the raw data in tables or something. You can't do a 10th grade school paper without showing your data; how come you can publish a peer-reviewed science paper without it? This is because the funders don't want it, and the journals recognize that and hence will not require it.

There are other things in the back of my head. Anyway, I'm saying that this is kind of a surface symptom of some very deep and pervasive things -- and these elements are just as alive in other markets, in their own way. We spend a lot of effort railing at these symptoms, but the underlying cause, and the only real solution, is a deeper cultural effort.

You have to file a flight plan just to fly to another city as a pilot in a 1 person plane even though it's nobody's business where you're going any more than if you were in a car, generally. What if any trial that was going to be formal published science had to have a study plan filed somewhere official before it began? And every journal required underlying data provided? These two things would radically, drastically, annihilate 80%+ of the ability of 'funders' to cause -- directly or indirectly -- researchers to lie, overtly or subtly; and would provide the foundation for the process of science to be, at the least seen and critiqued by others, who are greatly prevented solely by not having enough info to go on.

PJ