Epidemiologists and charlatans  Date 19/06/2004

http://www.henrythornton.com/article.asp?article_id=2652

Review of a scarey book about quacks, charlatans and junk-science.
By Louis Hissink  Email / Print


The epidemiologists – Have they got the scares for you! By John Brignell,
Brignell and Associates, Great Britain, 2004.



Hot of the press, this latest book by John Brignell outing the charlatans
amongst us is most disturbing. Disturbing because what I, and I suppose
most of us, read in the newspapers and assume to be accurate, is anything
but - the amount of rank bull dust masquerading as scientific fact
published by the media is astonishing.



John Brignell retired early from his Professorship of Industrial
Instrumentation at the University of Southampton to write about the abuses
of measurement – leading to his first book – Sorry – wrong number!
Published in 2000.  Since then he has set up his website
“www.numberwatch.co.uk” where hapless individuals and organisations are
roundly castigated for various numerical crimes.  I inadvertently scored a
hit there too – which arose from a misunderstanding of how we in the mining
industry compute statistics – but it did lead to a very succinct analysis
of global warming statistics and another demonstration that global warming
is a sham.



But back to this book – as the title suggests, it has something to do with
epidemics and hence the medical profession and the health-care industry.
The book starts off with a good start by repeating two newspaper headlines
in the UK – The Independent , June 5 2001 - “Pets double children's risk of
asthma attacks” and the from the BBC a few days earlier “Keeping pets
prevents allergies”.



Assuming that the both The Independent and the BBC got their information
from the same source, how could such contradictory statements be published?
Or how about “Pain killers prevent cancer”, yet at another time “Regular
pain killer use linked to cancer”.  Clearly the newspapers are obviously
quoting scientific studies, perhaps it was because scientists were
contradicting each other, or is it.



Damning as it is, Brignell sums it up nicely by writing that “science,
..had revolutionised human life and tripled life-span, ..was now reduced to
the status of necromancy or astrology.  Brignell's expertise was in avionic
instrumentation and from what one reads, it was the published baloney in
his daily morning newspaper which prompted his first opus - “Sorry, wrong
number”.  Having finished that area of science, he then discovers another
branch of science that also seemed to have degenerated into a corrupt
travesty – epidemiology – the science of epidemics.



What concerned him more than anything was how the very people who sought to
introduce scientific rigour into the science of epidemiology inadvertently
provided the means of its corruption.  In order to do that, of course, one
needs to go back into history and discover how it all began, and when and
why it started to go wrong, and who the villains were.  Epidemiologists are
not always the bad guy, it seems, and to find that out, you will of course
have to buy the book.



The early chapters deal with the early history of epidemiology, the
terrible epidemics which plagued humanity. Then follows the discovery of
what actually caused disease, and importantly a summary of one of the
pioneers of statistics, and the irony of his legacy.  The came Social
Theory – which turned scientific medicine upside down and changed the
world.



The second half of the book deals with the overwhelming amount of material
available to us on almost every imaginable topic of medicine. Of course the
author also shows how the present situation came about, looking at the
tools of the trade and the fallacies. And of course nothing like picking
the bones of a few pertinent examples.



Inside the cover, or at least on page ii of the flyleaf we find a Time
Chart of disease – starting from 2000 BC to today, and covering everything
in between. How, one would think, could all this be covered in such a slim
volume of some 200 pages? Well fortunately Brignell doesn't, but he does
focus on the essentials and some pertinent real case histories.



Most importantly he does spend some time on Social Theory – and don't make
the mistake I made by looking up a dictionary – my Chambers does not have
an entry for it, and googling on the Internet doesn't yield anything
precise either. And that is precisely the problem – what on earth is Social
Theory?  Having suffered the requirement myself in my undergraduate days to
do one or two “humanities” subjects, I guess Social Theory had to have its
origins in that part of Academia, and as Brignell puts it “The study of
kings and queens had been largely replaced by the study of the masses,
Social History,..”.  Just this little instance of the difficulty to get a
precise meaning of Social Theory starts to explain what has happened over
time.



Brignell points to one individual Thomas McKeown who wrote two influential
books, “The role of Medicine” and "The Origins of Human Disease”.  It seems
that McKeown accidentally became Professor of Social Medicine, as the
result of some funding of a Trust which wanted a specific chair of Social
Medicine.  The best way of showing what then happened was the disease of
Tuberculosis (TB) – which if I read Brignell right, was regarded by McKeown
as a disease of poverty, being one of infectious type, while those of
affluence were non-infectious diseases. Personally this categorisation of
disease is a load of nonsense, which Brignell then expertly shows to be so
in the rest of his chapter on Social Science.  (Social Theory can be
thought of as one of the most influential philosophical developments in
human history bequeathing us the Nanny State and the environmental
quangos).



Usually diseases are caused by something, and Brignell rightly uses the
furphy of cigarette smoking causing lung-cancer as his next demolition job.
My late father, a physician and surgeon, always maintained that individuals
who developed cancer of the lung, also tended smoke cigarettes, and that
the cigarette smoking was a symptom, and not the cause of lung-cancer.



Other chapters discuss statistics, in a highly readable form, then a brief
description of the tools of the trade, essential knowledge to unravel the
pronouncements of science published in the mass-media,  while the chapters
Body parts, Substance Abuse, Tobacco Road, and Cancer are pretty obvious
what they deal with.



The Chapter Holocaust was another matter – and what, I thought, has this
well known WWII event to do with the subject of his book – and of course it
wasn't what you think it was, it was actually Foot and Mouth Disease in the
UK and how the Brits managed to completely stuff it up – veritably a
holocaust of the intelligence type.  They and they alone, with their stupid
scientific advisors decided to cull all the culprits, with the equally
culpable epitome of bureaucracies, the European Commission.



A rather interesting observation was made on page 96 when the author
discusses SIP's Single-Issue-Parties where groups of fanatics form
political parties. This is usually a non event except in societies in which
proportional representation operates, and then indeed we are politically
affected by these minority fanatics.  The Greens, for example, managed to
gain a virtual monopoly of the environment ministries of Europe and forced
environmentalism onto those hapless Europeans.  As the Ice age doom theory
literally froze in the middle 1960's, the Greens then reversed direction
and starting screaming the opposite – global warming.



“The ease with which a specious theory such as global warming can be
imposed on the world constitutes a textbook example of political
chicanery”. And once a theory reaches a critical mass of acceptance, no
matter how stupid or scientifically specious, it becomes established fact.



The rest of John Brignell writes about means you have to buy the book from
his website but I can assure it was a riveting read – I finished it in two
nights in bed.



This book is a welcome relief for the usual pseudo-science we are deluged
with in the media. It is an excellent source of fact, and lists and
explains important concepts so that anyone can separate the wheat from the
chaff in their daily newspaper.



All in all a significant contribution to the demolition of quacks,
charlatans and junk-science.

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