‘I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on that.’

Me too.

In case you didn’t know, your article on the Guardian has been criticized here:

“Scientifically illiterate science pundit: Ben Goldacre”
http://hivskeptic.wordpress.com/2009/01/18/scientifically-illiterate-science-pundit-ben-goldacre/

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on that.

Evolution in action is a ice thought but really what happens here is that the people affected by the poor decisions are not often the ones responsible for them.

The more you read of this lady the more you become convinced that she was emotionally unable to accept an AIDS diagnosis and so grasped at the only straw available to her, courtesy of the Duesberg band waggon. Nothing that followed could convince her she was wrong. It’s a disease version of the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Poor woman.

Unfortunately like most people presenting a more palatabe version of reality than reality itself ( if only AIDS was a combination of flu and a botched smear test) she ahs gathered a following of co-delusionees. Maybe in ten years time it will be a religion.

What if everything that you know about tb is wrong?

What if everything you knew about various sarcomas was wrong?

What if stuff that you could see via electron microscopy was wrong?

What if so many other things were wrong too?

Whatever.

Am I right in thinking that some people who have been diagnosed as HIV-positive have been charged and convicted of crimes when knowingly having unprotected sex with people who later develop AIDS? It is interesting to note that Maggiore was not prosecuted for actions that almost certainly caused her child to develop AIDS yet medics were struck off for not documenting the offer/denial of HIV testing.

I think Maggiore was a very bad person. Maggiore’s actions lead directly to the death of one person. Natural birth over c-section, breast feeding for three years, inspite of evidence and advice.

I can accept an individual with no ties, no responsibilities deciding that, yes, they will go the woo! route, but… if there is family? I’ve been quite strong with my family in some ways. My parents are told to go and see their GP rather than trust to their copper/magnetic bracelets. I will not even allow them to argue with me. I would rather that my parents irritate their GP with minor stuff than they do the self-sacrifice stuff and then drop dead of something undiagnosed but treatable.

And this is the realm that Maggiore needs to be judged. Your cousin, your neice/nephew, your grand-child is sentenced to death by another member of your family. How tough is that to deal with? Meh, I’ve heard of it but not seen it first hand. On the other hand, my sister has deformation of the skull due to pertussis.

In some ways I wish these people would rediscover the “magic bullet” of 19th century medicine – calomel – (Hg Cl2 – If i remember my chemistry) – they’d do less harm that way.

Frightening because as a result of misinformation, the suffering of large numbers of people is being made worse. Fascinating because it reveals something of the fragile nature of truth.

Good science (advancing knowledge based on verifiable evidence) is always in a state of flux. Few researchers ever say ‘Now we know’, because study results often pose more questions than are answered. Deciding at which point something is actually ‘known’ can be tricky, and I suspect not all denialists are actually evil (though some may be). Some could simply be unwilling to swallow unquestioningly (for example) the ‘truth’ of large pharma companies, or the ‘truth’ of epidemiologists, whose modeling of HIV prevalence has recently been called into serious question by ‘mainstream’ scientists.

Sadly, in the case of HIV, the body of evidence confirms ART does reduce mortality, morbidity and infectivity. AIDS ‘denialists’ fly in the face of valid and reliable research findings. The resulting – and very public – disagreements about what may be ‘true’ is confusing for many, and fatal for some.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV#Origin

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_origin

Enjoy!

Further to previous post. I’m not worried about causing offence to AIDS denialists either. However an argument that appears calculated to cause offence can appear unconvincing to anyone who genuinely has not made up their mind.

My suggestion is that rather than wait for the second meaning of the word ‘denialist’ to wither away we should just find some other word that does not have the same baggage.

I’m sure that Ben was using the term in a respectable sense. But I don’t think that you can shake off the Freudian baggage that it has acquired that easily.

For that matter even the first sense of the word makes me feel a little uncomfortable because it still carries the implication that anyone who disagrees with you is wilfully ignoring the best evidence for some strange reason of their own. It may well be that they actually are doing that, but it’s still an ad hominem style of argument.

A better way of conducting the argument is simply to explain what the best evidence is and leave speculation about people’s reasons for ignoring it to those who like to speculate.

Ben was using the term “denialist” in its first sense (i.e. as a term to describe those who consistently reject the best explanations for a physical phenomenon or for any other objective fact). The second sense has Freudian origins (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial). Given the fact that the tenets of Freudian psychology are unfalsifiable it would no bad thing if the second meaning of the word “denial” just withered away. Any “straw-man” attacks by AIDS denialists would be given the derision it deserved. Causing offence to AIDS denialists should be the least of our concerns.

If a denialist was simply someone who denied something or other then there would of course be no problem (apart from the fact that it could be applied to anyone who holds any opinions at all). However the concept of “denial” has another meaning, which it has inherited from the less evidence based areas of psychology, and which is used to imply that disagreement is a symptom of some psychological imbalance.

This kind of woolly, ad hominem, attack is a strategy that is used by pseudoscientists to side-step the requirement to produce proper evidence for their opinions, and it would be best to leave it to the pseudoscientists.

I’m not of course suggesting that the AIDS deniers are right, nor would I necessary disagree with the suggestion that they are a bit bonkers, it’s just that the concept of “denial” is one best left in the dustbin of intellectual history.