Denialsim, defined in detail elsewhere, is an interesting phenomenon. It makes use of uniquely human qualities such as our intelligence, our pattern-recognition abilities, and our tendency to over-estimate how well we understand things. In the past, most “science”, including medicine, relied on similar human qualities. It was based on observation mixed with superstition and other non-evidence based ways of understanding the world. Many of these systems were internally consistent, but ultimately failed to accurately describe the real world.
The gradual transition of medical science (the use of evidence is used to evaluate medical practice) has revolutionized medicine. We no longer rely on the glorified shamanism that existed before the mid-20th century.
This also means that medicine has become a true “profession”; it isn’t something you can just “pick up”, hang up a shingle, and practice out of your front room. I’ve taken to calling practices that aren’t evidence-based “cult medicine”. This is because many of the practices have charismatic advocates who encourage followers to dedicate their beliefs and their money to non-mainstream (and ineffective) health practices. Cult medicine is full of folks who have simply decided what they think medicine should be.
Denialists also like to indulge in “should-ism”. AIDS, the WTC attacks, the moon landings are events they have difficulty explaining, so rather than getting educated or asking an expert, they ask themselves. They develop (often) internally consistent explanations of phenomena based on their own interpretations of facts, and their own preconceptions of what “should” be true. Partly because no one believes them, they close ranks, and feel conspired against (although to be fair, that thought pattern may begin before the conspiracy theory).
The patterns seen with denialism and cult medicine are very similar. Whether it’s the CIA-Zionist conspiracy to blow up the WTC towers as causus belli, or the Big Pharma/AMA/FDA conspiracy to suppress the “truth” about vaccines, denialists “deny” reality in favor of their own paranoid, Byzantine ideas.
Dr. Sean Tunis, a former chief medical officer for Medicare, remains an advocate for comparative-effectiveness studies. But, as Allhat showed, “they are hard to do, expensive to do and provoke a lot of political pushback,” said Dr. Tunis, who now runs the nonprofit Center for Medical Technology Policy, which tries to arrange such trials.
“There’s a lot of magical thinking,” he said, “that it will all be science and won’t be politics.”