By Faye Flam / Bloomberg opinion
We have a problem with our medical and scientific experts. It’s hard to know what to believe when we’re being bombarded by professionals with prestigious degrees and affiliations pushing contrary claims about covid vaccine side effects, about treatments such as Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and about the nature and severity of the disease.
A prime example is Senate candidate Mehmet Oz. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, was chair of his class at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, won an award for his research as a resident, and by 35, was saving lives with bypass surgeries and heart and lung transplants at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.
By the mid-1990s, he was experimenting with some unusual mind-body techniques but only in conjunction with conventional surgery, which by all accounts he practiced with great talent. But as he gained fame through Oprah Winfrey’s television show, that escalated into hawking dubious supplements for weight loss, advocating for homeopathy, and even suggesting a medical use for astrology.
Maybe the problem isn’t so much that the public has become too anti-intellectual to listen to experts. Maybe the problem is that some experts have gone rogue; and become even more famous and prominent for doing so.
Historian Edward Tenner started calling these rogue experts “alt-thorities,” and in a recent essay for the Milken Review he wrote about their infiltration into politics, law and various parts of academia.
It’s a problem because we need experts. Journalists depend on them to help people understand complex issues, and our legal system uses expert witnesses to decide important cases and set policy. But deference to expertise — to authorities in different fields — is a relatively recent development, said Tenner in an interview.
The age of experts as authorities started in the late 19th century; during the industrial revolution, he said, when we were entering a new age of scientific authority, using science to improve everything from industrial chemicals to drugs to food preservation. We elevated scientific thinking in all endeavors, organizing advanced training and special credentials to certify expertis; in law, medicine, accounting and business. Before that, science was pursued mostly by aristocrats, though there were opportunities for non-aristocratic geniuses such as Benjamin Franklin. Specialization wasn’t necessary; it was possible to roam around different kinds of endeavors without any specialized degrees or training.
Over recent decades, willingness to defer to experts has waxed and waned. The first downturn happened in the late 1920s and 1930s, said Tenner. People were disillusioned after the sinking of the Titanic, World War I and the Great Depression, which defied celebrated economists’ predictions of sustained prosperity.
There was another wave of pro-authority sentiment after World War II, with the nuclear age and the space race, and another lull in the 1970s with Vietnam, Three Mile Island and another economic downturn. As for the internet era of the 1990s and 2000s, Tenner says people started choosing among a variety of different intellectual authorities just the way 16th-century religious dissenters started choosing leaders and denominations.
Today we’re seeing another pendulum swing away from experts. The pandemic response was ineffective, disorganized and poorly communicated. Authority figures told us not to panic, then with little warning shut schools and businesses. Oz says on his website we were misled and patronized. “Elites with yards told those without yards to stay inside; where the virus was more likely to spread. And the arrogant, closed-minded people in charge … took away our freedom.”
He has a point. As scientists were backing the common-sense idea that being outside was safer, politicians were ordering police to herd people away from parks, beaches, playgrounds and jogging paths. Some experts talked with overconfidence or pushed models that never seemed to accurately predict the next wave. Legitimately difficult trade-offs were characterized as “following the science,” as if science only ever pointed in one direction.
Alt-thorities “are ideally positioned to take advantage of this skepticism and resentment,” said Tenner. They have the credentials to be taken seriously when they declare mainstream experts wrong.
How can we keep from descending into chaos and allowing quack doctors to steer people away from lifesaving vaccines? While it’s tempting to dismiss quacks out of hand, I think we have to instead judge their advice on its merits.
The worst thing you can do, Tenner said, is to label people as nuts, quacks, pseudoscientists, or conspiracy theorists; even if it’s deserved. That just builds resentment as people who follow alt-thorites will feel insulted.
And sometimes mainstream medicine allows terrible things; like the Tuskegee experiment and the proliferation of deadly opioids, for example.
Ironically, the most powerful ammunition aimed at Dr. Oz has nothing to do with energy healing or supplement hawking. His enemies have disparaged Oz for research that’s sanctioned by mainstream medicine. He supervised Columbia University animal research that led to the killing of dogs. Society’s view on the ethics of animal experiments is changing, less tolerated, especially with primates, dogs and cats. Even Oprah now says she’d vote for his opponent.
Faye Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the “Follow the Science” podcast.
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