Double standards on acupuncture?
The Twitterverse and blogosphere are positively quivering in outrage about the way the media covered Nature Neuroscience’s recent paper suggesting a molecular role for pain relief in a mouse model for acupuncture. This blog post is not about the science or the finding; and to put it into context, I don’t believe there’s evidence that acupuncture works beyond placebo in humans, either, either before this paper or after.
But what intrigues me is the response of the non-mainstream media (i.e. Twitterers and bloggers). All of their complaints are valid, particularly the often restated point that “mice aren’t humans and you can’t extrapolate”. But what strikes me is that you could levy the same charge against many, many papers published weekly in high-profile journals that use animal models to study human diseases or biology. Some of these papers are covered by science bloggers, who are just as critical, but somehow not nearly as outraged. I just think it’s interesting that because what’s being studied is something people don’t believe in, making overstated claims about mouse models is somehow more repugnant than what happens every day in the press.
Is it because giving the apparent stamp of scientific approval to alternative medicine is ultimately more harmful than validating this week’s cure for cancer? I think that’s probably the most likely explanation, but would be curious to know what others think.
Hmmm, well, without having personally reviewed the tweets & blog posts on the acupuncture article, I’m skeptical that ‘you can’t extrapolate from mice’ was really the main criticism. Was it?
Surely it’s more an extraordinary-claims-require-extraordinary-evidence thing? If eg a particular vaccine seems to work on mice, we have plenty of evidence that vaccination works, so we can reasonably assume that it might have similar effects in humans. Whereas acupuncture is largely unfounded on evidence, so we need a lot more before we can start extrapolating from one or two animal trials.
Hi Karen – I read four blog posts over the past few days and that point was indeed what stuck in my mind – sorry I was too rushed to actually back up my post with links and references. 😉
Tom, that’s exactly what I just tweeted before I read your comment – extraordinary claims. But it’s not so much that people were harsh on the acupuncture thing – it’s that there NOT so harsh about everything else, when perhaps they should be.
Yes, but the run-of-the-mill science (even in the big journals) doesn’t get written up as “Cure for Cancer Found!”. If it did, I suggest, it would get the same trashing.
I think that within science the “provisional” nature of published findings, and the reality that scientists nowadays are in a game where they almost have to “Talk Up” their findings subtly in the Intro and Discussion of their paper (esp, I would say, to get published in the Glamour Rags like Nat Neurosci). Within the biz everyone knows this is how it is, and so would just read the press release and give a wry smile, or roll their eyes.
However, once the press release is regurgitated all over page five of the Daily Beast it is a different game. And if the author is then quoted in the story repeating or embellishing “bigged up” claims, or saying something else stupid, then they are likely to get shot down – whether it is Alt.Med or not.
Of course, given the papers’ enthusiasm for silly Alt.Med stories, published scientific papers in this area are perhaps rather more likely than most to make the Daily Beast news pages.
Austin, I’m not sure we’re seeing the same headlines on our morning commute. Also, I used to work for a very minor (<2 impact factor) journal whose even trivial papers routinely got picked up as cancer cures by the mainstream UK press. So I know what I’m talking about!