Quiet Business

So things have been moving along this week. I'm not even sure where it went. I had to go back and take a walk through the bramble bushes of the Musings to get a feel for what is even happening. If you'd asked me straight away I wouldn't have an answer for you. I'm less and less fine with this phenomenon as time marches on. I see what is happening with my paternal grandmother and frankly it gives me the willies. She has dementia and is quickly sliding more and more into a delirious mental state. Not remembering is just the tip of the iceberg, then comes the hallucinations then who knows what is next. I seem to be running into people with memory loss more and more. Apparently some folks I know who done got knocked up are dealing with something called baby brain where you just plumb forget things from time to time. Maybe the baby steals those memories? I'm not a doctor, I won't bother trying to figure it out. I'm just going off their stories, so far no direct contact with that piece of the procreation process. It got me thinking a bit though, not really about that in any fashion, just about the doctor bit. It's swirling in my mind right now, several disjointed thoughts trying to become an idea. Let me just spill them out on to the page for a moment. So you have doctors, and I guess as a broader group scientists. These are folks, not unlike myself, who have dedicated multiple years of their education to learning and in many cases, mastering a discipline of science. Using the cumulative understanding mankind has on an issue to explain and use it for practical reasons. Doctors do this when they choose a specialty. Grad students pick their discipline as well. All the scientists become experts in their little wedge of the vast world. It happens through hard work and lots of effort. So when I see science being marginalized and ignored in favour of sensationalized or fraudulent, irresponsible headlines it irks me. Actually I'm flat out perturbed by this state of affairs. If a scientist does work, gets it independently verified, has it replicated by others and publishes in a peer reviewed journal shouldn't that be good enough that we can say with certainty that their results are valid? Missing any of those steps could leave room for question but not when all those boxes are checked. In my experience, scientific conclusions of this type are generally very specific to the study yet I'm seeing journalists interpreting things to suit their needs. Maybe I'm just up to late and getting fired up about idiots on Twitter but this seems to be a rising tide of a problem and I, for one, don't want the wave to sweep across my bow. I guess the message is that we scientists or science supporters need to begin to realize what is happening here and stand against it. We've been quiet too long. This isn't a sermon, or a call to arms. Just hoping that if you weren't aware that media and politics are trying to dictate things without using effective tools and knowledge that you maybe consider putting a bit of thought behind where you stand and how it can affect you. That got ranty fast but it's important to realize that when science accepts an idea it's not on a whim. It's real juice, drink it up.