Modern medicine thought it had finally nailed the beak to Plato. She believed that the questions of the old Athenian, who featured, in one of his dialogues, a Socrates wondering if medicine was a science or an art, belonged to ancient history. Because what?
In our time, is there a doctor who would feel closer to Picasso than to Einstein, to Wagner than to Pasteur? But the coronavirus has arrived, and many certainties have collapsed.
« Epidemic periods are special periods for everyone, the general public as well as healthcare professionals, believes Dr. Cyril Vidal, dental surgeon and president of the FakeMed collective, which brings together health professionals from various backgrounds to fight against what they consider to be pseudomedicines. During this crisis, journalists tended to hold up their microphones in such a way as to have two tones of the bell: that of doctors who trust scientific consensus, and that, very in the minority and absolutely not representative, of people who do not follow the guidelines. recommendations, and see themselves as artists rather than scientists. »
Glass half full
No need to draw a picture: the eyes of the FakeMed collective point directly towards a certain Marseille institute and its not really randomized trials, or even towards a certain ex-LREM deputy psychiatrist and its sulphurous anti-Covid protocol. But although not representative of the profession as a whole, these media examples are trees that hide a forest of doctors who have little or no training in the critical analysis of scientific production. A forest populated in particular, although fortunately not a general rule, by the older medical generation.
« The problem is, there are a lot of doctors who haven’t been trained in ACL. [lecture critique d’article, NDLR] “, Observes Cyril Vidal. Professor Olivier Saint-Lary, president of the National College of General Teachers (CNGE), prefers to see the glass half full, but the result in generational terms is the same.
« Things are moving in the right direction, he believes. The introduction of the ACL has precisely made it possible to make all physicians seasoned readers of scientific publications, practitioners who do not let themselves be fooled by each other’s strategies. »
50 shades of research
But there is another aspect to the question of the relation between medicine and science, at least if one considers that to do science is to participate actively in the production of knowledge: it is that it is difficult to understand. ‘estimate the share of the profession concerned. ” We don’t really know how many doctors are involved in research activities, because research activities are a bit like 50 shades of gray, considers Olivier Saint-Lary. It ranges from extremely intense activity to people doing additional training, to others participating in clinical trials. »
The good news is that while not all physicians are seasoned scientists, all can be. ” The majority of scientific content today is produced by university hospital doctors, who have a dedicated time for it, but more and more non-university hospital doctors are producing content, notes Cyril Vidal. Even if we are liberal, we can invest in this area. »
And the slayer of alternative medicines to notice that even the collective “Let us prescribe”, which promotes the use of hydroxychloroquine in Covid-19, has sought to be published in a journal. ” Their study is really of poor quality, it shows above all that they do not know how to handle the tools, but the fact that they wanted to write an article is in itself a laudable approach. », Considers the president of the FakeMed collective. That he found a journal (the Asian Journal of Medicine and Health, in this case) to accept their manuscript, on the other hand, is problematic, he adds, regretting that ” some predatory journals publish anything “. But this is another problem.
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Testimonial – 3 QUESTIONS FOR ARNAUD SAINT-MARTIN Sociologist Arnaud Saint-Martin recently published Science *, a small book questioning the notion of science in the current period. A questioning which medicine does not escape. What’s up Doc. Medicine, science or art … How does this old question arise today? Arnaud Saint-Martin. We can already notice that the fact that this question still arises, the fact that we can suppose that medicine has a complicated relationship with science, reveals interesting things about the functioning of the discipline. But anyway, we do not decree that a discipline is a science: that is verified, it is a claim that must be honored by respecting a certain number of standards. WUD. And how does medicine fare with this verification process? ASM. It seems to me that part of medicine functions as a scientific discipline, with people who have a career in research, who publish according to the usual standards of peer review, and so on. And there is another dimension, which is that of the practice of medicine, and which refers more to the notion of profession than to the notion of discipline. WUD. But in fact, university hospital physicians are both practitioners and researchers … and they are also teachers, moreover. ASM. Yes, and this dialectic between discipline and profession is also found in other fields. For example, I study physics, where there is both fundamental research physics and very applied physics. In space research, we often meet physicists who have put together boxes. But all the same, this rarely leads to asking the question of the scientificity of their discipline … * Science, Arnaud Saint-Martin, Anamosa editions, 2020 |
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