The Skeptics Guide #921 - Mar 4 2023
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Who is guest Perry Wilson and what is his new book about?
You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality. Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, March 1st, 2023, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Jay Novella. Hey, guys. Evan Bernstein.
Good evening, folks.
And we have a guest rogue this week, Dr. F. Perry Wilson. Perry, welcome to the Skeptic's Guide. Thanks. Great to be here. Now, Perry, your first name is actually Francis, but you go by Perry. And I'm just wondering, have you ever seen the movie Stripes, by the way? No.
Of course.
Yeah.
Oh, no.
Did you ever pull a – nobody called me Francis. If you call me Francis, I'll kill you. You ever pull it on anybody?
You know, I have tried and it only elicits scales of laughter. So I just can't pull it off.
You can't pull it off. I'll kill you if you call me Francis. It doesn't work. You've got to get that look in your eye. Yeah. A thousand yards there. Yeah, I'll do it. So, Barry, we're having you on the show partly because, you know, Kara's away this week. She's out of the country. So it's a good week to have a guest road. But you published a book recently, How Medicine Works and When It Doesn't, which, you know, I blurbed and have been helping to promote. Excellent book. Really, it's a good way of introducing people to just some of the inner workings of medicine so they could think about it a little bit more critically. So how is the book promotion going?
It's been going great. Yeah. I mean, this is a book that I think is very much in line with what you guys talk about every week. It's about why people are susceptible to medical misinformation, you know, the cognitive biases, the motivated reasoning that It leads people to make bad choices. But I try to be fair and I think one of the things that people are really responding to about the book is that I acknowledge that part of the reason that people go to alternative practitioners and engage with sort of hokum is because they're not getting something from the medical establishment, that we're failing in some fundamental ways to provide the best possible care for our patients. So I – I think it's important to take a kind of holistic view here and see what's going on.
Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, we can always do better in science communication. We could always, you know, do better in just the delivery of medicine and the regulation of medicine. I like your chapter on the pharmaceutical industry because it's not like we can give a full-throated glowing defense of the industry, you know, because they do shady stuff all the time. But there's a far cry from that to the wild conspiracy theories that people come up with. And so it's hard to have to be advocating for a nuanced position in the middle, you know.
It is and we're kind of in a world where nuance is really unpopular. In social media, it's like the way you get engagement is by taking very extreme positions and of course in medicine and I think in most things in science, the extreme positions are rarely correct. Usually there is some gray area and I think pharmaceutical companies is a – A perfect example. Yeah, they're for profit. That is their motivation. At the same time, there are some drugs that are essentially medical miracles, cures for hepatitis C. Obviously, these are big, big things that are life-changing for people.
It's like every institution humanity has ever developed. It may be help in some ways and it's flawed in other ways. Like there's no perfect institution, whether it's democracy or science itself or education or whatever. And we have to learn how to maximize the good stuff and mitigate the bad stuff.
Right.
Yeah, and keep improving. And keep improving, right? That's the self-correction. Yeah, self-correction has got to be built in, which also means transparency and honesty and all that stuff. But, yeah, people want their clean morality play, you know, where there's villains and heroes. And we just default to that simplistic narrative.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Who is guest Perry Wilson and what is his new book about?
0:03–30:26
2
How did ancient metallurgy reveal earlier use of tempered steel?
30:26–52:42
3
Could there really be mineable 'gold' hydrogen under the ground?
52:42–56:13
4
What are the pros and cons of erythritol as a sugar substitute?
56:13–58:19
5
How did the Nature Medicine study link erythritol to heart disease and is the evidence convincing?
58:19–1:10:46
6
How do bioelectronics researchers 'grow' electrodes inside living tissue?
1:10:46–1:20:13
7
What cultural controversy arose from Mexico's 'Alux' photo and what was Who's That Noisy this week?
1:20:13–1:53:28