by Shane Scott

It’s not at all uncommon to see credibility shoe-horned into a decision to resort to unproven medical interventions with the claim “but I tried conventional medicine for years and nothing ever worked”. You’ve got back pain (a common problem) so you go to see a self-declared shaman of the new millennium, who stings you with bees (I’m not joking, some people do believe stinging people with bees will cure all their ills) and you seem to feel a little better and so become a vocal champion of assaulting people with venomous insects.

“Yeah, I went to loads of conventional doctors and they couldn’t work out was wrong with me, but all it took was a course of getting stung in the arm off a load of bees and I feel as good as new. So much for science. Did I mention that science doesn’t even know how bees are able to fly?”

There’re loads of problems with this reasoning (correlation/causation, anecdote, experience of an individual, ignoring regression to the mean…) but it’s not my intention to go into them in detail here. Rather, it amused me to see reports this morning that a Mr Gary Lightbody, penman of pedestrian pop for serial ear-botherers Snow Patrol, has been singing the inverse of this old song.

It seems that Mr Lightbody fell down the stairs at a party in Glasgow around 2002 and has suffered years of pain in his jaw ever since but, due to a “mistrust of western medicine” (no mistrust for western eight cans of tennents and a bottle of buckie, though, eh Gary?) has never had it X-rayed. He had however seen “all kinds of people” about it. With his mistrust of “western medicine” (whatever that is) in mind, these are probably the kind of people who sting people with bees, one imagines.

Now Mr Lightbody has returned, blinking and rubbing his eyes, to the world of reason and had it X-rayed. It turns out his jaw was slightly dislocated all of this time. The fact that with the use of X-rays we can take a photograph and identify visually, beyond reasonable doubt, what the source of the problem is means that an appropriate, specific and evidence based intervention can be made. It doesn’t suffer from the same problems as unproven treatments because with a photograph we can say exactly what the problem is and we can specify exactly what was done to fix it directly.

Related Posts:

• Jenny McCarthy’s Battle With Sense
• “How Music Works” – John Powell (Review)
• Sense About Scotland?