Medical Arrogance and Butterfly Collecting

Wired is a technology magazine, and this essay takes an interesting perspective on the need for the medical profession to use technology to enhance our knowledge of human wellness as opposed to human illness.

If you had died 50 years ago, your body would have stood a pretty good chance of serving science. In the 1960s, autopsy rates at US hospitals exceeded 50 percent. Pathologists weren't necessarily looking for what killed people — they were taking advantage of the fact that a body was available and ready for inspection. There was still much to learn about normal human biology, the thinking went, so every corpse was an educational opportunity.

It turns out that autopsies are now comparatively rare now as modern medicine is much more confident about its current body of knowledge. However, it seems that in medicine (as other fields such as in spying) our capacity to gather information has exceeded our capacity to understand it.

In heart disease, for example, CT screening tests can spot abnormalities in arterial plaque — but no research exists on whether that information is actually predictive of heart disease or stroke. "We need to know normal variation," says Pat Brown, a professor of biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine. "It's really underappreciated as a part of science." In too many areas, Brown argues, we're too quick to jump at any blip without understanding whether it's a true red alert or just normal background noise.

I believe that alternative medicine has something to offer in instances where conventional medicine doesn't have answers because conventional medicine tends to discount things in areas that are considered well-understood. Instead of ignoring apparent red herrings, the medical community should focus more on better understanding of normalcy (and thus a better understanding of abnormalcy).

It seems like it would be easy just to step back and survey the broad picture. But research costs money, and studying what's normal is generally considered trivial, dismissed as mere butterfly collecting. At the National Institutes for Health, for instance, all grants are given a "priority score," an indication of a project's novelty, originality, and "scientific merit." Normal need not apply.

Very interesting stuff.