The Relatively Silent Debate about Contraceptives and Health
October 13, 2012
IN THE latest entry about the issue of cancer, abortion and oral contraceptives, Samson, a physician, writes:
[M]ost doctors are utterly unaware of the abortion-OCP-and-breast-cancer controversy. Understand: it’s not merely that most doctors disagree that there is a link, but most have not heard that there is a debate surrounding the issue whatsoever. When I was in residency (within the past five years) I was going to do a research project on the question of a link between contraceptive pills and breast cancer, but was talked out of it by several supervisors who thought the topic was unworthy of investigation because they had never heard tell of it.
To me, the issue highlights the power of the supposedly “unbiased” and “scientific” literature, but that is a whole other discussion.
When one thinks of how much public interest there is in the effects of pesticides on human health, the relative lack of interest in this subject is striking.
—– Comments —–
Terry Morris writes:
By taking an interest in the health risks associated with pesticides, people do not risk losing their “sexual liberation.”
Alissa writes:
Modern science and medicine is effectively a bureaucracy and ruled by political correctness. You can’t just do any type of (rigorous) research. There’s strict regulations and taboos for what can be breached and what cannot. There’s stiffling peer reviews. There’s lawsuits, you can lose money and be driven out for not thinking correctly. Real science died some time ago (according to some individuals it died a decade after W.W. II or just around it). The UK blogger Bruce Charlton has a couple of posts on this topic. Most scientists are either just researching trivial things and pushing papers or they’re just doing ordinary things. Yet, somehow, every scientist wants to create and be lauded for something enormous (e.g. being a genius) but this status race to the top is ironically dimishing standards, so that everybody can be proclaimed a winner and nobody is a loser. Science has morphed into having the “right opinions” and being status conscious. The results are already skewed. But they will continually call themselves unbiased.
