Michael Vassar: The Current State of Medical Research is Unacceptable | Big Think.

Michael Vassar: The Current State of Medical Research is Unacceptable

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Michael Vassar is co-founder and chief science officer of MetaMed Research, a medical consulting firm that conducts personalized medical research for clients. In this video interview, Vassar explains why the impetus for founding the company and dissects the many faults of modern medical research. Most notably, Vassar decries the fact that we have "essentially banned the sort of research which has given us all of our successes in medicine from the entire history of medicine." Hospitals are factories, says Vassar, in which thinkers are instructed not to think, but to execute protocol. And that's the opposite of progress. You can't make important medical discoveries when you're just pushing buttons.

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MICHAEL VASSAR:

Michael Vassar is an American futurist, activist, and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer of MetaMed Research. He was president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute until January 2012. Vassar advocates safe development of new technologies for the benefit of humankind. He has co-authored papers on the risks of advanced molecular manufacturing with Robert Freitas, and has written the special report "Corporate Cornucopia: Examining the Special Implications of Commercial MNT Development" for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology Task Force.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Michael Vassar: Studies show that the average doctor’s visit involves eight to 11 minutes of doctor-patient time. Meanwhile that medical intake interviews that doctors are taught to give in medical school should take an average of two to three hours. This is pretty typical of the system. Systematically, people are taught to do something in medical school that centuries of scholarly and scientific discovery have shown should allow them to bring humanities knowledge to bear on a case. And systematically, industrial processes are set up to go through the motions of doing something symbolic of that, but which there is no reason to think will actually work.

We have essentially banned the sort of research which has given us all of our successes in medicine from the entire history of medicine. Like, there have been a few kind of decent cancer successes, but there has never been a penicillin; there has never been a smallpox vaccine. There has never been a vitamin C for scurvy. If you look at the sort of research that to which we attribute practically all of the historical successes of science and especially of medicine, we see that there is virtually no funding for it and there is virtually no regulatory framework for doing it legally and for publishing it. The sort of research that we have invented in the post-World War II era is a sort of research that is designed to confirm and assert that we are doing research rather than designed to cure diseases. After we do the research, no one reads it anyway and it’s well known that even if there was no fraud, given the standards that we’re doing somewhere around, as John Ioannidis published in the most-cited paper in the history of PLOS — our Public Library of Science — something like 80 percent of all medical findings, 90 percent of cancer findings, 50 percent of the best medical findings considered highest-quality and 25 percent of medical consensus would be false in the absence of any fraud based on the methodologies.

And that’s not false in the sense of useless; that’s false in the sense of not true. In addition, there’s the uselessness of statistical rather than practical significance, et cetera. Then there is the, as I say, phenomena that generally no one reads the literature anyway because as bad as the literature is, it’s still possible by digging through it in excruciating depth and actually thinking hard in an analytic way doing detective work with the weak clues that it provides, it’s possible to do enormously better than you could realistically expect to do. We have television shows about medical detectives.

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