Iocaste, guest-blogging at Majikthise, quotes the below Wall Street Journal Op-Ed at length:

“The belief that there are such things as witches is so essential a part of the faith that obstinately to maintain the opposite opinion manifestly savors of heresy.” So begins “Malleus Maleficarum” (”The Hammer of Witches”), a book commissioned by Pope Innocent VIII and published in 1484. For three centuries “The Hammer” was the principal reference for witch hunters determined to punish sorcerers and rid them of the world.

A no less sweeping manifesto recently appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). It called for total extermination of contemporary witchery — “financial conflicts of interest” — caused by the malign influence of pharmaceutical and device manufacturers in academic health centers. It argues that these companies pervert altruism, misinform physician education and cause breaches of scientific integrity in medical research. . . .

The [American Board of Internal Medicine] Foundation, like the medieval church, liberally taxes without consent [by charging certification fees] to fund its crusade against “profit-seeking in medicine.” . . .

In their zeal, both “The Hammer” and the JAMA cited scripture selectively. “The Hammer” trolled the Bible and ecclesiastical works for references to support the existence of witches and witchcraft, which remained uncontested until the retraction of anti-witch doctrines centuries later. The JAMA article baldly states that “a systematic review of the medical literature on [industry] gifting . . . found that an overwhelming majority of [commercial] interactions had negative results on patient care,” although the source it cites explicitly says: “No study used patient outcome measures.” The JAMA piece reminds us that industry marketing influences the prescribing habits of physicians. But it repeatedly neglects documented evidence that physicians frequently fail to prescribe appropriate drugs according to evidence-based guidelines for nearly all diseases.

WSJ scores a minor point by noting that the studies mentioned in the editorial did not include clinical data. But they engage in apparently deliberate equivocation by using that point to discredit the actual claim made, regarding the much broader concept of “negative results on patient care” - which can easily be demonstrable without clinical outcome data (though would be better demonstrated with it). The point about sub-optimal prescription patterns is simple misdirection - the (well-documented, and much-criticized) fact that most doctors write the same prescriptions over and over, without close adherence to best-practices standards, will hardly be improved on if they shift to letting perky former college cheerleaders tell them what to prescribe in exchange for a paltry bribe.

What’s really interesting about this, though, is its place in the growing anti-science stance of the right wing. The Bush administration’s outright medievalism on scientific questions is well-documented, as is their wholesale dismissal and distortion of data on science-related policy issues, in favor of positions dictated by their religious or corporate supporters. But it is important to recognize this as a characteristic tactic of the right wing in general, not just the Bush fringe.

The basic position of the right wing on scientific issues that cut across their religious or economic interests is that nothing is ever believable. Distorting the honorable scientific position of keeping all questions open to new data, the right holds that this means nothing science tells us is ever true, or should ever be accepted. The fact that a question can be raised about a given scientific claim means that that claim is “controversial” - whether or not the question raised has actually been answered in a way that implicates the prevailing consensus, or answered at all, or even has any data whatsoever behind it. (Cf. William Hurlbut’s imaginary “altered nuclear transfer” cells, or “intelligent design”, for examples.) Thus every scientific question is controversial, since science allows that challenges can always be raised. Thus, it is always true to say that “science hasn’t proven _____”, and never proper to regard a scientific claim as reliable; for the right wing, “proven” means necessarily true (a category philosophers generally regard as populated only by purely logical constructs), while “reliable” means “proven”. (In clinical-ethics terms, right wingers are in “clinical equipoise” about every scientific fact ever discovered, where the alternative is anything they want it to be no matter what. Now that’s keeping an open mind!)

Thus, the great thing about being a right-wing critic of scientific consensus is that you never have to back up your own claims. To support their points, those advocating for change, or for the adoption of any new policy of any kind, must “prove” (in the right-wing’s impossible sense) whatever they are claiming, while those opposed to change merely have to repeat, after every new study, “it still isn’t ‘proven’”. Conservatism being defined as opposition to change, this is a strategy that works perfectly for conservatives, and has the bonus of making them sound like sophisticated philosophers of science while requiring absolutely no scientific knowledge at all.

From there, it’s simply a matter of putting the rhetorical touches on it. Creationists like to claim science is infected with “a naturalistic bias”; WSJ prefers the historical analogy of equating science with witch-hunting. Since factual claims have no meaning, none of this has to make sense; still, the arrogance of it is breathtaking. The JAMA editorialists cite studies showing impact on patient treatment from the non-patient-directed interference of pharmaceutical advertising; WSJ admits that the advertising is actually effective in distoring doctors’ treatment patterns, then calls this fact-based criticism a witch-hunt. (The alleged reason is that the studies could have been made stronger with more data - a point that makes little difference since WSJ conceded the main point anyway.) Witches, of course, don’t exist. WSJ is not merely calling for more data (and more data, and more data . . . remember how much data it takes to “prove” anything to the right wing?): they are claiming that there is no such thing as deleterious interference with doctors’ prescribing decisions. (But they said the advertising was effective . . .)

This is true in the same sense that there is no such thing as global warming, evolution, or tobacco-caused cancer. Only in the latter case have corporate shills been this shameless in declaring science irrelevant to science policy. That level of intellect, and discourse, is now the conservative standard for evidence-based decisionmaking. It’s going to hurt if we let them get away with it.