Peer Review: Science & Medicine At The User End

My old battered Saturn faithfully got me through a sweltering summer day to the alternative medicine clinic, situated in a cool building where the atrium is done up like a rain-forest.  A small waterfall splashes quietly into a fish pool that you cross by a bridge to get to the elevator.

The samples of Avemar were waiting for me, three packs of fermented wheat germ.  The company alleges that  the compounds inhibit the growth of cancer cells.

I'd like to write that I have no information as to whether it's true or not, but of course I have plenty.

Scholar Google, a boon to those of us who like peer-review, reminds me again of how the average end-user of any therapy (mainstream or otherwise) can forget that knowledge grows sometimes at glacial speeds.  Mouse-trial after mouse-trial.  Preliminary data.  Suggestive findings.  In vivo, in vitro.  

And always remembering that inside my mother some strange mysterious thing is growing, sluggish almost to the point of obscenity, lethargic, indifferent rather than "malignant."  

The peer review process guides thinking.  We all do peer review of a sort, seeking others who can verify and confirm our observations of the world.  It keeps us from sliding off the rails.

But it too aims at indifference, dispassion.  Science can be terribly passionate, and should be, but it must be a cold observation of the truth that confirms or disconfirms a belief.

The one thing you keep hoping for under those circumstances is that the fermented wheat germ in the Avemar package is warm and alive, and curious, and filled with the opposite of that sludged, sluggish indifference, which is love.

Comments

[emma]

please God let it help.