Popular Distrust of Health Science: A Crowdsourced Solution

Benjamin Waterhouse's GraveBy Christopher Robertson

Enjoying the fall foliage in Mt. Auburn Cemetery yesterday, I came across this marker for Benjamin Waterhouse.  In the overwrought language that is appropriate on a grave marker:  “In 1800 he introduced to the new world the blessing of vaccination.  Overcame popular prejudice and distrust by testing it on his own children and thus established a title to the gratitude of future generations.”

No less today, there seems to be plenty of popular distrust of elite science.  (And it doesn’t help that so much of contemporary science is infected by conflicts of interest.)  Self-experimentation does have a long venerable history, which has recently become more prominent in the quantified self movement.  (I’m not sure about experimenting on my kid though.)

Tomorrow, I’m heading to NYC to make a pitch to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Fund, for major funding to launch a new project that would create a platform for robust, randomized experiments of lifestyle interventions (think: migraine management, diets, exercise regimens, nutritional supplements) for which there is virtually no FDA oversight and thus no regulatory imperative for rigorous scientific investigations.  Nonetheless, these lifestyle factors are the primary drivers of health and healthcare costs.  By crowdsourcing these sorts of experiments in an sound ethical framework robust against institutional corruption, I hope to develop gold-standard scientific knowledge with huge samples, but also build public engagement, public understanding, and public trust of health science.

The crowd uses Wikipedia to organize knowledge, and Indiegogo to invest in new health devices.  The crowd needs a platform to create knowledge too, especially through randomized interventions, which have the potential to actually change behaviors for the better and eliminate the confounding factors that undermine observational studies.

So, wish me luck in NYC tomorrow:   https://bit.ly/pioneerpitch

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