– “to tar professions such as medicine and science with the conspiracy brush is not constructive.”
I agree. It both causes, and is itself, polarisation of what should be a discussion. That’s why I’m trying to draw the sides together; I’m going after the the root cause, not the symptom. But…
– “I am very reluctant to talk about personal matters openly in such a public forum.”
Isn’t everyone? That seems to me a big part of the problem. We get all sorts of comments, generally from one ‘side’ or the other, but never with any perspective of the experiences that lead to the motivations behind them. The centre is missing. Instead we stand like massed armies opposed across a battlefield, when we should be sat in the middle, in a circle, raising one finger when we have a point we wish to contribute. As I said before, dividing us is Mammon’s primary technique. With us all fighting each other, Mammon needs no weapons, Mammon just harvests the casualties with a laugh.
All the technical details in your comment ring true; they seem much like the material in Goldacre’s books. I have been looking at Goldacre’s Twitter stream recently; he was lamenting “lockdown” boredom, but celebrating Opensafely, his and his team’s secure medical data analytics project, which looks like an excellent piece of work.