Stegenga on Medical Nihilism
Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.
How good is modern medicine? Almost everyone loves to hate it, but routinely for the wrong reasons. We are used to hearing criticism of medicine mostly from cranks and quacks and deniers and conspiracy theorists, and it’s 98% grift, either a pitch for bullshit “alternatives” or influencer clickbait.
I’d like to recommend an extremely skeptical, high-quality take on the state of art and science of medicine, from the podcast EconTalk, interviewing Jacob Stegenga. Stegenga is harsh but absolutely fair. He gives credit to medicine where due (and it certainly gets some), but only where due.
This is the kind of criticism medicine actually needs.