Share this page!

Rachel Thomas Profile picture
Twitter logo
25 Sep, 13 tweets, 5 min read
Medicine, like all of science, is political:
- which questions get asked
- which projects get funded
- how debates get framed
- who the researchers are
- context of data (what categories, what labels, which biases, what is left out)
- whose suffering is counted 1/
Science does not just progress inevitably, independent of funding and politics and framing and biases. 2/
Activists of ACT UP pushed USA govt & medical establishment to stop ignoring HIV/AIDS in the late 80s/early 90s, and to invest more in researching & addressing it. The huge progress that has happened in HIV/AIDS research & treatment would not have happened otherwise. 3/
Tuskegee Syphilis Trials on Black men
Women diagnosed w hysteria
Multiple Sclerosis called "faker’s disease"
Many see these as relics of the past, when people were biased, when medicine contained unknowns

People are *still* deeply biased & medicine *still* contains many unknowns
ME/CFS (which disproportionately impacts women) has been a problem for decades, yet receives minimal research funding. This is a political problem, not purely a scientific one. 5/

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32568148/ Graph with NIH-funded diseases on x-axis, 2017 Actual fundin
There is a pernicious cycle around lack of funding making it harder to do the research needed to justify the funding 6/

Nearly half of women w/ autoimmune diseases report being labeled as “chronic complainers” by their doctors in the 5 years (on average) they spend seeking a diagnosis. This impacts what data is recorded in their charts, what symptoms are counted. 7/

psmag.com/social-justice…
Medical data is not just objective truths. It can be missing, biased, and incorrect. 8/

Pointing out deep methodological flaws of a medical trial, which shaped ME/CFS treatment guidelines & irreversibly worsened many patients, inherently became a political debate.

(CDC updated their guidelines; UK is stalling #PublishThatGuideline) 9/

statnews.com/2016/09/21/chr…
A doctor w/ VC funding to help hospitals cut costs by reducing medical care is a clear conflict of interest, yet he is given a platform in a major publication.

Biases & conflicts of interests show up in more subtle ways too. 10/

Ex of disingenuous framing in scientific debate: be technically accurate yet deeply misleading (for general audience) by hyper-focusing on blood-brain barrier, not mentioning the scores of research on neurological & brain changes in #LongCovid patients, ignoring broader issue 11/ Spreadsheet listing 7 academic papers on how Long Covid impawhat’s right next to it? The vagus nerve, which controls a
As @ahandvanish points out, dealing with tens of millions of newly disabled people is potentially going to be very expensive to many different institutions. 12/

The politics of medicine is particularly noticeable around health policy, and all aspects of covid have implications for policy

Efforts to minimize covid, including #LongCovid, have the same funders & playbook as efforts to deny the climate crisis 13/

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Rachel Thomas

Rachel Thomas Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @math_rachel

Rachel Thomas Profile picture
23 Sep
Queensland police to trial AI tool designed to predict and prevent domestic violence incidents. This raises a number of concerns 1/
theguardian.com/australia-news… h/t @benhutchinson
The police superintendent says that they have removed raw data about ethnicity and geography as part of effort to avoid bias.

This does not prevent bias, at all. Machine learning is all about picking up latent variables. More on this topic: 2/

Almost half the women murdered by an intimate partner in Qld had previously been labelled by police as the *perpetrator* of domestic violence.

All data has context, and "racism, poor community relationships, misogyny" part of the context of this data 3/

theguardian.com/australia-news…
Read 5 tweets
Rachel Thomas Profile picture
19 Sep
Corporate-funded efforts to downplay covid are using strategies straight out of the climate denial playbook, funding contrarian scientists, misleading petitions, social media bots,...

blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/09/13… @GYamey @gorskon 1/ Jeremy Baskin at the Melbourne School of Government has note
In many cases, it is literally the same billionaires & corporations funding climate change denial and covid minimization, opposing public health measures 2/ On 9 April 2021, Open Democracy reported that Oxford Univers
It is critical for physicians, scientists, & public health officials to realize that they are not dealing with an orthodox scientific debate, but a well-funded sophisticated science denialist campaign based on ideological & corporate interests 3/ How best can scientists push back against the AIER and GBD?
Read 6 tweets
Rachel Thomas Profile picture
13 Sep
[Faulty] assumptions in design & deploy of AI systems:
- user is an individual
- individual prioritizes personal well-being
- text & context can be separated
- the only useful knowledge is that produced through rational instrumentality...
jasonedwardlewis.medium.com/from-impoveris… @jaspernotwell The epistemology problem stems from a series of assumptions
"...This makes AI system engineers blind to vital aspects of human existence — such as trust, care, and community — that are fundamental to how intelligence actually operates." 2/ The epistemology problem stems from a series of assumptions
"The people who produced that data were not asked if it be used this way, they were not compensated for this use, & the use does not benefit them directly.

Indigenous communities have long histories with people like this. We recognize them for what they are: colonizers" 3/ What does this mean for the goose presently laying all the g
Read 4 tweets
Rachel Thomas Profile picture
6 Sep
One depressing aspect of the pandemic is how countries refuse to learn from other countries. Within a country, states refuse to learn from other states. Many refuse to learn from history. Many believe in exceptionalism, that they won’t face what everyone else has. 1/
I still remember first seeing the images of tent hospitals in Lombardy and realizing that this could happen everywhere. Jeremy & I did a data analysis and wrote at the time 2/
There is a 100-year history of flu pandemics causing long-term neurological problems (tweet from March 2020) 3/
Read 15 tweets
Rachel Thomas Profile picture
25 Aug
75% of people aged 16+ in UK have both doses of covid vaccine & there are currently 700 covid deaths PER WEEK in UK

Some Aus leaders want to reopen when vaccines for ages 16+ hit 70-80%. If our death rate is proportionate to UK, that would mean 266 Australians dying PER WEEK. 1/
Many in UK have already had covid, so it's likely that the AUS death rate could be higher than that 266 ppl per week

75% of ppl 16+ is only 60% of the whole population. 60% against Delta is not enough. We need to vaccinate children & we need rates ~90%. 2/
Some point out how society accepts deaths from flu. In 2019, there were 486 flu deaths in Australia (averages to 9 per week). 2017 was particularly bad with 1,255 flu deaths (avg 24 per week).

What we are facing with covid is over 10x more. These are not the same. 3/
Read 4 tweets
Rachel Thomas Profile picture
19 Aug
I’m hearing more people in Australia talk about wanting to "live with Covid", even though only 22% of the population is fully vaccinated. #LivingWithCovid (combined with low vaccination rates) means… 1/
Living with Covid (+ low vaccine rates) is:
- Delaying surgery for cancer, organ transplants, brain tumors
- waiting an hour to get an ambulance after heart attack
- turning medical emergency into a catastrophe, b/c the hospital is maxed out
- millions disabled with LongCovid 2/
Living with covid is not just the death count, it is 10-30% of so-called "mild" cases becoming permanently disabled with LongCovid, which can include debilitating neurological effects and constant pain. 3/

financialpost.com/news/economy/l…
Read 7 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @math_rachel has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @math_rachel!

Read all threads by @math_rachel

:(