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In an extraordinary editorial and feature article, Nature, one of the world’s pre-eminent scientific journals, has effectively admonished the chair of the Harvard School of Public Health’s nutrition department, Walter Willett, for promoting over-simplification of scientific results in the name of public health and engaging in unseemly behavior towards those who venture conclusions that differ to his.
Willett, who is one of the most frequently quoted academic sources on nutrition in the news media, appears to have crossed a Rubicon when he denounced Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist at the US National Center for Health Statistics, for publishing a study that showed people who were overweight (but not obese) lived longer than those deemed normal weight. “This study is really a pile of rubbish, and no one should waste their time reading it,” he told National Public Radio.
Willett is well know for being forthright in his views; but describing Flegal’s work as a “pile of rubbish” appears to have ticked off obesity researchers and biostatisticians alike, for this isn’t the first study to arrive at such a finding – and researchers lined up to tell Nature why it was plausible: a little extra weight for those who were older or older and ill, could help rather than hurt. Moreover, Flegal herself responded with some sharp statistical criticism of Willett’s “rubbish” thesis.
Well I'll be . . . maybe there's hope for the medical profession after all. I wouldn't wish hard luck on anyone (nor on their career built of straw), but it wouldn't make me mad if all the Good Ol' Boy's Clubs that currently flourish in the medical community were forced to close up shop, and their members forced to seek radical retraining in the real world.
Thanks for sharing the good news.
Tex
It is suspected that some of the hardest material known to science can be found in the skulls of GI specialists who insist that diet has nothing to do with the treatment of microscopic colitis.
