Politics
Daniel Roth
Last week, a research team from Stanford University School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System published an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine suggesting that new drugs be labeled not only with what we know about them (which they now are), but also with an accounting of what we don’t know.
The Stanford researchers’ effort to clarify the ambiguity surrounding the comparative effectiveness of recently approved drugs is laudable. But their proposal that the FDA begin labeling drugs with measures of this comparative effectiveness both ignores the realities of how pharmaceutical innovation happens today and endorses a flawed decisionmaking model that could foster false security in patients and undermine their medical caregivers—the professionals who are trained to help each particular patient discriminate among drugs of the same class in a way a label cannot. Doctors can and do disagree about what constitutes a statistically significant difference between two drugs. Giving patients a nudge in the direction of involving themselves in that decision—and the confidence to do so—without properly equipping them to make informed decisions will diminish rather than improve the overall quality of patient care.
Culture Politics
Kevin Hilke
Rallying supporters to a political cause, rallying supporters of a team, rallying the adherents of a faith, and rallying oneself to make a romantic commitment all take this form: pretending that we know something (usually about the future [i.e., "We will beat Cal"], but often about the past [i.e., "Christ died for our sins"] or the present [i.e., "The American people want change"]) that we do not and cannot empirically know. In the romantic sphere, as in political sphere, the distinction between lying and failing applies: a divorce due to marital issues does not mean that the parties lied when they said “Till death do us part”; it means that they decided, gradually or suddenly, that fidelity to the truth of their everlasting love has proved unfounded.
Culture
Kevin Hilke
Between the two idioms in which the event was advertised—as a “lecture” (an academic idiom) “in commemoration” of Richard Rorty (an elegiac idiom)—Habermas chose to lean heavily toward the second, the elegiac, in the form of hewing to Rorty’s life and work to the exclusion of other topics and ultimately to the extent that Habermas could have been anyone, a generic if eloquent deliverer of Rorty’s biography and intellectual lineage. Habermas wasn’t Habermas as Habermas, the thinker with unique ideas that engage uniquely with Rorty’s; he was our leader in group tribute. And so the man who asked Habermas, at the conclusion of his remarks, a question about his relative silence on how the new prominence of new media might affect his thinking about the public sphere was told, by Habermas, that such a question was inappropriate, that we were “here to talk about Dick.”
