Don’t be duped (or even gooped….)

I may have invented a new word. As far as I can tell there is currently no verb “to goop”. However, goop does exist as both a common and proper noun. In the dictionary “goop” is defined as a sludge or slimy concoction. “Goop” (capital G) is a completely different box of frogs. It started off as a newsletter, authored by the actress Gwyneth Paltrow. It has since become a money-spinning “lifestyle brand”, and most recently, in the form of “The Goop Lab”, a 6-part Netflix “documentary” series. There is of course the obligatory website, a cursory look at which suggests that Goop is primarily a shop window for expensive cardigans and handbags, quack remedies and lifestyle hacks. To be fair, you’ll find various disclaimers on the website, and in Netflix series, that those behind Goop are not making medical claims. However, if people don’t buy their stuff they don’t make any money, so I suspect the hope is that the disclaimers will be quickly passed over and forgotten as you move on to various opportunities to part with your cash. I confess I’m not fashionable and I’m tight with my cash, so Goop wasn’t really on my radar. That is until the boss of the NHS mentioned it in a recent speech.  

Sir Simon Stevens is the Chief Executive of the National Health Service in England. He is clearly frustrated by health “fake news” and more importantly its effects. Political fake news is bad enough. And you could argue that it has led to a number of alarming consequences in recent years. But health fake news can have fatal consequences. Essentially his charge was that Goop, particularly with the reach given it by Netflix, was spreading health fake news widely and quickly.  In his remarks he grouped Goop with snake oil salesmen and anti-vaxers. It was, in his view, not a source of useful, health-related information. Nor was it providing health-related but basically harmless entertainment.

In response, beyond the widely reported and relatively anodyne statements put out by Goop directly, Gwyneth herself went on the record to reject this criticism. She feels it is unfair primarily because she claims that Goop doesn’t give health advice at all. And it might be that that the professionals are just over-reacting to bit of entertaining fluff, with the expected sniffiness of professionals and “experts”. One Guardian columnist while agreeing with what Stevens had said, reckoned there wasn’t too much to be concerned about. The public were smart enough to work out that Goop was an over-priced, modern snake oil operation. “It’s just a wellness brand – expecting it to hold toscientific/medical criteria is like expecting a lip gloss to do a handstand.” I’m not sure I get the allusion, but you get the idea.

So what about Gwyneth’s claims that advice isn’t being issued and scientific claims are not being made? On the Goop UK site, under the “About” tab, it’s not too difficult to find language that at least drops heavy hints that both scientific and medical thinking are central to Goop’s operations. Under “Wellness” we read “We have a tightly edited wellness shop of products vetted for efficacy by our in-house research scientists, and we’ve also created five vitamin and supplement protocols with doctors to cover all the bases.” (emphasis mine). And as for the Netflix series, it is called the Goop lab. I accept that on one level this all falls short of clinical advice and scientific claims. But at the very least there is a particular kind of signalling going on. It strikes me that they want a veneer of intelectual respectability, and think this comes from signalling the involvement of a degree of scientific and medical competence.

This isn’t just me being over sensitive (I am after all a scientist, and I do clinical research). Or if it is, I’m not alone. Dominic Pimenta, a cardiologist writing in the Independent put it this way:  “The problem is that the Goop“lab”  gives itself the appearance of scientific rigour, while in fact offering pseudoscientific laziness: they cite“trials and experiments” without evaluating them, and talk to “practitioners and doctors” without critiquing their conflicts of interest (of course the largest conflict of interest on the show is Goop's, a billion-dollar brand selling, among other things, alternative health products).” It appears Gwyneth and her chums want the respectability that comes from hinting that they are taking a scientific and responsible approach, without doing any of the hard (and expensive) work that this entails. This would after all impact on the bottom line.

Of course part of the problem is that we don’t really need Goop to tell us how to be well at all. We know what leads to wellness, and it is not expensively packaged supplements, coffee enemas, and various beads and balls stuck in unmentionable places. It’s simple, boring stuff like a diet with plenty of fresh fruit and veg, a reasonable amount of exercise and as much sleep as you need. Accompany these with a degree of intellectual stimulation (analogue or digital) and engagement, and a network of meaningful human relationships and psychologically you’ll probably be the right side of fine. None of this costs a fortune or need involve Goop or any other website.

Mind you, this will only keep you in temporal (and therefore temporary) good nick. Without wanting to sound deliberately preachy (which of course means I am about to), while these simple measures will keep us in good physical and psychological health, they won’t ultimately satisfy our most basic need. At the beginning of his “Confessions” Augustine of Hippo pointed out that “..our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.” It’s that restlessness that Goop and much else in modern life seeks to address or at least distract us from. Inevitably it fails.

Don’t be duped. To quote the Psalmist: “For he satisfies the longing soul.” (Psalm 107:9). The "he" in this case is of course the God who created and sustains us (whether we recognise it or not).

Surely you’re joking (Mr Feynman)?

Richard Feynman was a Nobel prize-winning physicist, who is perhaps best known these days for his role in the Rogers Commission which investigated the Challenger disaster. It was Feynman who famously worked out what had caused the disaster. He was as far from the stereotypical nerdy, bespectacled, white coated boffin as it is possible to get. When I was a student (of Physiology, not Physics) his memoir “Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman”[1] was a must read. One thing you won’t read in it is a quote about the philosophy of science that’s usually attributed to Feynman: “The philosophy of science is as useful to scientists and ornithology is to birds”. No one appears to be able to pin down where and when he said (or wrote) this – hence the brackets in the title of this blog piece. So it is possible that it’s not one of his aphorisms. But it captures fairly accurately his attitude toward philosophy in general and the philosophy of science in particular. It is an attitude probably shared by not a few physicists.

Sir Peter Medawar, also a Nobel prize winner (this time for Physiology and Medicine for his work on immunity), had a bit more time for philosophy, at least to the extent that he was quite fond of perpetrating it. He pointed out that if you ask a scientist about the scientific method, “….he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare.”[2]  What he was highlighting was that in professional science we have tended not to think about the intellectual procedures we follow, and we rarely explicitly teach them to students either. I was expected to learn my scientific methodology through a combination of observation and osmosis. Of course what this has meant is that when challenged to articulate how we do what we do, we are apt to come up short. That was Medawar’s point. Given the undoubted success of science in providing explanations for, and control over, all sorts of aspects of the natural world, this apparent vacuum about science itself was bound to be filled with something.

Of course on one level there have always been philosophers of science. The list includes the like of Aristotle who philosophised about science before science, as we know it now, existed. Bacon, Hume, Mill and Kant all had something to say on the topic. Scientists did from time to time contribute; Newton famously had a dig at hypothises. But throughout the 19^th Century a division began to set in between those on the outside talking about science, and an increasingly professional cadre of scientists on the inside doing the science. And it appeared that you could do it fairly successfully, without actually knowing too much about how you were doing it. Perhaps this is when (some) scientists started getting a bit sniffy about the philosophers. It didn’t help that sometimes the description of science from the outside was not flattering. In the 1960’s it was the philosopher Thomas Kuhn who talked about one set of new scientific theories conquering and displacing an older less powerful set as a “conversion experience that cannot be forced”[3]. Not entirely rational on Kuhn’s account. Interestingly, his views were shaped by examples from physics and cosmology; perhaps this explains the antipathy of at least some physicists to philosophers.

But thinking has to be done, concepts have to clarified, and this is the proper province of philosophers. Yet even today there remains a bit of a prejudice against burdening science students with thinking about what science is and how it works. I used to be in charge of a large health sciences module on research methods. As part of the module I introduced a session on the philosophy of science, so that students would be introduced to a coherent account of scientific methodology (the sort of thing that might avoid the situation described by Medawar). To say that my colleagues thought that this was the lowest of low priorities would be an understatement. It didn’t remain a part of their course for very long!

However, there are a number of issues within contemporary science that mean it is more important than ever that  students are trained properly in scientific methodology, and that as a profession we understand what we’re doing and to what standards. There’s no harm at all in understanding research ethics (ethics being a branch of philosophy no less), and being introduced to issues in research integrity. There has always been successful and unsuccessful science. Some experiments work, others fail. Some turn out to be misconceived and doomed to failure from the start, at least when viewed with scientific hindsight. That’s all grist for the scientific mill. But success and failure in scientific terms are not the same as good and bad science, or for that matter good and bad scientists. The bad ones are the ones that fabricate data and such like – in other words they lie and cheat. This is of sufficient concern for governments, agencies and institutions to have introduced research integrity codes of practice. Perhaps the best known example of these is the Office of Research Integrity in the US.

Research misconduct certainly happens (as the ORI website attests). It is not common, and it is not widespread (probably). Along with proper policing and an open culture, better training might well improve the situation. Clearer understanding of how science works and what is, and is not acceptable practice, can only be a good thing. But more is required. This is about something beyond science; one might even say that it requires knowledge of something above science that underpins good science. Policies and procedures, clear thinking (yes, aided by the philosophers) will get us so far. But at root, this is about right and wrong, it is about values. But where do we get the right values? This is not a scientific question at all. But science (as well as every other area of human endeavour) depends on it.

Birds don’t need ornithology, but scientists do need lots of resources from beyond science. Intellectually, the help of the philosophers should be welcome. But an underpinning morality is needed too. And where are we going to get that?  

1. R.P. Feynman (1985) "Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman". 

2. P. Medawar (1982)  "Induction and intuition in scientific thought" in "Pluto's Republic".

3.T.S.Kuhn (1962) "The structure of scientific revolutions"