Theodore Schwartz: recommendation

Transcript context

…If you think about medicine as a whole, what do you think is your most nonconformist medical belief, the view that you hold that the other people you respect would think is a little weird or too speculative, or maybe just flat out disagree with? [sighs] That’s a tough one because I tend to be very scientifically motivated in the opinions that I give. I try to follow the literature. I tend not to be out on a limb too much. I will say there was a period of time in my career when I was starting to do minimally invasive neurosurgical procedures. What that means is, instead of doing the procedures that I had learned, where you open up the side of the head and take off the skull and pull down the muscle and go around the brain, I was learning and pioneering surgeries where we go in through the nostrils with endoscopes or make little incisions in the eyelid. At the time when I was doing those operations, most neurosurgeons thought they were crazy, and that they shouldn’t be done, and that they were unsafe. It was only because I was doing them at the time, and I knew that I could do it, and the other surgeons had never seen it done. They had never experienced it, so they didn’t realize what could be accomplished. I think there are some instances where you’ve experienced something first-hand, and other people haven’t experienced it, and you may hold a belief that’s different than them. Ultimately, science will prevail. Ultimately, the burden of proof is on you to show that your new technique is as good or better than the other technique. I wouldn’t expect them to believe me until I was able to prove it by writing dozens and dozens of articles, and having other people who also were doing that surgery so it was reproducible, to prove that it was correct. But in general, I tend to follow the science. I’m not much of a wingnut. Do you think there are areas of science, though, where the institutions are so screwed up that you don’t actually trust the product of what is coming out, and there’s some systematic bias in the ideas being generated?…

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