Tuesday, March 15, 2016

"Deconstructing the Evidence-Based Discourse in Health Sciences: Truth, Power and Fascism"

I am not making this up:
Abstract
Background Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena.
Objective The philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari proves to be useful in showing how health sciences are colonised (territorialised) by an all-encompassing scientific research paradigm – that of post-positivism – but also and foremost in showing the process by which a dominant ideology comes to exclude alternative forms of knowledge, therefore acting as a fascist structure.
Conclusion The Cochrane Group, among others, has created a hierarchy that has been endorsed by many academic institutions, and that serves to (re)produce the exclusion of certain forms of research. Because ‘regimes of truth’ such as the evidence-based movement currently enjoy a privileged status, scholars have not only a scientific duty, but also an ethical obligation to deconstruct these regimes of power.
Key words: critique, deconstruction, evidence-based, fascism, health sciences, power.
   This is the kind of nonsense, loosely derived from the worst of recent Continental philosophy and literary theory, that has taken over so much of the humanities and social sciences. This is also the same kind of gibberish that shows up in PC / SJW mumbo-jumbo. A lot of it doesn't particularly mean anything at all. And the parts that do actually mean something are worse...
   I tried reading this, but it really, actually is total horseshit. It's appalling to me that nonsense like this can survive even in the weaker regions of the humanities...but that it should get a toehold in medicine....shudder...
   Oh and: it's worth reading the first paragraph just to see people--apparently in all seriousness--use the term 'microfascism'...

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Don't worry too much. A decade later after this attempted deconstruction, Cochrane is doing fine:
http://community-archive.cochrane.org/cochrane-reviews/cochrane-database-systematic-reviews-numbers

6:13 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Whew!
What a relief!

12:51 PM  

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