It was amusing to behold the reverential coverage of Brother André's elevation to sainthood in Rome this week. The sight of all those secular, hardheaded journalists piously describing his holy work was a bit much. Evidently he was the Rocket Richard of saints, with (some people say) 125,000 miracles ascribed to him.
I know it's rude to be critical of other people's religious beliefs. Still, when I saw all those crutches piled up in Montreal, I had an eerie feeling that we had been transported back to the Middle Ages. What's next? Trial by fire?
I'm sure Brother André was a great guy, and you can argue that the term "miracle" is just a metaphor for the amazing effect he had on people. But it's not a metaphor to the Vatican - or to the millions of pilgrims who flock to St. Joseph's Oratory in Montreal to pray to St. André and buy vials of holy oil in the gift shop. At the Vatican, a "miracle" is precisely defined as the sudden remission of a life-threatening condition that cannot be explained by science. This remission must occur shortly after the sick person and/or his family have prayed to the deceased holy person, and nobody else. In this case, the miracle cure involved a 9-year-old boy who recovered from an irreversible coma after a car accident in 1999.
Should we really be celebrating this type of superstitious guff? It doesn't take a hardened atheist to ask. As my colleague André Picard pointed out the other day, people would be a lot better off if they put their faith in science instead of holy oil.
So far so good. The trouble is, my own cupboards are filled with vials of holy oil, and I bet yours are too. The only difference is that we don't call them holy oil. We call them "Vitamin D," "glucosamine," "flaxseed oil," and "baby aspirin." Instead of being endorsed by the Vatican, they are endorsed by health experts with varying degrees of credibility, and promoted endlessly in the media. In my the kitchen is more holy oil, with names like "quinoa," "kefir" and "low-fat probiotic yogurt." My cereal package has a panel called "directions for use" on the side, as if it were medicine. We really have no idea if this stuff does any good, but it makes us feel good to consume it and hey, it can't hurt. Even men of science (especially men of science) are not immune. I once had a Finnish doctor who swore by garlic pills, and who could blame him? All his Finnish patients lived to be 95 years old.
As modern, educated people, we doubt that God can save us. But maybe science can. For example, thanks to science, we are pretty sure that leeches aren't that useful for curing gout.
If only all such scientific findings were so clear cut. Unfortunately, they are not. And now, there's a mounting body of evidence that many of the scientific findings we thought were so definitive are about as good for us as our ancestors' belief in leeches.
The skeptic's skeptic of the medical world is a Greek doctor named John Ioannidis, whose work is profiled this month in an eye-opening piece in The Atlantic. He was struck by how many medical findings are refuted by later findings - on subjects as various as the benefits of exercise, optimum levels of alcohol consumption, ways to ward off Alzheimer's, the right amount of sleep, whether aspirin can prolong your life, the effect of being overweight on life span, and whether angioplasties work better than pills to unclog heart arteries. What he's found is that even the most highly regarded research findings - hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women, for example - are routinely overturned. In other words, today's conventional wisdom is often tomorrow's debunk.
The reasons for this are fascinating. Researchers tend to focus on sexy and exciting research, because that's what gets published and makes careers. But because of subconscious biases, as well as the extremely difficult task of devising bulletproof research studies, most of these sexy and exciting results turn out to be wrong. Even if correct, most studies detect only modest effects that make little if any difference in real life. The same is true for most drug studies.
In other words, an aspirin a day could be as good for you as prayer, but it might upset your stomach.
The scientific establishment hasn't challenged Dr. Ioannadis's findings. In fact, he is in demand around the world. Yet despite the fact that so much medical knowledge turns out to be flawed, we're getting more and more medicine all the time. Fifteen years ago, health care costs ate up around a quarter of Canada's provincial budgets. Today, health care costs eat up nearly half the budgets. Are we twice as healthy as we used to be? Maybe not.
I'm not saying that our faith in science is entirely misplaced. All I'm saying is that the Vatican needs to manufacture new saints as a marketing device, and that researchers and drug companies need to manufacture new findings, new procedures, new products and new advice. Some are genuine breakthroughs. But science proceeds in increments, and most are not. The evidence is often contradictory and unclear. And we, the public, are part of the problem. We demand certainty. We want our tests and pills and potions, and we're angry if we don't get them. And so, before we go to bed at night, we no longer say our prayers. We pop down our pills, and hope they'll do the trick instead.