You Can Observe a Lot By Just Watching
“You Can Observe a Lot By Just Watching” was originally published at City Journal.
The Covid-19 pandemic has drawn attention to the struggle to find effective treatments and cures. When most people speak of the science of medicine, they are referring to a process of deduction, whereby investigators propose and test hypotheses to reach a factual conclusion. Perhaps the best known and understood example of the deductive method in medicine is the randomized controlled trial that scientists use to test new drugs, as in the case of remdesivir, the drug that the FDA has just approved for emergency use in severely ill hospitalized Covid-19 patients.
Randomized clinical trials are what people mean when they say that a drug has been “tested,” and such trials remain the scientific gold standard. In many cases, though, bedside observation or laboratory serendipity has led us to effective treatments and cures. In the case of medicine, inductive reasoning starts with observation and eventually moves to new recommendations or guidelines for standards of care.
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