Science is not the oppressor.

So, please just be a little sensitive when you insult my first and true love. Yeah, it’s not perfect. I KNOW THAT, that’s why I’m trying to change it. Please don’t say its completely politicized. Have you been to medical research labs? Have you seen the GREAT work people are doing to cure things like breast and cervical cancer? It’s just insulting that you brush it off so easily.

Yeah the FDA sucks big time, but you demean the work I do with your comments.

Oh and probiotics work, just not at the low concentrations they put in the “active naturals” yogurts. Just get organic yogurt or take probiotic pills (they’re expensive but they work). Oh and just a warning: DO NOT take probiotics if you have compromised immunity.

Oh yeah, and douching doesn’t work, I agree.

Another commenter Kayt wrote:

As a female scientist with training in pharmacology, I can both understand and shake my head at the medicine-is-a-feminist-issue rant. No, paternalistic doctors are not good. But if you have a bad infection, you need to get rid of it.

Most of us who are reading this blog grew up with clean communities and ready access to antibiotics, so we fail to fully appreciate that infectious disease can be very damaging, if not fatal. Many antibiotics are derived from microbes and other natural sources, and they are often more concentrated than the helpful organisms/compounds that you find in yogurt or garlic. As a result, the antibiotics that you purchase are often at least if not more effective than the less concentrated source product, and efficacy matters if your infection is extensive. If you want to speak out against medical condescension towards women, a sometimes poor attention to education by people in medical fields, or excessive corporatization of medicines, then I am with you. However, if you’re attacking the objective study and effective treatment of infectious disease as being inherently masculine, you risk alienating those who devote their time to finding effective treatments for everyone. In addition, I have heard the Western-medicine-and doctors-are- anti-feminist-argument from people who won’t vaccinate their kids, and that is a dangerous route to take. Obviously yeast infections aren’t usually as serious as many diseases, but once you start following an overgeneral line of reasoning, you really set yourself up for primitive conditions for women (and children and men)-which seems pretty anti-feminist to me.

Those who bash science seem unable to make a distinction between scientific methods and the patriarchy of the scientific community. It is healthy to criticize individual scientific studies because of specific flaws in reasoning due to the authors’ biases. It is healthy to criticize the social aspect of scientific activity that shuts out certain members of society and their associated ideas. However, it is very unhealthy and counterproductive to reject science as a whole and trust anecdotal evidence over properly-controlled studies. Using anecdotes over controlled studies, using personal experience over real statistics, is a common practise of bigots who make false generalizations about entire groups of people. Anti-intellectualism is not progressive. Anti-intellectualism and ignorance are the problem.

Over at Shameless, and inexplicably filed under “Geek Chic”, Thea blogged about a study of the relationship between women’s fertility and hip-swaying:

A Friday Funny (though this could also fall under the category of a Friday Cry-y): Women sway their hips the most when they’re least fertile, according to Queen’s University study.

Scientists at Queen’s are apparently blowing the minds of current zoology, claiming that women, contrary to a popular belief, make themselves less, not more, attractive when they’re “fertile.”

The study got 40 women (my goodness! 40 whole women!!) to wear clothes with special markers on them so that computers could track their movements, and then asked the women to walk up and down in a 6-metre area.

I keep on trying to come up with a clever critique of this study, but honestly I’m speechless. How and who came up with the idea for this study? Why is the degree of swayiness of my hips considered important? What is humanity supposed to do with this breakthrough information? And when are they gonna do a study on the boys, so I know when my man is most virile? Vomit!!

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