Village office hours: please reduce »But it helped me!«

Know, what really worksSubjective experience and objective judgment must be very clearly set apart. Sentences like this don’t help: “Well, osteopathy has to be effective because I know this super good osteopath who definitely isn’t boozy, and my back was really better after that…!”

Why is this so important to me? Of course I am happy for everyone else who is better – no matter how. But we see, for example, with vaccines against COVID-19, that an individual assessment can be very problematic. You can hardly judge the “efficacy” yourself: if the vaccination works, you don’t pay attention to the “efficacy”, you just don’t get the disease. Or not so difficult, but it is not possible to compare how “hard” it would have been without “efficacy”. Effectiveness cannot be determined individually, but only with large comparison groups, one of which receives the vaccine and the other a placebo. It should then be objectively assessed how the number of infections and the severity of disease differ in the two groups.

It is the same when evaluating side effects: from personal experience it is difficult to draw conclusions about the whole. If you have the (great) misfortune of suffering a rare side effect, you will have to undergo inflammation of the heart muscle, for example, and subjectively and correctly curses vaccination. Many, many others have no side effects and benefit from vaccination protection. It is therefore not useful to generalize individual fear of side effects rather than consider the available data. Exactly for these purposes the whole bang was launched with approval and clinical studies – because it is known how deceiving subjective judgment can be.

Opposing freedom of facts

Of course, not everyone may be familiar with the existing evidence base for a wide variety of procedures. Then all that’s left is the humility to withhold personal evaluations of effectiveness. And if you’re now concerned that this will affect freedom of expression, it has to be said: If you ask to see how this opinion fits into the overall situation before expressing it, your right to an opinion can be given to anyone. will not be deprived of. When in doubt, your opinion is, according to this analysis, more correct – and that will help all of us. And with all the right to freedom of expression, there is no factual freedom. Effectiveness can be checked, safety too. We should do justice by it.