Pharmacists need to fight back against the rise in anti-science, says Professor Donald Cairns, head of school for pharmacy at Robert Gordon University.

We are witnessing a rise in anti-scientific thinking. In America, President Donald Trump has appointed an adviser who denies climate change is caused by human activity. He has also appointed a health adviser who believes vaccines cause conditions such as autism.

Enough of experts

Here in the UK, leading Conservative politician, Michael Gove, was quoted last year as saying he had “had enough of experts”, simply because the advice he received did not fit with his political views. Meanwhile, large sections of the media regularly publish articles promoting ‘natural’ non-evidence-based therapies, such as homeopathy, acupuncture and massage therapy.

Why us?

What has this to do with pharmacists? Well, unless they have another type of scientist as a friend or in the family, the only scientifically literate person the public encounter on a daily basis is their local pharmacist. If you disagree, remember it wasn’t that long ago that Boots ran an advertising campaign describing the pharmacist as the “Scientist in the High St”.

Responsibility

This places a responsibility on pharmacists to provide not only excellent pharmaceutical care, but to be the voice of reason and to speak with authority on matters of scientific interest. It is important in these digital days of instant knowledge retrieval that pharmacists know a little bit more about a topic than the person with Google on their smartphone.

As students, every pharmacist studied physical and biological sciences as the foundations for their practice. This knowledge should not be forgotten after qualification and should provide the evidence base for all clinical practice.

Science, however, is more than a list of facts to be learned for exams. It is a way of thinking about issues and problems by applying a set of principles requiring every hypothesis to be confirmed by rigorous experimentation and review before it is accepted as genuine. Pharmacists have all been trained in this discipline while undergraduates and were required to demonstrate their proficiency by examination.

Some aspects of science are difficult to grasp. I, for one, still can’t get my head around immunology, for example. However, only by promoting a scientifically rigorous view of the world are we going to provide the best care for our patients.