978-1572305441

130 A MIND APART
to unravel these mysteries. For parents, this gulf is painful to experience
and to tolerate. It can sometimes drive parents to years of fruitless exploration.
The temptation to weave a convincing story to help parents
understand their tragedy is strong. After all, parents have come to the
expert for an informed opinion. I recognize this is a powerful encounter,
and I am keen not to disappoint them. I am painfully aware of the
limits of science, but I try not to transfer that anxiety to parents and not
to pull any junk science out of the hat at the last moment to make them
feel better. Part of the necessary therapeutic alliance is trust and respect.
As the doctor who makes the diagnosis I am supposed know what I’m
talking about. But the story I have to tell does not have an overall narrative,
a grand and logical structure. It’s a pastiche, a collage of isolated
bits of information. It is a truncated narrative; not all the pieces fit together.
Each part of the story is told from one particular perspective,
and to be faithful to the science, disparate narratives need to be brought
together. But the overall story is unsatisfying at the end. Ultimately it
does not cohere. It’s like a modern novel, difficult to read.
The allergists and leaky gut doctors and scientists have no such
qualms. They cheerfully ignore the abyss between evidence and interpretation
in their stories and plow ahead, writing stories that cohere,
filling in the gaps with suppositions and guesses, confident that what
they are saying can accommodate any intrusion of evidence. They glide
over these gaps with facility. I envy their brazen confidence. I envy their
ability to communicate a story that makes sense.
Good science is located at the holes in knowledge. It lives in the
spaces between findings and stories. It explores them, lives in them, and
celebrates them. It is the disjunction that fascinates the good scientist
and distinguishes him or her from the junk scientist. The writer Annie
Dillard says that the scientist is like the tightrope walker, who must
never look down for fear of becoming aware of the emptiness of the
foundation—the lure of simple explanations, the impact of the method
on the findings, of the context on the interpretation of results. The
point is that not all interpretations are equal, not all stories are the
same, not all evidence is of equal value. There are rules of evidence. We
can tell good science from junk science once we realize that good science
is not the search for truth but an attempt to learn the error of our
ways.
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