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International Journal of Epidemiology 2002;31:1124-1127
© International Epidemiological Association 2002
Point-Counterpoint |
Commentary: The epidemiology of self-deprecation
University of Wisconsin Medical School, Department of Population Health Sciences, 610 Walnut Street, 707C WARF Madison, WI 53705-2397, USA. E-mail: fjnieto@wisc.edu
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
When Mervyn Susser wrote his 1989 commentary ‘Epidemiology today: A thought-tormented world’1 he probably did not realize how prophetic his words would be. During the ensuing decade, epidemiology journals were inundated by self-critiques and soul-searching commentaries. For Susser, epidemiology had abandoned its substantive-oriented nature to become a technique-oriented discipline, more concerned with its analytical methods than with its primary goals of guiding disease prevention and public health. Further elaborations of these criticisms urged a renewed emphasis on the population and societal perspectives of epidemiology.2–5
From an entirely different perspective, however, there were those who claimed that epidemiology was already too involved with public health.6–9 According to these critics, epidemiologists had become data torturers with an agenda of ‘social agitation’ and constantly made exaggerated recommendations aimed at promoting costly and invasive public policy interventions. For these authors, epidemiology is not a real science but a mere collection of inductive tools useful
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