The Scientific Method, COVID-19 School Opening Guidelines and Misinformation with Drs. Jack and Sara Gorman, Founders of Critica

This week's episode is amazing with Dr. Jack and Sara Gorman, the father-daughter team who have devoted their time to helping educate communities around making rational decisions about health and security through their non-profit Critica and their book, Denying To The Grave.

1. Founders of Critica - Led by Drs. Sara and Jack Gorman and Dr. David Scales, Critica is a community committed to making rational decisions about health and security. In a culture dominated by polarizing politics, and an abundance of unchecked misinformation, Critica exists to revolutionize the role of science in making rational health decisions.
2. Authors of the book Denying to the Grave - In Denying to the Grave, Drs. Sara Gorman and Jack Gorman explore the psychology of health science denial. This book points the way to a new and important understanding of how science should be conveyed to the public in order to save lives with existing knowledge and technology.

We covered a number of topics including:

1. The Scientific Method: "The scientific method is basically a mode of inquiry that's followed in the scientific field. It works really a little bit counter-intuitively through this idea of falsification. When you're doing a study, you set up a hypothesis that there's no effect of what you're looking at, and you try to disprove that. As time goes on, other people try to either replicate your findings or disprove them. After a while, a consensus is sort of achieved on what they actual science shows on a given time."
2. COVID-19 Opening Guidelines: "We can start looking at the science and the science is that children are clearly as able to be infected and spread infection as adults, even though they don't get as sick as adults and schools have lots of adults, they have teachers, they have kitchen staff, they have janitorial staff, children go home to their parents and their grandparents and other adults. Just because the children themselves don't get that sick, that by opening schools, you're going to prevent spread of the infection. And therefore this has to be done extremely cautiously. It can't be, let's just open the schools, no matter how much we want, because those children will be vectors for the virus and make people sick."
3. Should you send your kids to school: "It wold be good to understand - What's going on in your local situation. How high are cases and how well is the health department keeping track and testing? If the cases are very high, or if the health department is not collecting good data, then you might be on shaky ground. I would ask a lot of questions to the school on precautions. Are people wearing masks? You want a lower number of people there so they are not too close to each other. You want to know how well the facility is cleaned,m how close of an eye or is everyone keeping on the trend in the data? What you don't want to happen is to get behind a re-occurrence.You want to have some advance warning about that."
4. Misinformation: "Never in our lifetime, have we been so challenged by the dilemma of, on the one hand? You do want any information that might be lifesaving to get out there as quickly as possible. With, on the other hand, we want accurate information to get out there. We don't want to fill up the news wires with stories about things that may or may not work that are not true. And that's very, very difficult."
5. Loving our Children: "As a psychiatrist, one of the things I observed it did, it's very rare. It was very rare in my experience that you did much damage by loving [00:51:00] kids too much.