Controlled Experiments Show MDs Dismissing Evidence Due to Ideology

upstart writes:

When it comes to evaluating COVID treatments, MDs are only human:

[...] We'd like to think people like doctors would carefully evaluate evidence before making treatment decisions, yet a correlation between voting patterns and ivermectin prescriptions suggests that they don't.

Of course, a correlation at that sort of population level leaves a lot of unanswered questions about what's going on. A study this week tries to fill in some of those blanks by performing controlled experiments with a set of MDs. The work clearly shows how ideology clouds professional judgments even when it comes to reading the results of a scientific study.

The work primarily focuses on a panel of about 600 critical care physicians-the people who are most likely to be the first source of treatment for those who develop severe COVID-19. It also involved a panel of 900 people who aren't involved in medicine to provide a comparison population. While some initial surveys were done earlier, most of the data comes from the spring of 2022, long after COVID-19 vaccines had established their effectiveness in limiting severe symptoms of the disease. By then, a couple of widely hyped "cures"-hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin-had been definitively ruled out as therapeutic.

All the participants were asked to self-rate on a seven-point scale, from very liberal to very conservative. For most studies, the answers from the liberal and conservative participants were evaluated in terms of how greatly they differed from those of the moderate participants.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.