Apologies for not having read much of the rest of the thread - was just there listening live - but rabbit-holing off an AIBU thread about AI, came across this. A pithy summary of evidence based medicine, it really does highlight the scary absurdity of HW's comment about statistics (24 hours on, I remember it as something like, "I can't think of any other medical condition in which statistics are permitted to limit or withhold treatment"?!)
...evidence-based medicine (EBM). Emerging in the 1990s with the unassailable goal of improving care, EBM challenged practices based on habit and tradition by insisting decisions be grounded in rigorous research, ideally randomized controlled trials. First championed at McMaster University by physicians David Sackett and Gordon Guyatt, EBM quickly hardened into orthodoxy, embedded in curricula, accreditation standards and performance metrics that reshaped clinical judgment into compliance with statistical averages and confidence intervals. The gains were real: effective therapies spread faster, outdated ones were abandoned, and an ethic of scientific accountability took hold...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/nov/09/healthcare-artificial-intelligence-ai
It's even more interesting in that the article (have only skimmed) then shifts into what we lost with EBM / its limitations, and this is, I think, in part what HW has monetised and exploits in the interview - a post-truth cynicism about facts plus materialist individualism... So she becomes the superior expert in that she recognises (thanks to her Zeitgeisty medical expertise) that feeling is paramount and HJ's dry stats just can't match up.
My bold.
But as the model transformed medicine, it narrowed the scope of clinical encounters. The messy, relational and interpretive dimensions of care – the ways physicians listen, intuit and elicit what patients may not initially say – were increasingly seen as secondary to standardized protocols. Doctors came to treat not singular people but data points. Under pressure for efficiency, EBM ossified into an ideology: “best practices” became whatever could be measured, tabulated and reimbursed. The complexity of patients’ lives was crowded out by metrics, checkboxes and algorithms. What began as a corrective to medicine’s biases paved the way for a new myopia: the conviction that medicine can and should be reduced to numbers.
You could apply the last sentence to HW's brand: What began as a corrective to medicine’s biases paved the way for a new myopia: the conviction that medicine can and should be reduced to numbers feeling.