Date sent: Wed, 8 Dec 1999 17:01:26 EST
Subject: OFF: Critical Thinking (Was: Vocal Cord Paralysis/reinnervation)
To: vocalist
Send reply to: VOCALIST <vocalist>

On Wed, 8 Dec 1999, Cynthia S Donnell wrote:
>
> At the risk of sounding negative, may I suggest that when we do as Timothy
> suggests, and read the testimonials of folks helped by the treatments
> mentioned in the books and sites, we should remember that what we read is
> anecdotal evidence and should be regarded as such. Sufficient anecdotal
> evidence gives the scientific community the nudge it needs to investigate
> and carefully study treatments, supplements and the like. One has only to
> look at the NIH ongoing study on glucosamine and the studies on echinacea
> and ginko biloba to see this in action. Until the blinded studies have
> been done and the research reviewed by peers we should regard such
> information as anecdotal in nature.

Not to play devil's advocate or anything, but I would encourage everyone to
have a healthy skepticism for modern medicine and the scientific method as
well. While our civilization's implementation of the scientific method has
improved in the last hundred years, it's far from perfect. It is so easy to
skew lab results to mean what you want them to mean. (I would know, I did a
stint doing genetics research!) There is no such thing as a perfect,
self-contained experiment in the health sciences. There is always some
logical or environmental contamination.

Science breaks information down into discrete pieces to keep an experiment
manageable, but that's neither how the body works, neither is it how our
brain processes information. For instance, our brains easily recognize the
fanciest caligraphic "A". Most optical character recognition (OCR) software
has trouble getting accurate results with anything but the simplest typefaces!

I would much rather read a host of anecdotes, all the while picking up subtle
differences between stories, getting a gestalt sense of what is true and not
true, rather than relying on some arbitrarily chosen set of data any day.
Remember that everyone has their own agenda! Corporate owned labs especially
are especially susceptible. To a certain extent, all labs are "owned" by some
economic interests. When you hear a story from a friend, at least you know
they're not trying to sell you something.

Even the medical community recognizes a patient's mental state strongly
affects the results of a particular treatment. People who are willing to try
alternative medicines are in a much more pro-active frame of mind than those
who feel "treated" and powerless in a hospital/HMO setting. The binary
mindset of the scientific method has an automatic bias toward allopathic
medicine, which is combatative in nature: i.e. the medicine you take seeks to
reverse the current state of your body. It is much easier to track the
results of such an interchange using our primitive means than it is to
understand the more holistic workings of "non-combatitive" medicines.

-Tako Oda