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cybermuleI read the following two books in the following order in quick succession:
Why am I sick?: What's Really Wrong and How you Can Solve it using MetaMedicine (Richard Flook)
Bad Science (Ben Goldacre)
Heh - quite a bewildering exercise I have to say, but one that I actually enjoyed once I'd left it a little while to simmer in my brain.
So. Here's what I didn't expect to happen. The books agreed with each other (and I agreed with them) on two important points - firstly, the brain plays an important role in your physical health (interesting!), and secondly our current healthcare system could probably benefit from being a bit less rushed and impersonal. This is also "too true" (but IMO, less interesting - at this point I feel it would only be fair to declare that so far in my life I always have a pretty good idea of what's up, and I need doc to supply the necessary expertise to supply a solution, be it pharms or cutting).
Anyhoo, I so wish Mr Flook had just stopped there. The mind-body link is a fascinating and under-exploited area of medicine, and while he stuck to this, I was nodding along wisely and hoping this book could be a new source of interesting ideas. But then he suddenly went off at a tangent from poor understanding to near facism via just plain schlonky and dubious ideas. He's an NLP-dude, but I'm going to put aside the feeling that he was constantly trying to pull a fast one on his audience, give him the benefit of the doubt and note his poor understanding of:
(a) the science terms that he likes to use a lot to support his ideas. "Quantum" does not equal "holistic", "systems orientated" or "double headed arrow". Electrical is not the same as electromagnetic.
(b) basic logic. For example, cause and effect. Strange areas appear in CT scans in areas of the brain co-related to certain parts of the body (the homunculus idea, well established). You can't then say that these blips cause the illness - the illness could just as easily cause the blip(*) You certainly then can't dump a load of slightly Freudian sounding associations to each of these areas. For example, putting aside the controversy of his CT reading method, assume you have a blip in your brain corresponding to a pain in the right of your stomach. There's a lot of mileage in folklore remedies - willow bark may actually be good for your poorly tooth - but you can't jump to then saying trapped brain energies due to your poor relationship with your gran means that you can't digest that relationship, ergo tummyache (**)
(c) While I'm here, you can't use the same subjects for both proof and hypothesis. This is a circular error. The fact that all your breast cancer patients may present the same possible feature in their CT scan is actually rather interesting. I AM GENUINELY INTERESTED, MATE! Don't then ruin it by saying these cases prove it's true.
(d) Poor understanding of not appearing like a grasping and predatory git at times. See (***)
(e) Poor understanding of human dynamics and psychology. If your family or friends want you to go along with opinion of the medical profession, cut them out of your life!!!! THis will vastly improve your cancer recovery rate. So if I develop cancer, I should probably cut my husband, brother and favourite aunt out of my life right away (****)
(f) Poor understanding of how not to force readers to tend towards Godwinis Law. For example, suggesting that most people who die from cancer are those who accepted radiotherapy or chemotherapy, and were therefore PROBABLY NOT THOSE BEST SUITED TO PASS ON THEIR GENES. It's nature's way of selecting out the weak (*****)
This is the snark aside paragraph. My balanced and liberal brain made the above, my cynical and mean alter-ego made the below. I'm conscious of this and generally try to separate it as much as possible in my head as well as on the page :)
* but obviously then you wouldn't need to pay him or one of his EFT mates to iron out your brain wrinkles.
** IMO, here he is bumrushing people into equating his ideas with established hypotheses and scientific thinking - say a few things that are accepted beliefs, then quickly rush the reader through some really tenuous stuff. I could call him wildly enthusiastic, or I could be meaner and say he's using dirty NLP-magic.
*** I hated the chapter that basically said if you have cancer, ignore the medical profession, buy his stuff, then buy his mates stuff.
**** Personally, I don't think this lack of support network would make me feel so good. If I was being nasty, I'd say it might make me feel LIKE I WAS IN A CULT.
***** Firstly, most people with cancer have probably already bred. Secondly, anyone who starts making snap judgements on which behaviours and groups should have the right to pass on genes may attract a large following of goosestepping supporters, but may also just get a verbal or physical punch in the head.
Ach. And now I look back and see that that just turned into a rant. It isn't Mr Flook's fault, but I just got the sneaky impression that on some level of consciousness he was trying to profit from his ideas. I repeat, the guy really does have some great ideas - see those described in paragraph 2, and add to that the fact that he accidentally highlighted our tendency to think of science as "being too difficult" and to want to treat symptoms rather than cause. That is what medicine is about, but I think that's because that's what "we" want - someone to make the decisions for us and pass us a pill to cure the symptoms til the disease cures itself. And this is something that I think needs shouting from the rooftops, and then I get cross that he ignores all the actual interesting stuff and descends into quasiscientfic wibblings :(
And that's pretty much what Dr Goldacre decries. Actually, he's also annoying, but just mostly annoyingly right :) I enjoyed his book. I learned some things, even though I value my hard-headed realism and cycnicism when it comes to medicine and data studies. And I cried my eyes out pretty much all the way through the chapter on the media's MMR hoax.
Like I said, an interesting pair of books to read in tandem. I got lots of ideas and thoughts out of them that really meant a lot to my decision making and even my own sense of identity.
Why am I sick?: What's Really Wrong and How you Can Solve it using MetaMedicine (Richard Flook)
Bad Science (Ben Goldacre)
Heh - quite a bewildering exercise I have to say, but one that I actually enjoyed once I'd left it a little while to simmer in my brain.
So. Here's what I didn't expect to happen. The books agreed with each other (and I agreed with them) on two important points - firstly, the brain plays an important role in your physical health (interesting!), and secondly our current healthcare system could probably benefit from being a bit less rushed and impersonal. This is also "too true" (but IMO, less interesting - at this point I feel it would only be fair to declare that so far in my life I always have a pretty good idea of what's up, and I need doc to supply the necessary expertise to supply a solution, be it pharms or cutting).
Anyhoo, I so wish Mr Flook had just stopped there. The mind-body link is a fascinating and under-exploited area of medicine, and while he stuck to this, I was nodding along wisely and hoping this book could be a new source of interesting ideas. But then he suddenly went off at a tangent from poor understanding to near facism via just plain schlonky and dubious ideas. He's an NLP-dude, but I'm going to put aside the feeling that he was constantly trying to pull a fast one on his audience, give him the benefit of the doubt and note his poor understanding of:
(a) the science terms that he likes to use a lot to support his ideas. "Quantum" does not equal "holistic", "systems orientated" or "double headed arrow". Electrical is not the same as electromagnetic.
(b) basic logic. For example, cause and effect. Strange areas appear in CT scans in areas of the brain co-related to certain parts of the body (the homunculus idea, well established). You can't then say that these blips cause the illness - the illness could just as easily cause the blip(*) You certainly then can't dump a load of slightly Freudian sounding associations to each of these areas. For example, putting aside the controversy of his CT reading method, assume you have a blip in your brain corresponding to a pain in the right of your stomach. There's a lot of mileage in folklore remedies - willow bark may actually be good for your poorly tooth - but you can't jump to then saying trapped brain energies due to your poor relationship with your gran means that you can't digest that relationship, ergo tummyache (**)
(c) While I'm here, you can't use the same subjects for both proof and hypothesis. This is a circular error. The fact that all your breast cancer patients may present the same possible feature in their CT scan is actually rather interesting. I AM GENUINELY INTERESTED, MATE! Don't then ruin it by saying these cases prove it's true.
(d) Poor understanding of not appearing like a grasping and predatory git at times. See (***)
(e) Poor understanding of human dynamics and psychology. If your family or friends want you to go along with opinion of the medical profession, cut them out of your life!!!! THis will vastly improve your cancer recovery rate. So if I develop cancer, I should probably cut my husband, brother and favourite aunt out of my life right away (****)
(f) Poor understanding of how not to force readers to tend towards Godwinis Law. For example, suggesting that most people who die from cancer are those who accepted radiotherapy or chemotherapy, and were therefore PROBABLY NOT THOSE BEST SUITED TO PASS ON THEIR GENES. It's nature's way of selecting out the weak (*****)
This is the snark aside paragraph. My balanced and liberal brain made the above, my cynical and mean alter-ego made the below. I'm conscious of this and generally try to separate it as much as possible in my head as well as on the page :)
* but obviously then you wouldn't need to pay him or one of his EFT mates to iron out your brain wrinkles.
** IMO, here he is bumrushing people into equating his ideas with established hypotheses and scientific thinking - say a few things that are accepted beliefs, then quickly rush the reader through some really tenuous stuff. I could call him wildly enthusiastic, or I could be meaner and say he's using dirty NLP-magic.
*** I hated the chapter that basically said if you have cancer, ignore the medical profession, buy his stuff, then buy his mates stuff.
**** Personally, I don't think this lack of support network would make me feel so good. If I was being nasty, I'd say it might make me feel LIKE I WAS IN A CULT.
***** Firstly, most people with cancer have probably already bred. Secondly, anyone who starts making snap judgements on which behaviours and groups should have the right to pass on genes may attract a large following of goosestepping supporters, but may also just get a verbal or physical punch in the head.
Ach. And now I look back and see that that just turned into a rant. It isn't Mr Flook's fault, but I just got the sneaky impression that on some level of consciousness he was trying to profit from his ideas. I repeat, the guy really does have some great ideas - see those described in paragraph 2, and add to that the fact that he accidentally highlighted our tendency to think of science as "being too difficult" and to want to treat symptoms rather than cause. That is what medicine is about, but I think that's because that's what "we" want - someone to make the decisions for us and pass us a pill to cure the symptoms til the disease cures itself. And this is something that I think needs shouting from the rooftops, and then I get cross that he ignores all the actual interesting stuff and descends into quasiscientfic wibblings :(
And that's pretty much what Dr Goldacre decries. Actually, he's also annoying, but just mostly annoyingly right :) I enjoyed his book. I learned some things, even though I value my hard-headed realism and cycnicism when it comes to medicine and data studies. And I cried my eyes out pretty much all the way through the chapter on the media's MMR hoax.
Like I said, an interesting pair of books to read in tandem. I got lots of ideas and thoughts out of them that really meant a lot to my decision making and even my own sense of identity.
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no subject
Date: 2010-04-10 11:27 pm (UTC)We should yak about it over a good long evening somewhere nice sometime.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-15 07:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-15 08:56 pm (UTC)Book review - a compare and contrast exercise
Date: 2010-04-30 07:25 am (UTC)