Paul Anderson wrote:

>> "Placebo-controlled" is the keyword here: in this logic, if something
>> works similarly to a placebo, it's considered "not working". But it's
>> known that placebos work (even though we don't know exactly how). Am I
>> the only one seeing a logical fallacy here? 
>> 
> There is a key problem.  Placebos are unpredictable, real medicine is far
> more predictable in it's behaviour.  

Since we don't know yet much about the placebo effect, how can you say that
it is unpredictable? Could it not be that we just don't understand it well
enough to make it more predictable? At some point possibly more so than the
confirmedly quite unpredictable drugs? 

If you ever have read the list of possible (undesired) side effects of most
medications, you wouldn't say that there is a lot "predictable". Give a
drug to thousand "subjects" and try to predict the outcome -- not the
general direction, but a /prediction/ in the sense we expect it in science.
I doubt there would be a high correlation between predictions and reality.


> I really don't understand your meaning.  What is the problem of
> applying the scientific method to biology?

I'm not talking about biology (I never even used this term), I'm talking
about medicine, about health of humans. I'm also not saying that there
aren't a large number of good and powerful applications of scientific
medicine. I'm just trying to point out that there are some limitations to
it that stem from the scientific principle.

Some have already been mentioned. But there's more. Health, for me, is
about me feeling healthy. It is not about the population of my
area/country/the world being to 83% free of certain symptoms. I'm
reasonably certain that I share this with most. 

Scientific medicine is pretty much exclusively about statistics. But I
don't really care if a certain treatment only works in 1% of the cases and
therefore is dismissed by scientific medicine as not relevant because its
effectiveness can't be differentiated from statistical noise -- if it works
for me. Who's to say that it doesn't work in 1% and that I'm not part of
those 1%? Definitely not statistical medicine. What I expect of a health
professional is that he knows his statistics, but that she also can get a
notion of the individuality (at which point she isn't a scientist anymore
and starts to become a healer).

Then there's the "falsify by experiment" aspect of science. When was the
last time we did large scale controlled experiments with humans regarding
health? I'm not talking about studies, I'm talking about experiments.
Controlling all relevant conditions we know of, just like we do it with
electronics, physics, etc. The answer is: we don't do that. So where's the
science when the method is not being applied? We only apply it to
/biology/: to subsets of the human, to tissues, to cells and so on. We
don't apply it to the whole. Accordingly, we have a lot of scientific
knowledge about the parts, but very little about the whole. But it's that
whole that wants to be healthy. Healthy tissues definitely help with that,
but it doesn't stop there. (And one man's healthy tissue may be another
man's problem area...)

There's another thing that hasn't been mentioned so far. Health != biology.
There's much more to health than biology (and science in general) claim to
cover. Health is also about /feeling/ healthy. Part of that is a certain
absence of known diseases and ailments, and scientific medicine can help a
lot with that. But this is not all. It's well-known (probably even
"scientifically" confirmed by studies) that happier people are more healthy
on average (everything else being equal), but when was the last time a
health professional you consulted focussed on this? Are there scientific
methods to become happier? If it has an influence, it should be part of the
equation -- and it can't be. Nobody claimed yet that science is about
happiness.

How do you measure "health"? If we want to talk scientifically about
health, we have first to define what it is, and then how to measure it.
After more than a century (two?) of "scientific medicine", this hasn't been
done. There's a reason for this: it is impossible, because it is not part
of the scientific domain. Which is my point.

There's still more. We are, in medicine, to observe ourselves. That's by
definition subjective. That's different from science, where we assume that
we can observe objectively. Statistical medicine tries to work around this
with double-blind studies, by "objectivizing" diseases into symptom
clusters, but nothing can work around the fact that one human observes
another human and that many ailments are highly subjective. As far as
tissues etc. go, this can be made objective, to some degree, but not as far
as "humanness" goes -- anything "human" has to be taken out for it to get a
semblance of objectivity. I for one don't want to reduce my health to
everything non-human.

(I won't get into the distortions that the huge amounts of money create
that get burned on "health issues" that have a potential to make more
money. Health is not about making money -- but the "health system" is,
mostly. And so is most of scientific medicine. Methods that don't show a
potential to make money generally don't get pursued very eagerly by the
industry. Placebos is such a case, to get back to the initial argument.
This is understandable, but shows that healthy humans is not a primary goal
of scientific medicine. It's actually something that they very much try to
avoid. A generally healthy humanity would put a whole industry -- one of
the biggest -- out of business; unless, of course, they can make money out
of it, somehow. So far they only have figured how to make money from people
who feel sick. Guess what their goal is? When you want to understand how
things work, follow the money, they say -- that's not different here.)


The argument that it's just more time that is needed doesn't address any of
the principle shortcomings of scientific/statistic medicine. Of course,
more time for scientific/statistical medicine will bring more advances in
the areas it covers -- but there's little chance it will bring advances in
the areas it doesn't cover /by principle/. There is nothing in the
scientific method that says that it will find an answer to /every/
question; that's not even part of science itself (as long as you don't make
a religion out of it). For me, there are a number of good arguments why
health of individual humans is only partially addressed by science. And by
definition, there's no scientific proof that this is wrong :)

Gerhard

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