Re: The "Science can't explain this" fallacy

On Sun, Jul 02, 2006, Arik Baratz wrote about "Re: [hackers-il] The "Science can't explain this" fallacy":
> The affects of medicine are notoriously difficult to verify
> scientifically. First, medicine affects different people differently.
> Second, and perhaps more important, the body is a very complex
> machine, and people's brain or mind participate what's going on.
> That later aspect is both frustrating to scientists and hopeful to
> people who seek healing. Frustrating, because results are more
> difficult to replicate. Scientists have a name for it - the placebo
> effect. The most you can say about a medicine today is that, in most
> cases, it is more effective than a placebo. Granted, some medicines
> are MUCH more effective than a placebo. But people can die from
> placebo poison and can be cured by placebo antibiotics.

But this was also true when cures were found to Beriberi, to Rabies and
to Pneumonia. And still, somehow when these cures were found, it was not
hard to prove them using the scientific process. Nobody said to Flemming
(who discovered penecillin - and I'm saying this from memory so please
don't shoot me if I'm wrong), that "your medicine is herbal crap, just
mold. It's just quackery". They couldn't, seeing how it really killed
bacteria and really saved millions of lives.

So what makes modern "herbal" medicine (the kind of stuff you can buy
at your local superpharm) quackery isn't that it comes from herbs: there's
nothing wrong with medicine coming from herbs. It's the fact that after
decades of use, nobody can demonstrate that it works. If so many people
use it, and it works for all of them (or so the manufacturer claims!),
why not try to demonstrate that more convincingly? Because they can't.

Let me give you an example, from my new world as a parent to a baby :-)

Most parents of babies are familiar with "colic" [1], severe abdominal
pain that afflicts most babies up to three months old. There is no wildly-
accepted explanation of what causes Colic, and there is no wildly-accepted
medicine for it - some doctors just tell you to let nature run its
course, and the pains will disappear as the baby grows.
Still, if you go to a pharmacy, they will sell you a heap of (very expensive,
I might add) herbal medicines. If you ask mothers, each will swear to you
that one of these medicines worked wonders slash didn't work at all on her
baby. Do these medicines work at all? Do they work better than plain water,
water with sugar, or whatever placebo you can think of? (and note that the
patient is a baby, without much understanding of what is going on).
I find it utterly ridiculous that people accept these remedies, and continue
to sell them, without a trivially conducted experiment. For example, take
100 babies and give them nothing or sugar-water (or whatever placebo you want)
and count the number of times (or hours or whatever) they are in pain in
a month. Then take 100 more babies, give them some of these remedies, and
count the number of times or hours they are in pain. Is there any difference?
If there is no noticable difference - not on avarage and not on on the
distribution of pain across babies, then it isn't a case of "science can't
yet explain" - it's a case of a quack wanting to take money from you for
nothing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_colic

> Now here's something that I find frustrating. I'll call it the
> religion of science. Many people, and I have to admit that I belong in
> this group more often than not, reject a hypothesis accompanied by
> proof because they don't like it, because it goes against an existing
> collection of facts that they believe in, because the hypothesis
> involves fickle human factors like 'mood', 'belief' and 'feeling'.

There is certain value in being skeptical. The problem is that it's not
hard to write a 10 page scientific article that ends with the conclusion
that 1=2, and then you have to spend hours looking for what has to be
a mistake in one of the arguments.
When the conclusion surprises you, you need to be extra sure that none
of the arguments in the article are false.

Stephen Jay Gould (the renowned zoologist) has a book "The Mismeasure of Man"
in which he explains how people, pretending to use scientific methods, used
them wrongly to "prove" things like blacks being dumber than whites, women
being inferior to men, and so on. He demonstrates in his book the errors
they did in their use of probability, statistics, and so on. So not every
study pretending to be scientific actually is, and when you find a study
that contradicts your knowledge, it doesn't hurt to be skeptical before
you throw away your existing knowledge and exchange it for what you read
today.


> Why don't we have mood clinics as part of the conventional medicine?
> Why don't we have belief-change workshops subscribed like we have
> physical therapy sessions?

Because, arguably that's something you don't need a doctor for - it's
something you can do yourself. Similarly, eating is essential for life -
if you don't eat, you die. And still, society knows that 99.9% of the
people can manage that on their own, and you don't need to go to a doctor
to feed you. Only the 0.1% who can't feed themselves (e.g., anorexic)
will get treated by a doctor. In the same way, most people can change
their mood on their own - they just need to decide to do so. Only a
minority have a disease (e.g., depression) that prevents them from doing
that, and in that case doctors do intervene.

> I think that the religion of science is highly biased against these
> forms of healing, because of the way they are applied, because they
> are more difficult to measure, because they're "unscientific". I

The question is, why should they be more difficult to measure?
Why is it difficult to take a control group, and compare it to a group
on which you applied any sort of "healing", include "belief change workshops"?
If you find that a certain workshop decreased the number of flu/cancer/
whatever patients by 10%, then you can declare it successful. If another
workshop made no difference, it is not working. You can't say that
"all workshops will work" any more than you can say that "every medicine
based on mold will work".

> What's more, because conventional, science-based medicine rejects
> these aspects of healing,

I don't agree with this. Science also thought once that the sun revolves
around the earth, or that bread mold is bad. When someone proved this
to be false, scientists were surprised, but then convinced. If any sort
of "alternative healing" is correct, I claim that it will convince
scientists and will no longer be viewed as alternative. If feeling good
does cure disease, why should scientists have a hard time to accept it
while they accept that peumonia is caused by a particle so small it can't
be seen, that gets killed by... bread mold?

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |        Monday, Jul 3 2006, 7 Tammuz 5766
nyh-TS7m/[email protected]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |You have the right to remain silent.
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |Anything you say will be used against you.


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