Science and EBM vs. theory

[mordantcarnival]

I've actually been trying to write something about this for years now--literally years, like 7 or 8. But every time I come back to the topic, I feel like I'm drowning. Suffocating. About a month or so ago I came across a PDF on the topic which I thought might make a good jumping-on point, as it specifically tries to use the tools of post-

Comments

[traballenguas]

Lots of doctors are dicks about this, too. Because they possess the special pixie dust of "gut feelings" that can't be challenged by facts.

I guess I get the same vibe from Spanish people who smoke, with the devastating logic that "you have to die of something". Like, I got this great link from a friend about the first tests of the smallpox vaccine:

http://www.jameslindlibrary.org/trial_records/17th_18th_Century/boylston/boylston-commentary.html

I love this:

"Variolation, known in the 18th century as inoculation, was introduced almost simultaneously in Boston and London in the early 1720s (Huth 2006). A furious debate followed. Among the issues were the religious implications of interfering with divine providence, and the legality of spreading a potentially fatal infection; and whether the disease induced really was smallpox, and whether it was safer than natural smallpox, and induced immunity

[janinazew]

I took a quick look, skipped the Deleuzian stuff as I've never studied any (though I could get someone to tell me if they think it's an accurate reading of the philosophy). Then I got to the Derridean stuff and realised that essentially the reading of society in the article is wrong. These people have no place for specialism, they practically state that they're treating the privilege of body over mind in these circumstances as negative which is unholy crap practically speaking. All we require from medicine (which you've pretty much said in your response above) is that it recognises, on an individual level, that it doesn't know everything. This article is naive theory, it has its place but it's not a good argument societally speaking.

They stress post-modernism as well so it's no wonder I'm not a fan. I think of post-modernism as equivalent to processed whipped cream from a can.

[mordantcarnival]

What gets me about this whle thing is that I had a reasonably good grasp of the basics of the scientific method and the basic concepts underpinng EBM, as well as some of the specifics (how vaccination works, and so on) by the time I was 10. Theory claims to open things up and be more egalitarian ultimately but you can't understand a word of it w/o at least 5 years of specialised study.

[janinazew]

I got the philosophy checked out- citations are accurate but it was pointed out that no scholar can work without evidence so the discourse isn't really supported by the theory.

[mordantcarnival]

Well my point is that I don't understand the theory. Any of it. I don't get what exactly is wrong with EBM according to these authors, or what we are supposed to put together instead of it.

[cusm]

It seems to say, 'how can a woman understand a number, when she understands things in terms of their relation to the rest of her life experience' or some such. Its going back to analysis of differences in male/female cognition, where males are said to think more linearly and logically, and females abstractly and relationally. Some neuroscience showing womens brains having more interconnected synapses has been used to support this. All of which of course identifies biological tendencies possibly caused by hormones in development but fails to prove anyone can or can't do anything better than anyone else when put to the test. But in this case, it assumes that the woman can't rationalize the number, because numbers are meaningless cold abstractions in a cruel patriarchal world that fail to allow her to express her feelings for lack of connection to her life experience. It almost has a point in how one's life experience can't be boiled down to numbers, but loses it assuming the number itself is without value and that the woman simply can't

[gane5h]

In my experience, stats, numbers, percentages is what people want where bad news is concerned. I've no doubt that they all have slightly different ways of processing those stats, making sense of them, but almost every time I've broken bad news to someone, really bad news, the first thing they ask after the shock's begun to pass is something along the lines of, "how long have I got?" or "what are my chances?" or "how far has it spread?"

Far from being cold, cruel facts, stats that are meaningless within the rich tapestry blah blah of life, they're frequently the supporting struts, the scaffolding around which life - particularly a potentially time-limited life - is woven.