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Archive for the ‘science’ Category

Lessons from economics

Posted in from the consulting room, health, science on June 10, 2012| Leave a Comment »

There are interesting discussions taking place on financial and economics blogs mainly in relation to questions of control, complexity and the impossibility of certainty. Here’s an example from an article discussing computerised financial trading technologies.

Here is the conclusion of a US study of computer-generated trading recently concluded: “Financial markets are alive, but a model, however beautiful, is an artifice. …To confuse the model with the world is to embrace future disaster driven by the belief that humans obey mathematical rules.” The powers that be have been embracing future disaster on this belief in a manner which goes far beyond financial markets. But in that shrunken context, individuals everywhere have already abandoned that belief. Wall Street and its global counterparts have been trying to do that too, but their problem is that they have nothing to replace it with. The “belief” that humans can be managed by obeying arbitrary rules of any kind is the last bastion of our rulers. It is waning on the financial markets, just as it is everywhere else, with results that no computer program can predict. That’s why the “market model” no longer “works”.

Think of health care from this perspective. The tendency to confuse models with real life is everywhere in contemporary medical practice. Human beings just don’t follow mathematical rules at an individual level. So why treat statistics as if they are not only TRUTH but the only TRUTH?

It’s not only the “market model” which no longer works……

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Fancy a dose of Vitamin N?

Posted in from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, life, science on June 7, 2012| 8 Comments »

Vitamin N?

It’s what Richard Louv, author of “Last Child in the Woods”, and “The Nature Principle” , refers to as the therapeutic agent we call Nature. It’s a clever idea, as is his diagnosis of “Nature-deficit Disorder” which he claims is widespread in our urbanised societies.

He writes about how exposure to nature is healing and mentions that in Japan “Forest Medicine” and “Forest Bathing” are becoming recognised medical treatments.

He even has his own definition of nature – ” human beings exist in nature anywhere they experience meaningful kinship with other species”

A 2008 study published in American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that the greener the neighborhood, the lower the body mass index of children. “Our new study of over 3,800 inner-city children revealed that living in areas with green space has a long-term positive impact on children’s weight and thus health,” according to senior author Gilbert C. Liu, MD

And….

A study of 260 people in twenty-four sites across Japan found that among people who gazed on forest scenery for twenty minutes, the average concentration of salivary cortisol, a stress hormone, was 13.4 percent lower than that of people in urban settings.6 “Humans . . . lived in nature for 5 million years. We were made to fit a natural environment. . . . When we are exposed to nature, our bodies go back to how they should be,” explained Yoshifumi Miyazaki, who conducted the study that reported the salivary cortisol connection. Miyazaki is director of the Center for Environment Health and Field Sciences at Chiba University and Japan’s leading scholar on “forest medicine,” an accepted health care concept in Japan, where it is sometimes called “forest bathing.” In other research, Li Qing, a senior assistant professor of forest medicine at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, found green exercise—physical movement in a natural setting—can increase the activity of natural killer (NK) cells. This effect can be maintained for as long as thirty days.7 “When NK activity increases, immune strength is enhanced, which boosts resistance against stress,”

I like these ideas – a lot! You can read more here and here.

Our hospital, the NHS Centre for Integrative Care at Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital, is built around a beautiful garden, and patients frequently comment about the increase in well-being they feel gazing out into, or wandering around in, the garden.

My recent trip up to Crarae Gardens gave me a similar experience. Don’t you feel better after spending some time in natural environments? Which ones are especially good for you?

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What kind of world do you live in?

Posted in from the consulting room, health, philosophy, science on June 7, 2012| 1 Comment »

Here are two questions which are in my mind during every consultation I have with a patient.

What kind of world does this person live in? and What coping strategies does this person use?

Of course like every doctor I will have a number of questions in mind during a consultation. The primary goal of undergraduate Medicine is to teach diagnosis (as best I conceive it, “diagnosis” is an “understanding” – an explanation for what the patient is experiencing). So that is likely to be one of the main goals of all consultations – what’s the diagnosis? Having achieved an understanding/explanation/diagnosis, the doctor then wants to answer the question “what am I going to do about this?” What the doctor does might be to further examine, investigate, or seek the opinion of a specialist. Or what the doctor does might be a therapeutic act – the most common being either the prescription of a drug, or the carrying out of a surgical procedure.

In other words, the same two questions are important for the doctor too. What kind of world does the doctor live in? And what are his or her coping strategies?  The world view frames the diagnosis, and the coping strategies determine the actions.

The current dominant practice of Medicine has emerged from a particular world view, and this world view is the basis of the actions chosen. So what is that world view? (I’m not going to try and nail down a label for the current Medical orthodoxy, but others have termed it “biomedicine”, “Western Medicine”, or even “scientific Medicine”. Whatever the label, I’m referring to the type of Medicine most commonly practised in the UK, and, yes, of course, you’ll see that is very similar to the commonest practices in many other countries too)

The world view from which the current orthodoxy emerges is based on certain postulates –

  1. There is only one reality.
  2. Reality can be “partialised”. It can be divided into parts which can be studied separately in order to know the whole.
  3. Knowledge can be acquired by an observer who is separate from, and stands apart from, reality.
  4. Observing has no influence on what is observed. (or the influence can be isolated or “controlled”)
  5. The observer’s values and meanings can be isolated and suspended.
  6. Two events related in time can be assumed to be causative – “A is the outcome of B”.
  7. Specifics can be generalised i.e. an explanation from one time and place can be applied to other times and places.
  8. Reality can be described in terms of “laws” and “norms”.

I don’t find these postulates either helpful or convincing. What are the postulates behind my world view as a doctor?

  1. There are multiple realities. No two individuals experience identical realities.
  2. The multiple realities are inextricably interconnected to create the whole. As such no single part can explain the whole.
  3. No-one is outside of reality.
  4. Every act of observation influences (creates even) what is observed.
  5. The observer’s values and meanings create their reality. They can’t be suspended. (Points 3 and 4 are connected to there being no object which can be known without the active involvement of a subject)
  6. Complexity and chaos theories show us that reality is non-linear. Causation can never actually be proven.
  7. Specifics always occur embedded in multiple contexts and as such are always unique. Generalisation involves ignoring the contexts.
  8. Laws and norms are cultural constructions to describe common patterns. Nature is diverse and natural phenomena are emergent (continually evolving and developing into different patterns)

How do you think these different world views affect firstly the diagnosis, and secondly the actions taken?

 

 

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Science and certainty

Posted in from the reading room, science on June 1, 2012| 2 Comments »

We live in a complex, constantly changing, ever more amazing, astonishing world. One of the things which takes me aback every time I come across it is a claim to know something for certain, and, beyond that, the claim that this certain knowledge is the ONLY possible explanation or choice.

Margaret Thatcher once famously said “There is no alternative”. The moment she said that she revealed she was living in a state of delusion. In complex, interconnected phenomena (like Life, the environment, the economy…..) there are countless alternatives. What she really meant was she didn’t wish to consider anybody else’s opinions, views, or values.

We’re facing a similar situation in economics. The latest fashion is for “austerity” (which seems to mean protect the profit making potential of the finance sector by reducing everyone else’s standard of living). The advocates of this view, who are in the seats of power throughout Europe, are certain that this is the right policy to adopt. In fact they are so certain, (“there is no Plan B”), that they maintain there are no alternatives.

It’s the same in Medicine. I read a piece recently by a Pain Specialist (that’s someone who tries to reduce pain, not inflict it!), who used the phrase “the Ayatollahs of Evidence Based Medicine”. Health policy makers, claiming the certainties of science, cite “evidence bases” to support their choices based on their world view ie their values, prejudices and preferences. They are convinced they are right, that they know best, not just what is best for them, but what is best for you. If you think differently they will tell you you are wrong.

Yesterday, reading The Edge, I came across this statement by Carlo Rovelli.

 The very expression ‘scientifically proven’ is a contradiction in terms. There is nothing that is scientifically proven. The core of science is the deep awareness that we have wrong ideas, we have prejudices. We have ingrained prejudices

CARLO ROVELLI is a theoretical physicist, working on quantum gravity and on foundations of spacetime physics. He is professor of physics at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France and member of the Intitut Universitaire de France. He is the author of The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy; and Quantum Gravity.

It’s a good point, and one worth remembering……science is NOT about certainty, it’s about unceasing wonder and having the humility to know that you will never know everything.

I don’t trust those who claim there are no alternatives to their own “certain” one. There’s nothing appealing about the arrogance of conviction.

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There, there, where’s the matter?

Posted in books, from the living room, science, tagged on March 19, 2012| 1 Comment »

I don’t get the obsession with the physical which underpins materialism. The idea that “truth” is only found in what can be measured, weighed, or touched, seems, inherently to deny the reality of our irreducible subjectivity. Can love be measured? Can passion, beauty, joy?

I think it’s some desire for certainty, coupled with a drive for power. Materialistic, physicalist scientism places a high value on certainty and a need for prediction to deliver power over “outcomes”.

I do understand that. But, I don’t sign up to it.

This pre-eminence of matter is being undermined by our exploration of sub-atomic reality. As Lynne McTaggart describes in “The Bond”

matter is nothing but a relationship; x + y, in a sense, stands for an impenetrable bond between two indeterminate things that do not exist on their own

Think about that for a moment….what we perceive as matter does not in fact exist as other than a relationship between things which don’t exist on their own…..

The universe contains an indeterminate number of vibrating packets of energy that constantly pass energy back and forth as if in an endless game of basketball with a quantum sea of light. Indeed they aren’t even there all the time, but are constantly popping in and out of existence, making a brief appearance before disappearing back into the underlying energy field.

Beautiful.

The surface of the sea is rarely still. In fact, it is never still at the edges. Have you ever been to a beach where there are no waves breaking on the shore, where there is no tide?Some days, however, as you cast your eyes out further to sea, the surface may appear flat and calm, but it rarely stays that way for long. The wind blows, the currents flow, and the surface breaks into a myriad of waves. Every one of us is like one of these waves. We appear, as if we are separate and distinct entities, but only for a brief time, then we are gone again. This is no illusion. Like the waves, we do indeed appear as distinct, discernible entities. But only for a short period of time. Just as the waves emerge out of the ocean, without breaking away from the ocean, so we emerge from the universe, from Life, from the non-dual nature of reality. And just as the waves dissolve back into the great sea again, so do we, after a brief life, return to the universe, to whatever it is that we emerge from.  [Bob Leckridge. Be The Flow]

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Wildness and discipline

Posted in from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, science, tagged on March 10, 2012| 7 Comments »

Thomas Berry, in “The Great Work” describes a creative tension which exists in the universe. He uses the terms “wildness” and “discipline”

Wildness we might consider as the root of authentic spontaneities of any being. It is that wellspring of creativity whence come the instinctive activities which enable all living beings to obtain their food, to find shelter, to bring forth their young; to sing and dance and fly through the air and swim through the depths of the sea. This is the same inner tendency that evokes the insight of the poet, the skill of the artist, and the power of the shaman. Something in the wild depths of the human soul finds its fulfilment in the experience of nature’s violent moments.

Throughout the entire world there exists a discipline that holds the energies of the universe in the creative pattern of their activities, although this discipline may not be immediately evident to human perception.

..[the] mutual attraction and mutual limitation of gravitation is, perhaps, the first expression of the primordial model of artistic discipline.

We might consider then, that the wild and the disciplined are the two constituent forces of the universe, the expansive force and the containing force bound into a single universe and expressed in every being in the universe.

This is a beautiful description. Creativity requires both the freedom of play and the discipline of practice (the routine of “showing up every day”). He goes on to relate these ideas to our own solar system.

When first the solar system gathered itself together with the sun as the center surrounded by the nine fragments of matter shaped into planets, the planets that we observe in the sky each night, these were all composed of the same matter; yet Mars turned into rock so firm that nothing fluid can exist there, and Jupiter remained a fiery mass of gases so fluid that nothing firm can exist there. Only the Earth became a living planet filled with those innumerable forms of geological structure and biological expression that we observe throughout the natural world……….The excess of discipline suppressed the wildness of Mars. The excess of wildness overcame the discipline of Jupiter. Their creativity was lost by an excess of one over the other.

Wow! Beautiful story, fabulous imagery, and really a great insight. One thought which comes to mind when reading it is how the brain functions best in what is termed a “near chaos zone”. When thoughts and brain function become completely chaotic we are lost. When the brain function becomes absolutely rigid and fixed we can have seizures. Another thought is about the healthy heart. The intervals between every beat are not exact. The heart is not like a metronome or a machine-like pump. If it does become so rigid in its rhythm then begins to fail. However, if it becomes completely chaotic, it fails too. What we really need is a state of coherence, where the heart rate variability is high but rhythmically so.

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The Bond

Posted in books, from the reading room, life, science, tagged on March 7, 2012| 15 Comments »

Lynne Mctaggart’s “The Bond” makes a strong case for a reinterpretation of our commonly held view of life. She begins by summarising the current “scientific” story of the universe thus…

a story that describes isolated beings competing for survival on a lonely planet in an indifferent universe. Life as defined by modern science is essentially predatory, self-serving, and solitary.

Although that is the dominant mythology, it’s not one which attracts me in the slightest. I just don’t buy the miserable nihilistic theories of a pointless, meaningless universe and the belief that only what can be measured should be valued.

From Mary Midgely‘s clear demolition of atomism, to Rupert Sheldrake‘s skepticism about materialistic science, from Thomas Berry’s The Great Work, to Ian McCallum’s Ecological Intelligence, there is a more appealing story emerging. According to Lynne, The new story is…

An entirely new scientific story is emerging that challenges many of our Newtonian and Darwinian assumptions, including our most basic premise: the sense of things as separate entities in competition for survival. The latest evidence from quantum physics offers the extraordinary possibility that all of life exists in a dynamic relationship of co-operation.

All matter exists in a vast quantum web of connection, and a living thing at its most elemental is an energy system involved in a constant transfer of information with its environment.

The world essentially operates, not through the activity of individual things, but in the connection between them – in a sense, in the space between things.

This shift in emphasis from “things” to “relationships” produces a different set of views – a shift from solitariness and competition to connectedness and wholeness….

Nature’s most basic impulse is not a struggle for dominion but a constant and irrepressible drive for wholeness.

 

 

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Learning to trust your feelings

Posted in from the living room, life, psychology, science, tagged on March 4, 2012| 1 Comment »

When you stop to think about it, there’s an awful lot going on inside your brain that’s nothing to do with thinking. Well, when I say nothing to do with thinking, I don’t exactly mean that….after all, everything is connected to everything else in there. What I mean is that conscious thought and reasoning is only a small part of the function of the brain and the mind. Some of that is about sensory and motor function – your brain processes a lot of signals from the sensory nerves and a lot of those signals don’t make it as far as conscious awareness. Your brain also processes a lot of the muscle activity of your body…everything from voluntary movements eg picking up a pencil….to involuntary effects like heart rate and rhythm.

One interesting aspect of what goes on in the mind is emotions – by “mind” I do not mean “brain” – I mean the extended, embodied network of nerves and chemicals which are involved in “mental processes”. Emotions occur below the level of consciousness and some of them we become directly aware of and can think about, but others seem to occur in what Freud and Jung described as the “unconscious”. In fact, “depth psychology” is all about trying to work with all this material which lies either wholly or partly inaccessible to conscious, rational thought.

We have tended to hold rational, cognitive thought, at the highest level. As if it is best to think things through, and not to trust our feelings. But is that the best strategy?

Here’s a fascinating article on this subject from Jonah Lehrer writing in Wired.

…..from the lab of Michael Pham at Columbia Business School. The study involved asking undergraduates to make predictions about eight different outcomes, from the Democratic presidential primary of 2008 to the finalists of American Idol. They forecast the Dow Jones and picked the winner of the BCS championship game. They even made predictions about the weather. Here’s the strange part: although these predictions concerned a vast range of events, the results were consistent across every trial: people who were more likely to trust their feelings were also more likely to accurately predict the outcome. Pham’s catchy name for this phenomenon is the emotional oracle effect. Consider the results from the American Idol quiz: while high-trust-in-feelings subjects correctly predicted the winner 41 percent of the time, those who distrusted their emotions were only right 24 percent of the time. The same lesson applied to the stock market, that classic example of a random walk: those emotional souls made predictions that were 25 percent more accurate than those who aspired to Spock-like cognition.

The explanation given for this is…

Every feeling is like a summary of data, a quick encapsulation of all the information processing that we don’t have access to. (As Pham puts it, emotions are like a “privileged window” into the subterranean mind.) When it comes to making predictions about complex events, this extra information is often essential. It represents the difference between an informed guess and random chance.

One important aspect of this study was that just guessing about a subject you knew nothing about, and cared nothing about, didn’t produce the same results. But if you really care about something, and are knowledgeable about that subject, then learning to be aware of, and trust, your feelings can produce better results than relying on logic and reason.

This reminds me of a Heartmath technique called “Heart mapping” where you make a “mind map” about your project, then, get coherent, then ask your heart what more does this project need, and create a second, complementary map – a “heart map”. Between them, you have a more holistic map of your project – one which captures both practicalities and values.

It’s reassuring to learn that our feelings are actually such potentially powerful and useful tools.

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Healing occurs naturally

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, science on February 29, 2012| 3 Comments »

I often say to patients that there is no healing other than natural healing. What I mean by that is that all the drugs, and all the surgical techniques used in modern medicine, act directly against pathology. None of them actually stimulate or directly support self-healing. Yet that’s the only kind of true healing to exist. An antibiotic might kill a bug, but its the natural self-healing which repairs the tissue damaged by the infection. A broken bone can be held in place, but it’s the natural self-healing which knits the bone back together. I think it was Benjamin Franklin who said “God heals and the doctor takes the fees” – a rather cynical view of the same concept!

Then I came across this passage in Rupert Sheldrake’s The Science Delusion

…it is important to remember that animals and plants have been regenerating after damage, healing themselves and defending themselves against infections throughout the entire history of life on earth. All of us are descended from animal and human forebears that survived and reproduced for hundreds of millions of years before the advent of doctors. We would not be here if it were not for our ancestors’ innate capacities to heal and resist diseases. Medicine can help and enhance these capacities, but it builds on foundations that have evolved over vast aeons of time, continually subject to natural selection.

Actually he’s being quite generous about Medicine here – it can help and enhance – but only in complementary ways. I don’t know of any treatments marketed by drug companies which directly stimulate healing. Rather, they, at best, reduce pathology whilst we hope that the body will get on with healing itself.

Amazing thought though, huh? Every single one of your direct ancestors survived to an age where they could procreate – or you wouldn’t be here today!

Isn’t it time we made available, researched and developed the ways of directly supporting and stimulating self-healing?

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The Science Delusion. Rupert Sheldrake

Posted in books, from the reading room, science on February 27, 2012| 11 Comments »

Rupert Sheldrake’s The Science Delusion takes on the “dogmas” of scientific materialism. It isn’t a polemic. It’s a thoroughly thought provoking book which seeks to get people thinking about the claims and beliefs of those who think that human beings are mechanical “stuff” and nothing more.

He outlines ten common beliefs which underpin the materialistic conceptions of most scientists.

1 Everything is essentially mechanical

2 All matter is unconscious

3 The total amount of matter and energy is always the same

4 The laws of nature are fixed

5 Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction

6 All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA, and in other material structures.

7 Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activity of brains

8 Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death

9 Unexplained phenomena like telepathy are illusory

10 Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works

He then asks the reader to consider how valid or true such dogmas are, and poses questions for debate at the end of each chapter. This is most unlike most proclamations of scientists, and certainly of “skeptics” whose astounding sense of certainty about their own opinions is quite breath-taking and typically comes across as arrogant and closed minded.

Here’s a quote from The Independent  – one of many positive reviews you can find –

But alas, in large measure, science and the idea of it have been seriously corrupted. That some of its high technologies are not in the general good is all too obvious – although it isn’t always obvious which ones are and which ones aren’t. Even more to the point, and in some ways more serious, is that science all too often becomes the enemy of what it should stand for. Although it must have rules and methods – in particular, the ideas of science must be testable – it should be open-minded. It should go where the data lead. That’s what the myth says it does do – but the reality is very different. In reality, science is locked into a series of dogmas that are largely untested and to some extent untestable, which for science ought to be the great no-no. Yet they must be adhered to, or risk the charge of flakiness and loss of grant. In The Science Delusion, Rupert Sheldrake drags ten of the most powerful dogmas out of the basement and into the light of day; and does science, humanity and the world a large, a considerable favour. The most obvious and all-prevailing of the great dogmas is that the universe as a whole – including life — is mechanical. Bits of stuff interact – and that’s it. The smaller the bits, the more fundamental the explanation is deemed to be. According to Richard Dawkins, human beings are “lumbering robots”, driven by their “selfish” DNA (where “selfish” is a shameless and seriously misleading piece of anthropomorphism). Consciousness, says Boston philosopher Dan Dennett, is an illusion – just the noise that neurons make, although it is hard to see how something that is not itself conscious could suffer from illusions. On the back of this mechanical dogma all metaphysics, which in effect means all religion, is kicked into touch. Yet, asks Sheldrake innocently, where is the evidence that life and all the universe are simply mechanical? What can the evidence possibly be? Common sense and common observation cry out every turn that we and many other creatures at least, are conscious, and that we have free will. Why reject our intuitions? On what grounds? Then again, some of the greatest philosophers, including Baruch Spinoza and AN Whitehead, have argued in various ways that consciousness is not confined to our brains. We do not engender it within our own heads, but partake of what is all around. Now there are reasons from many branches of science – physics, psychology, anthropology – to take this seriously. But all inquiry that seems to offend the dogma is marginalised.

and another from The Guardian

The unlucky fact that our current form of mechanistic materialism rests on muddled, outdated notions of matter isn’t often mentioned today. It’s a mess that can be ignored for everyday scientific purposes, but for our wider thinking it is getting very destructive. We can’t approach important mind-body topics such as consciousness or the origins of life while we still treat matter in 17th-century style as if it were dead, inert stuff, incapable of producing life. And we certainly can’t go on pretending to believe that our own experience – the source of all our thought – is just an illusion, which it would have to be if that dead, alien stuff were indeed the only reality. We need a new mind-body paradigm, a map that acknowledges the many kinds of things there are in the world and the continuity of evolution. We must somehow find different, more realistic ways of understanding human beings – and indeed other animals – as the active wholes that they are, rather than pretending to see them as meaningless consignments of chemicals.

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