Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘science’ Category

“Novel” treatments?

Posted in education, from the reading room, health, science on June 3, 2007| 2 Comments »

A three year study of treatment for “acute promyelocytic leukemia” adding arsenic into the mix has shown that doing this can increase the survival rates significantly.
What really struck me in this story though was this comment by the Reuters journalist –

Arsenic has been used as a traditional therapy in China for more than 2,000 years, but its use in the United States is still rather novel.

Why is that? What is it about the tendency to certainty in Western thinking? I suppose we have a long history of believing we are right and that our ways are best. We live in a chaotic world where chance events change people’s lives forever every single day. When it comes down to the individual all the so-called certainty of our statistics-focussed view of the world is of little use. When I meet a patient with disease X, I have no way of telling whether or not they will CERTAINLY respond to the same treatment as other patients with the same disease, nor of knowing EXACTLY what will lie ahead for them. But as human beings we can’t cope with total chaos, and complete uncertainty. We need to have some idea of what’s happening in our lives and some idea of how things MAY turn out with particular choices we make. That’s just how we are. We need to juggle our knowledge of uncertainty and unpredictability of the particular with our knowledge of probability gained from the general. The problems arise once we turn those probabilities into certainties.
There was an interesting line of dialogue in CSI the other night – one character, a forensic scientist, said “I am confused”, and her boss replied “Good. That’s the best place for a scientist to be”. He was SO right. Well, not that scientists should always be confused but a scientist who stops doubting, stops looking and stops thinking.
Wouldn’t it be a good thing for us to look outside of our little boxes and see what phenomena are actually already well-observed (just by other people in other places – people who think differently from “us”)

I’m a homeopathic doctor and homeopathic arsenic was the very first remedy I had success with. Whether or not you believe in homeopathy, one thing a study of the subject brings is a greatly increased knowledge of substances used medicinally in different cultures over the centuries. It’s well known to homeopathic doctors that arsenic has traditionally been used to increase stamina and staying power (in fact, it was used to do just that in racing horses until it was made illegal!)  It’s also well known to us that arsenic is a commonly indicated homeopathic palliative treatment in cancer.

I wish we could replace the arrogant know-it-all and I-know-best in scientists and doctors with an attitude of lifelong curiosity and wonder.

What do you think? How would you change the education of scientists and doctors to increase open-mindedness, creative thinking and foster a spirit of humble, endless curiosity?

Read Full Post »

Quasicrystals

Posted in from the reading room, science on May 24, 2007| Leave a Comment »

You should never believe a scientist who claims to be certain about what is possible and what is not possible. For most of the 20th Century physicists believed that crystals could only have certain structures (based on their “rotational symmetry”). In fact, until 1982 they claimed that is would be impossible for a crystal to have a structure based on a five-fold pattern (like a pentagon). Then in 1982 somebody discovered the “impossible” – a crystal which had exactly that structure. As is often the case in science, once one had been discovered several others then turned up (you only see what you can see!). These structures were given a new name “quasicrystals”. Now, mathematicians are beginning to understand these strange materials –

“Mathematically speaking, quasicrystals fall into a middle ground between order and disorder,” Damanik said. “Over the past decade, it’s become increasingly clear that the mathematical tools that people have used for decades to predict the electronic properties of materials will not work in this middle ground.”

This is such an interesting comment – the “middle ground between order and disorder”. Finding patterns in apparent chaos is always somehow exciting. But for me, this story has another interesting element. There’s a kind of arrogance in many scientists which is the arrogance of certainty. Any scientists who stands up and declares that either all that can be known about a subject is already known, or that anything which does not fit our current understanding is just impossible, will, time and again, be proven wrong!

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts