From owner-biophysics@net.bio.net Mon Mar 07 22:00:00 1994 Path: biosci!bcm!cs.utexas.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!noc.near.net!news.delphi.com!usenet From: GREGORY C.O'KELLY Newsgroups: bionet.biophysics Subject: Re: electromagnetism and biology Date: Mon, 7 Mar 94 21:17:03 -0500 Organization: Delphi (info@delphi.com email, 800-695-4005 voice) Lines: 110 Message-ID: <5k0J-nX.gokelly@delphi.com> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: delphi.com X-To: GREGORY C.O'KELLY I have been told that my reference to the 'flaccid sciences' is out of order because medicine, like quantum mechanics (or more correctly, quan- tum electrodynamics) also employs statistics. I feel a word about history and statistics is in order. Ever since Newton and Descartes it has been believed that the reli- ance upon mathematics and quantification is an indication of true science. Ernst Mayr, in his 1982 THE GROWTH OF BIOLOGICAL THOUGHT, insists that a true indication of science is its reliance upon hypothetico/deductivism. He takes great pains to justify how biology is scientific, though it is not as mathematically rigorous as the 'hard sciences'. He says biology is special because of the uniqueness of its subject matter. He says nothing about the use of hypothetico/deductivism in biology, probably because there is very little evidence of it historically. Mayr insists that biology has escaped Cartesian calls for mathematics as the true indicator of scientificity. He also says that biology is very statistical, though, at the same time, he rejects inductivism as a poor research strategy. What is he talking about? There are at least two kinds of statistics. In the case of quantum electrodynamics one can see what I will call 'theory-dependent statistics'. Such statistics are predictive in the sense that, within the context of a larger theory, and given certain preconditons, these statistics lead us to expect to find certain phenomena in certain percentages. If we don't find these phenomena in different percentages, we go back and question the theory and refine it perhaps, or we check the preconditions to see if they are at variance from what we thought they were. In the case of medicine and biology the statistics are not theory dependent. Statistics is merely an attempt to bring mathematics to the practice of medicine and biology as if this will somehow qualify them as scientific, when in fact their being scientific is dependent upon how hypothetico/deductive they are. The statistics of biology and medicine are retrospective. They do not lead us to expect or predict anything. In- stead they are a report on findings in the past. Each new instance to be added to the heap of statistical facts is not a test of a theory or a prediction. Instead it is an attempt to achieve such an overwhelming pile of facts that patterns will emerge, statistical links will be detectible, risk factors may be assessed. And so we see attempts to relate diet and heart disease, smoking and prostate cancer, sun spots and the performance of the stock market, not in a way that allows us to understand the connection according to a theory, but in a way that appeals to brute facts and suggestions of connections according to statistical evaluation. Retrospective statistics are an attempt to collect so much data that a pattern emerges, and this pattern is then considered a theory. Mayr dis- misses this inductive approach as a bad research strategy because it is so incredibly expensive, and does not provide a guide as to what areas should be researched at what priority levels with the money that is available for research. In the case of medicine, at the end of the last century there occurred not only an increased hospitalization movement, but also the establishment of William Osler's 'school of therapeutic nihilism' at Johns-Hopkins Univer- sity. The school's operating thesis was that there would be no therapeutic intervention for any disease unless there was evidence for the efficacy of that particular ministration. The reason for this was that it was long noticed that the intervention of a doctor often had no effect on the course of a disease anyway, so it was better to do nothing than to precipitate a greater crisis. This was the Hippocratic oath. Four decades later (mid-1930's) Lewis Thomas, as a student in medi- cal school, was shocked to learn that as a physician practicing Osler's med- icine, there was nothing he could do for the majority of illnesses (THE YOUNGEST SCIENCE: NOTES OF A MEDICINE WATCHER). This was long after medicine had become organized and certification was required for entry into the profession and practice. Thomas makes the observation that, as at the time of the rise of the school of therapeutic nihilism, the emphasis was on diagnosis, not treatment. Diagnosis was important for the game of statistics gathering so that physicians could say to the patient, "Your chances are..." with some authority since they could do so very little other- wise. Even today a multitude of lab tests are performed on patients at the expense of the patient not so much so that the patient could be treated, but so that the statistical diagnosis game of Osler can continue being played, and the physician can escape the onus of a malpractice suit when nothing can be done or what was done is botched. The rise of organized medicine, contrary to the foundational myth of organized medicine which asserts that clinical efficacy was the reason for the increase of cultural authority of physicians, was due to the change in the nature of the doing of science itself. I.Bernard Cohen, in his REVOLU- TION IN SCIENCE terms this the third revolution in science, and says it concerned the growing expense and complexity of research such that solitary individuals like Pasteur or Edison or Bell were a thing of the past after the 1890's. In the field of medicine this institutionalization was not due to any breakthroughs in approach and findings with regard to the treatment of disease. It was due instead to the standardization of what was taught at the university level so that 'scientific evidence' was that evidence approved of by the elite at Johns-Hopkins and Harvard Uni- versity. By insisting on uniformity when there was so much diversity, the medical community, through the Flexner report (see Paul Starr's THE SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN MEDICINE), sought to gain access to the power of the state to outlaw those who were drawing off a chunk of the health care dollar from those who considered themselves legitimate physicians (even if these legitimate physicians could them- selves do little to help the patient). The Flexner report openly dismissed all electrical medicine as hogwash and superstition. And it is on this score that I now am attacking the claims of medicine to being scientific. If at times I seem insulting of organized medicine in the abstracts of the paper I am posting on this net, I advise the reader that the paper of which I speak, "Biology, Bioelectricity, and the Nervous System", is free of this invective. I am just very, very bitter at having spent almost 22 years in a wheelchair because of the clumsiness and inertia of the medical and neurological communities which, even according to Peter Medawar in his 1983 essay "Osler's Razor" says that neurology can do no more now clin- ically than it could a century ago. What I am finding is that I, and many others like me suffering from spinal cord injuries (in which the cord is anatomically intact, unbroken, unsevered, merely pinched or bruised) and CNS trauma, could have gotten out of the wheelchair years ago, soon after the injury as a matter of fact, if only orthodox neurology had entered the twentieth century and reconsidered its own research findings in the light of quantum electrodynamics. This relates intimately with the nature of bioelectricity and the functional organization of the nervous system, and the study of myopathy and atrophy and loss of CNS trophism during the time when the cord is quiescent following trauma. .