INTERESTING TIMES

"A single dot on a canvas is not a painting and a single bet cannot resolve a complex theoretical dispute.  This will take many questions and question clusters.  Of course it's possible that if large numbers of questions are asked, each side may be right on some forecasts but wrong on others and the final outcome won't generate the banner headlines that celebrity bets sometimes do.  But as software engineers say, that's a feature, not a bug.  A major point of view rarely has zero merit, and if a forecasting contest produces a split decisions we will have learned that the reality is more mixed than either side thought.  If learning, not gloating, is the goal, that is progress."
--Tetlock, Philip and Gardner, Dan, in p269 in Superforecasting; The Art and Science of Prediction 2015.

I was registered and attempted to attend some of it. I have never been to this event before, and it was free for me because I work for the University that hosted it. The keynote talk was Friday night, and the speaker was intriguing and beautiful, but it was held in Radelet Hall which holds about 200 people, but has air exchange sufficient for about 20. When I went in the room was very warm already, and the talk was just beginning. The O2 content had to be low, because I immediately felt sleeply. Perhaps all those young brains can withstand a high CO2 environment for 2 hours to get the wisdom, but I cannot. The University should improve the ventilation systems for that space, as it has no windows to open and doors only on one side.  It is stuffy even with a small crowd.

I hung out near the back door long enough to hear the theme of Ola Obasi's talk which was Deconstructing Reductionism. The theme continued to resonate from the entire gathering. I went to Paul Bergner's talk because his was a name that I have long heard in herbalist circles. I had no conscious expectation, but his appearance surprised me. Most famous herbalists are gaunt and woodsy looking, and he had a pot belly on a stocky frame and a collared shirt that made him look like a gas station attendant. Bergner was perhaps a little surprised at the turnout, for he was in a room that held 40 and there were 60 of us in there. I was stationed near the door because that is my rule when inside the academic building which is an old masonry structure that is likely to crumble in a quake. They're planning to replace it but that's years out.

Bergner talked a bit about how science is applied to herbal medicine. "A scientific trial is like a serial killer" he said, "because it kills the complexity of the herb." He said that all botanical science falls into one of two groups, 1. pharmaceutical companies prospecting for useful constituents, and 2. supplement manufacturers shoring up the plausibility of their formulations. In other words, the profit motive is always at hand. When Big Pharma finds a useful constituent, they extract or synthesize it and sell it as a drug. They are always looking for another blockbuster drug. When supplement companies conduct their own studies, they are usually trying to prove that one of their products works for a particular condition. In both groups the tendency is to bury negative results and exaggerate positive ones in order to generate sales and profits. It is no wonder that herbalists in general have a bad attitude about science when it is said to be reductionistic and corrupt.

What I hope that the herbalists will integrate is the fact that each one of those studies that does give us a result--this plant has that constituent which has such and such an effect--gives us an evidence base upon which we can build a case for herbal medicine. Sure, the studies are not done for our benefit. But we can learn from that and build upon it, even while keeping close the traditional knowledge upon which the studies are built. If we know from all that corrupt research that Scutellaria baicalensis lowers inflammation in the liver and the brain, awesome! We can use it for those purposes, and extrapolate that it might help with inflammation systemically. We can also remember all the indications for that herb in ancient Chinese and western eclectic traditions, and extrapolate beyond what the science says as to what the herb in its fullness (and not just one constituent) might do.

We need both. We need the subjective and the objective. Science does not have to be reductionistic. I suppose there are scientists that will say that everything is reducible to chemistry and physics. But there are just as many scientists who will tell you that we just don't know everything that is out there, and there could be surprises. The fact that we just don't know is not a rational reason to believe in nonsense, but it is a reason to stay humble and reject reductionism. Everything is more complex than we know. When we find out one detail about something through the scientific process, we know one tiny piece in a very big puzzle. Nobody knows how complicated things are better than scientists.

Berner's talk was officially about herbal pairings (and triplets). To him this means pairs of herbs with complimentary actions which he can see no contraindications for giving together, and no situations in which he would want one and not the other. One of the pairs he mentioned was dandelion and Oregon grape, aka taraxacum and mahonia. In general his pairings have a function so that he can grab that mixture off the shelf and add it to a more complex formulation, saving time in the formulation process.

I tried to go to a couple of other lectures but ended up walking out. One speaker's voice was practically sedating--though I imagine some in his audience might have been hypnotized. Social justice is a major theme for this group, and there was a lot of talk about finding our roots so that we could extract ourselves from the white supremacy paradigm.  I imagine the goal would be to begin to operate as a conglomeration of cooperative and complimentary minorities; a modern civil society. I appreciate this message, and I do not need to sit through another 2 hour lecture in which someone recites their entire lineage and teaches us their family traditions. I am fully aware that there is great variety in human life. And I have been quite educted enough about the advantages I have in this society because of my pale skin tone and heterosexuality. Berate me no more, instead go out into the world and be awesome. Run for office and help us bring nuance back to government. Model your own kind of success.

After I left the lectures I went home and processed my own herbs. I learn more from handling the plants than I do from lay-level herbal lectures. It makes me appreciate the difference between CE and not.  At least continuing education classes allow for the possibility that we might actually talk about how to treat a condition, because we have licenses that allow us to practice medicine. I believe I need to offer an herbal class, and I'm sorting out a topic.  Probably herbs for the mind, perhaps herbs for the aging mind.  The kiddos won't be interested yet but I'm interested.

Becca Zacchari on Treatment Outcomes of Alternative Therapies
OHSU Psychiatry grand rounds 10.18.16
Her interest: Trauma and substance abuse
Conventional and alternative treatment is merging-->integrative health
( My notes... )

Just the other day a young man came to a doctor for help with persistent headaches after a hard head hit.  He left with a prescription for Nat sulph 1M.  What's that you ask?  That's sugar pills.  That's homeopathy, that's a substance so diluted that it isn't there, that's a treatment that has zero basis in science and plenty of mythology around it.  If you look online you will find plenty of articles supporting the use of homeopathy for brain injuries.  Check it out:

http://www.naturalnews.com/026057_injury_homeopathic_medicines.html#

http://www.britishhomeopathic.org/bha-charity/how-we-can-help/conditions-a-z/a-little-bump-or-a-major-injury/

https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/blog/unexpected-help-for-victims-of-traumatic-brain-injury/

http://homeopathyplus.com/brain-injury-homeopathy-can-help/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/natural-remedies-emotional-health/201302/healing-cognitive-and-emotional-effects-head-injuries





Traumatic brain injuries are very common in athletes and soldiers, and many of them go unreported and untreated.  Sure, there's a lot of media buzz these days about TBI because they've discovered that some football players and boxers have dramatically shrunken brains, and depression and tremors later in life, because of something they call CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy.  Those words just mean longterm brain injury from being bashed around.

If you go to your doctor for a TBI, and it's a conventional doctor, he's likely to tell you rest will fix it.  Specifically no reading or screens for a week or so, no work if you can get out of it.  He's likely to tell you that it will pass on its own.  Sometimes it does.  That's when homeopathy "works", of course, when the condition it is supposed to treat would have passed on its own without treatment.  But what about those cases that are more severe?  What if rest and sugar pills aren't enough, and the brain really needs some help?  Both the homeopath and the conventional physician fail in that case.

There are good treatments for TBI.  There are doctors in the military who know them.  At a bare minimum people who've bashed their brains need lots of omega 3 fats and a clean, veggie rich diet.  There are herbs that have been shown to help a lot with brain recovery.  It's concerning that conventional doctors are so anti-botanical medicine that they don't even study up on that.  When are we going to get real about what works and what doesn't, instead of walking around parroting what we've been told?

Among regular people there seems to be precious little understanding of what exactly the method is, and what it does and does not accomplish.  This ignorance about the process of science contributes to claims that scientists are just greedy a-holes exploiting the government for profit.  This attitude rises from a complete lack of exposure to real scientists and their way of being.  It is not fair to scientists.  Scientists, for the most part, are trying to figure out how the world works so that we can use that information to make our lives and our world better.  They are not politicians, they are curious people who sought education enough to know what questions to ask and how to test them.  They care passionately about making the world a better place.

The first step of DOING science is to ask a question about the world.  The question doesn't have to be complicated, it just has to reach into the unknown.  Once you have your question, it is a good idea to snoop around and see if anyone else has already answered it, or tried.  Learn everything you can about the variables that might influence the answer.  Once you've studied up on it, you're qualified to make a guess---a "theory" in science terms---as to what the answer might be, and why.  A true scientist knows that a theory is just a theory--it has to be tested repeatedly by people who agree and by people who disagree.  A true scientist is not heartbroken when the data shows that his theory was bunk.  That is useful information.  Time to come up with a new theory.

This testing is the experiment.  There can be many different ways to test any one theory.  The most useful experiments are often the simplest, changing only one variable between two groups of test subjects.  Scientist use many different methods to approach the same question, and this diversity adds richness to the picture painted by the results.  We might know that B follows A three quarters of the time, but until we know WHY they are correlated, and what other variables contribute to the correlation, we do not understand.  A--->B at a rate of 75% is enough to know that there is a connection, but it is not enough to say that A causes B.  We don't know that.  Something else could be causing it.  We take our results from that experiment, share them with the other scientific thinkers in the world, and update our theory if possible.  Usually an experiment brings up new questions, which indicate new possible experiments that need to be done to understand.

So science does NOT discover causality.  It discovers correlations.  Correlations can have multiple contributing variables so more experiments are needed.  Sometimes someone repeats the same experiment and gets the opposite result.  This is evidence that there was something operating in the system that was not being measured.  This is a sign that the original theory was based in deeper ignorance than perhaps we thought at first.  This is hard to admit, even for scientists.

Just because an experiment gets peer reviewed and published in an journal does not make it the truth.  There are many false conclusions that have been published.  Egostists who call themselves scientists publish more books than all the real scientists put together.  Real scientists tent to be intraverts who'd rather stay out of the limelight and just keep digging into these interesting questions.  Every experient needs to be repeated from a variety of angles before a result is accepted as Truth.

So there is a basic primer on the scientific method.  My area is mostly medicine, though I am fascinated by all science.  Medical science is more than double blind placebo controlled studies.  It includes the careful evaluation of population outcomes and biochemical mechanisms and every other factor that could influence the answer.  Science is a process of asking questions and trying to figure out if our theories about the answers are right or not.  A theory is just a theory.

Evolution, by the way, has been proven in so many ways by so many different experiments, that it is not a theory anymore.

When I have a morning at home alone I work on my lists and I fall into my practice more easily.  The sun is streaming in and I am doing triage on piles of "urgent" items which have become buried under a stream of distractions and amusements like my nonstop study of public health.  One observation this morning is that the strong balancing poses which I find so elusive when surrounded by empty air and other students are more accessible when I am alone in my office.  Here I can step into a warrior 3 knowing that the sunny windowsill is right there to hold me up, and yet confidently not needing it.  This strength and balance that I find in my own small office is something I would like to take with me into the world.