Glen, I think you have nailed one of the origins of science-doubters: the relation between the nomothetic and the idiographic (which you can google, if you want to know more). Briefly, there is no strong reason to believe that a probabilistic generalization applies to my individual case. Well, let me put that round the other way: there is always some reason to believe that it doesn’t. So people will disbelieve science if the cost to them of doing so is low, and the possible gains are great. So, I think you have nailed one of the sources of anti-scientific irrationalism.
Having said that, am I allowed to say, "Crap! I wish you didn't have cancer!' Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of glen Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2015 5:51 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Good climate change skeptics On 09/23/2015 02:15 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > Diet and Heart Disease > Chronic Lyme Disease > Fibromyalgia > Diet and Cancer > Vaccination and autism > ???? and Alzheimer's > Chronic fatigue syndrome > Environmental sensitivity syndrome > > First of all, I would like to recruit this list to identify other issues > where at least one of us Global Warming Believers departs from some other > equally strong scientific consensus. Unfortunately, I don't know the consensus in most of those categories. I can wander off what my oncologist claims about diet and cancer, though. But my oncologist was trained as a DO, which puts her credentials at risk in some people's eyes: http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/QA/osteo.html So, the fact that she takes the very conservative position that we just don't know enough about the ties between diet and (my type of) cancer, is interesting to me. > AND then, I would like to have a discussion concerning why and when we feel > qualified to depart from a scientific consensus. I feel qualified to depart from what she tells me because of my personal experience about what has worked for me during chemo and the course of my experimental drug. But these departures do _not_ extend (by induction) to any general population. I can only say that what she tried failed and what I tried worked. Granted, this is not about diet and cancer so much as diet and cancer intervention. I can, however, proceed by deduction and suggest that I'm probably not an entirely unique subject. There are probably some generalizations that could be made and I can explore the space of conclusions to speculate on what those might be. To be concrete, here's an example. About 2 cycles into my treatment, I began to experience a "welling up" in my throat, especially when bending over or going upside down on my inversion table. She tentatively diagnosed it as GERD. She put me on proton pump inhibitors and when they didn't work, motility promoters. Neither worked. But I discovered that i nsoluble fiber _did_ work. She doubts me to this day. And, to be honest, I often doubt myself. Another issue where I disagree with her is on the subject of fasting. There are these somewhat controversial papers that indicate medium-term fasting (more than 48 hours) assists the therapy in triggering apoptosis (good cell death that minimizes free toxins) and reducing necrosis (bad cell death where toxins roam a bit more freely). She maintains that people on chemo need to eat in order to sustain themselves in the face of the poison. I maintain that as long as we're poisoning ourselves anyway, why not do a proper job of it? -- ⇔ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
