Controlled studies

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Western Science’s method of “studies” as informational sources, and am inclined to think that our reliance and insistence upon them is nothing short of arrogant. There’s an analogy Dr. Giovanni Maciocia gives about a Western doctor and a Chinese doctor going into a neighborhood and trying to determine the socio-economic status of the residents. The analogy is that the Chinese doctor can drive through the neighborhood and get an accurate picture of what the residents lives, lifestyles, income, etc. are like whereas the Western doctor will want to go into the house of every person in the neighborhood and rigorously dig through every belonging they own and record huge piles of data, then go back and sift the data later, then publish a report giving the answer to the question. Well, if that is a reliable analogy then I think the idea of ‘The Scientific/Controlled Study’ is where it finds its strongest support. It seems like in the current climate that unless a study is performed on something that any information surrounding it is unreliable. This is where it reaches arrogance. Essentially we are saying “The only information I will accept is information that I can gather by an experiment where I am in total control of all factors and can repeatedly reproduce the results.” Which is to say “Without having done ‘the study’ I understand what’s going on well enough that I can locate the root causes of the behavior and reproduce them. If I can’t, then the information is clearly wrong.” That strikes me as being patently absurd. I think one of the biggest obstacles for those from a Western Medicine/Science background preventing them from accessing Oriental Medicine is the reliance on studies, as if piles of books created from an unimaginably long chain of observation and experience over an unfathomably long time are unreliable because “they aren’t using the Scientific Method that we learned in elementary school!!! Where are the blinds? Where are the placebos?”

(I discovered I’m starting to repeat myself already,so if you want to read my complaints about the placebo effect go here: http://lifegivingsword.wordpress.com/2006/11/19/the-placebo-effect/ otherwise I’ll spare you)

a good opportunity to paraphrase CS Lewis presents itself here. Science does not deal in what MUST happen, science deals in what TENDS TO happen. The best science can do is say “I put a cue ball and the 8 ball on a pool table, with the 8 ball 6 inches from the left rear corner pocket and the cue ball 24″ from the 8 ball in a straight line with the pocket. i hit the cue ball 10 times with a 20 oz cue with the goal of sinking the 8 ball, and 10 times the 8 ball was sunk.” That does not in any way shape or form give any assurances that it will always happen that way (I think David Hume makes a big deal of that too, or so I’ve heard)because of the huge amount of factors that can’t be accounted for by the scientist, like say, his friend standing off to the side who may take it into his head to steal the 8 ball from the table in the middle of the shot. That possibility can’t effectively be accounted for by the scientist. If you want to know what the chances are that Dr. Smith’s friend Dr. Barney will steal the 8 ball and screw up the experiment, you’re going to need to talk to someone in a different field, like maybe a psychologist. I think the models brought to light because of my two science pets Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory would make this idea more accessible to the 21st Century scientist. It seems to me that those two disciplines would hammer home with certainty that the observer has to be considered a factor in any observation and that the number of complexities at work are far too diverse for the scientist to say with anything other than idiocy, lunacy, or laughable arrogance that it is a ‘controlled’ study. To control a few factors is certainly within the realm of possibility. To say that an experiment is completely under control-much like the ridiculous idea of a “Clean Room” in Western surgery-is unbelievable, and further demonstrates the difficulties we in the West have with the idea that isolation is possible (see: discrete vs. continuum, American global policy vs. isolationist practices in the past, etc.)rather than an unreachable state except by the death of the thing isolated.