‘Reality is only an illusion, albeit a very persistent one’.  Albert Einstein

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.”  Buddha 

…….page in construction…….. I believe that logic and rationality have become the latest religious fad in the latter half of the 20th century. In all my work I aim to empower people’s sense of their individual reality and their ability to choose. Rationality has its place, but no more or less than any other way of knowing - in any case I consider it highly probably that all ways of knowing are illusions anyway. Could rationality be a crude tool to assess reality and risk leaving out a lot that is important (feelings, love, belief, wonder, spirituality).

My practice, as many other holistic practitioners is based on an experiential, participatory, person-centred and holistic model of therapeutic intervention. For this reason, any research that doesn’t take account of these can only be considered crude primary data to me. For instance even the ‘best’ DBPCT multi-centre study I would consider a crude tool for looking at the complexity of what happens in a clinical encounter.

Themes 

• Complex systems / Multi-variable systems -  we can only ever approximate reality with the incomplete data set we are using

• Are case studies really statistically useless as the protocols of EBM would suggest? How much do we value individual experience? How much do we value our experience?How much do we hand over our experience to the great god of rationality or to some other authority? (or rather pseudo-rationality as I would prefer to call it)

• All my treatments are participatory - that is they require the patient to participate in their healing. If someone came who wasn’t willing to make any effort themselves, I wouldn’t expect particularly good results. How does participatory medicine fit into a randomised and blinded model? Can it be placebo controlled?

• The experience of the herbs is part of the therapeutic model. For instance the taste is part of the effect (e.g. it is well researched that the bitter taste alone stimulates a gastric responce). How is it possible to blind this in a trial?

• The case for ‘need‘ in healing as opposed to ‘desire to test’. Intention is everything and no single incident of healing between two people at one moment in time is ever reproducible. What about the psychology of those who would willingly enter a trial compared to those who would not - is this significant?

• Questions about the randomisation model. This immediately dis-empowers the patient. I suspect this will have a strong nocebo effect.

• The assumptions behind clinical trials - what does a disease focused rather than a person centred approach really mean. This has big implications for selecting patient groups since only if you are operating in a disease centred model does a trial on a group of ‘asthmatics’ make sense. Each of those ‘asthmatics’ is a different person, potentially benefiting best from a different treatment.

A short story about the big flaws in research

A drunk is found searching the street in the middle of the night. On approaching him a friendly passer by asks what he is looking for.

‘My wallet’ he says.

‘Where did you loose it?’ they ask

‘On the next street along’ says the drunk

‘So why are you looking here?’  asks the passer by curiously

‘Well, that street doesn’t have any streetlights’

Links

Essay ‘Limitations of Logic’ key point, the choice to use logic is not logical, logic relies on assumptions.

The ‘Uses and Misuses of Logic’ - nice article

Rather a nice list of well thought out fallacies, also another

Is Truth subjective, relative, objective or absolute? Try Wikipedia

Recommended book - Goedel, Esher, Bach