The Burning Question of our Time

When will we find the answer?

Chinese Medicine, Pseudoscience, and the Demarcation Problem

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times posted something of a debate concerning Chinese medicine in its Stone philosophy series.  At issue was whether Chinese medicine, with it's references to "qi" and use of acupuncture, can be taken seriously as science.  And both columns took the opportunity to discuss the demarcation problem in philosophy, which is concerned with distinguishing between science and pseudoscience.  The first was a column by Stephen Asma who offered a rather cautious, neutral take on Chinese medicine.  He testified that his experience with acupuncture suggested that it was effective, but he also doubted that a theory based on the force called qi, which no one has observed, could be made into a rigorous scientific theory.  Asma ended his essay speculating that many people take a pragmatic approach in health matters, following some methods that seemed to work but where the science was uncertain, and that might not be all bad.

Authors Massimo Pigliucci and Martin Boudry responded to this in their column The Dangers of Pseudoscience.  They sharply criticize Asma's relatively balanced take as well as his argument that the demarcation problem is rather murky.  They have a good deal to say about the danger of using alternative medicines or sham treatments: "Most importantly, pseudo-medical treatments often do not work, or are even positively harmful. If you take folk herbal “remedies,” for instance, while your body is fighting a serious infection, you may suffer severe, even fatal, consequences."

Unfortunately, Pigliucci and Boudry do not consider the cost of ignoring the possible benefits of alternative methods such as acupuncture might have over more conventional medicines.  After all, acupuncture is far cheaper and considerably less likely to result in complications or side effects.

More revealing perhaps is that to make their case that acupuncture has dubious benefits, they cite a recent study that appears to demonstrate that needles applied at random places are just as effective as acupuncture.  However, in the study's conclusion, the authors acknowledge "The study is limited by the number of patients lost to follow-up. We also cannot exclude the possibility that a more intensive treatment regimen may be more effective."  The fact that the authors needed to include a caveat on their findings suggests that it perhaps is not the strongest piece of evidence to make a good case.   On the other hand, a simple google search will reveal meta-studies (such as this one)  that demonstrate acupuncture is more effective than sham treatments with statistical significance.

In other words, the evidence suggests that acupuncture as an effective treatment has not been falsified, at least for some areas of treatment such as back pain.  This does not prove that there really is a system of meridians carrying qi energy, as Chinese medicine argues.  But at the moment it looks like something is happening that our current scientific understanding cannot account for. 

In their eagerness to dismiss even the possibility that acupuncture works, Pigliucci and Boudry reveal a bias that's arguably common among many contemporary scientists and philosophers.  In the process they overlook the possibility that something outside the more orthodox view seems to be working.  What would Karl Popper say to that?

UPDATE:  The Economist recently has an article that looks at the replication problem for many fields, especially medical research.  The article, Trouble in the Lab, provides important context in the science versus pseudoscience debate.  Some of the numbers are genuinely shocking.  For example

A few years ago scientists at Amgen, an American drug company, tried to replicate 53 studies that they considered landmarks in the basic science of cancer, often co-operating closely with the original researchers to ensure that their experimental technique matched the one used first time round. According to a piece they wrote last year in Nature, a leading scientific journal, they were able to reproduce the original results in just six. Months earlier Florian Prinz and his colleagues at Bayer HealthCare, a German pharmaceutical giant, reported in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, a sister journal, that they had successfully reproduced the published results in just a quarter of 67 seminal studies.

The essay goes on to give other examples of failures to replicate and discusses some of the reasons why. It's important context to remember whenever someone is throwing around arguments about the rigorous superiority of orthodox Western medicine over the alternatives.

Here is an interesting clip with the Alex Grey, famous for paintings that have been influenced by his psychedelic experiences.  Daniel Pinchbeck asks to describe how such experiences have influenced his thoughts on a "divine intelligence."  Here is an excerpt from his answer.

“Infinite terrain of an inner world and an equally deep and profound connection with what feels like source reality….And divine intelligence exists.  It’s basis is love and you are an emanation of one node of an infinitely one intelligence.  And so you have a sense of that without speaking, and yet suddenly you have a sense of knowing, an apprehension that transcends even your life.” 

Check out the whole interview from Pinchbeck's Mindshift.

Stephen Pinker and Scientism

Recently Stephen Pinker wrote a something of a defense of scientism as well as a plea for the humanities to be more embracing of science.  The piece has received quite a bit of attention, mostly critical.

Like many scientists, and especially evolutionary biologists, Pinker believes that the best thing that professors in the humanities and historians could do for themselves is embrace all aspects of science.  Hard to argue with that, I suppose.  Of course, as Pinker notes, there has been something of a strained relationship between science (or at least the hard sciences) and humanities.  No doubt there are many aspects to the debate on the merits of embracing scientism.

For me, there is an important piece that's been missing from the debate.  Scientists and most philosophers (and perhaps most scholars in the humanities) embrace the consensus on evolution.  (Recently there was something of a dustup in the reaction to Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, where he argues that a purely materialistic explanation of evolution might not suffice to explain things like consciousness, morality, and cognition.  Nagel was taken to the woodshed by Pinker and his allies. However  Nagel has recently responded somewhat.)  So Pinker and others believe everything in our culture can pretty much be explained (more or less) by contemporary theories of evolution.

I'm not exactly a scholar in the humanities, (most of my training has been in engineering and economics) but here is a question I'd like to post to Professor Pinker.  Arguably, one of the most important observations about human beings, if not the most important observation, is that over the centuries we have spent the vast majority of our free time (when we were not hunting or warring) reading, singing, and creating the arts.  After all, what is it that we value most about our ancestor civilizations?  Architecture, poetry, plays, novels, art, myths, and yes, religions.  And while the mediums and technologies may have changed, today we enjoy similar activities.  I would bet serious money that Pinker enjoys movies, television, or novels like the rest of us.  And what does all this mean?  Well....it means there are thousands of years of evidence that we (and our ancestors) seek activities where we experience something like a deeper meaning to comprehend our existence.  Could it be, perhaps, that we are wired to seek out such meaning creating activities?

If so, how do purely materialistic explanations of evolution account for this?  Why would selfish genes or other drivers on the molecular level lead us toward such efforts at transcendence?  I realize, I'm not citing data taken out of a laboratory.  On the other hand, I claim that thousands of years of ubiquitous human activity is far more important than the data usually bandied about by evolutionary psychologists.

In my view, it's a real puzzle.  And it may be just a bit premature to toss aside Nagel's arguments as nonsense.