| Yes, I read that quote when you posted it the first time. I notice you've posted it many times in this thread, so maybe you got confused. By the way, the director of the NIMH isn't the "highest-ranking psychiatrist". That title doesn't exist. >Ah. Now I see the problem. Scientific questions are never resolved by voting -- not ever. They are all resolved by empirical evidence. For questions that cannot be resolved by evidence, scientists adopt the null hypothesis, the precept that an idea is false until it is supported by evidence. This is not true. In most fields, including general medicine, there is no governing licensing body similar to the APA. This is because psychiatry is the only medical discipline that postdates the concept of regulatory bodies. In general medicine, it's very common for two doctors to treat the same illness differently. This is why cancer patients can choose between radiology and surgery and chemotherapy. Now, the APA could abandon the concept of regulation and allow any licensed psychiatrist to treat anything in any way, but as a society we've democratically (by vote) decided that psychiatry should be regulated, so its regulatory body decides the treatments that can and cannot be administered, and what constitutes something worth treating. (If you want to go outside this structure, you just can't call the person you're getting treatment from a psychiatrist. Priests, consolers, social workers, etc., are examples of alternatives.) So, the world does not work the way you think it does. This is because you're espousing a philosophy of science called Positivism or Verificationism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism This school of thought was abandoned in the early 1900s. Currently, the dominant philosophy of science is Falsificationism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability#Falsificationis... ...which holds that ideas compete via aggregate evidence judged by each individual scientist, gaining ground via confirmatory evidence (though never being proven) and losing ground via falsifying evidence. >The bottom line is that a scientist would never say, "We don't know what this is, but let's offer clinical treatments anyway -- because the public doesn't understand either science or our poverty of knowledge." This is also not true. Doctors offer treatments that aren't definitively explained all the time. It's far better to treat something however you can than to hold off for some logical positivist verification of your claim. -------------- But, you've said a lot about what other people think. What is your opinion, and how did you form it? |
Of course it does. In psychiatry, authority matters. In science, it doesn't. How else could Insel unilaterally describe psychiatry as a pseudoscience and rule that the DSM is to be abandoned, as he recently did? That would never be accepted in a scientific field, where authority is disparaged.
How else could a panel of authorities vote to include some imaginary conditions, and exclude other imaginary conditions, from the latest DSM? They did just that, and one change from the past was that the votes were held in secret. Another difference was that the governmental agencies that rely on the DSM have decided to abandon it.
>>The bottom line is that a scientist would never say, "We don't know what this is, but let's offer clinical treatments anyway -- because the public doesn't understand either science or our poverty of knowledge."
> This is also not true. Doctors offer treatments that aren't definitively explained all the time.
This kind of reply makes me wonder what is the point of this exchange. Doctors are not scientists, they are to medical research what an engineer or a technician is to a scientist in another field. Further, if a doctor really offered a treatment not vetted by research, he would have his license pulled.
> What is your opinion, and how did you form it?
My opinions are irrelevant, and I have not been expressing opinions, but facts. Note my use of literature references to support any facts I post.