Sometimes it feels like reason never existed

[Guest [Kp...]]

Sometimes it feels like reason never existed, or, that reason is hopelessly polluted by intuition. it becomes difficult to distinguish which the poison is, reason or intuition?

 

The Antioch Review -- Volume 66

 

We admire scientists. We turn to them for the needs served only by the cold fires of reason, but the nonsense we preach to ourselves is cut from the same cloth – and every bit as precious – as the nonsense preached by CAM’s shamans.

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And yet, despite their sound logic and noble ambitions, I suspect that scientists will fail in their efforts to expunge CAM from the landscape of American medicine. The cause of this failure is rooted in human nature, as I discovered some years ago while attending a convention sponsored by the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. CSICOP was founded by a panel of scientists, magicians, and psychologists who devote their lives to defending science against pseudoscientific nonsense. As one might expect, my fellow attendees were a skeptical lot, but they remained vulnerable to a human and all too common frailty. I explored this frailty by conducting an informal clinical trial of my own during the dinners and cocktail parties that followed each day’s lectures.

 

Several times each evening, after striking up a conversation with a randomly selected male, I asked my subject whether or not he was married. If he answered in the affirmative, and if his wife was not within earshot, I posed this question: “Is your wife more attractive than the average woman?” The question invariably brought forth a blush, a smile, and laughter, as the subject recalled Garrison Kielor’s famous benediction on The Prairie Home Companion: “ . . . and that’s the news from Lake Woebegone, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

 

But I pursued the issue, and, after a prelude of blushing and stammering, every subject – to the last man – admitted that he, like the unskeptical masses, did indeed consider his wife more attractive than average. A similar experiment conducted in my home town of Louisville, Kentucky, among friends blessed with children, revealed that each and every one thought their kids more intelligent than average – for the majority, MUCH more intelligent. Even those parents whose offspring scored toward the bottom of their class blamed this failing on a lack of motivation or on untalented teachers. In fact, I have yet to meet a man – myself included – who confesses to an ugly spouse or a stupid child. This irrational certainty, I would argue, is nothing more than the placebo effect with its white coat removed.

 

We live in a chimerical world, a world that allows a statistically impossible distribution of personal qualities. To survive, it seems, we all must cherish blatant falsehoods. In his innermost heart, no man considers himself an ordinary human, breeding and forging for food on a planet as mortal and doomed as the creatures inhabiting it. Astronomers assure us that the universe will someday end in a Big Crunch or a Big Freeze, destroying all record of human existence, but we set about our lives each morning as though an eternity of fruitful days lay before us. Indeed, I could argue that we all live in Lake Woebegone, a psycho-spiritual community where our meaning and our purpose – and our fragile, treasured affections – derive in large measure from the placebo effect.

 

We admire scientists. We turn to them for the needs served only by the cold fires of reason, but the nonsense we preach to ourselves is cut from the same cloth – and every bit as precious – as the nonsense preached by CAM’s shamans.

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Even on the rare occasion when NCCAM sponsors a properly controlled trial, the results do little to calm the furor. For example, in 2005 the World Journal of Gastroenterology published a study of the irritable bowel syndrome. During this study, patients were treated with either “real” or “sham” acupuncture. For the sham treatments, needles were inserted into non-meridional points traditionally thought to have no therapeutic value. When the results were analyzed, the improvement rate in both treatment groups came very close to the seventy-percent benefit from sham heart surgery reported by Sabiston and Blalock.

 

However clear-cut this finding may appear, both treatments made patients feel better, and thus acupuncturists around the world can boast that their procedure was proven effective by rigorous scientific methods. Skeptics will argue the opposite – that these results smack strongly of the placebo effect – but I suspect few patients or alternative practitioners will listen. Two-thirds of the patients improved. What more could anyone ask?

 

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Powerful indeed are the ties that bind CAM to the fallible traditions of mainstream medicine. Only in the past few decades have medical curricula expanded to include the rigorous standards of controlled clinical trials. Furthermore, many practicing physicians ignore or reject the subtleties of scientific reason, leaving themselves vulnerable to the placebo’s seductive lure. Deepak Chopra, arguably the most successful of America’s CAM practitioners, began his career well within the bounds of traditional medicine by serving as Chief of Staff at Boston Regional Medical Center and by teaching at Tufts University and Boston University Schools of Medicine. Now a multi-millionaire thoroughly seduced by the placebo effect, he is the author of 35 books plus 100 audio, video and CD-ROM titles that advocate virtually every form of alternative therapy.

 

Despite these non-standard credentials, Chopra remains an instructor at the University of California School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. It seems appropriate that Chopra and legions of his ilk should now populate the halls of academic medicine, since they carry on the placebo-dominated traditions long ago established in those very halls by their progenitors – respected professors whose measure of success differed not one jot from the measure used nowadays by CAM practitioners of every stripe.

 

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