Newsgroups: sci.med
Subject: Re: Bernie Siegel & Cancer
From: RGINZBERG@eagle.wesleyan.edu (Ruth Ginzberg)
Date: 16 Oct 92 19:22:19 EDT
 <1992Oct16.100206.347@news.wesleyan.edu> <1992Oct16.214341.28179@u.washington.edu>
Distribution: world
Organization: Philosophy Dept., Wesleyan University
X-News-Reader: VMS NEWS 1.20In-Reply-To: distef@carson.u.washington.edu's message of Fri, 16 Oct 1992 21:43:41 GMTLines: 106

In <1992Oct16.214341.28179@u.washington.edu> distef@carson.u.washington.edu writes:
sd> I am an athiest and I am not a proponant of holistic medicine, but I
sd> KNOW that the knowledge western doctors have is very limited.  They have
sd> a lot of technology but they do not know everything.  Therefore, neither
sd> you nor I nor the brightest doctors in this country know the full
sd> extent of way our bodies and minds work together.

I have no disagreement with you here at all.

rg >CLEARLY mind & body (if one wants even to speak of them as two entities) affect
rg >each other in intimate ways. [EX1:  You can (mentally) DECIDE to raise your left
rg >hand, and that mental act can cause you, physically, to do it;  EX2: physical
rg >states (like being sleep-deprived or hungry) can cause you MENTALLY to *desire*
rg >sleep, food, or whatever.]  
> 
sd> How about the yogis who can (with a form of bio-feedback) change their
sd> blood pressure, pulse, and several other autonomic bodily functions?  They are
sd> not Yuri Gellers, they have a very fine control over their bodies.

Fine, also a good example; I accept your example as consistent w. mine...
 
rg >Clearly, also, psychological well-being improves
rg >one's subjective experience of physical misery.  Clearly, too, physical
rg >well-being improves one's psychological/mental/spiritual state.  I also FULLY
rg >believe the various studies that show that (e.g.) happy people's wounds heal
rg >faster, people whose psyches are thriving catch fewer viral or bacterial
rg >infections than people whose psyches are beleaguered, etc., etc., etc.  But 
rg >extrapolating these results to form a belief in the possibility of healing
rg >physical disease through act of will ... no.
> 
sd> Why not?  Those same researchers you believe above have also shown
sd> that your immune system can be affected by your mental state.

Yes, I agree so far. No problem.

sd> If you
sd> could bolster your immune system, you could heal physical disease.  

Nope.  Well, yes & no.  I accept that "If you could bolster your immune system,
you *might* be able to heal *some* physical disease."  But I do not accept that
"If you could bolster your immune system, you would definitely be able to heal
*all* physical disease."  You are assuming that *all* disease is a result of
immune system malfunction.  This is, as they say, a premise in need of support.
In otherwords, you don't get to *assume* it as part of your argument; you have
to demonstrate that it is TRUE before it can be accepted into the argument.

sd> Why can't it follow that if humans can learn to control
sd> their autonomic nervous system at will (change their blood pressure, etc)
sd> they couldn't learn to control or at least affect their
sd> immune system.  I'm not saying that it necessarily does follow, 
sd> but I'm not discounting the possibility.

I would ACCEPT (as a hypothesis, in need of demonstration, however) that
"If humans can learn to control their autonomic nervous systems at will, then
they might be able to learn to control or at least to affect their immune
systems."  I already said that I accept as true the antecedent here (the
"IF..." part of this statement), so I must (by modus ponens, for logic
choppers) accept the consequent (the "THEN..." part of the statement).  I.e., I
agree to the following:

	"Humans might be able to learn to control or at least to affect their
	immune systems [at will]."

In other words, I'd accept as a reasonable research programme, research
designed either to prove or to disprove the above sentence.  HOWEVER, even if
you demonstrate that it is true, you still haven't demonstrated that positive
thinking (or mind control, or whatever) can cure cancer, or chronic bronchitis,
or any other physical disease, because you still have that other problematic
premise (above) to deal with (about whether all disease is the result of immune
system malfunction).

You see, what is really at stake here is the validity of the scientific method
itself.  Basically (without going into detail) you cannot derive a conclusion
the truth of which you can trust from premises that weren't all undeniably
true.  So how does something get to be "undeniably true"?  2 Ways: 1)
demonstrate its truth with empirical evidence (research, experimentation); 2)
derive it by valid inference from premises all of which are undeniably true.

This is the scientific method.

Now (true confessions) -- in my "other life" (what I do when not reading
sci.med) I have actually published several articles which are critical of the
scientific method (gasp!). (I'll leave it as an exercise for the unbelievably
motivated reader to dig them up out of obscurity, if desired.) One of those
articles even used an extended example in scientific medicine & compared it to
results obtained using "unscientific" methods, arguing that (in that particular
case) the "Unscientific" method get better results than the scientific method.  


So I CERTAINLY don't hold the scientific method to be sacrosanct.  *BUT* ---
you CERTAINLY can't abandon it cavilierly w/out some d*** good idea of how much
"baby" you're dumping out with the "bathwater".

If you come to accept POST HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC as valid reasoning (X happened
after Y; therefore Y caused X) (e.g., bronchitis got better after meditation;
therefore meditation CAUSED recovery) you've regressed to an infantile level of
reasoning  ("Mommy and Daddy got divorced after I fondled my genitals;
therefore Mommy & Daddy got divorced BECAUSE I fondled my genitals...")

Oh I'm sorry this got so Long again.  But if you read this far, I hope it was
worth it.


------------------------
Ruth Ginzberg <rginzberg@eagle.wesleyan.edu>
Philosophy Department;Wesleyan University;USA
Newsgroups: sci.med