So far, so good. But Shaywitz made the mistake of testing the patients to see if they also performed better. Unfortunately, they didn't. Objective evidence of brain activation wasn't accompanied by any detectable change in memory function. This problem of subjectivity extends to much of medicine, whether one is analyzing treatments for chronic pain, depression, social phobias, chronic fatigue or even the effects of zinc lozenges on the common cold.
Symptom relief makes a lousy scientific endpoint.
We are stuck. We need a new way of asking medical questions and we need a new way of reporting results. The article should address the very knotty problem of whether the question being asked can be answered. As consumers, we need to be comfortable with these distinctions, to know when an article represents a true scientific determination and when it simply represents subjective opinion. I think of the judges at an Olympic diving competition.