Talk:Daniel Amen

message: as i'm an amateur scientist and layman, after seeing the Ted talk on YouTube and then looking at this article, my initial thoughts are (and these can be directions for improving the article)
#The Wikipedia article helped me notice the lack of scientific validation of the use of activity scanning for SPECT scans.
#maybe some of the example cases (the athlete with a cyst) could have been detected by other types of scans! (I can look that up!)
#What's a range of normal activity scans for a normal brain? The Ted talk shows one where the whole brain is active but is it taken the same way as the others? How much time does a SPECT scan take? What kind of image do I get from it; is it like another kind of CT scan or ultrasound where I can get the results on a CD? In the Ted talk it just shows stills.
#is it true that other psychiatrists are "guessing" and "throwing darts at the patient" when they prescribe meds with black-box warnings when presented with ambiguous "clusters of symptoms"?  Maybe psychiatry is a pseudoscience too!  (I can look up psychiatry.)
#On this talk page, of the talk combatants I'm surprised to see some chastised by a moderator and not some others.  Mod?
Not making an appointment for a SPECT scan yet!  Thanks Thinkadoodle (talk) 11:52, 10 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I forgot to say, the very first thing that I wanted to find on the page is what is this SMART treatment program?? Is it just vitamins and exercise or meditation? Crossword puzzles? Some new kind of brain yoga? I can only speculate.  I thought maybe the difference in result images is from when he fiddles with the knob on the SPECT machine possibly?? Ted talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esPRsT-lmw8  entitled "The most important lesson from 83,000 brain scans". Thinkadoodle (talk) 12:07, 10 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it's fairly clear from the sources what the science says. As to the history of edits here, you'll no doubt have seen this article has been plagued by (sometimes dishonest) paid editors and PR people trying to push a pro-SPECT POV. Alexbrn (talk) 12:57, 10 July 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ways to improve the article: activity scans? how cysts are diagnosed? what SPECT scans look like? Pseudoscience? 

message: His books and quackery are peddled uncritically in Central European countries. 
This article helped me arrive at a quick conclusion what to do with these.
Let us protect it against astroturfing etc. Zezen (talk) 10:05, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Useful, protect content 

message: This has been going on here for years now. Selected studies are used to claim "Scientific consensus" when there is none. One can make the argument that Amens SPECT studies are not fully accepted. One can not make the argument that there is large-scale (majority) scientific consensus that they are wrong.
Opinion (the jury) is "out", not "against".
That means-- Most scientists/Doctors don't know if Amen is right-- but most have not said that he is wrong either.
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The leade (lede in British Engish) of the article is consistently used to totally discredit Amen without any comprehensive scientific basis. Four (small) scientific studies do not equate to "scientific consensus" that Amen is wrong. Yet these four inadequate studies are put prominently in the lead to discredit Amen before any reader, the very moment they start reading the article.
The article is written like a hit piece. It doesn't cover the issue from NPOV, it targets the subject.
Chesapeake77 >>> ♥ Truth 08:45, 26 May 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Can you please explain more about what you think the problem is? For it it to be a NPOV violation, there need to be sources which are currently omitted, not just you making your own interpretation that the article is biased. By my count, there are eight named individuals (John Seibyl, Martha Farah, S. J. Gillihan, Irving Kirsch, Anjan Chatterjee, Steven Hyman, Robert Burton, Harriet Hall ) who have criticised Amen's approach and I'm not aware of any non-connected scientists or doctors who support the approach. As to the lead, we have some leeway in summarising the rest of the article, but I don't think that it suggests that there is a scientific consensus that his approach is wrong, just that it has been criticised. SmartSE (talk) 14:55, 28 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article is biased, uses cherrypicked (and small) studies, claims consensus that does not exist