Corwin

When you're dealing with human perceptions, such as people's perception of pain, narratives are all you have to work with. Otherwise, you end up with a wonderfully unsympathetic doctor insisting that you aren't in pain, simply because you can't be...

'Well the study says this doesn't hurt so quit screaming willya?'

Dr Rick

You need to slow down and take a breath, cowboy; you're posting more gibberish than usual.

Rick

Dr Rick

When you're in pain, there's a valid, objective reason why a doctor gives you morphine instead of recommending prayer.

Rick

Rick

Corwin

Then let me break it down for ya doc....

I related to tron that the wilder claims of what acupuncture is capable of don't actually come from people who practice acupuncture.

You said it didn't matter who made the claim, just that there was nothing to support that claim. That who made the claim was irrelevant.

I informed you that you were guilty of a logical fallacy we call 'complete bullshit.'

I then provided you with an example of exactly why your statement was an example of the 'complete bullshit' logical fallacy.

To restate. You have made the claim that it doesn't matter where a claim comes from, only whether or not there is objective evidence to support the claim.

Hence, by your logic, evolutionary theory is wrong because there is no evidence to support the idea that a dog will give birth to a cat. The fact that evolutionary theory should not need to support the claim that a dog will give birth to a cat, since proponents of evolutionary theory do not, in fact, claim that a dog will give birth to a cat, is irrelevant, according to your 'logic.' SOMEONE, (in this case, the more braindead set of the creationist movement) has made the claim, and since their claim is entirely true, (dogs do not give birth to cats) and therefore they're right, and evolutionary theory must be wrong.

We who exist in that strange world we like to call 'reality' refer to this as 'complete bullshit.'

To extend your reasoning to the current argument, the equivalent would be taking a claim that acupuncture will cure cancer, and using the fact that acupuncture will not cure cancer to 'prove' that acupuncture doesn't work. This in spite of the fact that if you went to any acupuncture practitioner and asked to be cured of cancer, you would get in return a blank look and a response of 'where the hell did you get the idea we could do that?'

Does this make more sense now?

Corwin

And when I've strained a muscle or am in caffiene withdrawal, there's a valid, objective reason why I meditate instead of using an extremely addictive and extremely dangerous opiate.

Mad Kally

Like a doctor would give you an opiate for that? lol.. How about cancer pain? Now there's a valid reason.

[ September 19, 2002: Message edited by: Mad Kally ]</p>

Corwin

Dr Rick's the one that brought up morphine, not me.

If I happen to get a headache and happen to have aspirin on me, I'll take it. The fact that I'm willing to use aspirin when I have it doesn't invalidate meditation... both are effective. Meditiation doesn't upset the lining of my stomach, (although admittedly I don't have a whole lot of problem with aspirin in that regard either...) and doesn't require packing around a bottle full of rattling pills everywhere I go.

Dr Rick

No; maybe you should pass over that joint...

What the hell does this mean?:

<strong> Evolution doesn't predict dogs will give birth to cats; are you claiming that it does? or that because it doesn't, it's not correct?

Either way, your wrong; such nonsense doesn't help your spurious arguments about the nature of studies and anecdotes.

Rick

Corwin

I am aware that evolutionary theory does not claim that dogs will give birth to cats.

Creationists, however, claim that this is part of the theory. (Essentially claiming that evolutionists do claim that dogs will give birth to cats.)

So, since 'it doesn't matter where the claim comes from,' then by your logic, evolutionary theory is wrong because the above refuting claim is entirely true. The fact that it's an irrelevant claim and doesn't matter in any rational sense is no longer relevant.

Hence my description of your logic as falling under the logical fallacy of 'complete bullshit.'

Nickolaus

There's two different arguments going on here.

The argument I think Corwin is going for is that the only way (or the most typical way) we know if someone is in pain or not is asking them. If someone says they were in pain before X procedure and not in pain after X procedure, that's what we have to go on, even in a scientific study. In this he is perfectly correct, but that does not mean that scientific studies cannot acheive better results than simple surveys or hearsay.

A couple others, therefore, are quite rightly arguing that what we call "anecdotal evidence" is vastly inferior to controlled scientific study.

For starters, when we talk about anecdotal evidence we are usually referring to the type of thing you hear every day - "X treatment worked for me". For instance, Siren is telling us all about acupuncture and recommends it because it worked. This is even worse than a survey, because in a survey you record all the people who say it didn't work, and thus eliminate what we call the voluntary response bias.

Now, assuming we do a survey and 80% of the people say it worked. We then conclude that something is going on with X treatment. However, here we must examine the placebo effect, which means basically that there are basic physical and psychological processes involved when a patient believes they are being treated, that can have a healing effect.

This means that any treatment whatsoever will achieve a certain level of healing, as long as the patient believes they are being treated.

Scientific studies therefore compare the difference between X treatment and a "placebo" treatment in which the patient is convinced that he is receiving X treatment but really is not. With drugs, the placebo is often a sugar pill.

These issues are why we draw the semantic distinction between anecdotal evidence and scientific study, and it is a very important distinction. A controlled experiment will always be able to tell you more about whether X treatment is anything special.

I apologize if I sounded too pedantic there, but there seemed to be a fundamental misunderstanding going on and I figured getting down the the simple basics would get everyone on the same page.