This is my new EMPIRICAL MEDICINE Page - 2003-01-16TH 5763 - === HAPPY NEW YEAR ! === Last revised 2006-02-24SA (Latest date scheme: YYYY/MM/DD).
In the last year or so I have become comfortable with Harris Coulter's meaning of the expression "Empirical Medicine" and it has improved my understanding of his work. I hope to add some quotes soon-- as soon as my FURSHLUGGINER lINUx uNIx eUNUCh computer decides to spit it up. Any unix/linux nerds out there, please contact me PRONTO!!!
For example, what is sticky/unsticky in KDE's windows? I - My New Understanding of Coulter's "Empirical" vs. "Rational"
But I am getting off the subject. Harris Coulter, Ph.D., now deceased, wrote a four-volume history of medicine from the beginning of civilization to the present day. He saw the important thing in medicine as the schism (pronounced sizm) between the empiricist doctors and the rationalist doctors. But he meant these words differently than I had come to understand them, so for quite a few years I was in a quandary over what he was talking about.
That is to say, not a quandary over whether he was right or not--since you will find I am a believer in anything radical about medicine and politics--you might say I was a knee-jerk agitator and provocateur. But there was a dissonance between how he used those words and what they meant to me. [More later - I am getting a cold today, dear reader -- but the book, volume 3 at least, is available in paperback for $15 or $25 - check it out; It is subtitled Divided Legacy-- anyway you'll see it; the other volumes cost $50 each so get Volume Three.]
Anyway 05-04-09SA "empirical" meant to me the opposite of "rational," sort of like a posteriori vs. a priori respectively. So I thought of orthodox, standard medicine as being more empirical since it used more laboratory science (physics, chemistry, biology, biochemistry, organic chemistry, genetics, physiology, pathology, anatomy, etc.) than nontoxic, progressive medicine. But Coulter didn't mean "empirical" to require a lot of technology. He meant it only in the sense of being "result-oriented" or "fact-based," that is, only in the sense of bringing about curative and healthy results. This was a big bridge, which took me more years than it should have to cross. But I am on the other side now, and have been for a few years (say six?), and I hope you will get there too some day.
He is saying that using laboratory science isn't necessarily "empirical," because the laboratory science can get in the way of really curative results. This can be confusing and obfuscating, because the results of laboratory medicine are empirical within themselves. That is, it is true that a certain chemical, immunoglobulin, cell type, etc. is correlated with other chemicals or cell types, or is different in health than in "disease" (more on this later). But it isn't true that the treatments based on these facts are the best treatments available, or that treatments not based on these facts cannot be the best treatments available. Orthodox medicine claims to be "empirical," and in many ways they are, but the requirements for FDA approval include a complete chemical description of the drug and that the medicine used must contain this pure chemical. You also have to show the "mechanism of operation" of the treatment. Thus the use of laboratory science becomes a requirement, a "rational" requirement, for finding treatments. Treatments that do not fulfill this requirement are frowned upon, trivialized, marginalized, openly slandered, and financially starved.
Clearly there is more to the "rationality" of laboratory science than that it is a requirement for FDA approval. Obviously all of these sciences have a great deal of internal logic of their own, and a great deal of empirical justification. Clearly there are more things wrong with orthodox medicine than that it is "rational," for example it is completely exclusionary in law and recent tradition. But what Dr. Coulter chose, or was compelled to choose, as the theme that would cover all the eras of history that he encountered in his studies, was this somewhat unusual distinction between "rational" and "empirical" medicine.
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II - Underpinnings of This Distinction: Empirical Medicine I
I will use the example of homœopathy not because it is the only form of empirical or fact based medicine, but because I know more about it than about the others, and because it is probably the clearest and most unequivocal about its position. Homœopathy explicitly states that the causes of illness are "unknowable" . . . I am looking in my Organon but haven't found the exact quote yet, but I am glad I at least could find the book!
orthodox establishment standard reactionary . . .
More later - best wishes - =========== :) ==============
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My Favorite Things About Homœopathic and Pleomorphic Philosophy