Science, Labels, Stuckness, Brain Diagnosis 2007

Brain Complexity

Beyond the Illusion of Precision Through Labels
As a group, we health care providers often find ourselves profoundly, categorically stuck in black and white medical arguments.  It's Aristotle‘s fault!

Aristotle's efforts to lock down the scientific world of the day into labels, into concrete concepts, still lasts to this very day. We all can get locked down in a heartbeat, and miss the change that surrounds us. This entire subject is very interestingly covered in the book Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (International Non-Aristotelian Library) by Alfred Korzybski. I heard about Korzybski as an medical intern in Grand Rapids, MI, in 1968 from a wonderful doc there who looked like a postcard from Miami Beach [plaid golf pants, pompadour hair], and drove a red Mark IV Lincoln Continental. Profound information often arrives in unexpected packages. I am forever grateful for that surprisingly useful 2 AM conversation.

The Culprit: Apparent Fixation in Time
This book will change the way you think and speak for the rest of your life, and Korzybski [who lived upstairs from my doc friend in Chicago] does it with the very best in particle physics science… Heisenberg, Einstein, you catch the drift. Has to do with simplistic thinking which binds phenomena into frozen time-bound packages of illusions, insanity, and limited thinking. And this is only Monday….

But I am telling you, this stuff is what we do everyday! Back in 1998 I was at an international meeting attended by some of the luminaries in our [psychiatric] field who have contributed to the identification and treatment of OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder in children and adults.

‘Scientific' meetings, I can tell you from considerable experience, are the breeding grounds for those categorical-thinking bugs.

There, an academic from a prestigious university, ordained by Professorship [made at lunch quite a puff about the importance and relevance of his spiritual practice] clearly denounced my comments about “cognitive anxiety” as related to ADHD [during my comments you could hear a pin drop in an audience of ~ 300]. I'll go over my remarks in a later post, but want to leave you today with his bombastic retort to my attempt at dialog:

We must move forward only with research, not with observation of anecdotal remarks, only research can lead us forward.

But what drives research, what begs the questions and the further inquiry other than that single person in the office? “Only” is a categorical, reductionistic, fundamentalist word that locks down, arrests the development of science. The way we think and the words themselves do matter because they can either embrace our thoughts or kill the next step. I “never” use “only” and am “always” “right.”

Change is good if it can help that next person in the door.
cp

Related articles by Zemanta

• Psychiatric Diagnosis and DSM 5: Maps to Nowhere (corepsychblog.com)