Yesterday, as I was driving to work, I happened to be listening to a discussion programme on BBC Radio 2 and one of the guests on the show was a professor of medicine who produced a research report that stated that the effects of holistic medicine is negligible and that there are risks associated with it. One of the other guests on the show was another professor who specialises in holistic medicine, and osteopathy in particular, for over 40 years, who disagrees with the report, naturally, saying that he had treated thousands of patients using osteopathy and he has managed to cure them when traditional medicine had failed. Both of them were making claims and counter-claims about the benefits or the lack of osteopathy and their arguments got me thinking.
The issue I had with listening to the programme was not who was right and who was wrong, but how the research was carried out in the first place.
In Western science, there is one fundamental Golden Rule that anyone who is doing any kind of research or experiment has to abide by and that is: The person performing the experiment MUST NOT be a participant in the experiment. On the first reading of this statement, one would argue that it is right; it is pure common sense. The experimenter must be a detached observer so that the results are objective and not biased by personal opinions.
However, I would argue that this very notion of non-participation in research has limited scientists and researchers from discovering truly paradigm-shifting understandings about the world we live in. It is ONLY through participation with the experiment that one really knows the truth.
I'll illustrate the fallacy of non-participation research using a simple analogy. Let's say you have heard of a new restaurant opening in town and you want to know if it's any good. One of your friends just happens to be a research scientist so you send him to check out the restaurant.
On arrival, he looks through the window of the restaurant and sees that the restaurant is very busy. He then enters the restaurant, takes a seat at a table and looks through the menu, and orders something from the menu and waits for the food to arrive. Whilst he is waiting, he sees and smells the delicious food being served to the customers on nearby tables. Finally, his food arrives and as he was about to take the first bite of his meal he suddenly realises that as a research scientist who's evaluating the restaurant he must not allow himself to participate in the consumption of the food.
So, he pays for his food, leaves his table and stands outside the entrance of the restaurant all evening until the closing time, with a notepad and a pen, and asking the customers what they thought of the food as they leave the restaurant.
He then comes back to you around midnight and tell you, "Yes, I've been to the restaurant and I observed the following:-
a) The place was full throughout my entire stay there, which means this is a popular place with the patrons.
b) The descriptions on the menu shows a good selection of ingredients and the clever and unusual combination of them indicated to me that the chef is highly experienced.
c) The food being served to the nearby tables and the look and the smell of the food gave me clear indication that the food is high quality and very well made.
D) I interviewed all 238 people who ate there and 98.5% of them said the food was excellent, and therefore I conclude that the restaurant is a very good place to eat."
What's your reaction would be? Would you applaud him for his objective and scientific nature of his analysis and accepts his conclusion, or would your reaction be to say to him, "You plonker! All you had to do was eat the bloody food and you'd know if it was any good instead of wasting your time standing in the street in the cold asking questions to strangers!"?
The point I'm trying to make with this rather silly example is that the truth experienced by others (i.e. the fact that the food was good) is the truth only for those people who tasted it. All the analysis in the world would not help the researcher knows for himself with absolute certainty if the food was good. He would only have not first, but a second-hand experience. Their truth becomes your truth only if you have tasted the same food yourself. As Newton once said, "Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — but my greatest friend is truth", and there's no greater truth than the truth experienced by oneself.
And yet, one great sad thing about the nature of the current thinking in scientific research is the total reliance on accepting the truth experienced by participants of the research (a small sample set of the public) and imposing that as the truth for everyone else, or discovery of new knowledge through the use of highly sensitive instruments and monitoring equipment to observe either natural or manufactured phenomena, both of which lack personal experience.
Going back to the discussion on the radio programme, all the medical professor who carried out the research has to do was to undergo a session or two of osteopathy treatments and see for himself if it was any good or if his experience agrees with those in the research. But, sadly, his faith in the figures, his reliance on the experience of his research subjects and his unshakable trust on the method of research would not allow himself to undertake a treatment of osteopathy himself and would never know the benefit (or the lack of) of this form of treatment. He would forever stand on his metaphorical soapbox and say, "My research conclusively shows that holistic medicine has no real benefit and you run the risk of damaging yourself, and therefore it should be banned."
This is a very sad state of affairs to be in.
The issue I had with listening to the programme was not who was right and who was wrong, but how the research was carried out in the first place.
In Western science, there is one fundamental Golden Rule that anyone who is doing any kind of research or experiment has to abide by and that is: The person performing the experiment MUST NOT be a participant in the experiment. On the first reading of this statement, one would argue that it is right; it is pure common sense. The experimenter must be a detached observer so that the results are objective and not biased by personal opinions.
However, I would argue that this very notion of non-participation in research has limited scientists and researchers from discovering truly paradigm-shifting understandings about the world we live in. It is ONLY through participation with the experiment that one really knows the truth.
I'll illustrate the fallacy of non-participation research using a simple analogy. Let's say you have heard of a new restaurant opening in town and you want to know if it's any good. One of your friends just happens to be a research scientist so you send him to check out the restaurant.
On arrival, he looks through the window of the restaurant and sees that the restaurant is very busy. He then enters the restaurant, takes a seat at a table and looks through the menu, and orders something from the menu and waits for the food to arrive. Whilst he is waiting, he sees and smells the delicious food being served to the customers on nearby tables. Finally, his food arrives and as he was about to take the first bite of his meal he suddenly realises that as a research scientist who's evaluating the restaurant he must not allow himself to participate in the consumption of the food.
So, he pays for his food, leaves his table and stands outside the entrance of the restaurant all evening until the closing time, with a notepad and a pen, and asking the customers what they thought of the food as they leave the restaurant.
He then comes back to you around midnight and tell you, "Yes, I've been to the restaurant and I observed the following:-
a) The place was full throughout my entire stay there, which means this is a popular place with the patrons.
b) The descriptions on the menu shows a good selection of ingredients and the clever and unusual combination of them indicated to me that the chef is highly experienced.
c) The food being served to the nearby tables and the look and the smell of the food gave me clear indication that the food is high quality and very well made.
D) I interviewed all 238 people who ate there and 98.5% of them said the food was excellent, and therefore I conclude that the restaurant is a very good place to eat."
What's your reaction would be? Would you applaud him for his objective and scientific nature of his analysis and accepts his conclusion, or would your reaction be to say to him, "You plonker! All you had to do was eat the bloody food and you'd know if it was any good instead of wasting your time standing in the street in the cold asking questions to strangers!"?
The point I'm trying to make with this rather silly example is that the truth experienced by others (i.e. the fact that the food was good) is the truth only for those people who tasted it. All the analysis in the world would not help the researcher knows for himself with absolute certainty if the food was good. He would only have not first, but a second-hand experience. Their truth becomes your truth only if you have tasted the same food yourself. As Newton once said, "Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — but my greatest friend is truth", and there's no greater truth than the truth experienced by oneself.
And yet, one great sad thing about the nature of the current thinking in scientific research is the total reliance on accepting the truth experienced by participants of the research (a small sample set of the public) and imposing that as the truth for everyone else, or discovery of new knowledge through the use of highly sensitive instruments and monitoring equipment to observe either natural or manufactured phenomena, both of which lack personal experience.
Going back to the discussion on the radio programme, all the medical professor who carried out the research has to do was to undergo a session or two of osteopathy treatments and see for himself if it was any good or if his experience agrees with those in the research. But, sadly, his faith in the figures, his reliance on the experience of his research subjects and his unshakable trust on the method of research would not allow himself to undertake a treatment of osteopathy himself and would never know the benefit (or the lack of) of this form of treatment. He would forever stand on his metaphorical soapbox and say, "My research conclusively shows that holistic medicine has no real benefit and you run the risk of damaging yourself, and therefore it should be banned."
This is a very sad state of affairs to be in.
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