Posted by yxibow on September 1, 2006, at 4:27:43
In reply to Re: Biopsychosocial vs Biological Reductionism » yxibow, posted by Estella on September 1, 2006, at 1:02:08
> Sorry, what was the groundbreaking discovery?
>
> That if you take a bunch of people with OCD and do brain imaging... Then you figure the averages across the population... Then you decide on your colour scheme... And you do the same with people... Without OCD? With another dx? Then your pretty pics look different?
>
> Er... How does that help?
Well true insults aside to peer reviewed journalism and key scientific individuals whose intellectual product have helped save the lives of thousands of people with OCD by groundbreaking research when at a time it was just a "neurotic" disorder, it illustrated for the first time that OCD was clearly based on biological underpinnings. That if you gave a sufferer a dirty rag and a control the same, areas of the brain normally not thought to possess suchprocessing energy light up, for example.
> I just don't understand what the brain imaging shows. Also... If you take a person with OCD chances are their brain is within normal range. It is just averages across populations that have been deemed to be different (and are there systematic differences between averages across different populations?)
2% of the population will have an OCD breakthrough at least once in their lifetime. That's a significant percentage. That's what brain imaging has increasingly helped in demonstrably showing. I can't argue circular logic that if everybody is the same then everybody is the same. People with OCD do not have the same particular brain structure, nor do people with Schizophrenia, nor other key illnesses, all due to increasing abilitiy to image the brain in more precise fashion. I'm not going to argue deities over science, its an endless discussion.
I agree with the idea that the patient is not just a number or a statistic, but biological reductionist models help us understand complex systems in intricate ways never thought before. If you believe brain imaging has no basis, I cannot argue science over pseudorationalization. MRIs clearly show an increasingly accurate diagnosis as to whether cancer exists, etc.
And when SPECT and other technologies are perfected, who knows what we will discover, along with stem cell lines and other issues that this country is pathetically behind in the 21st century at the moment compared to other western societies. But I digress -- we have free will, and I feel you have the free will to believe what you may wish-- Jay
poster:yxibow
thread:680731
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060901/msgs/681975.html