Posted by SLS on March 30, 2008, at 11:38:57
In reply to Re: Inductive versus Deductive Reasoning, posted by dbc on March 30, 2008, at 10:54:29
Your points are very well taken. I can't find flaws in anyone's response along this thread. In essence, there can be a balance between inductive and deductive approaches. As time passes, I hope the two will merge into a unified structure where the inductive serves as the proof of the deductive.
My original post was meant to be provocative so as to challenge the status quo here. I, too, have been concerned with the number of aborted drug trials and the growing belief that you can predict the worth of a drug by how it behaves during the first week of treatment. Often, personal hypotheses and theories seem to take on the appearance of fact - at least in the mind of these individuals. I first proposed the involvement of dopaminergic systems in my own case in 1983. I was a bit of a loner at that time. The psychiatric team at Columbia would not hear of it and refused to prescribe to me bromocriptine and Wellbutrin. They were still hung up on norepinephrine at the time. Serotonin was the neurotransmitter of the future, but was without a representative drug available in the US. To my amazement, I found a researcher by the name of Randrup at the University of Chicago who also deduced a role for dopamine in depressive disorders, especially when bipolar disorder was considered.
Since then, I have hypothesized and found dopamine implicated in the actions of several different drugs that have been found effective for treating depressive and bipolar disorders. For example, it is my theory that Lamictal becomes pro-dopaminergic in its resultant action at the nucleus accumbens, which is the primary reward center in the brain. Lamictal produces a reduction in glutamate release in the thalamus. The inhibition in the firing of glutamatergic neurons in this circuit produces a disinhibition of limbic dopamine release. At least that's what I think. I was motivated to search for a role for dopamine in the actions of Lamictal once I responded favorable to it. Here, deduction followed induction. I had no idea Lamictal was dopaminergic when I first decided to try it. However, my intuition that it was somehow dopaminergic led me to continue with it.
It really doesn't matter whether I am right or wrong. What does matter is that some neurologists at the NIH observed that their depressed epileptic patients experienced an improvement of their depression upon the administration of Lamictal. All they had to work with was inductive reasoning that led them to notify the Department of Biological Psychiatry that they had witnessed something interesting in a series of depressed patients undergoing Lamictal therapy. It's pretty cool that this happened while I was down there, and motivated me to try it when it first became available. Any conjecture as to the mechanism of action of Lamictal is after the fact.
- Scott
poster:SLS
thread:820639
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20080330/msgs/820666.html