Faith: Humankind’s Worst Trait For Science
“What concerns me is not the way things are, but rather the way people think things are.” – Epictetus Before I head down this road, let me clarify a couple things: I’m not talking...
Science Is Absurd
When I say “absurd” I don’t mean the common usage of the word which means unreasonable or irrational. I mean it more in the philosophical sense. I guess I should have called it “Science Is...
APTA Combined Sections Meeting 2016 Review
You should have been there. Sorry that you’re lame…
Practice Template
One of the great things about the modern PT student is their level of education. Current programs, with the occasional unfortunate exception, do a pretty good job giving a proper foundation of the scientific...
Placebo-Fu
“An error is the more dangerous the more truth it contains.” – Henri-Frédéric Amiel Ah placebo! Along with natural history and regression to the mean, it is one of the positive non-specific effects of...
Sure, But What Does It Predict?
He takes a bite of his bacon cheeseburger, “Medical providers don’t know how science works.” “Tell me about it!” I’m having dinner in a noisy sports bar in the Midwest with an applied mathematician with ties...
Treating Ghosts
A common argument that I hear is, “Since pain is a subjective interpretation, who cares how it improves?” The reasoning goes that the pain is real to the patient, so if a treatment makes improvement...
It’s Magic!
“I see you have a deck of cards. Go ahead and shuffle them in any way you would like then hand me the deck.” You look at your deck of cards, a deck your...
What Is Your Razor?
“Often myths arise because a single claim or research finding has particular intuitive appeal. The claim makes sense, it supports a popular argument, and soon it is cemented as taken-for-granted fact even though its evidence base...