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...
Category: Critical Thinking
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...
Doesn’t the Emperor have some nice new clothes?
In The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen, the Emperor hires two weavers to make him a new suit of clothing. The weavers provide no actual clothes but swindle the Emperor by telling him that the “fabric” is...
Is pain what brought the patient in? Kind of, but not exactly…
Many times when I’m discussing placebo and specific effects, physical therapists will say, “The patient doesn’t care. They just want less pain. We should give them less pain even if it’s temporary and the treatment...
What Is Science and Why Do Medical Providers Suck At It?
It has been said that medicine skipped The Enlightenment since it was already a fully established profession at that time. Where the likes of Newton, Hooke, Huygens, etc. evolved “Natural Philosophy” into the sciences of physics,...