Ladies and gentlemen: Psychiatry Denialism.
“It’s not REAL, it’s just a conspiracy of scientists!”
1 Like
Well, it’s a tool. Idiots and criminals can do terrible things with tools.
2 Likes
When is acne a disorder instead of just a normal part of puberty? When it causes significant distress and impairment. What is “significant distress”? That would be the determination of a dermatologist. But would you say that dermatology is not a real science? Psychiatry is a type a medical science, just like dermatology. And both use expert opinions to make diagnoses. Using expert opinions does not mean something is not scientific. And as I’ve discussed in other posts, the DSM has used clinical trials to validate itself.
1 Like
Yes, because the field of psychiatry just plain doesn’t exist.
Yes. Although it is closer to science than most medical practices, since there’s more room for experimentation without harming the patient.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was science. The practice of medicine is an art, a craft, a profession, a skill, or any combination of the preceding, but it is not and should not be a science. If medicine was a science, you’d leave some portion of your patients to suffer and die, as a control group to validate your treatments. Seriously - science requires multiply validated reproducible results, which is not compatible with optimal patient care.
Medical science can be done on monkeys and rats in research laboratories, but medicine is practiced on people. This is a very important distinction, and I believe it supports your major point, doesn’t it? The DSM is a guidebook that quantifies standards, and the product of sciences such as statistical analysis of research.
Psychiatry is not science, because people’s mental health is not something that should be treated with the scientific method; people should be treated with the best known methods and medical experimentation should be restricted to research efforts and cases where no methods exist.
1 Like
In all fields you have to look for the gold standard. In physics it is easy (which is why I studied physics). In fields where you ‘create’ a disease, the gold standard has to be the expertise of the field until a more objective standard is found. It is still science (it uses the scientific method), but it is not as simple. You can study an arbitrary diagnosis created by ‘experts’ and then compare how different drugs affect it (such as double blind studies). You can create a diagnostic book and then perform clinical tests to see how it compares to the diagnoses created by ‘experts’. This is still science, even if it isn’t pretty.
Exactly, which is why optimal patient care is not provided during treatment trials, except for suicidal people and pregnant women. Are you not familiar with placebos?
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
