John_Maxwell_IV comments on How to Deal with Depression - The Meta Layers - Less Wrong

26 Post author: ShannonFriedman 26 October 2012 06:44PM

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Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 27 October 2012 05:52:53AM *  6 points [-]

Hm, looks to me like you committed the noncentral fallacy twice. "Scientific evidence"--evidence can still be evidence without being "scientific". "Quackery"--yeah, there are people who scam others with fake medical advice with little regard to the others' actual health. That doesn't mean that all medical advice from non-doctors should be disregarded. For example, I resolved a long-standing repetitive strain injury thanks to this guy. If I decided to disregard his advice because he wasn't a doctor, I'd probably still be controlling my computer using voice recognition (did this for almost a year and it seriously sucked).

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 27 October 2012 06:36:45AM *  4 points [-]

For what it's worth, I attribute the vast improvement in my health over the last year to quackery (that is to say, advice given by non-doctors, based on assumptions that are far from being the consensus among those within traditional scientific institutions like medical associations and universities).

Comment author: V_V 27 October 2012 01:24:19PM *  -1 points [-]

I'm sure you could find literaly millions of personal anecdotes of people who allegedly got better because of homeopathy, chromotherapy, magnotherapy, faith healing and whatever form of snake oil out there.

The effectiveness of medical procedures is essentially impossible to evaluate subjectively due to large aleatory effects, individual differences, sponteneous regression and the placebo effect. On the other hand, due to the large emotional effects of illness and death, medicine is the ideal fertile ground for fallacies such as wishful thinking, confirmation bias and for outright fraud.

Therefore, the value of medical advice unsupported by science is virtually zero. In fact, it could be argued that the existence of an unscientific medical practice in a society where scientific medicine is available is actually weak evidence that such practice is ineffective and possibly fraudulent.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 27 October 2012 07:36:30PM 4 points [-]

You're discounting the possibility that "fringe" medical advice would have theoretical evidence behind it, as opposed to empirical evidence.

You're also not doing an expected utility calculation. What are the costs and benefits of following this particular bit of "fringe" medical advice? In my case, the cost was: I spent a few hours reading and massaging my arm, and discovered a knot in my bicep such that when I massaged it, my wrist pain was replicated. Benefits? I got my career back. Indeed, when I first heard about "trigger points" I thought the probability that they were legit was extremely low. But in retrospect, I'm glad I followed up all the low-probability leads that I did. In fact, I wish I'd done this sort of experimentation more and sooner--the cost-benefit analysis favored it overwhelmingly. (Unfortunately, severe depression seems to make it very hard for me to motivate myself to do things that I know have only a low probability of working.)

In fact, it could be argued that the existence of an unscientific medical practice in a society where scientific medicine is available is actually weak evidence that such practice is ineffective and possibly fraudulent.

The fact that someone is passing it off as medical advice makes the probability of it being useful medical advice way, way higher than the probability that some random string of characters is useful medical advice. I agree that "fringe" medical advice is less likely to be useful than advice you get from doctors.

Comment author: V_V 27 October 2012 08:20:44PM *  2 points [-]

You're discounting the possibility that "fringe" medical advice would have theoretical evidence behind it, as opposed to empirical evidence.

Are you talking about a theory rooted in solid biological and medical science or some alternative newagey theory like chakra points? Even within the realm of scientific theories, the ability to predict the actual effectiveness and safety of a therapy is generally limited: 92% of drugs that pass in vitro tests fail animal or human trials, and these are only the drugs that have already passed the computer-based design phase.

You're also not doing an expected utility calculation. What are the costs and benefits of following this particular bit of "fringe" medical advice? In my case, the cost was: I spent a few hours reading and massaging my arm, and discovered a knot in my bicep such that when I massaged it, my wrist pain was replicated.

As far as I know, there are a number of conditions, notably inflammation, that are actually made worse by massage.

The fact that someone is passing it off as medical advice makes the probability of it being useful medical advice way, way higher than the probability that some random string of characters is useful medical advice.

That's an irrelevant comparison, since nobody suggested to sample random strings for medical advice. In any case, an alleged medical advice also has a probability of being actually harmful way way higher than that of a random string.