It was remarkably sensible. They students sat in with an osteopath and a homeopath. The osteopath was very respectful, a very nice friendly woman, and offered several pieces of fairly sensible advice - being exceedingly respectful towards one of the students when she found out that she was already a qualified physiotherapist.
The homeopath asked "does anyone know anything about homeopathy", and my girlfriend told her. She apparently went into quite a lot of detail about Avogadro's constant, the fact that every drop of water on the planet should already be a homeopathic remedy for everything and the fact that homeopathy just doesn't work. (To be fair, of course, as Ben Goldacre would say "it's a lot more complicate than that", but the pills don't work any better than any other sugar pills). The homeopath stood there, listened, thanked my girlfriend (I might need to come up with a codename if I'm going to keep doing this... or get her to let me use her real name) for her contribution and then went on to explain about what the various tablet do.
She told them all she'd give them some free arnica tablets next time (for general aches and pains, I believe) and offered to give a few of them medicine for various conditions if they hadn't cleared up in two weeks time, and then finished with an exhortation to "do some research about homeopathy". Her suggested source was the Society of Homeopaths website which I'm sure would offer a "Fair and Balanced" view. I'm going to give her a copy of Ben Goldacre's book,as well as a few of the better meta-analyses.
As for the (very helpful) point made in the comments about using the experience to learn about why people feel the need to go to these people for help instead of using medicine that actually works - yes, we've already talked about that - it is a good chance to see something that she probably won't get to see working in hospitals or on future ward rounds (although asking the patients tactfully why they aren't seeing a traditional doctor might be a challenge). Still, that's not the way the hospital treats it - they consider it an opportunity to watch real-life health professionals at work in the field. Also, I apologise about the comments I made about the qualifications of the psychotherapists at the Centre - I was not happy at the time, and it was unnecessary.
Anyway - the visit didn't go too badly, everyone was polite and, whilst I don't think she got much out of it, my girlfriend was slightly more happy than she expected to be - at least she got a chance to air her views. We'll see how things go next week when she'll have more contact with patients.
Saturday, 25 October 2008
Tuesday, 21 October 2008
Enforced Quackery
My girlfriend is a second year medical student at a UK university (naming no names, as she seems to think she'll be punished if this gets out...) She does a module called "Medicine in Society", she has 11 full days observing real-life medical practitioners at work, more than half of her patient contact for the year. This year, she will be doing her placement at the Greenwich Natural Health Centre. Yes, it is as bad as it sounds.
Among other things, they offer "Holistic Aromatherapy", "Homeopathy", "Cranial Osteopathy", "Cranio-sacral therapy" (on reading the blurb on the website, I honestly can't see any difference between these particular two brands of woo) , and the Reiki Healing. Even when some of the treatments sound as though they might be sensible (Pyschotherapy, Relationship Counselling...) it turns out that some of the practitioners are the same people who do the Reiki healing. Although, to be fair, some of them do seem to be qualified psyhotherapists (not, note, qualified pychiatrists).
There doesn't appear to be a single person on the staff at GNH who is a qualified medical doctor (I haven't looked through the entire list, I'm willing to be corrected on this) and one woman proudly offers her qualifications as "BA Hons", "DipTch", which unless I'm mistaken is just a Bachelor's degree (in an unspecified (arts) subject) and a teaching diploma.
Anyway, that's enough trashing the place - obviously, it's a hotbed for woo, and they don't really buy into the whole "evidence-based medicine" thing. Fair enough, there's a time and a place for that sort of thing, as Ben Goldacre points out in his new book, there are probably more important things to worry about, but this is where the story gets silly.
On hearing that she was going to be sent to woo-central, and not really liking the idea, my girlfriend decided to ring up the School and ask if she could possibly be transferred to a placement where they did actual medicine. She was told in no uncertain terms that she could not, and that if she didn't attend all eleven days of woo-school, she couldn't possibly pass her second year. An extract from this conversation apparently went:
My Girlfriend: "But there's absolutely no evidence that any of it works, it's not based in science."
Office Lady: "That's a fair point, but..."
"but..."? But what? What "but..." could possibly justify forcing someone to waste 11 days and (approximately) £1000 of tuition fees on learning about treatments that can't possibly work? Possibly the scariest part about this is that the other twenty or so medical students who were sent on the same placement don't seem to have objected at all.
Anyway, today is day one of her placement. She's promised to take copious notes, and I'm going to write about them here.
Among other things, they offer "Holistic Aromatherapy", "Homeopathy", "Cranial Osteopathy", "Cranio-sacral therapy" (on reading the blurb on the website, I honestly can't see any difference between these particular two brands of woo) , and the Reiki Healing. Even when some of the treatments sound as though they might be sensible (Pyschotherapy, Relationship Counselling...) it turns out that some of the practitioners are the same people who do the Reiki healing. Although, to be fair, some of them do seem to be qualified psyhotherapists (not, note, qualified pychiatrists).
There doesn't appear to be a single person on the staff at GNH who is a qualified medical doctor (I haven't looked through the entire list, I'm willing to be corrected on this) and one woman proudly offers her qualifications as "BA Hons", "DipTch", which unless I'm mistaken is just a Bachelor's degree (in an unspecified (arts) subject) and a teaching diploma.
Anyway, that's enough trashing the place - obviously, it's a hotbed for woo, and they don't really buy into the whole "evidence-based medicine" thing. Fair enough, there's a time and a place for that sort of thing, as Ben Goldacre points out in his new book, there are probably more important things to worry about, but this is where the story gets silly.
On hearing that she was going to be sent to woo-central, and not really liking the idea, my girlfriend decided to ring up the School and ask if she could possibly be transferred to a placement where they did actual medicine. She was told in no uncertain terms that she could not, and that if she didn't attend all eleven days of woo-school, she couldn't possibly pass her second year. An extract from this conversation apparently went:
My Girlfriend: "But there's absolutely no evidence that any of it works, it's not based in science."
Office Lady: "That's a fair point, but..."
"but..."? But what? What "but..." could possibly justify forcing someone to waste 11 days and (approximately) £1000 of tuition fees on learning about treatments that can't possibly work? Possibly the scariest part about this is that the other twenty or so medical students who were sent on the same placement don't seem to have objected at all.
Anyway, today is day one of her placement. She's promised to take copious notes, and I'm going to write about them here.
Sunday, 1 June 2008
Singularly Selfish
I've been reading Eliezer Tudowsky's posts at Overcoming Bias religiously (sic) for a few months now, but there's still one problem that bothers me, and which I've yet to see him address (I'm sure he has addressed it, I'm just not sure where, or where to find it - at some point, if I don't find it, or figure it out for myself, I'll ask). If the singularity really is near, and Unfriendly AI really is about to wipe out the human race, why should I care?
Yes, it would be a tragedy if an asteroid hit the Earth and killed us all, or if we managed to kill several billion people in a nuclear war, but is there really any moral imperative to privilege future intelligent beings which happen to be made out of the same sort of squishy stuff as we are ahead of future beings that are made out of silicon, or toilet paper and stones, or whatever it might be? When I read Eliezer's story about the Alien Message, I'm on the side of the people - and not just because they're made out of the same stuff as me. Put the people outside the box, and I'd be on the side of the computers. Is trying to develop friendly AI really a rational goal? Or is it an obvious bias?
Disclaimer: I haven't read Eliezer's wiki post of the Knowability of Friendly AI yet - some of the questions I ask here might well be answered there.
Yes, it would be a tragedy if an asteroid hit the Earth and killed us all, or if we managed to kill several billion people in a nuclear war, but is there really any moral imperative to privilege future intelligent beings which happen to be made out of the same sort of squishy stuff as we are ahead of future beings that are made out of silicon, or toilet paper and stones, or whatever it might be? When I read Eliezer's story about the Alien Message, I'm on the side of the people - and not just because they're made out of the same stuff as me. Put the people outside the box, and I'd be on the side of the computers. Is trying to develop friendly AI really a rational goal? Or is it an obvious bias?
Disclaimer: I haven't read Eliezer's wiki post of the Knowability of Friendly AI yet - some of the questions I ask here might well be answered there.
Wednesday, 28 May 2008
101 Philosophy Problems Part 4: The Hairdresser of Hindu Kush
Or, more traditionally, Russel's Paradox, or the Barber's Paradox.
The paradox as presented by Cohen is horribly worded, and doesn't even manage to reach the status of contradiction, but that's not really anything new. In it's standard "barber" form, it goes:
Imagine a town with only one male barber, the Elders of the town are seriously committed to everyone having neat hair, so they require *by law* that the barber cuts the hair of everyone, and only those people, who does not cut their own hair. No-one else in the town is allowed to do any hair cutting. Everyone's hair must be cut.
So, does the barber cut his own hair? Obviously he can't, because then he wouldn't be allowed to cut it by law, but he must, because no-one else can cut it either. Blah, blah. The conclusion, one would think, is that this is a really silly law. Bertrand Russel certainly thought so (and never endorsed the "paradox" in this form).
However, it is supposed to be a version of Russel's real paradox - "The set of all sets which do not contain themselves". This set, it seems can neither contain itself or not contain itself, as either would lead to a contradiction. However, to simply declare that, like the barber, this set doesn't exist is rather rash - it undermines the axiomatic set theory that Russel spent a lot of his life developing. Luckily, it doesn't undermine Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory, so mathematics didn't entirely collapse in on itself.
The paradox as presented by Cohen is horribly worded, and doesn't even manage to reach the status of contradiction, but that's not really anything new. In it's standard "barber" form, it goes:
Imagine a town with only one male barber, the Elders of the town are seriously committed to everyone having neat hair, so they require *by law* that the barber cuts the hair of everyone, and only those people, who does not cut their own hair. No-one else in the town is allowed to do any hair cutting. Everyone's hair must be cut.
So, does the barber cut his own hair? Obviously he can't, because then he wouldn't be allowed to cut it by law, but he must, because no-one else can cut it either. Blah, blah. The conclusion, one would think, is that this is a really silly law. Bertrand Russel certainly thought so (and never endorsed the "paradox" in this form).
However, it is supposed to be a version of Russel's real paradox - "The set of all sets which do not contain themselves". This set, it seems can neither contain itself or not contain itself, as either would lead to a contradiction. However, to simply declare that, like the barber, this set doesn't exist is rather rash - it undermines the axiomatic set theory that Russel spent a lot of his life developing. Luckily, it doesn't undermine Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory, so mathematics didn't entirely collapse in on itself.
Tuesday, 15 April 2008
Graph Homomorphisms
So, it seems I finally have a project that could last a good while. Counting Graph Homomorphisms
modulo primes numbers. I've already done Independent Set, and when I finally get round to finishing the corrections on my paper, that's hopefully going to go up on ArXiv (I guess that X is supposed to be a chi, but I can't be bothered to figure out how to generate special characters, so I'm not going to).
So far, we know that counting graph homomorphisms exactly is hard (except when it's trivial), that counting colourings mod p is also hard (except when it's trivial), and that counting independent sets is hard. Conjecture: if H has trivial automorphism group, then counting the H-colouring problem is hard modulo p for all p. Actually, I guess that doesn't qualify as a conjecture yet - it's more of a speculation. So far the only evidence we have in favour is that we can't see why it wouldn't be true.
So, I'm off to read Dyer and Greenhill (paper is probably gated if you're not in an academic institution, and probably completely incomprehensible if you don't study computational complexity at at least postgraduate level). And hope that some of their proof techniques can be extended to my world.
modulo primes numbers. I've already done Independent Set, and when I finally get round to finishing the corrections on my paper, that's hopefully going to go up on ArXiv (I guess that X is supposed to be a chi, but I can't be bothered to figure out how to generate special characters, so I'm not going to).
So far, we know that counting graph homomorphisms exactly is hard (except when it's trivial), that counting colourings mod p is also hard (except when it's trivial), and that counting independent sets is hard. Conjecture: if H has trivial automorphism group, then counting the H-colouring problem is hard modulo p for all p. Actually, I guess that doesn't qualify as a conjecture yet - it's more of a speculation. So far the only evidence we have in favour is that we can't see why it wouldn't be true.
So, I'm off to read Dyer and Greenhill (paper is probably gated if you're not in an academic institution, and probably completely incomprehensible if you don't study computational complexity at at least postgraduate level). And hope that some of their proof techniques can be extended to my world.
Monday, 14 April 2008
101 Philosophy Problems Part 3 - Protagoras
Problem 3 is very similar in nature to problem 1 - it's just another classical, and mildly more complicated rewording of the Epimenides paradox (actually, I think it's probably Russel's paradox). Anyway, it was so uninteresting that it's taken me three month to write this, but here goes:
To me this has never seemed either very interesting or very paradoxical - Eualthus should win, as he hasn't yet won a case. Then Protagoras can sue him *afterwards* for the tuition fee (as Eualthus will now have won his first case). However, if we are to take the paradox at face value, it is simply another liar paradox, which we will meet again, and discuss at greater length at that juncture.
Protagoras was a lawyer, and a teacher. He was a teacher so confident in his own abilities that he used to agree very unorthodox remuneration packages with his students - with one, Euathlus, he agreed that he would receive *no* payment unless the student won his first case. Having completed his training, Euathlus decided that he didn't want the shame of losing a case, but he also didn't want the cost of paying Protagoras: his solution? Don't take on any cases.
Protagoras' was not happy with this turn of events, and decided to sue for his tuition fee. His argument was simple. If Eualthus won, he had won his first case, and must pay Protagoras. If he lost, then he had to pay Protagoras by order of the court. Either way, Protagoras must be paid.
Eualthus, however, had obviously been listening in his lessons. He argued that if he won, he did not have to pay Protagoras, by order of the court. However, if he lost, he clearly would not have to pay by virtue of their agreement.
To me this has never seemed either very interesting or very paradoxical - Eualthus should win, as he hasn't yet won a case. Then Protagoras can sue him *afterwards* for the tuition fee (as Eualthus will now have won his first case). However, if we are to take the paradox at face value, it is simply another liar paradox, which we will meet again, and discuss at greater length at that juncture.
Friday, 11 January 2008
MPs make a sensible decision
MPs reject online touting ban
But unfortunately they don't seem to have made it for very good reasons. It has long been a mystery why concert promoters don't charge enough for their concert tickets (they fill the stadiums and have people queueing round the block at the prices they do charge, they could certainly fill them at some higher price). It is just as much of a mystery why anyone would object to "ticket touts" taking advantage of this.
If people are willing to pay 3500 euros for a ticket to go and see Liverpool get convingly trounced by AC Milan, then why shouldn't they be allowed to pay it? The tout wants the money more than the ticket, and the fan wants the money more than the ticket. It's win-win. Ticket touts are providing a valuable service. So why the vitriol? I think it's mostly because they don't teach economics in schools (seriously, I'd never heard of the Invisible Hand before I was about 18 - most people I know probably still haven't, it's all well and good getting worked up about not teaching evolution, but which is actually more relevant in day-to-day life?).
The government committee apparently conceded that ticket touts to provide some benefits to consumers, apparently noting that "where venues are not full, touts sometimes sell tickets below face value.", whilst failing to note the equally valuable service they provide by getting the tickets to the people who are most willing to pay for them when venues are full.
Not a single one of the articles I've read has mentioned the very simple fact that if the concert organisers really did "resent" seeing their tickets change hands without them getting any recompense, they could soon solve the problem by the very simple mechanism of raising the price of the tickets. Like I said, it's always been a mystery why concert promoters don't charge enough for their tickets. Maybe the internet-inspired boom in the touting industry will give us some evidence that might help explain it.
But unfortunately they don't seem to have made it for very good reasons. It has long been a mystery why concert promoters don't charge enough for their concert tickets (they fill the stadiums and have people queueing round the block at the prices they do charge, they could certainly fill them at some higher price). It is just as much of a mystery why anyone would object to "ticket touts" taking advantage of this.
If people are willing to pay 3500 euros for a ticket to go and see Liverpool get convingly trounced by AC Milan, then why shouldn't they be allowed to pay it? The tout wants the money more than the ticket, and the fan wants the money more than the ticket. It's win-win. Ticket touts are providing a valuable service. So why the vitriol? I think it's mostly because they don't teach economics in schools (seriously, I'd never heard of the Invisible Hand before I was about 18 - most people I know probably still haven't, it's all well and good getting worked up about not teaching evolution, but which is actually more relevant in day-to-day life?).
The government committee apparently conceded that ticket touts to provide some benefits to consumers, apparently noting that "where venues are not full, touts sometimes sell tickets below face value.", whilst failing to note the equally valuable service they provide by getting the tickets to the people who are most willing to pay for them when venues are full.
Not a single one of the articles I've read has mentioned the very simple fact that if the concert organisers really did "resent" seeing their tickets change hands without them getting any recompense, they could soon solve the problem by the very simple mechanism of raising the price of the tickets. Like I said, it's always been a mystery why concert promoters don't charge enough for their tickets. Maybe the internet-inspired boom in the touting industry will give us some evidence that might help explain it.
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