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Biology-based psychiatry? Is it just a cover for materialism in medicine?

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Sometimes sounds that way. Gonna be ugly.

Medicine is hard to materialize because one is always dealing with people, not particles.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual has rightly been criticized for its made-up categories, but in fairness, the human mind is more complex than the ocean. And it may be hard to characterize exactly what is wrong, just as it may be hard to determine where a school of fish will go next.

However, in some versions, like this one, the solution is just more materialism:

Dr Greenberg and other critics are demanding a re-emphasis in psychiatry in favour of a more biologically-based assessment procedure, having long accused the authors of the DSM of failing to appreciate developments in neuroscience and medical technology.

The important thing to see here is that what will be de-emphasized is listening to the patient. So if you are a patient, this is what it will sound like:

‘All of the [current] diagnoses are done according to presenting symptoms, but we increasingly know a lot about genetics and neural circuits and we know that the symptoms don’t map very well onto those genetics and neural circuits,’ says Professor Bruce Cuthbert, the director of the NIMH’s Division of Adult Translational Research and Treatment Development. ‘So we are finding that for research purposes, the DSM is not serving us very well,’

‘As some people have said, the brain has not read the text. So we really need to try to find alternative ways of conducting research to take advantage of the explosion of knowledge that we’re getting about how the brain works.’

It’s cheaper. And if it is less effective, your brain will not know, whatever you may think about what happens to you.

See also: An end to the madness

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Comments
"Medicine is hard to materialize because one is always dealing with people, not particles." Not that particles are any more material than persons.Mung
August 22, 2014
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I don't believe it, necessarily, as a French girl staying with us was painfully psychologically troubled, but was found by a hospital psychiatrist to be suffering a hormonal imbalance which could be readily cured, and was. So, it's nice to know it need not all be quackery. On the other hand, it would have been easier to debunk its fundamental premise without such exceptions!Axel
August 22, 2014
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OT: Roy Davies Exposes Charles Darwin’s Plagiarism - Jun 17, 2014 Interview with journalist and author, Roy Davies reveals how Charles Darwin lied about the help he received from Alfred Russell Wallace. http://www.skeptiko.com/247-roy-davies-exposes-darwin-plagiarism/ audio of interview: http://www.skeptiko.com/?powerpress_pinw=3693-podcast supplemental notes: It is interesting to note that the co-discoverer of Natural Selection, Alfred Wallace, ended up turning against against Charles Darwin and embraced Intelligent Design, in large measure, because of the 'problem' of human consciousness: Darwin's Heretic: Alfred R. Wallace - Did the Co-Founder of Evolution Embrace Intelligent Design? - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxvAVln6HLI Alfred Russel Wallace on the Web - Michael Flannery September 28, 2012 http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/09/alfred_russel_w_2064831.html Rescuing Alfred Russel Wallace from his (Darwinist) Rescuers - May 22, 2012 Excerpt: By 1913, Wallace declared himself unapologetically for theism: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/05/rescuing_alfred059961.html New thoughts on evolution - A 1910 Interview with Alfred Russel Wallace Excerpt: “There seems to me,” said Professor Wallace, “unmistakeable evidence of guidance and control in the physical apparatus of every living creature. Consider for a moment the question of nourishment. Men of various races eat different foods; men of the same race may follow diets as separate and distinct as chalk from cheese. But in all cases the main result is the same. The food is converted into blood. That is interesting enough, marvellous enough, baffling enough; but mark what follows. This blood circulating through the body becomes at one point hair and at another nail; here it transforms itself into bone and there into tissue; at the same moment that it changes into skin it changes into nerve; it is at once the bone in my finger and the eye in my head. Materialism forges such words as secretion, but no word signifying unconscious and accidental action can explain this mystery.” Alfred Russel Wallace - An interview by Harold Begbie printed on page four of The Daily Chronicle (London) issues of 3 November and 4 November 1910 http://wallace-online.org/content/frameset?pageseq=1&itemID=S746.1&viewtype=text And again from the same interview: New Thoughts on Evolution (1910) Views of Professor Alfred Russel Wallace, O.M., F.R.S. "Nothing in evolution can account for the soul of man. The difference between man and the other animals is unbridgeable. Mathematics is alone sufficient to prove in man the possession of a faculty unexistent in other creatures. Then you have music and the artistic faculty. No, the soul was a separate creation." Alfred Russel Wallace - An interview by Harold Begbie printed on page four of The Daily Chronicle (London) issues of 3 November and 4 November 1910. http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S746.htmbornagain77
August 22, 2014
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