http://www.aihm.wa.edu.au

It is a shame that it appears that what are promoted as ‘academic’ programmes in Nutritional Medicine espouse gobbledigook about vital energy etc. There are thousands of research papers on the effects of vitamins, minerals, amino acids (positive, negative, neutral). Why can academic programmes not focus on these – and arm nutritional practitioners/therapists with facts rather than the sort of stuff than puts them in the same class as crystal healers? It’s very depressing.

It’s counting thing again. Come on people, stick with the arithmetic.

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/344/21/1594

I have a friend from California who writes in the same way you do. I can never work out what she’s saying either.

As you suggest, it may be a difference between the British and American education systems, but, though stream of consciousness may work for William Faulkner, it doesn’t work for you.

Would you try to be a bit clearer, please? Sentences would be handy.

Rights have consequent responsibilities. A cat has no rights beacause, however well you may treat it, it will never respond by treating a mouse – or any other creature on the planet – any better.

We may have a duty to treat animals well, but we cannot have any contract with them.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bookshelf/br.fcgi?book=dmssa&part=A268

‘Adequately functioning systems that produce statistics on causes of death on a regular basis exist in only about one-third of all countries of the world (Lopez et al. 2002). In Sub-Saharan Africa, very little information has been available on cause-specific mortality, let alone data from civil registration systems…’
—
Reading ‘Cholera Epidemic Reaches Dangerous Levels in Zimbabwe By Peta Thornycroft
18 November 2008’ at

http://voanews.com/english/2008-11-18-voa28.cfm

‘ (B)roken water pipes and sewage systems are responsible for most of the cases in Harare at a time when almost all government health services have collapsed… Many of those dying of dehydration from the ongoing epidemic are also suffering from HIV/AIDS, said one Harare doctor. He said so many people have damaged immune systems and do not get enough to eat and therefore have little resistance to recover from cholera.The government has only disclosed partial statistics and some doctors believe several hundred people have died from cholera in the last month. The outbreak of cholera has come just as the annual summer rains are due to begin and doctors have warned that more than 1.4 million people could be in danger of contracting the disease unless urgent action is taken.’

Your cure for dehydration – ‘simply stir one level teaspoon of salt, and eight level teaspoons of sugar, into one litre (5 cupfuls) of drinkable water’, is a Catch 22. In Zimbabwe, there is no sugar or salt available, unless you have US$, but then you could buy bottled imported water and thus not have cholera.

Read the thesis yet? Thought not. Feel free to confirm this.

To what extent this derives from Chomsky’s work, I cannot say, not having studied it in anything like the requisite depth.

At the core, in terms of scientific validation, there is a problem, namely this. Scientific validation requires that tests be repeatable, and conditions be controlled.

If you take it to be understood that your consciousness is incapable of tracking every process of your body, and every sensory input simultaneously, not to mention how they are interrelated, both the conditions of repeatability and control become, in the context of interpersonal communication, literally impossible.

So in what way can a general scientific study be formulated? Is the scientific microscope even suitable for a subject that can look back through it and see a huge eye peering at it, and think to itself, “What the fuck are you looking at?”?

Take for example, the Id, the Ego, and the Super Ego. Nowhere, in any description, anywhere, is there an indication of how an Id smells, or where it does it’s shopping. It’s a model, an idea about ideas. It’s not true. You’ll never meet an Id in a supermarket, or see one on a swing, but that a councillor can carry one around in his or her head, and compare people to it doesn’t seem to phase anybody! Doesn’t this strike you as odd? It’s a label on something that has no internal or external reality, until you start to categorise things accordingly.

Final word from me, (because I’m becoming aware of the impoliteness of carrying on a long conversation in the threads of Ben’s blog), the ideas of Chomsky or Freud are not immune from criticism, but only if you can point out something that would be more true, or at least more useful. Chomsky said recently that if he believed now what he believed ten years ago, he would assume the field were dead, which it probably would be, had he studied homoeopathy at the University of Westminster.

The word “adherence” gives me the chills.

The links to Freud, Erickson and hypnosis are more substantial. However, just because they borrowed some nice ideas doesn’t make it a good therapy and there is sadly no evidence that NLP is better than, say, Psychodynamic counselling.

I’s also add that NLP clearly isn’t science – it is a therapy. CBT is not a science. It too is a therapy. What differs between CBT and NLP is the extent of the evidence base in terms of the scientific rationale for the theory and the scientific evaluation of the therapy.

My own personal view is that clever ideas are interesting and important, but sometimes over-rated in science. It is is pretty easy to come up with clever ideas. What is hard is expressing them in a form that is useful, testable and then following through by actually publishing them and testing them. I should add that my evidence for this is almost entirely anecdotal. I have loads of what I think are good ideas – most turn out to be rubbish (but a few have ended up as published work or led to publishable experiments).

Having said that I think there can be dangers in contagion from slagging off one thing on its intellectual antecedents. However, I think Chomsky and Freud are safe from this line of attack.

Many mud has been thrown. I figured if I was going to argue in favour of NLP not being bad science, I might as well do it thoroughly. ta.