Message-Id: <l03102803b0d814769689@[153.90.236.25]>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.HPP.3.96.980105203653.28742B-100000@hills.ccsf.cc.ca.us>
Date: Tue, 6 Jan 1998 11:12:34 -0700
To: pinhole@exploratorium.edu
From: Steven Eiger <eiger@montana.edu>
Subject: Re: some bio-med questions, kinda
>OK, a CT scan is basically an X-ray and delivers high doses of radiation.
>But what exactly is an MRI? The doc I talked to today said it gives
>little or no radiation, and they use it on pregnant women. I know it's
>magnetic resonance, but magnetism is part and parcel with electricity, and
>magnetic fields produce electric currents. So what kind of electricity is
>produced by an MRI? How strong is it?
The best place to get a decent explanation of this is in a basic organic
chemistry text under nuclear magnetic resonance. "Nuclear" has been
dropped because the word scares the general public. I will try and jog my
memory for a crummy explanation as my organic book seems to be home. As
you know you get inside a huge, powerful magnet. Certain nuclei, like
hydrogen or phosphorous can be affected by a pulse of energy (I think
caused by an magnetic field generated from an electromagnet), they flip
spin states and then jump back or something like that. Their jumping back
causes a change in magnetic field which can be picked up by the detector (I
think the huge magnet). Magnetic fields produce electricity when they
move, or change in the presence of a conductor. I suppose this is a
possibility but the procedure seems quite safe. This could be due to
several possibilities. Actually, I do not know how safe the procedure is.
>I was talking to a doctor because I had been sick recently. The illness
>-- Bell's palsy -- isn't really treatable by western medicine, but is
>highly treatable by traditional Chinese medicine. I got rid of it in
>about 1 and 1/2 weeks using accupuncture and herbs (yuck!) When I
>mentioned this to the doctor, he said, "Or maybe it just went away by
>itself. You'd have to do a big study with half the patients getting
>Chinese medicine and half no medicine at all to determine that." Which
>brings up my second question. Western medicine developed around the
>double blind test as the only way to ensure that a particular procedure or
>medicine works. Chinese medicine developed around different ideas and
>different views of how the body works. In traditional Chinese
>medicine, they know how to treat Bell's palsy -- they have no doubts
>about what to do, and the standard of treatment is quite ancient. The
>western doctor can point to a patient saved by a particular operation or
>drug and say, "See, that proves my way works," but the Chinese doctor can
>do the same. If both methods produce results and both methods
>self-evaluate differently, does that mean that medicine is really just a
>best approximation to reality as developed from a particular cultural
>viewpoint?
While Chinese medicine has many therapies that work, they all should pass
the double blind test when they are effective and not do so when they are
not. For instance, I assume that ground up rhinocerous horn would not pass
a double blind test for enhancing male potency . Most folks are
comfortable with the simple test of whether something works or not, which
is the basis of western science; what is the basis of self-evaluation you
speak of concerning Chinese medicine? I believe it is the same; if it
works, keep it, if not discard it. The only difference is that Western
science has gotten a bit more sophisticated in terms of designing these
experiments and analyzing the results. It is also true that many adherents
of Western science and medicine are skeptical of results obtained
elsewhere. While skepticism is a very healthy attitude as most new ideas
do not work (remember laetrile), I believe that Western medicine has not
generally accepted the idea that if something has been used for a long time
it has a better chance of being the genuine article relative to some new
contraption. It probably is an extension of our inherent arrogance.
Humans generally think their culture, planet, is the center of the universe
until proven wrong. There are a handful of businessmen who are profiting
greatly by these attitudes as they are combing for medicines in many
cultures and analyzing their potencies, and synthesizing them for market.
>
>Which leads me to may last question. If we have such a hard time seeing
>past our own cultural educations to the values and possibilities of
>sciences developed by other cultures of our own species, on our own
>planet, how will we be able to even begin to understand the creations of
>other species, or of intelligences from other planets?
I don't know, but I just saw Men in black for the third time with my
4-year-old and those characters recognized advanced machines when they saw
them, although they all seemed to pass the western science test of actually
working.
> Steve Eiger