Alternative Medicine Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Alternative Medicine, including details on complementary medicine, alternative therapies, homeopathy. | ||||||||
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About hypotheses and paradigms: exploring the Discreetness-Chance Paradigm.Kaellis E 909 St. Andrews Street, New Westminster, BC, Canada V3M 1W1. ekaellis@hotmail.com Hypotheses generally conform to paradigms which, over time, change, usually tardily, after they have become increasingly difficult to sustain under the impact of non-conforming evidence and alternative hypotheses, but more important, when they no longer are comfortably ensconced in the surrounding social-economic-political-cultural milieu. It is asserted that this milieu is the most important factor in shaping scientific theorizing. Some examples are cited: the rejection of the evidence that the world orbits around the sun (suspected by Pythagoras) in favor of centuries-long firm adherence to the Ptolemaic geocentric system; the early acceptance of Natural Selection in spite of its tautological essence and only conjectural supporting evidence, because it justified contemporaneous social-political ideologies as typified by, e.g., Spencer and Malthus. Economic, social, and cultural factors are cited as providing the ground, i.e., ideational substrate, for what is cited as the Discreetness-Chance Paradigm (DCP), that has increasingly dominated physics, biology, and medicine for over a century and which invokes small, discrete packets of energy/matter (quanta, genes, microorganisms, aberrant cells) functioning within an environment of statistical, not determined, causality. There is speculation on a possible paradigmatic shift from the DCP, which has fostered the proliferation, parallel with ("splitting") taxonomy, of alleged individual disease entities, their diagnoses, and, when available, their specific remedies, something particularly prominent in, e.g., psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a codified compendium of alleged mental and behavioral disorders, but evident in any textbook of diagnosis and treatment of physical ailments. This presumed paradigm shift may be reflected in Western medicine, presently increasingly empirical and atomized, towards a growing acceptance of a more generalized, subject-oriented, approach to health and disease, a non-material-based system of energy flow dependent only on vitality, not anatomy; and a more cohesive, integrative patient-centered approach to therapy. Published 8 November 2005 in Med Hypotheses, 66(1): 188-92.
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