Wonderful overlooked fact about Obamacare--it will curtail mandatory alternative medicine coverage!

[patrice]

162. I taught Psychology, as Science, for high school. Human behavior and mental processes

are such that they present unique challenges to the nature of Scientific "proof", so I made sure that my students understood, in their study of psychological research, what the assets and limitations of scientific methodologies are. "Proof" is more technically referred to as support. Knowledge is very contextual and we have gotten into the habit of treating it as though it weren't.

Thomas R. Kuhn's book, linked above in my reply to Mineral Man, describes historically how the limitations inherent in the nature of proof lead to circular paradigms, with little or no new productivity, plus what are considered to be ir-relevant anomalies, which may be significant or not until, for whatever idiosyncratic reasons, something which is considered to be an anomaly MAY trigger a different perspective and then, depending upon reliable validations, perhaps a paradigm shift in explanatory theory.

Though I believe there are potentialities in both "proof" and "paradigm shift", I get nervous talking about this stuff in the context of medicine, and especially elder care, where there are also strong pressures, individual, social, and economic, to engage in convenient nostrums until what could be the most convenient nostrum of all, hospice care, becomes "unavoidable".