[From Mike Acree (2011.08.29.0947 PDT)]
My thanks to Erling for remembering (he has the advantage of Eastern time).
It was just at this time last year, Bill, that you were posting a series of very worrisome messages about your health. I was more alarmed than others appeared to be at the time, but didn’t get around to saying so. In fact, I don’t expect
to be contributing to the CSGNet for at least awhile. Since having moved my mother, with dementia, in with me 2 years ago, I’ve had substantially less time than before for such activities. Several times in that period I’ve undertaken to respond to a post;
but, by the time I had anything halfway ready to send, it was some weeks out of date.
There is one observation that seemed worth relating on this occasion, however. One of life’s lessons that took me far too long to learn is the folly of trying to understand human institutions or theories that don’t make any sense (like
statistics). The risk is that that is what you become an expert in, and spend the rest of your life doing. It has never been clear to me what alternative path I might have taken, were I starting over with my present knowledge. But I’m impressed of late
with how much interesting and vital work remains to be done in recreating medicine along PCT lines. Working in a major medical research center the past few years has been eye-opening in terms of the level of thinking about fundamentals. A given hormone,
say, seems to be a good thing, but only up to a point; so some correlations turn out positive, and some negative; the idea that the body is trying to control some parameter within a certain range seems completely absent. A few investigators are privately
willing to express doubts about the correlational, statistical approach; but the overwhelming dominance of federal funding gives that paradigm a huge inertia. I was startled to hear a presentation in June by a postdoctoral fellow, Kirstin Aschbacher, using
control theory to predict very closely the level of cortisol in an individual. She had worked with Amos Ben-Zvi, an engineer at the University of Alberta,
and was not familiar with your work. I naturally gave her a copy of B:CP and the
Psych Review article, and haven’t heard from her since. Her considerable ambition being naturally directed toward career as much as science, she was looking more for a niche than for a radical departure; her hope in consulting with me was that I could
show her how to incorporate statistics into her work, to garner more mainstream acceptance. So you know what a disappointment I was to her. One of her mentors here at UCSF, Margaret Kemeny, is unusually thoughtful and open-minded, so my occasional prodding
might still yield some fruit. The implications for medicine could be huge, even just in terms of returning the focus to individuals. Roger J. Williams, best known for identifying Vitamin B5, published a book in 1956 called
Biological Individuality , in which he documented the staggering range of individual differences on many biological parameters, even in small samples of basically healthy individuals. There are, around the edges, encouraging signs of increasing recognition
of the relevance and importance of individualized, or personalized, medicine, as opposed to “prescription by numbers”; but the prevailing political forces are pushing more powerfully in the opposite direction, toward standardization and uniformity in medical
practice. Ted Nelson, who could be credited with inventing hypertext in 1974, thought the idea would catch on like wildfire; he said, in an interview in the early ’90s, that he was right, it was just that it caught on like wildfire 20 years later. I hope
we don’t have another 20 years to wait before PCT catches on like wildfire.
Best,
Mike