Quick summary: Rheumatoid arthritis can be put into remission in some patients by stimulating the vagus nerve for some reason. Eventually it may be possible to stimulate the nerve more precisely using one of several exciting technologies.
This is one of those rare times where a rhetorical question from a link-bait title is definitely "Yes"!
The author has a great anecdote about the work that is being done to combat rheumatoid-arthritis, however the story preys on our own hubris to believe that our bodies are not made up of very simple parts that have little knowledge of ourselves, rather a fairly strict set of inputs/outputs. So of course if you can manipulate the inputs, then you can achieve your desired outputs.
The true beauty of medical hacks is that the basal inputs and outputs of each individual component is relatively unknown!
Using a soft screwdriver handle, gently tap the top of your knee where your patellar is located. You're performing the patellar reflex procedure which will cause your hamstrings to contract and your leg to kick out gently.
Its not high tech ghost in the shell stuff but it is technically a hack!
It's interesting how 'we' as a society build up archetypes about the different sciences(and, well, everything really) and instead of fostering and promoting innovation in those areas we oftentimes question/demean/discredit people who bring forth new ideas pertaining to those preconceived notions.(referring loosely to the scientist's skeptical coworkers)
From my limited anecdotal experience(therefore potentially/likely flawed) I would say that it's namely a result of aversion to change, desire to assimilate(fit in), and fear of failure.
It's a shame really; I honestly believe that a LOT of value could be gained from looking at life sciences from a completely blank/unaltered perspective. If they were void of preconceived notions as to how these underlying biological systems function I think that intelligent people would at very least yield novel concepts in terms of comprehending inputs and representing results.
To restate in different vernacular, How it is now:
If you want to do research pertaining to something that interests you personally you've got at _least_ 4 years of college before heading into the industry.(This precludes university research labs (as if you'd have project control anyway)). Not only that, but for most active-minded humans, the 17 years before college are boring as fuck(not to say that an active social life and interesting/engaging childhood makes you, in any way, less-active-minded). We literally teach children to fore-go logic and reasoning and mindlessly obey authority. We train children to read/write/copy/repeat, but we NEVER teach them to discover something novel on their own.
Which is not to say, of course, that every idea is valid(or even worthy of exploration). I mean, the system does 'work'(in that by forcing you to work up the ladder before innovating it weeds out the thoughtless/crazy/impractical ideas and ensures that anyone hoping to do research has a vested interest in the subject matter), but I think that if we, as a society, encouraged/accepted failure and were less hostile towards change we could stand to gain a lot.
Eh. This is a bit of a ramble, I guess TL,DR:
I find that the aversion to failure/change which is so inherent in society today stifles innovation.
What do you guys/gals think? Am I off base here? Would love to hear someone else's opinion on the matter, I can't enumerate the number of times that I've fully fleshed out an opinion only to have reality altering conjecture come into play.
I think you're being slightly too bitter / cynical regarding the "how it is now" section. Certainly, my own upbringing included logic, reasoning, and questioning things, although I suspect many parents feel that this kind of thing might undermine their authority. My siblings and I were even provided with (at the time) prohibitively expensive Commodore 64s to foster our own "research" and exploration, leading us to discover (or rather, stumble upon) basic programming before our teens. And yes, a single counter-example might not mean much, but I've seen many others with similar, fortunate upbringings.
I suspect a similar thing applies to your "system" comments. First, I'd add "re-inventing things" to the list of stuff we'd like to avoid. This is a big one; in my experience most people don't seem to have an idea about how deeply things have been researched in various directions already. As a simple example, I recently had a colleague re-invent the concept of a consumer price index, and pitch it as something brand new. As time goes on, this will just get worse and worse. In this sense, I'd add the ability to review the state of research in a particular area, the ability to perform and document research in a way that's repeatable, and these types of things to the wish-list. It just seems to me that most people pushing for more innovation in research don't seem to value these things very much.
EDIT: So really, the question for me would be whether the current approach of upbringing as well as strict research career paths do more harm (by stifling innovation) than good (by preventing people from doing bad science). Who knows.
The fact that scientists can be overly conservative has been known for a long time - Thomas Kuhn's "paradigm shifts" describe this phenomena. Now, of course, you could argue that the naturally conservative nature of academic research is a good thing as it arguably filters out clearly daft idea early on - but a lot of spectacularly good scientific theories looked completely daft to the mainstream at the time they were first suggested (continental drift being a great example).
> a lot of spectacularly good scientific theories looked completely daft to the mainstream at the time they were first suggested (continental drift being a great example).
Academic "conservatism" hasn't prevented them from taking over the field as collected evidence made their correctness (compared to the old model) overwhelming, so that does not seem to be much of an argument against the existing system.
Of course, change does happen but slowly in a lot of cases - as Max Planck famously said:
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Ha, nice; sometimes it seems as if any concept I internally stumble upon(albeit only tangentially related in this case) has already been thoroughly fleshed out and eloquently described by a more intelligent mind than my own. You are glorious Wikipedia.
Of course, you have to be careful, as Carl Sagan said:
"The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
And for that matter they were right to laugh at Columbus, whose estimate of the distance from Europe to China were ludicrously wrong. He would certainly have starved to death less than halfway to his destination if he hadn't had the enormous luck to run into a unknown continent on the way (which he was too stupid to realize wasn't China).
You're completely correct, but without concrete suggestions to address the problem, your remark is also completely cliched. We all figured this out at some point, we all know everyone else knows, and we just don't see a way out of this shitty Nash Equilibrium at the moment and we all have real, working lives to get on with.
As a counter example, I like many people did some 'original' research for my HS science fair. I ended up working with a geologist at my local school who was both willing to give advice and a little help for free. I saw plenty of examples where someone got access to either testing equipment or raw data. EX: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/search/ As long as you have the methodology down you can even get published.
IMO, the real issue is the vast majority of people both inside and outside the establishment don't have any ideas that are both original and anywhere close to correct.
PS: It tourneys out my idea was less novel than I thought but the journey was still fun.
Innovation is not stifled. Look around, we have plenty. But we can't have too much. Evolution should happen with reasonably stability. Evolution takes place on the border between order and chaos. Innovation is promoting force. We need retarding forces too.
I see no definitive/logical reason for establishing an upper-bound on innovation. The past several centuries are a testament to the fact that biological evolution and human innovation have a symbiotic relationship^1. That's not to say that there aren't drawbacks to innovation, particularly to the implementations of said innovation, but rather that I personally believe those detrimental aspects would be best mitigated by altering implementations of current infrastructure/technology, not by stifling innovation.
I'm just trying to say that one should not neglect the importance of damping factors in dynamic systems. Our human environment is a complex dynamic system. No one can tell what would be the right amount of evolutionary progress without risking runaway phenomena. An example of which could be all the innovation taking place in Germany before WW II.
Though I'm unaware of empirical studies, wouldn't attempts in Chinese medicine be precedents here - particularly could the sending of electrical pulses through acupuncture needles inserted at various places to "stimulate the immune system" be some kind of primordial theory connecting the nervous system and the immune system?
In other words, I'm rather surprised that when we can think about and exploit the fact that regular exercise can result in good health, it has been considered a stretch to imagine that the nervous system can be more intimately connected to the immune system. 1998 is disturbingly close in this case.
The thing is Traditional Chinese Medicine does not fit into the Myth of Progress (TM), which clearly state that everybody before Francis Bacon were retarded caveman/peasants/alchemist/inquisitors/whatever-triggers-repulsion-in-listener.
The idea that non-European (a.k.a. non-White) peoples of thousands of years ago were making careful observations of natural phenomena, which lead to relatively accurate predictions and techniques that allowed to increase the chances of preferred outcomes - even if the explanations they came out with were off-base and terribly fantastic for our civilization's sensibilities - is anathema to Modern Science (TM) Dogma.
In the particular case of Acupuncture, they first said that you cannot run a proper clinical trial because the technique is invasive and you cannot control against placebo effect. When pointed out that there are invasive techniques, such as surgery, in modern medicine, they claimed that since the mechanism of action of surgery are evident, it'd be unethical to run tests with double blind controls, but since acupuncture mechanism of action is unknown, it's unethical to run any tests at all.
Now (I mean, 15 years ago) someone comes up with a plausible, non mystic, mechanism of action, and they claim that since it is impossible to measure the voltage/amperage of a needle stimulus, only properly designed equipment is good to use. This movement has the double advantage to create a new fancy specialty with a fresh occidental name, and allows ignorant GPs to keep calling acupuncture a quack.
And in the mean time, we force the new field to rediscover literally centuries of accumulated knowledge from first principles. But it is a small price to pay, so that traditional medicines practitioners are kept outside of the "Evidence Based" umbrella.
I am confused as to why you are down voted. You make a fair point that a lot of traditional knowledge in a lot of domains is frowned upon by proponents of modern science. I am not saying that all traditional knowledge is valid (i have seen my fare share of baseless myths), but some of these deserve respect for having such advanced knowledge in such ancient times
Yes, I was not going to comment, but now that you mention it...
Downvotes are intended to be cast for people that add nothing to the conversation in course. But many people weaponize them and use them against points of view they feel strongly against. Shame of you... you know who you are!
I have formal training as an Technician Acupuncturist, though I can only practice legally under the supervision of a MD with specialization in Human Acupuncture (and being a programmer, that does not make economic sense to me). Since I was at school, I witnessed several times how some GP got offended by this or another pieces of ancient lore and dropped out of the program.
The thing is, you could see they were not thinking. They did not question if the thing worked or not. They just heard some random stuff like "Qi of air and Qi of rice transform into True Qi" and snapped like a devote Catholic would if told that "Virgin Mary was not really a virgin". They were also completely unable to imagine that "Qi of air" could be oxigen, and "Qi of rice" could be glucose, and that both of them get transported by blood vessels to preserve life of tissues across the body. Which from our point of view is a remarkable thing to have been figured out 3 thousand years ago.
> They were also completely unable to imagine that "Qi of air" could be oxigen, and "Qi of rice" could be glucose, and that both of them get transported by blood vessels to preserve life of tissues across the body. Which from our point of view is a remarkable thing to have been figured out 3 thousand years ago.
Wow. I have a new-found respect for acupuncture.
Its interesting that a lot of ancient knowledge is very similar to modern knowledge, they just have different abstract layers. Herbs are sometimes frowned upon as medicine, because people fail to appreciate that our ancestors managed to identify them as a source of some modern organic drug.
The most interesting part of this to me is the link between the brain and the immune system. As the drug in the example had no effect on the body after the vagus nerve was cut, I wonder if when injected into the body the drug still has no effect - if it is all caused by the brain.
If that's the case I wonder if it's possible to achieve the same results just by 'thinking' the right things. It is possible to consciously control your heart rate which is a similar low level brain function (and I think also involves the vagus nerve).
I doubt this research will get much funding though as GSK can't sell a $50,000 device from this :)
Objective: To investigate whether a special concentration/meditation technique employed by a Dutch individual known as ‘the iceman’ can influence anatomic nervous system activity and the innate immune response.
Looking more broadly in the literature, you can find many "biofeedback" studies related to inflammation and the immune system. For instance http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10484-010-9139-5 shows some interesting results in normal people (not just "the iceman"), but unfortunately, followup studies by that group were impeded by the untimely death of the last author :(
Humans thought their strength and agility was superior until John Henry lost to the steam drill.
Humans thought their intellect and intuition was superior until Gary Kasparov lost to Deep Blue.
Today, we still hold to the notion that our biology is somehow different, unique, not-just-another-bucket-of-chemicals, but as with the examples above, once we get past this hang-up and accept that we are not special, that is when truly interesting and exciting things can happen.
It is "special" only because it's the result of millions of years of evolution, not because some reassuring omnipotent being from another plane selected it to be so. Dozens of species are using tools, building things, solving problems, and feeling things (however small and nascent!). Our species is just early to the party by a fraction of a million years, which is, geologically and cosmologically, peanuts (Not even talking about the time we've been actually toying with electricity and transistors).
Carl Sagan sums up how deceitful an anthropocentric point of view is quite nicely in Pale Blue Dot. Although applied to science and cosmologies, it definitely applies to anything we deem sacred just because it's us.
“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.”
“Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.“
“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.”
“Once we lose our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe which dwarfs -- in time, in space, and in potential -- the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.”
