My undergraduate degree is in Psychology, and after getting my baccalaureate, it looked like having a BS in Psychology, and 50 cents, would buy you a cup of coffee (meaning it was worthless), so, I applied for and was accepted in the Masters program at my alma mater, but after being there a week, the master's program was much different than I anticipated, because, like a Southwest cattleman's field, it was full of so much bovine feces, it was intolerable ( I don't know if you've been in a scorching field full of bull excrement in July, but , it's the closest thing you can get to being in a master's program in Psychology).
My late uncle was in a field dealing with the mind, but he was a Psychiatrist, specializing in Psychoanalysis (more BS if you ask me, "Pappa Freud" being a bit on the , "odd" side, shall we say), but the difference between my late uncle, and the psycho-logist, Ms. Mercer, is that he could prescribe drugs, had more clout when he talked, and went to school a hell of a lot longer.
That being said, PhD "Dr." Mercer's attack on the ability of Chiropractic to help children with the purported "disease" of ADHD is found, for your amusement, at
Now, to see a writer's style, sometimes I look at the last line of their piece.
The last line of her article, declares for all the world to see, how totally ignorant the woman is about Chiropractic. Her last line, I quote :
"
By the way, when did the adjective "chiropractic" become a noun?"
Well, PhD "Doctor" Mercer, the answer to that is 1895, when Chiropractic began. It is a noun in the same way that medicine (as in, the practice of medicine) is a noun. It makes me wonder where you went to school, that they would graduate someone SO STUPID, that they would write an article attacking a discipline they obviously, haven't exercised the least bit of scholastic enterprise to gain insight into.
But, since you obviously are not a fan of Chiropractic, let's talk about YOUR little profession, and the lack of efficacy of its methods, shall we ?
Number one, I find it odd that you are in a backhanded way attacking Chiropractic, since psychology and Chiropractic are both under attack from the SOPP movement (Scope of Practice Partnership), in which the AMA would like nothing better than both Doctors of Chiropractic and Psychologists, to be legally barred from diagnosing their own patients. Thus, if SOPP has their way, you would not be able to even DIAGNOSE a case of ADHD. For more on SOPP, see my blog at
http://STOPSOPP.blogspot.com.
Now, as far as efficacy of methods, and outcomes basing, name ONE condition, disease, mental illness, that you can guarantee you can successfully cure someone of, PhD "Dr" Mercer ! Please name it and be ready to defend your assertion. Psychology has a LOUSY history of treating and curring ANYONE.
Firstly, IS PSYCHOLOGY A "REAL" SCIENCE ? I think if PhD "Dr" Mercer wants to do a diatribe about how someone else is not following good evidenciary protocols in designing a study, perhaps she needs to meet the Daubert standard as an expert in science herself.
Let's start with this webpage.
http://www.arachnoid.com/psychology/index.html
"The items listed above inevitably create an atmosphere in which absolutely anything goes (at least temporarily), judgments about efficacy are utterly subjective, and as a result, the field of psychology perpetually splinters into cults and fads (examples below). “Studies” are regularly published that would never pass muster with a self-respecting peer review committee from some less soft branch of science.
If society correctly evaluated human psychology as a loose grouping of subjective cults and fads, the above summary would not pose any kind of social problem. But in fact there are people who still think human psychology is based in science, all evidence to the contrary. The sad result is that society's engine of legal and social authority is sometimes steered by psychology, sometimes with unjust and terrible consequences. Here is a brief list of historical examples in which psychology's bogus status as a science has produced harm (it is by no means a comprehensive list):
During World War I, psychologist
R. M. Yerkes oversaw the testing of 1.7 million US Army draftees. His questionable conclusions were to have far-reaching consequences, leading to a 1924 law placing severe limitations on the immigration of those groups Yerkes and his followers believed to be mentally unfit – Jews and Eastern Europeans in particular. Yerkes later thoroughly recanted his methods and findings in an 800-page confession/tome that few bothered to read, and the policies he set in motion had the dreadful side effect of preventing the immigration of Jews trying to escape the predations of Hitler and his henchmen later on.
The original test results happened to dovetail with Yerkes' explicit eugenic beliefs, a fact lost on nearly everyone at the time.
In an effort to answer the question of whether intelligence is primarily governed by environment or genes, psychologist
Cyril Burt (1883-1971) performed a long-term study of twins that was later shown to be most likely a case of conscious or unconscious scientific fraud. His work, which purported to show that IQ is largely inherited, was used as a “scientific” basis by various racists and others, and, despite having been discredited, still is.
In the 1950s, at the height of psychology's public acceptance, neurologist
Walter Freeman created a surgical procedure known as
"prefrontal lobotomy." As though on a quest and based solely on his reputation and skills of persuasion, Freeman singlehandedly popularized lobotomy among U.S. psychologists, eventually performing about 3500 lobotomies, before the dreadful consequences of this practice became apparent.
At the height of Freeman's personal campaign, he drove around the country in a van he called the "lobotomobile," performing lobotomies as he traveled. There was plenty of evidence that prefrontal lobotomy was a catastrophic clinical practice, but no one noticed the evidence or acted on it. There was — and is — no reliable mechanism within clinical psychology to prevent this sort of abuse.
These examples are part of a long list of people who have tried to use psychology to give a scientific patina to their personal beliefs, perhaps beginning with
Francis Galton (1822-1911), the founder and namer of
eugenics. Galton tried (and failed) to design psychological tests meant to prove his eugenic beliefs. This practice of using psychology as a personal soapbox continues to the present, in fact, it seems to have become more popular.
What these accounts have in common is that no one was able (or willing) to use scientific standards of evidence to refute the claims at the time of their appearance, because psychology is only apparently a science. Only through enormous efforts and patience, including sometimes repeating an entire study using the original materials, can a rare, specific psychological claim be refuted. Such exceptions aside, there is ordinarily no recourse to the “testable, falsifiable claims” criterion that sets science apart from ordinary human behavior.
One might think that psychology might have learned from its past errors and evolved into a more strict and scientific enterprise. In fact the reverse seems to be the case. Here are two contemporary examples:
This bogus field sprang into existence, fueled by the wish that specific disabled (autistic, severely retarded) people might be able to communicate with their loved ones after all. It purports to allow communication with a disabled person through the agency of a facilitator, someone who typically holds a writing implement (or operates a keyboard) simultaneously with the disabled person, and the two together create a written account of the disabled person's otherwise inaccessible experiences. Frequently, the “communication” seems to reveal that the disabled person is being abused horribly by parents or caretakers. This in turn has resulted in bogus legal actions, spurred by prosecutors who think psychology is a science.
Was this set of beliefs tested and shown to be flawed in a scientific study? No. Was it called into question because of the utterly fantastic content of the “communications”? No again. How then was the fraud uncovered? Well, the PBS television program “Frontline” showed up and taped some typical clinical practice, revealing some aspects of the practice anyone not brain-damaged should have been able to notice, such as the fact that the disabled person was often looking at the ceiling while supposedly coöperating in keyboard communication, a behavior that requires one to look at the keyboard at least occasionally. The facilitator, of course, was looking intently at the keyboard.
And finally, after evidence of the bogus nature of both the practice and the communications was demonstrated, was the field abandoned? Of course not – it is still widely practiced, with the difference that TV cameras are now typically excluded from the clinics.
In this variation on the above bogus practice, talk-therapy clients are guided to “recovering” repressed memories, typically of horrible childhood abuse, sexual and otherwise. And, like the above practice, these “recovered memories” sometimes cause people to be jailed for vivid, if imaginary, crimes.
In this case, unlike the above, over time the frequency and implausibility of the actionable claims ruined everything for the eager practitioners, and most clients later decided they were talked into the “memories” by the therapist. There have been a number of lawsuits by disgruntled former clients, and wrongly convicted people have been freed.
But, just as in the case of “facilitated communication,” science played no role in either the creation or destruction of this aberration, this fad. Science played no part in the creation of either field, although properly designed experiments could have been used at the outset to prove that both fads were not remotely what their advocates claimed. And science had little role to play in the later debunking, because psychology is only coincidentally addressed by science.
Some may object that the revolution produced by psychoactive drugs has finally placed psychology on a firm scientific footing, but the application of these drugs is not psychology, it is pharmacology. The efficacy of drugs in treating conditions once thought to be psychological in origin simply presents another example where psychology got it wrong, and the errors could only be uncovered using disciplines outside psychology.
To summarize this section, psychology is the sort of field that can describe things, but as shown above, it cannot reliably explain what it has described. In science, descriptions are only a first step — explanations are essential:
- An explanation, a theory, allows one to make a prediction about observations not yet made.
- A prediction would permit a laboratory test that might support or falsify the underlying theory.
- The possibility of falsification is what distinguishes science from cocktail chatter. "
HMMMM....OK, some great points that would TEND, or "SUGGEST"
strongly, that Psychology is NOT a "real science" in the usual sense of the word.
There is an old saying about the pot calling the kettle black, and this is an apt saying with regard to this silly and groundless attack of Phd "Dr" Mercer's attack on this study.
Prove that YOU have the ability to have repeatable accounts and that you have ANY efficacy of curing ANY condition, illness, or disease which is within your scope of practice PdD "Dr" Mercer. Psychology, as was previously pointed out, tends to be a collection of cults, who view the world and people through the eyes of whichever Psychology Guru they follow, whether it be Jung, Freud, Adler, or whoever.
My undergraduate degree in the discipline was extremely easy for me to get because, the field is based on so much touchy feely crap. Unlike organic chemistry, where one can perform the Grignard reaction over and over and get the same result, you could administer the MMPI to the same person on several trials and get different results.
You could have a normal person go to five different "psychologists" and get five different "diagnoses".
So, "Dr" Mercer, how many children with ADHD have YOU cured ? How many ADULTS with ADHD have you see ANYONE cure ? How many cases of paranoid schizophrenia have you cured ? How many cases of bipolar disorder have you "cured"?
Since you liked to end your idiotic piece with a question, then so shall I.
When did Developmental Psychology develop a protocol to cure ANYONE of ANYTHING at ANYTIME and have repeatable positive
results ?
