File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2003/bhaskar.0311, message 2


From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-gis.net>
Subject: BHA: Biological reductivism
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 20:43:00 -0500


Shiv wrote:

>    For the recent discovery on how (any type of) OCD - Obsessive
Compulsive Disorder - is reducible to genes, see
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/24by7panews/page.cfm?objectid=13548514&method=full&siteid=50143

Smelling a rat, I read this article.  Guess what: if you read carefully, the
article doesn't say that at all.  The genetic disorder was found in only 2
of the 30 people with OCD within the study.  So there is one or more type of
OCD that does not reduce to the genes.  That also corresponds to therapeutic
findings for depression and bipolar disorder: drug therapy and (at least
some types of) talk therapy have roughly equal success rates (which in
general improves dramatically if they're combined) -- and talk therapy
actually changes brain chemistry!  So much for biological reductivism.

T.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-mail.com
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce



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