Science is just a belief system

[CreekDog]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/health/research/10spinal.html?_r=1

Spinal-Fluid Test Is Found to Predict Alzheimer’s
By GINA KOLATA

Researchers report that a spinal fluid test can be 100 percent accurate in identifying patients with significant memory loss who are on their way to developing Alzheimer’s disease.

Although there has been increasing evidence of the value of this and other tests in finding signs of Alzheimer’s, the study, which will appear Tuesday in the Archives of Neurology, shows how accurate they can be. The new result is one of a number of remarkable recent findings about Alzheimer’s.

After decades when nothing much seemed to be happening, when this progressive brain disease seemed untreatable and when its diagnosis could be confirmed only at autopsy, the field has suddenly woken up.

Alzheimer’s, medical experts now agree, starts a decade or more before people have symptoms. And by the time there are symptoms, it may be too late to save the brain. So the hope is to find good ways to identify people who are getting the disease, and use those people as subjects in studies to see how long it takes for symptoms to occur and in studies of drugs that may slow or stop the disease.

Researchers are finding simple and accurate ways to detect Alzheimer’s long before there are definite symptoms. In addition to spinal fluid tests they also have new PET scans of the brain that show the telltale amyloid plaques that are a unique feature of the disease. And they are testing hundreds of new drugs that, they hope, might change the course of the relentless brain cell death that robs people of their memories and abilities to think and reason.

“This is what everyone is looking for, the bull’s-eye of perfect predictive accuracy,” Dr. Steven DeKosky, dean of the University of Virginia medical school, who is not connected to the new research, said about the spinal tap study.

...

We learned from some DUers that science was just a belief system. :eyes:

[Silent3]

1. To some of the mystics, this proves nothing, of course

There used to be one guy who loved to troll in this forum who would tell you something like this: People only get diseases like Alzheimer's because they believe in diseases like Alzheimer's. The scientific community isn't identifying diseases, it's creating them by making up believable-sounding stories, wrapped in a bigger medical/scientific mythology, that convince people into the reality of such problems as Alzheimer's. People's lack of faith in their complete mental self-control over their health then leads to sickness and diseases.

I'm not sure to want extent this guy allowed that "creating" disease this way was done out of mere ignorance and stupidity, or that he imagined it was a devious scheme to profit from treating deception-induced illness.

[realisticphish]

3. Boy

if only I hadn't believed in skin cancer...

[mr blur]

4. Yeah, but he was a dick, happily long-gone.

[Silent3]

5. That one troll may be gone...

...but the attitude lives on, lurking in the dark corners of the Land of Woo.

[TZ]

2. SIgh- I see stuff like this every day..in some sense

We have tests that tell us precisely how much drug is in a persons system and we can match it up to the way the patient feels at the time plus with parallel tests that show an immune response..and they generally correlate very well... Unfortunately there are too many people who don't seem to want to believe that science often gives actual proof, not just guesswork. Its like the idiot in GD that told me since medical science doesn't work 100% of the time, its not any better than the magic herbs and water..AGGGHHHHHH....
Edit: excellent study, hopefully it can be used to do preventative care on people who are likely to develop Alzheimers.