Oxytocin Not So “Warm and Fuzzy,” and Other Links
The love hormone has a darker side: Oxytocin may also be an agent of ethnocentrism.
Will you burn more calories sitting at your desk if the thermostat is turned down? Yes.
Thirteen percent of pregnant women smoke. Almost 1/4 lie about it.
Even when following medical guidelines to the letter, doctors often use treatments that have little or no scientific support. Only one in seven treatment recommendations were based on high-quality data from clinical trials.
Shoveling snow is risky. U.S. hospitals treat on average about 11,500 injuries and medical emergencies a year related to it.
There’s a dark side of love? This is news?
The item on doctors is a cheap shot. If doctors waited to use a therapy until there were double blind trials and statistically results, we would all be dead.
Oxytocin is a bonding agent so it stands to reason that is would encourage selective bonding in exclusive relationships rather than make people touchy-feely with everyone.
I can understand why the women lie.
Is the darker side, really a darker side? Or isn’t that what you want: a mate who is focused on you and is repelled by outsiders who could potentionally compete with you for the mate’s affections?
Cheap shot indeed. Where’s the randomnized control trial that shows that setting a broken leg is better than letting it heal without intervention?
Good point, Linda.
I hope you would agree: Empirical experience doesn’t require randomized controlled trials to useful information. (Such information could be used to specify targets for study.) If this is true, isn’t there a lot of useful information from physicians’ practices (e.g., off-label drug uses) that isn’t being collected because there are few incentives to do so?
I think Joe is right and so Linda. All this calls into question the whole push for “evidence-based medicine.” That is beginning to look like a euphemism for health care rationing.
I hadn’t thought of evidence-based medicine that way, but now that you bring it up I see the problem. This would be a good topic for one of John Goodman’s Health Alerts.
The notion of medical guidelines comes from the evidence-based medicine movement. To use leftist vocabulary, it “privileges” information from randomized controlled trials over information from clinical observation. As a result, using evidence in the practice of medicine is not at all the same as evidence-based medicine. The observation that statistics are not science bears repeating.