Thanks folks, for all the well wishes and suggestions. Wife is impressed. She has even agreed to try Nafod's scrotum test.
Smet, terra, spiller, others, appreciate the thoughtful and honest input.
There's nothing wrong and a lot right with taking the standard route or following best practices or high probability courses of action. It's when they don't produce results and one has to seek answers elsewhere that the stultifying glib responses from the MDs are so maddening-whether it be the outright dismissal of alternative explanations coupled to the clear inability to explain the reason for the dismissal or, worse yet, proffering reasons and ideas that are clearly wrong and trying to cover up the ignorance with a "you just wouldn't' understand" attitude. The best way to describe the attitude is "anybody who disagrees with me or doesn't recognize my superiority is arrogant." The irony is wholly lost. It's almost like they're all British.
To the idea that "you just wouldn't understand" I recently had a discussion with a new graduate of a motorcycle riding course. He was nonplussed by the idea that one can steer the bike one way or another by moving the bar in the opposite direction of the intended turn. Easy enough to explain but his questions forced me to think harder about it than I might have and to come up with explanations that didn't rely upon artifices like preservation of angular momentum vectors. The point is that answering his questions forced me to learn a new mental picture. Happens all the time in my profession and those of others, as well, I suspect. Recipients of our systems, bright folks in their own right, turn up observations and results that often times cause us to rethink our understanding or learn something new entirely and we're the supposed experts. Damn shame the medical profession sees itself above this legitimate interchange and learning tool.
The human body is complex. It is true that there are so many interactions leading to so many cross correlations that even big data analysis properly applied turns up false associations. And it's not very often that it is properly applied. Using software that you don't understand can lead to all sorts of false results. Especially among those who believe p=0.05 is some magical mathematical result rather than a randomly chosen number for experiments with far smaller solution spaces. To get an idea of the extent of the problem, read the below. For those of you enamored of climate science, consider that this problem is likely not unique to medical pseudo-science.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... /308269/2/
The working definition of dumb fucks I'm using here is closely associated to Smet's description of his students-I don't want to understand principles and apply them, I want to know what type of problem is going to be on the test and how to answer it. Well, it's Newtonian mechanics and there are just three laws-understand how to apply them and there's no reasonable question I can ask that you can't answer. The same sort of students who make sure to gerrymander their schedule to take the easy course with the easy professor, who fight for unearned extra points on their exams, and who have no interest in understanding. It's independent of traditional measures such as college board scores, grades, and kindergarten IQ tests. Seems the method of training of MDs herein described reward and reinforce the supremacy of that view.
