Philosophy Explorer wrote: ↑Tue Jan 23, 2018 9:58 am
What methods do they use in their work? How predictable is their work in saying how someone will behave? How much do psychiatrists rely on opinion when they do their studies? When violent prisoners are turned loose on society, how often do they go back to doing crimes? Have child molesters ever been cured of their urges to repeat their crimes?
How do we know that psychiatrists are objective in their work? If not, then their research doesn't amount to a hill of beans.
PhilX
Psychiatric research is concentrated on chemical experiments on lab rats, and then on people. Opinion plays little role in the lab rat experiments, I would suspect.
You can't 'cure' someone of the disease of child molestation because it is not a disease, it is a behaviour and motivated pleasure source due to mutation. Much like homosexuality is, or a tendency to become bald, or a tendency to be heterosexual with an adult partner. Who gave you the idea that child molesters were anything but mutated humans?
Psychiatrists' work is somewhat predictive, although not on an individual basis, but on a mass scale. They will stay with precise accuracy things like (as an example) "out of 1000 schizophrenics 14.8 will commit suicide by age 28", although they will be hard pressed to point at WHICH individual ones of the 1000 in the initial sample will be the ones to kill themselves.
How do we know psychiatrists are objective in their work? By repetition of their methods and experimental results, by holding them to industry standards, by giving them training that enables them to do their jobs well.
It is a thankless profession, btw. Treating psychiatric patients today can be compared to treating bacterial infections before the discovery of penicillin. Most people with serious bacterial infections died prior to ww2. There was nothing the doctors could do when you had an ear infection to save you from deafness, and there was nothing they could do when you had TB to save you from suffocating in short order. There was nothing they could do to stop you from developing sores, painful skin abresions, dementia, and eventually premature death when you contracted syphilis. Much like you will be suffering a lifetime, and will your immediate environment when you somehow become ill with a psychiatric disease nowadays.
They say the psychiatry branch of medicine lags about 100 years behind physical medicine, and that is pretty good, considering there were doctors 2000-4000 years ago, but psychiatrists, only for the last 150-250 years. Psychiatry, as a branch of medicine, is a fast learner, if you allow that metaphor.
