Let Me Reintroduce Myself
It has been years since I have written a new piece on this site, as many of you know. I am not sure whether I am beginning anew; or whether this site may slide into something quite distinct from its origin; or even if this turns out to be a lone entry. But today, I have some thoughts to share that I hope might be of use to some of you out there.
Flickr: Justin Kern
If I do continue to post regularly again, it will not be to reiterate the basics of the physical requirements of getting to remission from an eating disorder. Past entries, papers and the book cover those bases already. However, if I do come across notable new research on the topic, I will likely relay it here.
That means that if you are going to embark on any kind of recovery journey from eating disorders, or any kind of chronic illness, based on information sourced from this site, speak to your healthcare team and trusted in-real-life connections and seek their advice. Everything you find on this site is a repository of information filtered and synthesized by me (with the exception of a few first-person guest posts of course). It only has use if it is subsequently assessed by you and your team.
Near the end of my posts a few years ago, I was most curious about the resistance I would see in others around my first-hand observations that doing the psychological work alongside the physical recovery process was almost a necessity if remission was to become permanent. And this is what I intend on picking up a bit in this post.
We have all been living through unprecedented times. I suspect many of you found cycles of lockdowns and isolation created better opportunities to address recovery from an eating disorder (or perhaps other and/or additional chronic illnesses), in new ways, while others found that hard won progress to remission seemed to slip away.
What features, if any, might those who have realized improvements have in common? And are the commonalities in any way relevant in realizing those improvements? I do not know the answer to these questions, but there is a breadcrumb trail I am interested in following and hope you might like to join in the journey.
I highly doubt there will ever be a version of me that veers too far from my comfortable roots in scientific practice, but it seems relevant to me these days to explore the reductive limits of scientific practice as well.
Science and Regimes of Existence
The Definition of Terroir
Right, so let us get stuck in on some vocabulary. This is my first joyous leap into a rabbit hole of esoteric knowledge in quite some time! First up: “terroir.” It is a French agricultural term identified with particular crops, most commonly grapes for wine.
There is no exact translation of le terroir in English; it is sometimes referred to as simply “soil,” and other times as “region.” And therefore, in typical fashion, if we need a sentence to describe a word in another language, then we just adopt the word as is.
Un terroir, pronounced roughly tare-woir, is an ecosystem and a relationship. It is does encompass discrete items such as soil, precipitation, temperatures, geology etc.; but it is also the careful management of farming; as well as all the creatures living within and drawing on that ecosystem more broadly; and finally, it is the connections and relationships of all these things.
But there is a dispute between winemakers and scientists on the validity of the modern definition of terroir.
How Science Measures
The article from which I quoted above goes on to suggest that scientists have debunked the concept of terroir, but the author uses the scientific definition of terroir as rocks giving flavour to wine– the essentialism of terroir as geology.
Most commonly, when science debunks anything, the proponents of what has been debunked often brush it aside on the unproveable tenet that science simply cannot measure the phenomenon.
Scientists have two ways to debunk something: 1) experimentation and, 2) exposition and ridicule. Oftentimes they use a combination of both kinds of debunking. Exposition and ridicule are common fallbacks either when there is no way to use an experiment to definitively debunk the phenomenon being studied, or perhaps when the experiment generates vague results. The scientific method depends upon developing a theory that is falsifiable.
As an example of scientific method, let us say that I have a theory that I can boil rose petals in water and the various chemical compounds found within roses will then subsequently leach into the water. There is an absolute potential to disprove this theory because I can measure for the presence of those compounds in the water after I have boiled and removed the petals.
Now I subsequently take that rose-infused water and dilute it several times over with fresh water to the point where I can no longer detect the presence of any rose chemical compounds when I test for them. I then state that the benefits of those compounds remain in the now tested pure water as it remembers the prior introduction of rose petals before dilution. In the absence of being able to measure the capability of H2O to remember, or even to define the measurable expression of memory within three molecules, then I am in an utterly science-free zone. I cannot prove or disprove the ability of water to remember.
To accept this unproveable tenet as true is the act of belief or faith.
And the problem of belief for many scientists, and people in general for that matter, is in the perceived or actual presence of manipulation, most specifically manipulation for financial gain or perceived special status. Debunking through exposition and ridicule is precisely focused on the individual who receives status or financial gain when what that individual is espousing is not instantly falsifiable through experimentation.
Perhaps everyone may recall the individual who stated he was a “breatharian” – able to thrive on breathing alone (no food, no water)? This was quickly debunked when he was photographed buying a large quantity of fast food at the local corner store in the early morning hours. That photograph was actually debunking through exposition and ridicule. Had he been brought into a 24/7-surveillance laboratory setting then that would have resulted in debunking through experimentation. There was in fact another breatharian, a woman after that first guy, who had the same thing happen to her. Hopefully breatharians have now mastered the necessity of getting food in other ways beyond late-night corner-store runs. And that would be sarcasm, another form of ridicule in this case.
But this is how we slide into scientism, or what this cardiologist calls the “Yay Science! crowd.” The Yay Science! crowd will unreservedly adopt and defend anything that has the word “science” in it.
It is easy to confuse science-based debunking and socially-based debunking. But exposition and ridicule are all about us as social primates using our affinity for shunning to create uniformity in the group. Debunking through exposition and ridicule actually renders the ability to debunk using experimentation less compelling for many a conspiracy theorist out there. We do not change minds through ridicule; we silence dissent. I have quoted Charlan J. Nemeth in other posts over the years as her area of research centres on dissent. In spaces where dissent is not tolerated, then there is overt assent and covert dissent. What ridicule impacts is behaviour – people become more conforming. Something the researcher Leslie M. Janes calls “Jeer Pressure” in her experiment published here.
I am someone who will never fall out of love with the scientific method. But I must admit that I do not feel that same love-at-first-sight thrill that I had when, at age 17, I read The Hundredth Monkey and Other Paradigms. I know Science still has a good heart, but it really needs to step away from becoming a conduit of social suppression.
Paradoxically, yet irrefutably, it is an unproveable tenet that facts might only be revealed through scientific inquiry. How would you test for the presence of a fact that does not arise from scientific inquiry if all you have for investigative tools is scientific inquiry? Head hurts.
Back to Regimes of Existence
But what if in between a falsifiable scientific theory and pure belief (and some might say pure gullibility) lies something amorphously intermediary? And what if that intermediary space best serves the observation of more complex systems rather than discrete objects or outcomes?
We will look at this middle world in next week’s installment.