> Subject: Chaos and medicine
>
>
> rather than more smarta*** comments about strange attractors
> what about a
> serious question. Apart from being fascinating, what can
> chaos theory teach
> us about medicine?
>
> The only two occurences I have seen investigated have been to
> do with some
> theories about cardiac electrophysiology, which seem plausible from a
> distance but I haven't looked closely, and bipolar disorder
> where a neat
> longitudinal study demonstrated periodicity and scalability
> suggestive of
> fractal patterns in mood swings in patients but not controls.
>
> Do those of you who "know" (Ahmad, Declan anyone else) have
> any ideas about
> other problems. I actually suspect much behavioural illness
> eg depression,
> physical symptoms no physical cause, develops strange
> attractors over time
> but it may be a complicated way of explaining common sense.
>
> Bet this post could generate even less replies than my average!
very pretentious ;-) so try this;
during physiology BSc many moons ago (UCL by the way, first of course)
learnt about noise analysis from the master Prof Katz (Nobel prize for
this work, him, not me); stroke of genius to think of analysing the
random variations in an electric current to produce an estimate for the
half life of an acetylcholine receptor, always thought that noise
analysis must have other applications, perhaps in general practice,
perhaps to produce some sense out of variations in GP referral
patterns/rates or something, producing a measure of threshold.
any budding pretentious biophysicists out there?? I sense a whole new
era of primary care research about to start; be there, be smart
owen dempsey
GP
West Yorks
UK
'trained to move at a slow and loping pace'
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|