Intuition over Logic 3: Flower Essences & Thunderbird Two

There’s a plane that can be seen in the sky near where I live every few weeks. It belongs to Airbus and is used to fly aircraft wings from one of its factories near Preston to another in North Wales. The first time I saw this plane I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The plane was enormous – and incredibly wide. It looked very like Thunderbird Two. And it looks like it shouldn’t be able to get into the air – it looks like it is contradicting gravity!

My day job is in health research, a world where there is an obsession with the randomised controlled trial. It’s a world with an unhealthy  focus on evidence. If something hasn’t been proven to work beyond any doubt, apparently we shouldn’t waste resources on it.

Of course, this is a good point of view in general – and ensures that we don’t do things to patients that either have no effect, or worse, may even harm them.

But it can also create an environment that is completely averse to risk and where new things can’t be tried out until they have been thoroughly tested in trials. We seem to have forgotten that so much of medical practise is about judgement, and the experience of the clinician. It’s often not about referencing what we do from a journal article, but rather it is about the tried and tested – “I did this before and it works”.

Recently I read “Placebo” by Seth Godin. You can find a free copy of this short book here. It’s a marketeers take on the idea of the placebo effect. It’s a really powerful extension of the whole idea of the effect of placebos. Typically, we tend to think of placebo as the effect that a sugar lump has that is purely psychological and not based on any interaction with the substance. This tends to underplay the power of the mind in healing. Godin puts this all in the context of the impact that placebo can have on our behaviours – the perception that something has an effect can be enough to convince us that it does – and that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

All of this then, and my partner trained a little while back in the use of flower essences in complementary therapies. It’s a fascinating idea. Of course, a lot of modern medicine draws heavily on the plant world for cures. It is not all about synthetic chemicals developed in the lab! So, when we try a combination of flower essences which are claimed to have certain properties – but we aren’t sure what that means because we can’t see a trail of well researched papers that demonstrate the efficacy – should we be sceptical like Ben Goldacre? Or should we treat it in the same way we do the plane in the sky? We look up and point, we think to ourselves “That doesn’t look like it should able to stay in the air like that” and then we accept that it does because our eyes are telling us that it does. Similarly, if we try a remedy and find the results are remarkable – and it may be the essence that we are taking or it may be a placebo effect – we should accept that it works because that is what we are experiencing.

I wrote years ago in my PhD thesis about the need for Hunch-based medicine as well as Evidence-based medicine. I know a lot of people won’t agree with me – but this comes from the intuitive side rather than the striving for certainty that sometimes tangles up science. Physicists dream and speculate – they put forward the wildest hypothesis that is seen by the mainstream as absurd, and then they spend their lives trying to prove the hypothesis.

We have to be able to believe the incredible if we are to be able to live lives that are remarkable.