Posted by avid abulia on June 14, 2003, at 12:47:55
In reply to Re: St.JAMES: HELP! Need some DEFINITION assistanc, posted by stjames on June 13, 2003, at 23:48:08
to take the hand analogy further, you could, say, be left-handed. then, you could shake hands with your right hand pretty well with someone, provided that they extend the right hand to shake, and you would pass an evaluation at handshaking as having your right hand being a better fit... but if you were never tested for writing skills, no one would notice that your right hand was not all that good at signing your name for you. quite simply, tests are not done to evaluate all measures of chemical activity; you might compare it to preliterate scientists doing the testing on your communication ability, wherein they may understand that your right hand is good at communicating a greeting, but they have no context for which to understand why signing the proper name may be important as well.
the biogenic amine theory may have a use in treatment of depression and the like, but we know relatively little of most other neurotransmitters and less still of second-messenger systems, neurotrophic factors, neurohormones, gene expression, and the like, so it is difficult to say if a given enantiomer is inactive if we only have a limited schema in which to test effectiveness...
and in addition to all of this, one may consider a very good friend of mine who has a very rare variant of dwarfism. one might say, my friend has wet his pants because his legs are too short and have no knees to carry him fast enough to the bathroom, or because he has lost the tool he must use to unbutton his pants and acheive proper aim, or because he has had a seizure and lost urinary control, or because he always antagonizes rednecks and they prevent him from entering a bathroom, or any combination or variation of the above, but the end result is still the same, and some magic-bullet effect to find just what it was in that situation may not work in all other scenarios unless a very specialized and broad-spectrum system is developed.
reductionist psychopharmacology: see how well it works for us!
~AA
poster:avid abulia
thread:233801
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20030614/msgs/233961.html