Recent quotes:

50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education

The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules. They can't help it, because they don't know how to identify what they condemn.

The Rise of Evidence-Based Psychiatry - Scientific American Blog Network

Psychiatry remains an outlier in the medical profession regarding the use of data; even after the rigorous Osheroff v. Chestnut Lodge debate, the importance of data in practice remains unsettled. In particular, objective data and data science remain underutilized by the psychiatric community. Has your therapist ever used a predictive algorithm to guide your treatment?

Abysmally primitive

as Dr. Sophia Vinogradov, Chief of Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Medical School, recently wrote in Nature Human Behavior, “There's a secret that we psychiatrists do not like to talk about: the abysmally primitive state of how we assess, understand, and treat mental illness.”

Why Are There No Biological Tests in Psychiatry? - Scientific American Blog Network

we must also not minimize the grave practical problems and limitations associated with not having biological tests to identify psychiatric disorders. Most troubling is the fact that the overwhelming majority of prescriptions for psychotropic medicines are written by primary care physicians who often have little training in psychiatry; little time to perform an adequate diagnostic evaluation; a tendency to depend on tests rather than talking to patients; and too great a susceptibility to quick trigger diagnosis and poorly chosen pill solutions (fostered by aggressive and misleading drug company marketing). The lack of precise and easily available biological tests in psychiatry permits much loose diagnosing and cowboy prescribing.

Why Are There No Biological Tests in Psychiatry? - Scientific American Blog Network

The problem of teasing out heterogeneous clinical presentations in psychiatry is compounded by the fact that they also have heterogeneous underlying mechanisms. There will not be one pathway to schizophrenia; there may be dozens, perhaps hundreds. Biological tests that appear to be associated with schizophrenia are never useful for making the diagnosis because they always show more variability within the category than between categories. And seemingly intriguing findings usually don't replicate.

Why was truth about saturated fat buried for 40 years?

It’s possible, Bob Frantz said, that his father’s team was discouraged by the failure to find a heart benefit from replacing saturated fats with vegetable oils. “My feeling is, when the overall objective of decreasing deaths by decreasing cholesterol wasn’t met, everything else became less compelling,” he said. “I suspect there was a lot of consternation about why” they couldn’t find a benefit. The coleader of the project was Dr. Ancel Keys, author of the Seven Countries Study, Time cover subject, and the most prominent advocate of replacing saturated fat with vegetable fat. “The idea that there might be something adverse about lowering cholesterol [via vegetable oils] was really antithetical to the dogma of the day,” Bob Frantz said.

Dr. Nestler is dean for academic and scientific affairs and director of the Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Hyman is a past director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Virtually all of today’s treatments are based on serendipitous discoveries made six decades ago.