Defending the GP clinician–researcher

Defending the One Percent

I magine a society with perfect economic equality. Perhaps out of sheer coincidence, the supply and demand for different types of labor happen to produce an equilibrium in which everyone earns exactly the same income. As a result, no one worries about the gap between the rich and poor, and no one debates to what extent public policy should make income redistribution a priority. Because people e...

Defending the Dynamical Hypothesis

Defending Diversity

Why do some observations lead to broad generalizations whereas other observations do not have as much influence on people's beliefs? One principle of evaluating evidence is the diversity principle, which states that more diverse evidence should lead to stronger inferences than a narrow sample of evidence. For example, if you see someone repeatedly acting aggressively while giving lectures, you ...

Defending Abduction

Charles S. Peirce argued that, besides deduction and induction, there is a third mode of inference which he called "hypothesis" or "abduction". He characterized abduction as reasoning "from effect to cause", and as "the operation of adopting an explanatory hypothesis". Peirce's ideas about abduction, which are related also to historically earlier accounts of heuristic reasoning (the method of a...

GP or no GP, is that the question?

t has long been recognized, on the basis of numerous experimental and clinical studies, that the autonomic nervous system has a significant role in the pathogenesis of atrial fibril-lation (AF). More recent studies have focused on the ganglion-ated plexi (GP), which are part of an interconnected structural and functional atrial neural network constituting the intrinsic cardiac autonomic nervous...