In Reply to: Actually posted by Q II on October 06, 2006 at 15:52:47:
You make some excellent points. What I learned from many years of school and practical training is a deep appreciation for the enormous amount of stuff I don't know anything about whatsoever with any degree of certainty.
PhD programs CAN train a person to do research, but they can also train people to be professors & instructors. I don't think Chancellor's ethnographic research on TFI is all that good as qualitative anthropological research goes, but he could be one heck of a classroom instructor for all I know.
Some PhD programs are not based on learning scientific method. PhDs in theology, English, or the law, for example, are in the liberal arts. Nevertheless, there is a level of rigor to research methods in the liberal arts that is comparable to that of the soft and hard sciences.
There are also eight-year postgraduate programs like PsyD and DSW that allow people to earn doctorates in clinical practice. These are equivalent to MDs in many respects. There's little focus on how to do research, much more focus on how to use scientific methods to diagnose and treat people.
I'm not sure I'd agree that medicine isn't a science. I view medicine as both an art and a science. MDs are trained to order complex medical tests and interpret the results in terms of what they know about human physiology and diseases processes. That's scientific method, to me. The "art" of medicine involves eliciting the proper information to make an accurate diagnosis, then working in collaboration with the patient to facilitate healing.