Criticisms of “The Body Keeps the Score”

> Book falls apart

My claim: there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to criticism. Not a single piece of psychological science is 100% true.

Drugs work but often don't. Therapies work but often don't. Alice's research falls apart under Bob's scrutiny.

It's a soft science, it is what it is.

There is always somebody, especially on HN, who will comment on an article debunking pop psychology, "Well that makes sense because it's all bullshit."

I understand there is a bias towards the hard sciences here (which is somewhat odd, because the vast majority of commenters here do not practice any hard science). But I think there is extra skepticism of psychiatry and psychology (which get lumped together), and I wonder why that might be.

Well, I have a theory, but it relies on psychology and it isn't very charitable.

Science involves doing experiments, collecting data, and testing hypotheses, i.e. claims are falsifiable.

We don't have the technology to collect the necessary data to be able to test hypotheses for psychiatric and psychological phenomenoms, and even many other non brain related medical claims about the human body.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Seems pretty reasonable to take claims about unverifiable subjects with a grain of salt.

The replication crisis has become a thought-terminating cliche. There is a lot of space between "this field suffers from methodological issues" and "it can be dismissed outright."

Also, falsifiability is broadly rejected as solution to the demarcation problem.

I honestly think a lack of grounding in philosophy of science leads people to draw the line between science and pseudo-science based on nothing but vibes. For example, I've seen people reject mainstream psychiatry as totally pseudoscience and then endorse evolutionary psychology, a field with a huge bullshit issue.