A clinical study of root surface conditioning with an EDTA gel. I. Nonsurgical periodontal treatment.

The present study was undertaken to investigate if subgingival administration of an EDTA gel has any adjunctive effect to subgingival and supragingival root debridement. The investigation was performed in one study center involving 6 clinical investigators and 91 patients. The patients were selected from 2 patient populations: 41 were included from a consecutive referral material on a voluntary basis, and 50 were included from a maintenance care material at the clinic. No significant differences were found between the EDTA-treated and control groups with respect to clinical attachment gain or probing pocket depth reduction. The referral patients showed a significant improvement of pocket depth and attachment gain compared to maintenance care patients at the clinic. In multiple regression analyses, it was found that patients with small attachment losses at baseline responded better to treatment than patients with severe periodontitis. Also, in multivariate analyses, referral patients responded better than maintenance patients when controlling for other predictors.

The necessary subjectivity of bodymind medicine: Candace Pert's molecules of emotions.

This article discusses the relevance of Candace Pert's Molecules of Emotions (1997) to the development of bodymind medicine and argues that Pert's research and conceptual analysis provide the missing link connecting the messages of the mind to physiological effects in the body. The research and analysis also present a fundamental challenge to both the reigning body of medicine and the scientific commitment to so-called objectivity by positing a human organism that can act upon itself with thoughts and feelings--that is, through subjectivity. The contention is twofold: The only adequate medical science is one in which the patient's subjectivity is written into the health and disease equation. But for this to happen the classical/modern concept of science needs to be dramatically reconfigured.

The Nobel Prize and the biomedical paradigm: is it time for a change?

An examination of the early history of Nobel Committee deliberations, coupled with a survey of discoveries for which prizes have been awarded to date--and, equally revealing, discoveries for which prizes have not been awarded--reveals a pattern. This pattern suggests that Committee members may have internalized the received, biomedical model and conferred awards in accord with the physicalistic premises that ground this model. I consider the prospect of a paradigm change in medical science and the possible repercussions of such a change on the distribution of Nobel prizes "within the domain of physiology or medicine." For expository purposes, I contrast a model based on a science of pathophysiology with one based on a science of pathopsychophysiology. I propose a means whereby members might minimize the potentially blinding effects of model-dependence and come to evaluate medical discoveries from an inter-model rather than an exclusively intra-model perspective. By bringing to light questions rarely asked and proposing answers, I seek to open a dialogue and furnish a vehicle by which the putative delimiting effects of model-dependence might be overcome.

The challenge to biomedicine: a foundations perspective.

The basic premise of today's scientific medicine is that the 'book of man' is written in the language of the biological sciences, ultimately molecular genetics and biochemistry. The patient is a complex biological organism and disease is a deviation from the norm of somatic parameters. At the same time, many major contemporary diseases are reported to have psychosocial and environmental components in their etiology. Hence the challenge: how can a medical model be both scientific and conceptually well-suited to today's disease burden? I argue that certain contemporary "postmodern" sciences support alternative, non-reductionist (self-organizational) premises. So doing, they offer an infrastructure for a medical model at once scientific and responsive to the diseases at hand.