An article in the September 2, 2006 New York Times discusses research that fails to find a big genetic reason for why some people get sick and die young, while others live to a ripe old age. Some impressive identical twin studies found that factors besides genetics seem to be much more important in determining disease and death, or lack thereof.

But here's the interesting thing - the researchers are frustrated because they can't tell us what those factors are. Wealth? Nutrition? Exercise? Church membership? Having a pet? Positive mental outlook?

What's the problem here? Why is the holy grail of medicine - keeping people healthy for a long time - so elusive?

Could it be the broken research methodology known as reductionism?

Here's how reductionism works, in a nutshell: we look at a complex situation and try to figure out what happens when we manipulate one little part of that situation. We take two groups and give one group 1000 mg more vitamin C than the other, and see what happens. We teach one group about wearing bicycle helmets and see what happens. We make them drink skim milk and skinless chicken and see what happens.

If this experimental mindset were just a fringe activity, for the hypercurious who don't care about real-world application of their research, then cool. I'd be interested in seeing what they were up to every now and then.

But unfortunately, this is the way science is done. It's the only way that gets to be called "proof." And as I hope you can see, it seriously distorts reality and makes us believe all sorts of things that just aren't true. Real life is holistic. Real life is interconnected. Real life is dynamic and fluid and messy, and it's that reality we need to study if we want to learn anything.

For example: some studies have shown that owning a pet seems to increase life span in the elderly. So what should we do? Give every grandma a chihuaha? Or is it possible that pet ownership is related in a complicated way to a more positive mental outlook, to having the resources to feed and care for a pet, and to an increased social life due to requirements to walk the pet and shop more frequently for its food and other supplies?

Here's another problem that researchers gnash their teeth about - they don't know it when the see it. Let's say "positive mental outlook" is in fact a key element of a healthy life strategy. How do you define it? Psychologists create tests, but those tests don't measure "positive mental outlook" - they measure people's responses to the tests. Who knows how closely related the test results are to reality? There's absolutely no way to know.

The way most scientists do health research is like a musicologist studying only the bassoon part of a symphony, and trying to figure out why it's a good symphony. "Oh, look," the musicologist might say, "Beethoven's 9th and Brahms' 1st both have the bassoons playing lots of G notes in the second movement. Let's do a study of all symphonies written in the last 200 years and see if bassoons playing G notes is the thing that determines the quality of the symphony."

Holy cannoli - that's insane! Yet that's what billions of dollars are spent on every year, and the meaningless results are reported dutifully by clueless health and science reporters in this form: "It turns out that eating a low-fat diet does not protect women against breast cancer or heart disease." That leaves the dazed and confused public - us - to fend for ourselves. And we usually do it by throwing up our hands and saying, "It's all fate. I'm going to stop trying to live a healthy life, because nothing I can do seems to matter."

You see, there's a big bias in all this research. The fancy term for it is "false negative." That means, reductionist research on health tends to NOT find things that are there. For example, what you and I eat has a huge impact on whether we get cancer. Just look at cancer maps of different countries and you'll see the relationships. And - just in case you're about to argue that it's genetic - look at what happens when a group of people migrate from one place to another. Within a generation, that group takes on the cancer risk of their new home.

Yet reductionist research can't find those truths. Just like the guy searching for his keys under the street lamp, even though he dropped them on the dark side of the street, the researchers look where their tools let them look, rather than where the answers are.

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