Question Everything

My take away message of this course is to question the validity and the limitations of information that is presented to us. One of the major topics that we considered during this course was the idea that our understanding of reality comes from an episteme. More specifically, the area of epistemology that interests me the most of this course is the idea that scientific facts are considered valid because they are "scientific". The example that I would like to use comes from one of the poster presentations. One of the groups presented a study that analyzed the contents of a water sample. At first, I was shocked by the results of the findings. That was until I realized that the concentration of the drugs found in the water was very small in comparison to the concentration that is needed to create some medicinal effect. Another argument was that small amounts of these drugs can over time produce changes in our bodies over time with the example of a hormone when found in small concentration can cause disorders of the uterus. This also seemed shocking, but we did not consider that different amounts of each drug can produce drastically different effects in the body. My counterexample would be ibuprofen and diphenhydramine. A typical dose of ibuprofen is around 200mg whereas a typical dose of diphenhydramine is 25mg. Both doses will create some medicinal effect, but different amount of each drug is needed. This is because the therapeutic dose and the lethal dose of drugs can vary greatly. When scientific information is presented to us, it is important to consider the evidence based on the methods used. We sometimes think that scientific evidence is inherently true. It also seemed that we were scared of having impure water to be hazardous, but my counterexample to that would be fluorinated water that we all drink in Minnesota. So my take away from this class is to question the validity of information that is presented to us and to also try to map out a thought process to make sense of the world we live in.