Androstadienone Ineffective If VNO Is Blocked

[Irish]

Yes, they seem to have the same

concern that they were blocking only the VNO, and not olfactory surface as well.

But this is still a

fundamentally better test than what the Erox folk were doing... they were administering the pherins directly to the

VNO through some device, and measuring electrical potential changes on the VNO. I'm not saying they didn't pull

that off, but that's a pretty difficult medical and engineering task. Blocking off the VNO sounds a whole lot

simpler. And now that -dienone effects are well established this seems to be a clever experiment to test for

possible VNO activity.

[DrSmellThis]

It's a big deal. If you

interfere in any way shape or form with normal olfaction -- even in a strictly emotional way, for example; or if you

simply distress the olfactory system via your procedures -- you don't know to what extent you're measuring VNO

mediated changes. The whole bottom falls out of the study. I'm skeptical, for methodological reasons, rather than

theoretical ones.

That might be the reason for the delay in publishing the results, for all I know. It's way

more likely a methodological problem, than some kind of belief about the VNO one way or the other.

One way to

solve that kind of problem, or to get a little closer to a solution (someone will find another valid

criticism almost every time), is using various control groups.

So if you're blocking the VNO with some kind of

a patch, for example, you put identical patches near but not on the VNO for other groups, to rule out the patch

itself as a "confound" (as inadvertently causing the results to some extent). But that's hard if you can't

pinpoint each person's VNO precisely. Individual physiological variations are common here, unfortunately. So

ideally you'd have more than one method of blocking the VNO, until enough reliability/validity studies have been

done for your favorite procedure. Research is really hard! It could easily take a decade just to refine the

procedure (to shut up everyone who wants to shoot holes in your research program).

As my advisor once said, and

this is my favorite quote from him, BTW, "you really have to bend over backwards to study human sexuality".



Belagareth, it's not uncommon to be shocked at basic problems that professional researchers (much less

"unprofessional" ones) leave unsolved/unaddressed; while still gleefully trumpeting their results from the highest

mountaintop. I take little for granted. That is because humans are exceedingly difficult to study.

That is why

people should have to become experts on research methodology, as a prerequisite for studying anything human,

especially at the level of complexity of human sexuality/relationships. The basic state of affairs is thinking

you've got it figured out while you don't; until you learn as a mature scientist to mistrust fully your own

"beliefs".