Woo or new? Specifically, this outfit. Legit or not? It makes sense that if a specific part of the brainorgan is malfuncioning it would result in a fairly specific set of symptoms, but is the state of imaging technology good enough yet to identify potential disorders based on something like a fMRI? Are there enough neuropsychologists who know how to correlate imaging data with behavior to make this a common, acceptable practice with reasonable accuracy?
What bothers me about the specific organization mentioned is they describe their method as, “a proprietary process”, suggesting they alone possess some mystical device heretofore unknown to medical science.
Thanks, that was a useful start. But it’s worth noting 16 months can be a huge amount of time when it comes to advances in technology. Still, I suppose it can take time to decide what the information provided by new/improved tech actually means.
This isn’t really an advance in technology, though, is it? fMRI scans are old hat now, but the process of correlating fMRI results with mental symptoms or personality variables, or behaviors (which depends as much on the independent recognition of the symptoms or whatever, which is as much art as science) is a slow, difficult matter, with three steps forward and two steps back all the time. They will not have got significantly better at it in 16 months. There are still a lot of scientists who are very critical of some of the sloppy methodology and sloppy statistical analysis that often seems to go on in the fMRI community, too.
On the whole, MRI is a wonderful tool for diagnosing neurological problems; for “mental” (i.e., psychological) ones, not so much (not yet, anyway, and not for a good long time). It is easy to blind laypeople with science with it though, with the fancy machines and nice colorful pictures.