‘It just doesn't seem to fit’. Environmental illness, corporeal chaos and the body as a complex system
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Environmental illness (EI) still remains something of an enigma, despite attempts to squeeze it into the increasingly flexible framework of the biomedical model or label it as 'psychogenic'. Consistently, environmentally ill bodies fail to respond to conventional medical tests, with the emergence of ambiguous, indecipherable or negative results. During a series of in-depth interviews in Canada, both patients and environmental health practitioners advocated the need for an alternative paradigm from which to view EI. They also spoke of the complex nature of the illness, a conundrum that is currently being explored at the Nova Scotia Environmental Health Centre through an alternative epistemological framework: complexity theory. In this paper, I present a tentative proposal, based on the juxtaposition of theoretical insights from this new science to discourses emanating from patients and doctors. Specifically, I argue that the diverse symptoms of EI can be comprehended through a study of complexity theory, a conception that has positive implications for treatment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".