Slashdot Mirror
Trick or Treatment
brothke writes "The recent collapse of financial companies occurred in part because their operations were
run like a black box. For
many years, alternative medicine has similarly operated in the shadows with
its own set of black boxes. In Trick or Treatment: The
Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine, Simon Singh and
Edzard Ernst, MD, break open that box, and show with devastating clarity and
accuracy, that the box is for the most part empty." Keep reading for the rest of Ben's review.
Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine
author
Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst
pages
352
publisher
W. W. Norton
rating
9
reviewer
Ben Rothke
ISBN
978-0393066616
summary
Peels away the fallacies of acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic and herbal medicine
I first encountered co-author Simon Singh at the
2005 RSA
Conference. In his
presentation, he included a demonstration of the human brains unique
capability for pattern matching when specific patterns are expected, and used
Led Zeppelins Stairway to Heaven as an
example. Stairway has long been rumored to have
subliminal satanic messages. When played backwards,
it is impossible to decipher any message. But when
the message is known in advance, one can then hear
the message imploring the listener to go to Satans tool shed.
Once Singh put the subliminal lyrics on the overhead, the
subliminal message was now clear, not due to a subliminal message, rather via
pattern matching.
While no reasonable person can believe in Stairways subliminal lyrics, far too many people do believe in equally implausible things in the realm of alternative medicine. In the book, the authors tackle four main areas: acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic and herbal medicine. The books conclusion is that acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic are essentially worthless, while herbal medicine has limited value.
Chapter 1 starts with an overview of evidence-based medicine (EBM), of which the authors are staunch believers. EBM applies evidence gained via the scientific method and assesses the quality of the evidence relevant to the risks and benefits of the treatments. The foundation of EBM is the systematic review of evidence for particular treatments via mainly randomized controlled trials. In the chapter, the authors reiterate the concept that the plural of anecdote is not data. Acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic have plenty of first-person anecdotes, but a lack of controlled studies with real data to back up their spurious claims.
EBM shows that homeopathy and other bogus cures are of no value, yet the public is oblivious to those facts. In a piece I wrote on this topic, New York News Radio" The voice of bad science, its shows that cheap radio advertising (with its mishmash of pseudo-scientific claims) combined with a public that is ignorant of basic scientific facts, creates a perfect storm for the continuation of homeopathy and other bogus cures.
A recurring theme the book stresses is that acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic and other alternative therapies are scientifically impossible, and often will violate fundamental scientific principles. A perfect example of this implausibility is with homeopathy. Contrary to what common sense and basic science, in homeopathy, a solution that is more diluted is considered stronger and as having a higher potency. The issue is that the end result is a product that is so diluted, that its contents when in solid form is pure sugar, and when in liquid form; 100% H20. When a homeopathic liquid is in its most diluted state, there is not a single molecule of the active ingredient. Therein lays the scientific implausibility of homeopathy.
Chapter 1 also asks one of the books fundamental questions: how do you determine the truth? The authors answer that it is via the scientific method. This is determined only after strict and careful analysis of a clinical study, of which the most effective is double-blind and randomized.
In chapter 3, the book jokingly notes that since homeopathic liquid remedies are so diluted that they contain only water; their only use would be for dehydration. And since homeopathy is based on the fact that the strength of a remedy is based on its dilution, one could conceivably overdose on a homeopathic remedy by forgetting to take a dose.
The chapter concludes with perhaps the strongest indictment against homeopathy; namely its content. If one looks at the content of oscillococcinum, a homeopathic alternative marketed to relieve influenza-like symptoms, the packaging states that each gram of medication contains 0.85 grams of sucrose and 0.15 grams of lactose. Sucrose and lactose are simply forms of sugar, of which oscillococcinum is nothing more than am expensive sugar pill.
In chapter 4, the authors write that while homeopathy is nothing more than a placebo, the added danger with it is that patients will often forgo real medications to take a homeopathic one. It reports of a study in Britain, which demonstrated that the most benign alternative medicine can become dangerous if the therapist who administers it advises a patient not to follow an effective conventional medical treatment. The study demonstrated that alternative medical practitioners often recommend homeopathic remedies for malaria, and ignore proven conventional medicines. Such an approach can often mean a death sentence for the person taking the homeopathic remedy.
Chapter 5 deals with herbal medicine. The chapter is somewhat different in that the previous chapters about acupuncture, homeopathy and chiropractic showed them to be useless, herbal medicine does have value. The book notes that herbal medicine has been embraced by science to a far greater extent than acupuncture, homeopathy and chiropractics. The chapter lists over 30 herbal medicines and their levels of efficacy. An irony of herbal medicine is that some exotic ones, such as those with tiger bone or rhino horn are pushing the species to the brink of extinction, due to their level of popularity in certain parts of the world.
Chapter 5 concludes with on why smart people believe such odd things? Alternative medicine has failed to deliver the health benefits that it claims, so why are millions of patients wasting their money and risking their lives by turning towards a snake-oil industry? The authors provide numerous reasons for this, from the concepts such as natural, traditional and holistic, to attacks on the scientific method by the alternative medical community and more.
The appendix is a rapid guide to alternative therapies and lists over 30 new treatments with their benefits and potential dangers. The appendix gives single page summaries of the plethora other alternative therapies, from ear candles, colonic irrigation, reiki, to leech therapy and more. The authors write that most of these are bogus, many violate fundamental laws of sciences, and but a few have real, but limited value.
Alternative medicine operates in the shadows, blithely touting that their products have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, and that they are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. While these products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease; consumers nonetheless spends billions of dollars per year on unproven supplements. Consumers can be quite fickle. On one side they are furious at the SEC for their lack of oversight around Madoff Investments Securities. Yet when the FDA requires products use their disclaimer of how ineffective the item is, consumers will throw billions of dollars on ineffective products.
Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine is an incredibly important and eye-opening book. While Singh is a physicist and Ernst a medical doctor, the book is written in a clear and compelling style, avoids technical jargon, and sticks to the facts. In the spirit of the scientific method, the authors scrutinize alternative and complementary cures and the results show that the snake oil is still selling.
Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.
You can purchase Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
While no reasonable person can believe in Stairways subliminal lyrics, far too many people do believe in equally implausible things in the realm of alternative medicine. In the book, the authors tackle four main areas: acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic and herbal medicine. The books conclusion is that acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic are essentially worthless, while herbal medicine has limited value.
Chapter 1 starts with an overview of evidence-based medicine (EBM), of which the authors are staunch believers. EBM applies evidence gained via the scientific method and assesses the quality of the evidence relevant to the risks and benefits of the treatments. The foundation of EBM is the systematic review of evidence for particular treatments via mainly randomized controlled trials. In the chapter, the authors reiterate the concept that the plural of anecdote is not data. Acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic have plenty of first-person anecdotes, but a lack of controlled studies with real data to back up their spurious claims.
EBM shows that homeopathy and other bogus cures are of no value, yet the public is oblivious to those facts. In a piece I wrote on this topic, New York News Radio" The voice of bad science, its shows that cheap radio advertising (with its mishmash of pseudo-scientific claims) combined with a public that is ignorant of basic scientific facts, creates a perfect storm for the continuation of homeopathy and other bogus cures.
A recurring theme the book stresses is that acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic and other alternative therapies are scientifically impossible, and often will violate fundamental scientific principles. A perfect example of this implausibility is with homeopathy. Contrary to what common sense and basic science, in homeopathy, a solution that is more diluted is considered stronger and as having a higher potency. The issue is that the end result is a product that is so diluted, that its contents when in solid form is pure sugar, and when in liquid form; 100% H20. When a homeopathic liquid is in its most diluted state, there is not a single molecule of the active ingredient. Therein lays the scientific implausibility of homeopathy.
Chapter 1 also asks one of the books fundamental questions: how do you determine the truth? The authors answer that it is via the scientific method. This is determined only after strict and careful analysis of a clinical study, of which the most effective is double-blind and randomized.
In chapter 3, the book jokingly notes that since homeopathic liquid remedies are so diluted that they contain only water; their only use would be for dehydration. And since homeopathy is based on the fact that the strength of a remedy is based on its dilution, one could conceivably overdose on a homeopathic remedy by forgetting to take a dose.
The chapter concludes with perhaps the strongest indictment against homeopathy; namely its content. If one looks at the content of oscillococcinum, a homeopathic alternative marketed to relieve influenza-like symptoms, the packaging states that each gram of medication contains 0.85 grams of sucrose and 0.15 grams of lactose. Sucrose and lactose are simply forms of sugar, of which oscillococcinum is nothing more than am expensive sugar pill.
In chapter 4, the authors write that while homeopathy is nothing more than a placebo, the added danger with it is that patients will often forgo real medications to take a homeopathic one. It reports of a study in Britain, which demonstrated that the most benign alternative medicine can become dangerous if the therapist who administers it advises a patient not to follow an effective conventional medical treatment. The study demonstrated that alternative medical practitioners often recommend homeopathic remedies for malaria, and ignore proven conventional medicines. Such an approach can often mean a death sentence for the person taking the homeopathic remedy.
Chapter 5 deals with herbal medicine. The chapter is somewhat different in that the previous chapters about acupuncture, homeopathy and chiropractic showed them to be useless, herbal medicine does have value. The book notes that herbal medicine has been embraced by science to a far greater extent than acupuncture, homeopathy and chiropractics. The chapter lists over 30 herbal medicines and their levels of efficacy. An irony of herbal medicine is that some exotic ones, such as those with tiger bone or rhino horn are pushing the species to the brink of extinction, due to their level of popularity in certain parts of the world.
Chapter 5 concludes with on why smart people believe such odd things? Alternative medicine has failed to deliver the health benefits that it claims, so why are millions of patients wasting their money and risking their lives by turning towards a snake-oil industry? The authors provide numerous reasons for this, from the concepts such as natural, traditional and holistic, to attacks on the scientific method by the alternative medical community and more.
The appendix is a rapid guide to alternative therapies and lists over 30 new treatments with their benefits and potential dangers. The appendix gives single page summaries of the plethora other alternative therapies, from ear candles, colonic irrigation, reiki, to leech therapy and more. The authors write that most of these are bogus, many violate fundamental laws of sciences, and but a few have real, but limited value.
Alternative medicine operates in the shadows, blithely touting that their products have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, and that they are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. While these products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease; consumers nonetheless spends billions of dollars per year on unproven supplements. Consumers can be quite fickle. On one side they are furious at the SEC for their lack of oversight around Madoff Investments Securities. Yet when the FDA requires products use their disclaimer of how ineffective the item is, consumers will throw billions of dollars on ineffective products.
Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine is an incredibly important and eye-opening book. While Singh is a physicist and Ernst a medical doctor, the book is written in a clear and compelling style, avoids technical jargon, and sticks to the facts. In the spirit of the scientific method, the authors scrutinize alternative and complementary cures and the results show that the snake oil is still selling.
Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.
You can purchase Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
...My psychic told me so!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You mean all those alkaloids that are the basis of most of the precription drug industry.
Essentially taking money from people who want to believe.
I find it ironic that this book seeks to take money from people who _don't_ want to believe.
"the plural of data is not anecdote"
should be
"the plural of anecdote is not data"
it was our good ol' boy Hatch who called in chits to get a law passed that puts the not-medicine hawkers beyond the reach of scientific proof and tests for safety and efficacy of their nostrums.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
None of the above.
So what? Anybody with half a brain already knew that alternative medicine is a scam. I'd be much more interested in some of the evidence-based medicine exposes of mainstream medicine. Menopause replacement hormones? Oops, turns out they give women breast cancer. Low-fat diets? Gary Taubes says they may be making us fat. 3rd-generation anti-depressants? They may work for a week but also seem to cause dependence, long-term depression, and make people more suicidal than before.
Doctors aren't scientists (not very good ones anyway), even if they do plan them on TV.
http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,164071,00.html
"In the beginning, many people were skeptical, but after seeing it demonstrated on patients and the benefits achieved -- especially in the area of pain -- the majority of physicians embraced it and learned how to use it in their practice as an adjunctive therapy," said Colonel Niemtzow, who is the consultant for alternative and complimentary medicine to the Air Force surgeon general.
If the Army is embracing acupuncture, I wouldn't be so quick to lump it in with the sugar pills and diluted solutions.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
And likely many of his other claims as well. Here's what PubMed says:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17568299?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
"Accupuncture may be an efficacious and acceptable nonexposure treatment option for PTSD. Larger trials with additional controls and methods are warranted to replicate and extend these findings."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6289567?ordinalpos=3&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
"A brief characterisation is maccccde of the working principles underlying neural therapy under local anaesthesia or accupuncture. Common approaches to therapy are offered by disorders of autonomous regulation, including inflammatory processes, and by purely functional disorders.--There are many applications in gynaecology and obstetrics. A brief statistical information on lumbosacral pain is quoted as an example. Optimum performance can be expected from them, when used in combination with proven therapeutic methods. They provide a low-cost approach to reducing both the consumption of antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals as well as time of morbidity."
There are many others outside of PubMed. And that is but one of the author's claims that actual published studies in the medical literature refute. This side-swipe skepticism is not science, it is marketing in order to sell a bullshit book. Ignore idiots like him and read peer reviewed journals and abstracts before basing your own judgment.
I was under the impression that for some conditions acupuncture had been shown to have a small but statistically significant benifit, especially when combined with conventional thearapies. Wikipedia cites several published, peer reviewed articles to that effect, especially in regards to chronic lower back pain.
I had a serious fall when skiing in february. A muscle in my back was so sore that I could not tie my own shoelaces or sit down without severe pain.
After having consulted three different medical doctors who all told me to just go home and lie down and just wait for the pain to go away I consulted a chiropractic. He was able to make some of the pain disappear immediately.
So I have to say that for me at least it worked. YMMV.
In general, if you are sick or injured you get better or die. If you die you can't say anything about the failure of your medical care. If you have received care, more than likely likely you will improve. The question is whether the care altered the healing. Since humans like to find patterns, which help us predict future events, we tend to associate an action with an outcome. So, if we tend to get better, and we receive care, unless we are careful we will assume the care was positively associated with getting better. I really wish we were better able to teach that correlation does not imply causation.
Remember, your chiropractor is little more than a highly paid masseur/se.
PLEASE tell me that there's either currently a way, or will soon be a way to block stories by specific editors, much like the way one can block the 'idle' channel from the front page?
I don't know about others, but Slashdot would be a LOT more enjoyable for me if I could block kdawson and samzenpus from showing up on the front page.
From someone who's a published author, I expect better grammar in a book review.
The aphorism is mis-stated (it's "the plural of anecdote is not data"), and directly contradicts the next sentence. I actually read it over several times because I thought it might be deliberately reversed to make a point. Nope, it's just wrong.
Either the third word, "what", shouldn't be there, or there's some missing word(s) after "basic science", such as "assert" or "claim" or "would say".
Either "on" is not supposed to be there, or should be something like "the question of".
Overall, it reads like a high school student's book review. Get a proofreader.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
For the love of God, please: learn to use punctuation and better sentence structure. I tried making it through your review -- I really did. But this review, as well as your "New York News Radio: The voice of bad science" are so rife with incorrect usage that the message becomes blurred and incoherent. Just one example of many:
"Contrary to what common sense and basic science, in homeopathy, a solution that is more diluted is considered stronger and as having a higher potency."
What? Oh! I just realized: if I remove "what", the sentence suddenly makes sense. (No, I'm not being sarcastic or ironic.) Perhaps a careful proofreading is what you require, though your utter lack of possessive apostrophes implies that is probably not the case.
Bottom line: you've got good stuff to say. Please learn how to better say it.
Thanks.
A lot of standard medicine doesn't really pass the test of evidence-based medicine either, in the sense that specific advocated treatments have been validated experimentally when applied to specific, observable conditions. That's one reason EBM is still relatively controversial: many standard surgical and medical practices are based on rational inferences from facts we're pretty sure of, but have never themselves been validated.
To take a really simple example, look at how dermatologists treat moles. There isn't very good experimental data on mole prognosis. An EBM approach would say something like: given specific observed features of this mole, data tells us it has an x% chance of turning into a melanoma within Y years. You would probably need computer models to aggregate the various features that could contribute to or against it being at risk. Dermatologists don't generally have this information at hand (if it exists at all), but instead make more subjective judgment calls, based on some high-level knowledge of risk factors (which may or may not have ever been validated experimentally themselves).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It shouldn't be news to nerds.... but unfortunatly it often is...
That is also the reason it does matter.
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Um, it does contain both .85 grams of sucrose and .15 grams of lactose, but those are only the "inactive" ingredients. The supposedly active ingredients are "200CK Anas barbariae hepatis," or heart and liver of the Muscovy duck. Whatever that is. I'm not saying I think it works (though they do have clinical data showing some benefit over placebo), but that the reviewer is wrong that it's ONLY a sugar pill.
I don't know. My back feels a whole lot better after I get manipulated at the chiropractor, after a day of digging ditches. You can't tell me that is all in my head.
From the example of my family (all have at least a master in education, albeit I am the only one with a natural science [physic] PhD), the main problem is that people do not know how long an usual illness can take to naturally cure (without intervention) and also suffer for confirmation bias. This is enough to explain fully why people even intelligent one buy into it. I keep telling them the old doctor joke : "with medicine you will cure your average banal cold in 14 days. Without it will take 2 weeks". I keep telling them to try blinding as an experiment, to try reading scientific result, I indicated them why it could only be placebo, but after a while, I decided to simply stay silent. Their usual answer was only "it works for me". From that position of belief, sympathic magic, nothing can be done. you can as well try to convince a christian with logic that Jesus was an oridnary man and not the son of god or something similar. The worst is that when they get "complication" they ascribe it to having forgotten or not properly taken their "homeopatic" globule... But when they are cured after the average "14 days" they ascribe it to their beloved oscillocoxnium. The usual confirmation bias, the same which works with other scam like dead talking and what not : forget the negative remember the positive.
In the mean time, I simply have utterly given up, I think we would need 3 or 4 generation of basic scientific education from the 1st grade onward to change the trend. The way it is now, people as a whole will never be able to recognize homeopathy for the pathetic scam it is. Even if you rub their nose in it.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Why are geeks so trusting of medical doctors?
I have met many medical doctors who chose their profession because it comes with prestige and high pay, which makes them no different then the majority of the population, except for having more resources to start with. They are merely at the pinnacle of the sheeple/consumer-breeder class that slashdotters loathe!
In contrast we have mathematicians, theoretical physicists, and open source programmers who chose these professions because they want to do great work, while disregarding the low pay and low social status. These people are true thinkers, true geeks, while so many medical doctors are egomaniacs who like to chase women, drink beer, watch sports and excessively pat each other on the back (hence the kind of groupthink that makes their ability to evaluate any kind of new medical advances poor).
The authors provide numerous reasons for this, from the concepts such as natural, traditional and holistic, to attacks on the scientific method by the alternative medical community and more.
This _really_ makes me angry. When I talk to someone about homeopathy, they always tell me about how "alopathy" doesn't work on prevention and how all those "chemicals" do bad things for your health.
I think they don't relate the studies saying "don't eat too much fat, it's bad for your heart" and "don't smoke, you bastard, or your lungs will collapse" with prevention. I don't know why.
I don't have a problem with people getting cured by placebos. But I do want them to notice that, if they have TB, it's the "oh-my-god-they're-so-bad" antibiotics that will probably save them.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Especially in areas where there's some specific push to use evidence-based medicine, its adoption is increasing and leading slowly to changes in clinical practice, as long-established assumptions have turned out not to be supportable by evidence.
One of the more notable examples is the significant decrease in use of antibiotics for many bacterial maladies, which has been driven by an initiative to experimentally validate allegedly positive uses of antibiotics, and stop prescribing them if evidence of positive effect can't be found.
It used to be assumed that, because broad-spectrum antibiotics kill bacteria, they are therefore useful to prescribe for maladies caused by bacteria. However in many cases they turn out to have little effect at all; for example, controlled studies of antibiotic prescription for ear infections have generally shown no improvement in recovery speed or likelihood with antibiotics as compared to without. Therefore the previous, non-evidence-based standard medical practice ("you should prescribe antibiotics for ear infections") has turned out not to be experimentally supportable.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Well if we are going to call acupuncture a bluff then we should call many of the modern "fashion drugs" also a bluff. Many drugs seems to have less of an effect than the placebo - but are still marketed as mainstream medicine - with the blessings of the FDA. even scarier is the idea that an anti-allergy drug can cause a variety of "side-effects" - many of which sound worse than watery eyes to me (like say intestinal bleeding, giddiness, nausea, sexual dysfunction ....). EGAD!!
If missing a homeopathic dose is overdosing - then taking many of today's pills is effectively "Take my money and make me sick(er?) in a different way".
Ah well - the beer has run out .... :)
With the whole stairway thing it would seem to imply that if you are looking at one of those pictures and don't see the hidden image then it is not there. However if someone points you in the right direction and you suddenly do see it then its still really not there, but you think it is???
Being one of the gifted few chosen to be Satans Little Helper I've always been able to hear it. Just because you need help doesn't make it less there. You just may not have been meant by Him to hear it.
The review is good it is a pity it skips the chapter on Chiropractic care. There results are mixed, especially for lower back pain.
As for why these are popular.... alternative medicine providers offer a much higher level of customer service and focus on customer satisfaction. They work hard to make sure their patients are happy with the treatment regimen and spend time with them.
While some Chiropractors are trying to sell people on "Blue Light Therapy" and other stuff, others do help patients who are in great pain. Ask anyone who has been helped with Sciatica that occurred after a lumbar disc problem whether they would prefer to go back and have surgery, rather than the solution they got from the chiropractor. Or maybe the person who had a pinched nerve in their neck causing total numbness to shoot down their arm and pain in their shoulder. When the Chiropractor fixes this issue, do we disregard the results because we believe Chiropractic to be quackery?
Meanwhile, we'll have all the kooks out here proclaiming that Vitamin C or Zinc don't help with colds, and whatever you do, don't drink cranberry juice to help you with a UTI.
I've seen plenty of quackery. Many people in the Alternative medicine field are insane. But that doesn't mean that every treatment that is not released by a pharmaceutical or approved by a certified M.D. is useless.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
"In the chapter, the authors reiterate the concept that the plural of data is not anecdote."
Shouldn't that be "the plural of anecdote is not data"?
That, by the way, is exactly why all of the people who wrote things like "But it worked for me!" need to buy this book.
The problem here is that people tend to reproduce before they choose a homeopathic therapy for their cancer and die. We need a way to exploit lethal gullibility prior to the propagation of those genes into the gene pool.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
it looks like the local insane asylum finally got internet access.
I'm pretty sure the author doesn't know as much as he claims to. Take herbalism for example. Until the advent of synthetic drugs, the entire list of pharmaceuticals was plant-based medicine, which could arguably be called herbalism. 25% of medicines still sold in pharmacies are plant extracts, and science is still finding uses for new plant compounds, though not at the rate it once was.
Kava Kava and Valerian root are known sedatives, White Willow bark contains salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin (where do you think they got it from), and the list goes on.
Don't be so quick to throw out everything just because there is incorrect information and belief floating around. It's not like the AMA approved and licensed people have all the answers.
The key is to use the systems for what they were designed for - I wouldn't go to a chiropractor for an ear infection, and if I were experiencing chronic pain, I'd rather go to an acupuncturist than walk around while pumped full of Vicoden or whatever is being advertised this week by Big Medicine.
And massage is a valid healing regimen for many injuries. Studies have shown the effective of therapies like massage increasing the rate of healing and improving overall return of full capacity. (e.g. 100% range of motion return instead of 95% for shoulder injury)
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
I looked into these things at various points when I was feeling bored. My recollection is that
- The placebo effect is a real effect, and can make you feel better, especially if you are more invested in the outcome (either financially (spend $$$$) or socially (there are doubters but you *know* it works); simply wanting to be better for health reasons is less useful).
- Homeopathy is useless except as a placebo (but one could argue that generating belief in homeopathy is the best way to deliver the placebo effect because you don't have to give the person anything but water).
- Chiropractors on average do not generate an improved outcome for their patients (possibly beyond a short initial time when the patient feels worked on) on *average*, but there exist some chiropractors who perform at well above chance on helping people with certain types of problem. It was unclear to me at the time whether this was due to the mechanical manipulations or to the placebo effect.
- Acupuncture has mixed success, but can have reliable if small-on-average effects on certain types of problem. I am pretty sure that there was a control group here, so this is above and beyond what one gets from the placebo effect.
- Herbal medicine runs the entire spectrum from harmful through better than established commercial drugs for some things. Knowing which is which is difficult if you listen to the people who like herbal medicine.
- Commercial drugs usually (but not always) work well on average, but insufficient attention is paid to whether they give small benefits to everyone or large benefits to only a small subgroup, and they very often have long-term side effects that are insufficiently characterized. Using older products it therefore more safe than using new exciting ones.
But I'm afraid I don't have references for any of these vague recollections. Perhaps someone knows of studies to the contrary (or which support these tentative beliefs)?
I'd like to see a follow-up book on all the crazy shit that's out there like the penis enlargers, the motorized belts that vibrate your fat away, oddly shaped ergonomic chairs and desks, ionic air purifiers, the automatic muscle exercisers, yadda yadda yadda.
Flip through a SkyMall catalog on an airplane some time and you'll find tons of examples of devices like this that supposedly improve your body or health. (Also, a magnet stand that magically ages your wine collection 100 years in minutes!!) This industry is even less regulated that alternative medicine but can be just as dangerous, if not more so. At a minimum, they lend credence to the saying, "a fool and his money are soon parted."
Recommended reading on the topic of "alternative medicine": http://kingmaker.net/DeadDoctorstxt.html
None of the above.
Don't be silly. Of course it matters to Nerds. Guarana and Ma Huang would be good places start.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
Now you're arguing that an ancient Chinese model for how acupuncture works is flawed because it doesn't conform to modern medical terminology, nor does it conform to the scientific method of making predictions based on prior results.
I fully agree.
But that doesn't discount findings, it only calls into question an understanding of the underlying mechanisms behind the technique. Which ultimately means, let's do more research and find out that answer. But having a broken model is not confirmation that one's findings are wrong. That's ridiculous. In fact, such a position is as much the exact opposite of the scientific method as are those ancient claims about chi.
IOW: Skepticism as a business has far outstripped anti-science nuttiness from new-age and other so-called 'alternative' medical and science quacks.
It isn't all wrong, the plural of data definitely isn't anecdote. ;)
The real black box is the current doctoral regime and their strong ties to big pharma and the insurance companies. How many 100s of thousands of the worlds children need to be the victim of regressive neurological spectrum disorders before the greed and the lies finally stop.
I think it's important not to throw the baby out with the bath water. I come from a vegan family (health reasons) and I have to say, chiropractors, and alternative medicine does work. Sure some of it is just a crock, but not all of it.
Two examples: my mother was told by the doctors that her thyroid deficiency was untreatable and that she would need supplements for the rest of her life. A local alternative medicine doctor claimed otherwise, he explained that back in the 60's chickens were fed with chemicals that were not safe for humans. Humans ate these chickens and that was what had caused her thyroid to start malfunctioning. He treated her, and she hasn't needed the supplements for several years now.
More recently, I have had serious eye/head pain. The eye doctors didn't know what it was. Out of a whim I visited a chiropractor, and a day later I was totally fine. And that was after living off of pain killers for an entire week.
So yes, this stuff works. Nothing is a cure all, and there's just as much snake oil as there ever was. But I have been cured more times by alternative medicine than I ever have been by doctors.
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
you are correct. chiros are massuers, with one difference, they are allowed to manipulate the spine. and so are osteopaths.
pain relief is not necessarily "getting better" as you say, but with pain relief i can go about my life while my body heals.
the thing to remember how to avoid damaging the body a second time thus the pain and finally healing process. this could include strengthening the body, avoiding undue stress, careful use of the body (proper lifting, etc.)
so i go to a chiro knowing what he is and isn't. get pain relief without drugs in my case and then let my body heal.
the body heals, nobody can make it heal for you.
uncle bri
Where is it proposed we find doctors practising this "evidence based medicine"? If you go to a doctor today with a sore throat, the doctor will prescribe you antibiotics, take your co-pay and ask you to leave. You can see all the time the doctor took to collect the evidence -- like if the infection is bacterial or viral, what kind of bacteria it may be, what antibiotics will work best against that bacteria, etc. Yup. All sorts of evidence based medicine there. And how is it not anecdotal when the doctor says "Oh yeah, there is a bug going around right now." Did he run a double-blind, randomized clinical trial to determine that? What is his evidence other than anecdotal?
I am not saying "alternative medicine" is better. I am just questioning where I am supposed to find this "evidence based medicine".
I used to "know" that chiropractors were all quacks... right up until one of my brothers became on. I was initially shocked when he went to college to become one since he was one of the most intelligent and logical people I knew. How could he reject all reason to base his career on such garbage?
Well, after several years of in-depth discussions, I've come to realize that there is more to this than meets the eye. Basically, there are several schools of thought in the chiro world. My brother went to one of the few reputable colleges whose curriculum tracks with modern medicine (particularly the orthopedic realm). Apparently there are quite a few colleges that focus mostly on the junk-science. But even in the "good" college, there were a number of instructors and students that worked more on belief than science.
Still, he did get a solid medical education and when he graduated, he worked with a practice that focused on sports medicine. This field is all about results. You come in, diagnose problems, and fix the problems. If you can't do that, then the teams find somebody who can. There's no hoodoo here, just solid science.
Right now, he's with a more conventional practice that combines medical doctors with chiropractors. If the patient has an illness, then they go to the MD. If they have muscular (and related) issues, then they see my brother.
So I still tease him every now and then, but overall, I've come to respect his line of work quite a bit. Trying to compare what he does with homeopathy is patently ludicrous.
What is this? I think there is a possibility that this is propaganda spam fed to Slashdotters. I want transparency behind the submitter. Are you paid by the publisher? Are you paid by any pharmaceutical companies? Are you paid by any doctor's associations? Do you have any relationship with the aforementioned people/organizations?
Does it work on animals? If it does it almost certainly is real, if not then it's probably fake. Can't speak for most of the mentioned remedies but herbal remedies (what are drugs based on?) usually do work on animals.
I don't claim to know very much about things that can't be seen. But I know that the world is more than what meets the eye, I know there are consciousnesses different than ours and I know that there are worlds other than ours. This I know for a fact (and I know that many others know this too by first hand experience). It is said that homeopathy operates on a subtle level, subtler than the solid matter, in a body that some call a 'subtle body', maybe on the level of consciousness. I don't know how homeopathy works, but I admit this possibility. I have no basis to discount it and all that I have known so far tells me that there are things that I didn't believe in, that I came to know to be true, and that the most basic of the questions science can't explain yet.
Life is about being a Phoenix!
I would agree that the way homeopathy is done most of it is worthless, but there are a number of non-medicinal remedies that do work (anyone care to claim that use of Vitamin C and Zinc are ineffective on colds?)
But this book is basically just another of organized medicine's slams on anything that threatens its cartel-like powers to control the delivery of sick care (we do not provide health care in this country, most doctors are too busy treating symptoms of problems, not preventing illness). A large part of what is claimed by the book is probably either misleading or is simply 'tarring with the same brush' ineffective practices with things that might have value.
One example, the claims by manufacturers of FDA unapproved products that 'this product is not intended to cure, prevent or treat any disease'. They are required to say this because if they make any claims at all not proven by double-blind studies their products are subject to seizure and fines. If a seller of limes (the fruit) was to announce their product cures scurvy - absolutely known to be true since the British Navy started giving limes to sailors, hence their nickname - the company would be in violation of FDA rules and its crops would be seized and destroyed, because federal law makes it illegal other than for a manufactured drug which is licensed for distribution by the FDA to claim it can cure any disease, even though the statement is true.
Some of these practices - especially chiropractic - may have use in some cases. But this is an old, old rivalry; MDs hate chiropractic and have been trying to have it outlawed for decades. There are many people who have had relief for various conditions as a result. But since it can't be patented, nobody is going to spend huge amounts of money to do double-blind tests on these various methods, because organized medicine - as well as pharmaceutical companies, who, if people use other methods, they get less money - sees it as cutting into their profits, and it's best that there be no evidence available to argue in their favor.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
What about Doctors of Osteopathy? Full MD training, but doesn't have the constraints of what is essentially reaction-based medicine (fixing what is wrong) instead of preventative (keeping your body from what is going wrong).
. I really wish we were better able to teach that correlation does not imply causation.
Maybe there is a correlation and causation. That is, the reason all these alternative treatments gain traction in the first place is because of the gross failures at every level of our so called "modern" medical system. I submit the quicker someone as a patient realizes that when you go to see a licensed doctor, you are not seeing a scientist, but rather a guild member, the better his health will be. For an instance, when was the last time that after your physician prescribed a medication for you, did they on they're own accord call you up and see how you were doing? (i.e. measure the efficacy of their diagnosis and hence treatment). Maybe if the doctor was not worrying about his portfolio, tee times, or whoring himself out on a ski vacation sponsored by a drug company he would have the time to do so. Another interesting fact is that medical care skyrocketing costs are at least twice that of inflation, and I know that when I go to see the doctor it seems to me that I am receiving half the care.
It's clear to me that the medical community et al top down has a considerable amount of housecleaning to do, before they call people out on so called quack medicine. The reason they are there in the first place is because modern medicine is not working (for a myriad of reasons).
And don't tell me how wonderful your current doctor is blah blah blah. If that was really the case, you would not see all the whore-swag from the drug companies in his office.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
About 15 years ago magnets were all the rage. I had a friend who's uncle was part of a pyramid scheme to sell magnetic insoles and other items. He came out to give us a demo of his products. He had a massager with magnets in it, and a little gizmo that lighted up when you introduced EMF to it. He spun the massager to show us how the magnets created an electric field and caused his tester to light up.
I was an electronics student at the time and understood magnetics and electricity. I grabbed my electric mixer, plugged it in, and ran it next to it's tester. The tester, of course, glowed much brighter with my mixer. I then asked him why I should buy his massager when I could accomplish the same thing by using anything that had an electric motor.
I don't think he liked me much after that.
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It sounds like the book skipped over what I would think may be the main driver behind the popularity of alternative medicines which is that the patients feel a strong connection to the practitioner. I don't know as much about acupuncture and chiropractic experiences, but what I've heard of homeopathy is that it is common for the practitioner to spend up to an hour with the patient on the first visit. They'll ask lots of questions and consider the patient's overall situation. The result is that the patient feels they are being cared for as a whole person.
Read through the whole comment. Don't just flame away.
A. What about the placebo effect?
It is widely observed, well documented and amazingly effective. Call it homeopathy if you want. How can it NOT be healing if it is observed in research settings?
B. The fundamental failure of alternative medical practices is there is too much basic research that no one is willing to pay for before a scientific framework (discipline!) can be created. Medical monotheists exploit the unfamiliarity and lack of large-scale Western-style research and lack of discipline on the part of many practitioners of alternative medical practices to justify their superiority.
C. Their logical position is not consistent with reality. Try as medical monotheists like this might, LOTS of people experience healing, or at bare minimum an improvement in their chronic condition as a result of alternative healing.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Have you ever had a pinched nerve in your spine?
Get back to me when you have. Nothing helped my back except chiropractic care.
My wife had carpal tunnel in her wrist and elbow from mouse usage. A nerve velocity conductance test proved this, and our insurance authorized the surgery. Instead, after six treatments with accupuncture, she had no synmptoms, and has been fine for 10 years since working as a programmer. Call it fake, call it the placebo effect, but she avoided surgery, and was back to work in a couple of weeks instead of six months.
Many people in alternative medicine are quacks, but many of the people trying to debunk it are just as biased.
As someone who has dealt with depression and anxiety: 9-10 of meditation, exercise and healthy eating have helped far more than my doctors singular advice to take 3 different medications for over a year.
I've dealt with more than a few doctors who seem more interested in, to borrow a phrase, treating the illness and not the patient. I really do think that our drugs are over prescribed. In emergencies, no doubt would I want the latest and greatest; but for every day living your average person probably doesn't need a medicine cabinet full of prescriptions.
I'm as skeptical as the next guy when it comes to "alternative" medicine and down right dismissive of religious quackery from which of it stems. Conversely I can't help but feel there is a disconnect between modern medicine and patient care. There is more to being a doctor than telling people "Take two of these and call me in the morning.". A school of thought I immediately align authors of books like this to.
I haven't started it yet, but I am looking forward to cracking open this book as well as digging deeper into Zen & the Brain. Both also written by MD's.
No sig for you!!
What this book and the popularity of these alternative approaches to health and healing show is that people don't believe the science education they were given.
Most people are familiar - at least vaguely - with the Scientific Method. They were introduced to it in middle school or earlier.
While it's fun to laugh at the people that believe in this stuff and meet an early grave or a debilitating chronic condition because of their belief in this hocus-pocus, I believe we'd be better served (and more moral) if we were to focus on the big questions:
Why don't people believe in science? Why don't they know or keep the Scientific Method close to their hearts? What could we be doing better to make sure that quackery like this passes away naturally as it would in any system wherein most people subscribed to the SM?
We all know this stuff doesn't work (beyond the power of the placebo), but we're obviously in the minority. As Stephen Colbert might opine, this stuff is succeeding in the market, so it must be true.
If we want to save people from doom, we should look at improving either the quality or the retention of our science education.
Since tigers and rhinos are apparently herbs, can't I just buy some seeds and grow some more of them in my back yard garden? Sheesh, scientists think they're so smart but fail to see a solution right in their faces.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I guess it's better than using apostrophe's for plural word's like so many other people, but wow. I'll bet your editor hates you.
Some things work for some people, but not necessarily for everyone. The thing is, you can always find anecdotes for both sides. I have one friend who goes to a chiropractor to get relief for her migraines - medications don't help them, but a good neck massage does. On the other hand, I have another friend whose back was permanently disabled by a chiropractor to where not even surgery was able to repair the damage.
This is why in-depth studies are needed to determine just how effective the treatment is for the average person all the time and what side effects could be expected with different conditions.
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
Because they are not very smart.
I have found that many people confuse being educated with being intelligent or "smart". They are most certainly not the same thing. In fact, it's my experience that the more educated someone is the more likely it is that they will be conned by homeopaths, scaremongers and the like. This is education up to, as especially including, the university level. This is probably due to hubris on the part of educated people that they're "too smart/educated to be conned".
The only people I knew who were conned by "The Great Global Warming Swindle" were third level graduates. Same goes for people who frequent homeopaths and acupuncturists. They've almost all graduated from universities with adequate degrees. Some with STEM degrees!
I personally do not think that our education system promotes or advocates critical thinking. All of these people have received mathematics education to at least secondary school level, and I take this as solid evidence that teaching mathematics does not promote critical thinking by itself. Western secondary education at least does not seem to create a smart populace. An educated one perhaps, but as this post is all about, those two concepts are most certainly not the same thing.
May the Maths Be with you!
Women produce 1 egg per month, men produce something like 2 million sperm per day. If you block 95% of the eggs a women is basically infertile. If you block 95% of the sperm a man is still mostly fertile.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
...but aren't there studies that need to be disproven? Yeah, I know you can fudge stats, lie, cheat steal etc. However, there's plenty of information using The Google like: "A German study done in 2002 showed that of the 80 women who underwent IVF and received acupuncture, 34 women got pregnant, a success rate of 42.5%. Of the 80 women involved in the study who received IVF without any acupuncture treatments, only 21 women (26.3%) became pregnant. More recently, an American study involving 114 women showed that 51% of the women who had acupuncture and IVF treatments became pregnant versus only 36% of the women who had IVF alone. Deeper analysis of this study revealed that, while 8% of the women in the acupuncture group miscarried, the rate of miscarriage in the IVF-only group was 20%. Furthermore, women who received acupuncture also had lower rates of ectopic pregnancies. " So, does the author go on to say every one of these studies is bogus? Are you going to make me actually read the book?
Note: This is applicable to the US only, where health care is treated as a business.
People who resort to alternative medicine have probably had a bad experience with mainstream medicine that didn't work for them.
Mainstream health care providers seem to act suspiciously like the sales force of the drug industry. The process is streamlined and efficient. Make an appointment, pay your co-pay at the reception desk (that's right, American hospital receptions have cash registers), see the doc, he emails the prescription to the pharmacy, and on a quiet day it's available for you to pick it up by the time you get down there, where of course there's another cash register. All credit cards accepted.
1 Examine
2 Diagnose
3 Prescribe a drug
4 Profit
I had a back injury that tortured me for years, and I got sick of the expensively ineffective painkillers that my health care provider foisted on me to mask the problem, nor was I impressed with the exercise class that I had to share with 20 other people who were completely different from me and had completely different needs.
I then tried a chiropractor who seemed to spend more time convincing me that I needed to keep coming back for many more expensive adjustments if I really wanted to get better. I didn't get better.
Then I went to a doctor who disagrees with the culture of prescribing a pill for every ill, but who also sees through the chiropractic single-type-of-adjustment-to-fix-everything charade. She gave me personalised attention, figured out what was wrong with my posture, came to my car and fixed my driving position, let me bring my bike in to check my riding position, used a little bit of massage and a few chiropractic type adjustments, and prescribed a set of exercises that she taught me how to perform. I was as right as rain within weeks.
Bottom line: there's a happy medium between Chiropractic's overblown claims and Big Pharma's allies in the commercialised health care industry.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Didn't read the book but acupuncture has a body of clinical studies related to actual, verifiable physical changes in body chemistry. see: google. Tying acupuncture to backwards Stairway audio makes this look like generic straw man hack job.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Firstly let me note that my wife is a practicing herbalist, and both her father and brother (and sister-in-law) are practicing homeopaths.
I prescribe to the rigors of science and fact as far as I can.
While I do not believe in the vast majority of alternative medicine, I have to admit that there is a lot to be said for it.
Firstly the idea behind homeopathy is the treatment of the person, and not the symptoms. I have found current clinical medicine to be a bulldozer when it comes to the body.
Recently we moved to the US and my eyes have opened... Drug companies rule here! They are really powerful companies. I see drive-by dispensaries... OMG! I was raised on clinical medicinal drugs, but even my parents kept it to a minimum. So anything that is 'proven' I take with a pinch of salt, and I follow my own mind.
I let my wife feed me whatever she wants (because she is my wife and I love her) but I also don't take much western medicine because most of that stuff just poisons you. (Have you READ the side-effects of some of that stuff!?)
Currently we are at odds about talking some vaccinations... I truly believe that the benefits outweigh the risks, while my wife still doubts. I feel that I need to let my body sort out and deal with any natural ailments. I only intervene if there is a real risk of permanent damage, great discomfort or death. I do not take anything for flu or colds... and have not had any serious illness for some time.
Strange thing is it seems since I have started living more healthy since I met my wife I do not get such severe colds (if any). The key to alternative health is in prevention, not cure.
Drug companies detest prevention because of their bottom line... I call this biased.
I believe through evolution, our bodies have adapted to be receptive to certain natural remedies, and I'd like to keep it this way and work with it. But I also realize that this may not be true anymore in today's environment of pollution, radiation and drug-laden societies. To this end I would use any western medicine for anything caused by a malfunction in my body (cancer, failures) or by outside interference (deadly virii, poisoning, etc.).
I'll say this... a few years ago it was scientific FACT that lobotomies cured schizophrenia. There are many 'facts' for which scientists have shuffled their feet apologetically. It was also a proven fact that antibiotics helped heal the body with little or no side-effects (although we are now seeing more and more strains of resistant bacteria... ain't evolution great!)
Do I believe that alternative medicine supersedes all western medicine? No.
Do I believe that I should try and stay with natural remedies as far as I can? Yes.
Do I believe that homeopathy has been proven? No.
But as I read the article I saw the same pompous self-righteousness that I had fresh out of school. That was before I learned that science did not have full answers yet to everything and the more I studied in Math and Physics and Computer Science the more I learned of our limitation of knowledge on which we base our 'proofs'. (And reading "Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid" also helped, amongst other books)
I know that scientists are still discovering properties of things as basic as water. And until I can prove otherwise I will not contest (but not agree either) with homeopaths.
there, those are my views.
I use nearly exclusively what some would consider alternative medicine, being too cheap, lazy, and private to bother going to the doctors. Though the most 'out there' thing I've done is probably brainwave entrainment, which I'm still debating if it actually works. Works great for helping you sleep, but I have a feeling it's probably no different than white noise. I have wanted to try accupuncture a bit for this back problem I have, but probably won't be doing that any time soon. But anyway, to me alternative medicine is anything you won't normally find in a doctor's office - including more mundane treatments like herbs and even massage, which I don't think is at all questionable. While not all herbal treatments are good, there's no doubt that many of them are.
Of course, my biggest concern when it comes to medicine is why so many people seem to be entirely unable to figure out what to do with even small problems. And worse still are the people that just pop pills for every little problem. I know _college kids_ that are popping several asprin on a damn near daily basis! And of course, something like Cancer or a stroke is one thing...you should always seek professional advice in that case...but there's no reason to be throwing down painkillers for every little headache, stomach ache, etc. Why start throwing down chemicals when all you need is a cup of tea or some seltzer or something? Or maybe, rather than wondering why your stomach keeps getting upset and popping pills every day, you should try changing your diet? Of course, those are probably the same things most doctors would recommend, so I suppose that's not so 'alternative'...even if it seems that way to the majority of the pill popping populace.
It's that the entire premise this book's authors are coming from---that standard medicine is about evidence-based medicine---is not really universally accepted in standard medicine. Its acceptance is growing, but EBM as an explicit aim was only introduced in the early 1990s, and was initially seen as basically a crusade by a bunch of ivory-tower lab scientists who didn't understand the subjective complexity of real-world clinical practice. It's only from the late 1990s or so seen increasing acceptance in affecting clinical practice.
So to some extent, saying "homeopathy is wrong because it doesn't follow EBM principles" is a bit off target, because it's not the primary thing that distinguishes standard from alternative medicine.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I've suffered years with allergies and to make a long story short, homeopathy cured me.
Before someone call "placebo effect", let's say that if placebo effect did the trick, why it didn't with all the previous treatments I tried before taking homeopathy?
Believe me, I've hade this conversation several times and I'm just tired of arguing about this whole stuff. People who don't agree never will so I stopped trying. The only advice I can do is this: it worked for me and as it's just water without any chemical effect, try anyway. Won't harm you.
Scientia est Potentia
The existence of all of the "quack" therapies is just a symptom of a bigger problem. Modern medicine has achieved a lot, but to a certain extent, is still in the dark ages.
If all diseases could be accurately diagnosed and perfectly cured, or even better, prevented, there would be absolutely no market for the alternatives.
We are very good at "battlefield repair", sewing up cuts, setting bones etc. Unfortunately, our ability to cure cancer, heart disease and all the other complex diseases is poor at best.
And no...I am not a fan of alternative medicine, I firmly believe that science is the right tool to use to solve the problem. Unfortunately, it is a big, difficult problem.
I see a lot of people responding in agreement that alternative medicine is all snake oil, and I wanted to offer another perspective.
About five years ago I came down with some mysterious affliction that affected me physically, mentally, and emotionally. I went from being a bright-eyed energetic person with a quick wit and relentless optimism to a tired, drained, dead-eyed, irritable, emotionally-numb zombie. My digestive system started functioning poorly, my sinuses started hurting badly, I would get night sweats, my memory became horrible, my concentration wavered constantly. It happened pretty quickly, and had a complete and horrible affect on my life. I went from doctor to doctor, and none of them saw anything unusual in their tests, so they would shrug and send me away. After the first few visits like this, I decided to try to figure it out on my own. When my mind was responsive enough, I studied articles from PubMed, scoured the literature for hints, looked to people's personal experiences, and sought opinions from alternative medicine. I kept seeing clueless doctors during this period as well, and went through an unnecessary surgery that "might" help. It didn't. The medical community has siphoned maybe ten thousand dollars from me in the last ten years, and provided very little as far as answers or relief. In fact, several of their non-researched guess medicines have done permanent damage to me, and they seem not to be the least concerned about it.
Recently, I made some progress in figuring out what is happening, and think I have found a drug that would counter the problem at its source, but doctors won't even think of prescribing it to me because it isn't in their books.
I could not be more disappointed in doctors. We are only in the baby steps of a medicine, especially concerning the mind and emotions. Doctors are little more than keyword-triggered pill-pushers. Many people turn to alternative because of this great failure.
The reviewer took for granted that the sugar and lactose would be 100% pure. Most probably it got trace of other impurety, like salts, NaCl, NaI , maybe even metals, SiO all in exceddingly ridiculously small trace. But the reviewer was quite right that there should not be any active substance left as it is supoosedly diluted by 1 by 10^400. For your information there is something like 60 moles of molecule of H2O in 1 liter of H2O, and 6.02 .10^23 molecules in a mole. That should give you an order of idea.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Market success of such "medicaments" is proof that free market is essentially a myth.
No sig today.
If I had the technology to remove every single atom of any given element from any substantial amount of pretty much any other material at all, I'd be richer than Bill Gates.
Part of the "problem" (bias against) western medicine is when using western medicine, you engage a huge apparatus. You have you doctor, which may or may not order scientific and painful tests. You have testing labs that take time to get results, you have to deal with your insurance company.
Next, usually for the types of problems which people engage holistic medicine for is of the minor (at first) variety. People don't worry about chen/shen balancing if they have a compound fracture, but they'll go is there is a minor chronic problem. The idea here is that something small thew their system out of whack, and it'll take only a proportional response to restore it. Unfortunately, problems develop and continue to, unless fixed.
Finally, most herbal solutions can be bought and prepared in the home. Its a comforting idea that you can cure yourself. It keeps you feeling in control, that you're doing something. And what you're doing is relatively easy, usually a tea. Contrast that with the traditional delivery method of an I.V. of western medicine.
I have to admit western medicine to me seems forced and cold. There is an attractive, warm side to natural therapies. But you can bet that I'll rely on science every time. But for those (not us slashdotters) who haven't seen and appreciate the miracles of science, western medicine seems like just as much magic and voodoo as holistic medicine, but with a colder, more expensive experience.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Several problems with it:
1) Homoeopathy may be bad in that it may be ineffective.
I will be a devils advocate in that I would expect to add to the comfort of a patients illness. Perhaps, though not making much contribution in correcting the condition.
But, if this is hoaxism...consider what we have now:
2) Medical science covered with patents, for treatments for the super wealthy and the rich.
For example, right NOW, 5 million people are leaving the middle class in the country. Another 8 million are expected to leave next year, as 2009 becomes the BIG CRASH. America is quickly becoming a developing nation. Bridges, roads all failing and killing people in the news everyday. If the ambulance arrives it could kill you just on the roads it has to drive over or bridges, to get you to the hospital.
Furthermore, medical science and treatment is for profit here. Cures are the WORSE type of medical research for American companies, preferring medications that locks in that nice monthly refill fee.
Nobody funds cures anymore, only continuous research into various ways to make last years patent run out drug, different enough so they can jack the price up for another 20 years with a new patent application.
Personally I hope most of the research establishment in the USA, is the target of the social unrest that is going to hit this country, just like it has hit Greece in recent days.
These people take blood money and grow wealthy off of the misery of others and I hope they get EXACTLY what is coming to them.
4) Finally as a devils advocate, herbalism is NOT entirely all bunk. My fathers Lung Cancer was cured by taxol.
http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/Entomology/courses/en570/papers_1996/hill.html
Unfortunately, he died of liver cancer because it spread to the liver and the cancer mutated to a form immune to taxols effects. :-(
People who practice herbalism probably could help.
knowledge of plants that specifically seem to inhibit or make people's conditions more comfortable to deal with could be holding great secrets in the fight to improve the human condition.
-hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Ideally, all potential medical treatments would be exhaustively researched and clinically studied. Companies are going to spend the most time and money on drugs that they can make the most from selling. So treatments that help manage pain, anxiety, performance or stave off death get the green light...so long as they are patentable and somewhat enforceable. There is a lot of abuse on both sides of alternative medicine. Also, there's a blurred line as some supplements gain acceptance into proven medicine over time and some fall out of favor. We know so little of what their is to know, and that's the biggest challenge. Certainly the vast majority of treatments are going to have little, no, or an adverse affect. But that doesn't mean only proven, understood treatments should be employed when there are treatments that cost very little and seem to work but are poorly understood, or sound like they might work, but have little potential for creating a marketable product.
There's no doubt that (at least some) herbal medicines have therapeutic value. It's also well known that many pills sold by big pharma contain chemicals originally found in nature (not just herbs, but also fungi and so on). .1%. The same kind of pill, at a different pharmacy, the next month, will also contain 50 mg. An herbal decoction might have 10mg in winter at the hippie store, and 800 mg in summer at the herbal website.
So what's better, the natural herb or the pill, if they contain the same chemical?
The pill, without a doubt, because its content is precisely calibrated. A plant will have wildly varying concentrations of the substance, depending on weather, soil, method of harvesting, drying, packaging and how long it's sat on a shelf. A given pill will contain 50 mg plus or minus
Why will it matter? Because it might just take 30 mg to heal you, and 500 mg to kill you.
It means a dilution of 1 part in 100^200, or 1:10^400. Yes, that's 1 followed by 400 zeroes!
A dilution ratio like that means that it is unlikely that a single MOLECULE of the duck is actually present in the finished product.
So yes, the product is nothing but a sugar pill, because the "inactive ingredients" are the only constiutents that are actually there!
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If I had the technology to remove every single atom of any given element from any substantial amount of pretty much any other material at all, I'd be richer than Bill Gates.
The technique they use requires that they have 19.8kg of something known not to have any of the element in order to mix it with the element, and then end up with 1g that won't have any of that element.
If the end goal was simply to obtain something without the element, then you've got 19.8kg of it before you even start.
Scientific revelation! Parts of animals are now classified as herbs.
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That's a great anecdote.
I had the same kind of problem once, my doctor sent me to a kinesiotherapist. He probably did the same kind of thing, but without the bullshit. Chiropractors believe that a lot of completely related ailments have something to do with the spine being improperly aligned. That's bullshit.
Well, they don't of course remove every single atom. What they do is dilute the original substance over and over. When homeopathy first started this was not a wholly unreasonable thing to try. But with modern understanding of chemistry, we now know that the dilution is so extreme that there is by far less than 1 molecule per dose left of the original substance. So the typical does has not even a single molecule of the active ingredient, but if you take the stuff long enough, why yes, you might possibly get a molecule or two of active ingredient--but not likely.
I have never taken acupuncture. That is not the point.
Your cite, however, is welcome. Thank you.
Without adding that key word "Western" in there, you're missing an important point -- the whole concept of Chi is based on a complete medical theory independent of Western medical thought. So basically yes, describing Chi flows to someone trained only in Western medicine would be about as productive as talking in Chinese to someone who only understands English. Both languages deal with information, but in radically different ways. Both may be perfectly valid, but analyzing the one from the perspective of the other is going to be an arduous affair.
The main problem I see with the book, based just on the review here, is that it lumps many different things together. What exactly do they mean by "herbal medicine"? (And what the heck is "herbal" about tiger bone or rhino horn? Those are animal products, not herbs.) "Herbal medicine" is an exceedingly broad category, and could potentially include Native American shamanistic practices, experimental hippie salad recipes, strictly controlled German and Swiss herbal pharmacopoeia, doobie brownies, and Chinese apothecary traditions all in one big indiscriminate mess.
Likewise, what is "alternative medicine" as the authors intend? It sounds from the review like they mean everything that doesn't normally happen in a Western hospital, which again is an obscenely broad over-generalization. Some things are probably completely la-la -- "oh sure, my neighbor ate nothing but oranges while standing on his head for two days and it cured his sinus cold!" -- while other things are backed by many centuries of refinement (Chi theory, yoga, etc.).
The reviewer also notes, ...alternative therapies are scientifically impossible, and often will violate fundamental scientific principles. "Scientifically impossible" suggests a misunderstanding of science -- science is about looking into things as objectively and quantifiably as possible, and deriving theories that best fit the observed phenomena. "Theoretically impossible" would certainly make sense -- but it would also imply the need for more study, and if XYZ "alternative" treatment were shown to be effective, then perhaps existing theories need modification. But that is a matter for further research, and thus lies outside the scope of this book.
Frankly, although the reviewer mentions a disdain for garbage science, such indiscriminate verbiage in the book sounds to me like a big factor in producing garbage science. Clearly defined terminology is a must for any productive hypotheses or research.
Just my two bits as a professional translator. Sloppy terminology just bugs the bejeezus out of me.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
If one is looking for black boxes or comparison with financial industry, look no further than modern orthodox medicine. Than the book would be hundred times bigger.
Traditional Medicine works on the theory of 'if a lot of something makes you sick, then a little of something makes you feel better'. The problem is that modern medicine doesn't cure the condition, it masks it, making you dependent on medication that often doesn't actually make *anything* better. Don't believe me - ask a friend in the medical profession. The best things modern medicine has brought us are antibiotics, pain management and surgical procedures. Alternative healing works for many people through trial and error with types and quantities. I went through traditional physical therapy for months with back pain, yet one visit to an osteopath has kept me pain free for years, and in addition he noticed I was severely deficient in certain vitamins and minerals that a blood test proved. That's quite a Placebo! Especially as I went to my own doctor three times not feeling well and having various tests done, with no answers. Because body chemistry is different for people, Alternative Medicine is not failsafe. Traditional medicine goes through so many trials, and purification processes to weed out the variants so it can be clinically proven. Some of the most popular medicines people take are derived from naturally occuring chemicals found in fungus, plants, urine or even crude oil. Where do you think the ideas for those medicines came from? You got it - alternative healers.
To boil this down.
The government wanted to create a social program to give low income people houses. Clinton started it, Bush continued it and Obama strongly supports it.
That government sponsored entity (GSE) guaranteed loans that should never have been made and forced other companies to do the same to get loans. All was well when the economy was going well and the housing market was hot. When it wasn't those GSE's were screwed, and they now had so much power that they could collapse the economy if let to fail.
The real question is why did we ever allow a government sponsored entity to do this?
Who really backed these guys and who tried to stop them?
Go to youtube and search on Fanny and Freddy.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
// RANT //
Argh FCOL everyone is using this term... A perfect fucking storm... much like all retards that use "at the end of the motherfucking day" emphasis mine (and maybe I will be modded offensive and lose all my karma.)
Is it so difficult to convey that something coincides in ways nefarious?
Also not all storms are bad and if it is a bad one how can it be perfect?
Colloquially I would say a mofo of a storm. // RANT //
Other than that... yeah what the book writers said.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-11/ncfh-nef111308.php
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Chiropracty and acupuncture are really quite pleasant experiences.
Chiropracty has made me feel much better when I've gone in with joint pain too. For example, when I've lost the ability to to rotate my neck. I've never gone in to cure measles or leprosy though.
I did enjoy the acupuncture session, but I did not get the clear-cut improvement that the chiropractor offered.
I have to think that if these processes were more painful or unpleasant that they would not have the following that they do.
Nullius in verba
So what's the reality? And from whose point of view? Look, things like Chi are just models - a way of describing subjective phenomenon, just as electricity used to be described as a kind of liquid (voltage = pressure, amps = quantity). Like the "liquid" theory of electricity, chi theory isn't perfect. It's not going to tell you about endorphins or detect small tumors. It is, however, useful (to a degree) if you learn the model, just like the "liquid" theory of electricity. Will it be supplanted by scientific medicine? Sure. Eventually. But here's the thing. Scientific medicine (e.g. prostaglandin manipulation with aspirin) doesn't do squat for someone who doesn't know what a "prostaglandin" is, or who's never heard of aspirin. From that viewpoint (i.e. most of the poorer 3rd world population, this sort of medicine is as magic, and useless) as the author's description of homeopathy.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I like the homeopathic recipes that are alcohol based. While not a cure, I find that after a few ounces I usually forget I'm sick. The only side effects I've found are a slight headache the next morning and a tendency to call ex-girlfriends.
When you see such hype-marks as "undeniable facts" (you can deny anything; something's status as a fact won't change with or without denial), you can be pretty certain that you're seeing the work of a True Believer. Pro- or con- is irrelevant, they all sound the same. So convinced are they of the "proof" of the "evidence" (both being assertions, typically having circular reasoning connecting them).
Chapter 1 starts off with such an error: "Acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic have plenty of first-person anecdotes, but a lack of controlled studies with real data to back up their spurious claims." At the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine exists to oversee such ongoing studies. Results of such work are reported as journal articles listed in the National Library of Medicine's PubMed (entire alternative medicine journals exist and are referenced) and in consumer-friendly format in their MedlinePlus. Both positive and negative results are reported. On the NCCAM page itself there is an article summary about testing "essentially worthless" acupuncture with fMRI (the worthless results are positive; acupuncture has an effect that sham acupuncture doesn't), as well as several regarding "limited value" herbal treatments (as opposed to really-truly-scientific stuff which has unlimited value? Hype-marks).
I have no idea if the authors have ever heard of NCCAM. I do know that PubMed has heard of Edzard Ernst. He has published many cautiously positive articles on alternative therapies. He seems to favor the summary phrase "encouraging but not compelling", an empty weasel-phrase that can be applied with validity but no effect to most any bit of science. He even seems to favor it in cases the book claims are "essentially worthless".
What we have here is a book that pretends to science under the guise of "skepticism", which is in fact one pole of the True Believer scale. Like most who make the same pretense, they fail to grasp that skepticism is an activity internal to science, requiring rejection of belief and acceptance of only supportable data and logic, not an a priori stance one can take. That is, unless one wants to reel in the gullable masses with entertainment framed in the manner they too accept as valid in their attempts to claim superiority with evidence that isn't, including considering lack of as evidence.
Perhaps, as the reviewer states, this is an important and eye opening book. Hopefully some eyes will be opened to the fact that hiding behind "skepticism" provides a subjective acceptance of material that under objective assessment would be fraudulent. To take it a step farther, if a researcher makes claims of one sort in one place and of the opposite in another, yet claims to be carrying out science, such hypocrisy should earn an investigation into whether the misconduct happening is scientific or journalistic, or both.
Note that I do not take the reviewer to task here. His purpose was to review the book, not the field. I happen to have experience in the field through the NCCAM's earlier form, the Office of Alternative Medicine, as well as in conducting and reviewing science. It is indicative of the pervasiveness of the problem of True Believers hiding behind science to find that one reason for the reorganization of OAM into NCCAM was to eliminate from its ranks those who sought to protect the unwashed from themselves based on appeal to (their own) authority, failing miserably to do so with much scientific rigor, or integrity. A prime example of the problem that required solving was research applications to OAM on alternative therapies being rejected because (and it said it right out loud) "the therapy proposed is not accepted as having scientific value." That mind set is part and parcel with the mindset that finds herbal therapies to be of "limited value" and fails to note that the vast majority of pharmacology exists because compounds of value were found in and/or derived from plants.
This book is as f
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I have a friend that undergoes "alternative treatment" that greatly helps with his chronic condition. In his case alternative medicine is natural equivalent for a drug that is out on the market. The only problem is that drug is not yet approved to work on his rare chronic condition and doctors are hesitant to use it. So I personally know one example where alternative medicine works better than traditional due to relations on traditional, perhaps there is more?
While I agree that some areas of natural medicine like Homeopathy are silly (diluted to the point of being water! Give me a break.) but there is also the problem that for proper scientific studies like the author is pushing for, you need lots of money, and who's going to pay for studies when you can't monetize it in the form of a pill?
The problem is that the medical field, which I will be the first to admit has worked wonders for me, is also too quick to prescribe a pill for every ailment. When I came to my doctor with stomach problems mostly caused by stress, he was quick to suggest various over the counter and prescription medications. But simple peppermint tea and stress reduction activities has helped me more than anything.
I am a chiropractor.
I was also a bit disappointed to see that the review didn't mention the authors writings on chiropractic. I'd be curious to see what he objects to, but I guess I can probably imagine it for myself. I'd hope that our musculoskeletal workings aren't being called into question. Chiropractors are generally excellent body workers, and can provide lots of help when you've injured something. Unless you're bleeding, of course, then you need to go somewhere else and not get blood on my carpet.
What I wanted to try to explain a bit of is where I think the treating-all-diseases aspect of chiropractic came from. To start, you must know that while the organs can act autonomously, the brain is generally in control of the body and one of the main ways that it exerts it's control is through the nerves that come off of the spine. So what you've got is a whole body of organs that often need some guidance on how to react to the current situation. Ideally, all flows well.
Our vertebrae in our spinal cord are designed such that rotation, lateral flexion, or extension of the joint between two vertebrae can cause an impingement of the nerve roots exiting the spine at that level. (Flexion, which in this case means tucking the chin and/or bending over forward, will lessen pressure put on the nerve roots.) And when a nerve is impinged, it affects the transmissions going down that nerve, which will change the amount of control the brain has over that organ. This lack of unity with the rest of the body could possibly be enough to cause a noticable problem.
I speculate at this point, but here goes. Sometime, somewhere, there was a patient with asthma who tried every cure they could find and eventually ended up at the chiropractor. That chiropractor did what they do, and assessed the spine using manual palpation. Finding a subluxation, the chiropractor adjusted it and the asthma disappeared. This kind of action might just lead him/her to think that they can cure asthma. And it may cause the patient to tell all their friends that their chiropractor cured their asthma. The flaw is the doctor thinking that he can therefore cure All asthma, when instead he can only cure the 0.1% ( * made-up statistic * ) of asthmas that are caused by spinal misalignment.
So apply this to every organ system. It would make me think that there is a small percentage of the population out there whose non-musculoskeletal problems could be treated by chiropractic care. Where much of my profession has gone wrong is in the execution of letting patients know this. No, we cannot treat every case of asthma, nor is it responsible doctoring to claim to be able to. I went to one of the more science-based schools, but there was still a little bit of this turn-of-the-last-century attitude of us being healers of all ills.
Supposedly though, our profession started because the founder cured a man of his deafness by a spinal adjustment. Once again, cure all deafness? No. Cure a very small percentage of deafness? Yes.
What this also does mean to me though, is that for all the people out there reading this, there are a few of you whose unrelated-seeming problems can be solved by a chiropractor. The rest of you will come out of my office feeling a bit sore, with a bit more range of motion in your neck, and with your original unrelated problem being unchanged.
I do wrestle with the implications of the word "healer", as it really is the body that's healing. All I do in nudge it in the right direction. And yes, it usually is Subtle. Except when there's a thrust and a pop and a gasp and then a smile and maybe an evil cackle on my part. That's a bit more direct.
Absurdity has a place in fiction and humor, but the suggestion that the catch-as-catch-can, unexpected-side-effects commercial drug industry is somehow "scientific" while medicine based on years - often thousands of years - of painstaking observation is inherently unscientific is a bad joke at best. Even the least seasoned of the so-called alternatives, homeopathy, was built on a rigid application of the scientific method, called "provings" in that discipline, which shames the patent drug industry that suppressed it not by better results but by legal maneuvering. Most interestingly, thousands of "modern" drugs are nothing more than packaged (and patented) versions of well established natural medicines, while many others are synthetic forms of long-used naturalopathic substances. Meanwhile, patent drug companies frequently find new uses for products which didn't perform as anticipated, clear evidence they were working not from hypothesis to solution but from product to application, the "let's see what this does" form of pseudoscience. Shilling for drug companies does not serve the public, nor does defending the shills just because they or their benefactors work in shiny laboratories and control large budgets. Both patent and alternative medicine has its place.
I have provided medical citations that dispute the author's claims that certain popular so-called 'alternative medicine' techniques are worthless bunk. The author is claiming a negative finding which is not supported by the literature. I do not argue that it is your responsibility to refute an unreferenced positive claim. Please see the entire thread in context.
Would you prefer citations from journals that require a subscription or academic access?
Look, get to the original point. There are many peer reviewed studies from the late 1980s through to the present that show a positive result beyond placebo. I've never taken or used acupuncture, I don't practice it, I have no interest in the procedure beyond using it to challenge this author's abuse of factual claims not substantiated by his own academic press in order to sell copy.
Skepticism has become a business. As a result, it is not a rational way to set science policy. Nor is it a good way to educate oneself about what are and what are not recent scientific findings. It is - at best - a shorthand for being "right". In the sense that a clock is right at least twice a day. But - like all pseudoscience - over reliance on skepticism as a shorthand never predicts new results nor do those engaging in the practice offer new data for determining new findings.
Thus, I argue that skepticism has become nothing more than a new religious bias.
... one significant factor.
The placebo effect. It's amazingly powerful for both curing and causing illness.
Apparently the book treats chiropractic from the British standpoint. there are substantial numbers of North American chiropractors who limit their use of spinal manipulations to treating certain well-defined conditions. There are also North American chiropractors who claim to treat virtually everything with spinal manipulations. In the U.S. or Canada, the problem isn't that the whole profession is fraudulent, the problem is seperating the honest from the con artists.
CNN ran a report recently in which they reported on a hospital in China that will give stem cell injections to patients for a wide variety of neuropathic ailments. In the case they highlighted, a young boy has a genetic degenerative disorder that results in the devastation of the entire neural system. For $40,000(USD) they gave him a series of stem cell injections into his spinal column. After the first injection, his mother was delighted when he woke up, burbled a single word, and fell back to sleep. The next 4 injections had no detectable effect. This hospital, which claims to have serviced over 100 foreign patients in this manner already, refuses to comment on whether they actually think the stem cells have measurably helped anyone, but they freely admit that what they're giving the patients is "hope."
I don't wish to take away from the amazing potential stem cell research promises, but this hospital, and others like it that will spring up, are selling the 21st century version of snake oil and homeopathy.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
If the user thinks he is feeling better, isn't that like having a religious faith?
And at the end of the day, if the user relaxes enought to allow the body to heal itself, didn't that work as well?
That won't cure a lot of problems, but some it will.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
I'm not going to buy the book because I'm broke and already agree with the general conclusions.
With all the talk about cannabis (Ok... un-educated people refer to it as marijuana) lately I'm hoping people will begin to accept the truth.
Do a search for "Medical Cannabis Storm Crow" and read the list of research papers that Granny Storm Crow has found and linked to.
You'll be amazed at what our govt would love you not to know about cannabis.
This will be fun. I love quackery!
If proof == "medicine" and no proof == "alternative treatment", then why is massage [miami.edu] or acupressure [google.com] or dietary changes [webmd.com] considered alternative treatment?
How about 2+2 = chocolate milk? That's a redefinition which makes about as much sense as yours. Alternative mean an option. You might have several alternatives that are effective treatments though one might be preferred. Alternative has nothing to do with proof or the lack thereof. You can try treatments that are not proven to work. Happens all the time and that is how medicine advances. The first time we tried penicillin there was no certainty that it would work. But the doctors did have a credible theory as to why it might work. Most drugs we try are abject failures.
Now you are using "alternative treatment" in a different sense meaning something different than the standard of care. Massage has its uses but it doesn't cure brain cancer. Dietary changes are helpful for many things but won't set a broken bone. Suggesting that they will is quackery and anyone who promotes them as cures for problems they clearly cannot help is a criminal who should be in jail.
I do shiatsu acupressure, and I can cite studies on its effectiveness
How about citing some double blind studies from actually reputable journals ("Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine"? You HAVE to be kidding me) or even some studies that I can't shoot holes in by reading the abstracts?
And why is surgery considered "medicine"?
Because it works and actually cures people of serious problems would be my guess. Call me crazy but I'm pretty sure some smart folks might have looked into this.
Every placebo controlled study of a surgical technique has found it no better than a placebo operation.
That might just be the most ludicrous thing I've ever read on Slashdot. And that is really saying something. Apparently you'll believe anything you read no matter the source unless that source has a hint of being credible.
I was going to jump and buy it, but the summary proves a single point. It is a book that can be written in five pages. The rest is fluff and padding. There is one point that should have been driven very hard, and I am not sure it is.
Alternative medicine harms and kills, with examples. One I have heard is a story about a man with prostate cancer that is a slow cancer. He started taking herbal medicine on the side and
There are a lot more arguments, but it should be driven that the "practice" is full of people taking advantage of people in need
G
Did the book happen to mention that the convential medical system routinely prescribes medications that have no effect as well - to simply provide the patient with a "Placebo"?
http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/10/30/ep.doctors.prescribe.placebos/index.html
One clear example of this is all the doctors that prescribe anti-biotics for viral infections! What a waste of time and money that is...
I want to know how you perform a double-blind study of chiropractic at all. Can you fool a person into thinking they've had a massage and adjustment? Can the chiropractor not know which patients actually got massage and adjustments from them?
The plural of "data" is "data", BTW. The plural is "datum" or "point of data", and these days "data" is increasingly common as also being the singular. That doesn't make it non-plural.
As for anecdotes, there are repeated mentions that "often" practitioners of these different remedies do certain things. The plural of "statistic" is not "anecdote" either.
I'd really like to know why massage, traction, electrical stimulation of a muscle, anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen, ice packs, spinal adjustments, physical therapy, and muscle relaxants are valid treatments when prescribed by an MD or a DO but not a chiropractor. I've had MD doctors refer me to a chiropractor and a chiropractor refer me to an MD. Some pain management clinics have MDs, DOs, physical therapists, and chiropractors in one place.
Just because something is difficult to test double-blind does not mean it's worthless. It just means it's more difficult to validate and quantify. I wonder if the authors have ever double-blind taste tested their favorite restaurant's food.
Yes, and Medicine has long relied on this. I've read (sorry, no citation) that it wasn't until sometime in mid-19th century that you were statistically better off consulting a physician than not. Of course, that depended greatly on whether the problem was in that limited subset of illnesses they could actually do something about. But people went to doctors anyway and were regularly bled, purged and given near-poisonous drugs and thanked the good doctor for his attention. Some even survived..
For my allergies - hay fever, and massive reactions. Childhood was not pleasant.
After explaining carefully to me the premise that a mild, virtually undetectable exposure would activate my immune response, triggering the beneficial reactions, and free me of these allergies, I asked some questions:
1. If I'm getting fairly massive doses now from Nature, how can you claim that your remedy will give me the mild dose needed for theraputic effect?
2. If it's the immune response that causes the symptoms I want to get rid of, how does triggering the immune response change that?
3. How do you know what I'm allergic to?
Answers were not forthcoming. My homeopath explained that the first requirement was that I believe in the cure. Direct quote, "believe in the cure".
Ok. The treatements that worked have been Seldane/Claritin/Zyrtec, and Patanol.
Undiagnosed asthma didn't help either.
I'm not a real believer in alternative remedies, though I know people who benefit from acupuncture, and I'm not arguing with their results. I also know people who have been healed through prayer, and all of them would advise you to go see your family physician first. All of them. Go with what works.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
1) In 1977 Jimmy Carter made subprime loans mandatory as a form of affirmative action
2) In 1999 Bill Clinton deregulated banking reversing every thing FDR put into place after the Great Depression to prevent the banking industry from collapsing.
Guild member, you say? Screw modern medicine, the next time I get sick I'm asking level 80 Night Elf Priest Healzalot to work his magic on me... And if that doesn't work, I'll just scream over Ventrilo about how I "need a res pls kthx."
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
The real question is why did we ever allow a government sponsored entity to do this?
Because the human race is docile, ignorant and this is just another manipulation to keep us in our little human coops.
The bigger question is, "Why do we allow the government to borrow the entire money supply, at interest, from a private banking consortium (the Fed, and in Canada the bank lending system; every industrialized country does something similar), rather than print it at zero interest ourselves? --When it is well understood at the highest levels that this practice of borrowing the money supply from a small group of wealthy families can only lead to one, inescapable result: Debt Slavery. (How do you pay back interest when the only money in existence was borrowed from the same people you owe? You have to borrow more from the same source to keep the wheel spinning and the debt ballooning until the entire world finally defaults and a small group of bankers ends up owning everything on the whole planet.)"
Obama is just the latest puppet in this game. We seem to go through growth and harvest cycles. People recover, grow strong, develop resources for a period of years, then the Bad Cop comes into power and reaps the harvest. Afterwards, the Good Cop comes back and tills it all under to begin the cycle again. Or at least that's how it appears from a casual glance. The Good Cop is complicit, and Obama, as we can see through his cabinet choices, is marching right along in tune. And all the while, other subtle nooses tighten, forever dumbing people down, ratcheting up the coils of social control and tweaking the system so that the whole thing works ever more effectively.
-FL
I knew you were going to say that. Of course it's real. Enron was a real company, too. Didn't mean it was worth anything ...
I have had a personal experience with acupuncture. I was at an event in the mountains and cut my foot about an inch long and 1/4 inch deep. I was treated with saline solution for about 1/2 hour. It was ridiculously painful.
I went back the next day and they started to do the same thing. I felt the same pain. I asked them if there was anyone at the event who knew acupuncture and it turned out there was. He put 3 needles in the top of my foot. I didn't know what to expect but for the next 1/2 hour I felt a warm sensation as the open cut was treated with saline solution.
I am perfectly aware that there are quacks selling snake oil out there. But as far as I'm concerned, the authors of this book are part of the group that has claimed diet has no effect on health, and then claimed that some foods are bad, no they're good, no they're bad sometimes, ... (They are also part of the group that refuses to report incompetent physicians, so yeah, I'm biased.) I mean, come on, it's hardly like they aren't selling their own snake oil, just look at all the drugs that have been 'scientifically' proven to be safe, except they aren't.
As far as acupuncture goes, I have a theory. Our nervous system transmits information using electro-chemical impulses. After thousands of years of trial and error, acupuncturists have figured out how to short circuit those impulses. Will it cure cancer? I doubt it. But it does seem to block out pain, and I know people who claim to have had muscle problems improved.
As far as I'm concerned, the authors are trying to prove a negative. Starting from a position of denial, they have been unable to produce any clinical proof that acupuncture, et al, works, therefore, they claim it is bogus. From the review, I can't tell if they are working with patients who are being successfully treated, or if they came up with their own tests, but from the adjectives, I suspect the latter.
The worst part is, I'd really like to see a valid study of acupuncture. If what has been developed thru trial and error could be given a scientific foundation, it is possible that a breakthrus in neurological diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, could be discovered.
Later . . . Jim
The authors answer that it is via the scientific method. This is determined only after strict and careful analysis of a clinical study, of which the most effective is double-blind and randomized.
I don't know if homeopathy works. But let's suppose for a moment it does, and that there are skillful practitioners of the craft. Why would they not wan't to prove it by doing such studies? I can think of a reason: Morality. When you allready know, by expierience, that something helps with given symptoms, the study would require that you do not give that to sick people, but instead give them something completely different without telling them.
Also i find the statement that it's "impossible to work" quite arrogant. How to you know for sure? Have they found the Higgs Boson yet? We do not know (and may never find completly find out) how everything works exactly. Just because there are no molecules left doesn't mean that there could not be some other mechanism by which information about the substance being there is retained.
The author of the review makes it hard for me to take him, the book, or his review seriously for the following reasons:
- he is incapable of using an apostrophe.
- independent of the book's context, he uses language which displays an existing bias (or, perhaps "hatred" is a better word) against the subject matter ("EBM shows that homeopathy and other bogus cures are of no value").
- the intent of the review (I can't speak of the book as I haven't read it) seems to be nothing more than "all alternative medicine and their practitioners are dirty cheats. All of them".
- the comparison to the current economic crisis which bookends the review is rather thin and clumsy.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
Every single study that shows positive results have been discredited
Oh really? Every single study? It's a big world, mister, lots of labs. Lots of people experimenting and working in this field, --which I should add, has been around for hundreds of years longer than Western civilization. But you're telling me that every single study has been discredited? In every language, too? Every Chinese dialect?
Wow. That's some pretty amazing research ability. What must that effort have cost in time and money? Heck, the transcription and communications budget alone must have been a fortune!
Okay. I'm done throwing dumb sarcasm at you. --I wish you were worth actual reason, but clearly your mind has been beaten and tenderized far too effectively for such things! This post is meant for everybody else. . .
One of the easiest red flags you can look for when trying to determine when people are living in some manner of denial construct is when they claim in sweeping statements an absolute knowledge of something which is impossible to know fully. Any idea or bit of data which is inconsistent with their belief system is considered a personal threat which must be destroyed and/or rationalized out of existence.
This is irrational behavior. Real scientists must accept that no matter how strong their theories, no matter how much corroborating data has been collected, they know that NOTHING is for 100% for certain. Those are simply the rules of reductionist theory. Real scientists combine this, by necessity, into their everyday thinking and would embarrassed to make absolutist statements in full seriousness like the above poster. But because such posters have chosen delusion over real science, (despite their claims), their powers of rationalization are weak at best, and as such sweeping absolutist statements discrediting everything they don't like, amazingly don't sound ridiculous in their own ears. They really do believe themselves because they have been so relentless in pounding away at their own brains with dogma.
You can make the wrong puzzle piece fit if you hit it hard enough and refuse to look too closely at the final picture. But the problem is now that you must work hard to discredit anybody else who looks too closely at the finished picture. In the end, as knowledge grows and people discern more and more for themselves, such delusionals find themselves ever more isolated and desperate, howling at the world.
-FL
http://www.badscience.net/ Ben Goldacre's website and his recent book "Bad Science". Covers similar topics but adds in wider issues such as nutrition showing how thses quack remedies are hyped and maintained by an ignorant/anything-for-a-headline media community.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez
The official US database on medical research ... they ought to be lying on the subject of acupuncture ...
Oops ... I forgot the dogma that scientifically valid == double blind studies and randomized. Since you cannot fake acupuncture, it is definitely not valid ... (author conveniently forgets that it's been used for at least five millenia in east-asian countries, that it's been recommended by the medical UN comitee, and that its been re-instated in China because Mao had been successfully cured by it ...)
This strangely uninformed author would be well advised to check the biography of the author of the "double blind and randomized trials" principle (hint : Avicennes = Ibn Sama, musicotherapist, father of modern medecine)
but I play one on TV
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I agree that there are a lot of quacks that are in it for the money, but when I was in China my friend with a slipped disk was having some serious back pains and went to a doctor of Chinese medicine. After a fire-cupping and drinking herbal teas for a week he helt much better.
Not again...
"I know about the placebo effect, but it worked for me!"
"Censorship is a dangerous tool for the powerful to have, but we need to filter the Internet so we can catch those spammers and traders of music and child porn!"
"Those Mormons and Scientologists are crazy, but MY religion deserves respect!"
Hypocrites. You're just as bad as those you decry.
"Yeah, all those OTHER forms of woo are bunk, but MY pet woo is for real!"
http://outcampaign.org/
At least for me (and I suspect many others), the lure of alternative medicine is that *it doesn't require a prescription*. If I get sick, I wait quite a while to figure out if it's going to go away. If it lingers, say 3 or four weeks, then I figure I might need antibiotics or something. So I call the doctor:
"We can get you in here in a couple of weeks..."
Well, that's great. I didn't call at the first sniffle, the only reason I call is that I'm *really sick* and can't wait any longer. Of course I'll try some alternative stuff at this point, it's my only option save the emergency room, which isn't really appropriate here obviously.
It's just like tech support. I don't call them first, either.
"...of which the authors are staunch believers."
No need to continue reading. The authors have already debunked their own work.
It is a fallacy to try to prove things about unprovable things.
All rites reversed 2010
Will my scientific mind allow me to believe in this stuff? Of course not. But like Bohr said about the horseshoe over his doorway, I'm told it works whether you believe in it or not!
Shiatsu massage and related "arts" have proven to make me better in many instances. Why? I can't explain it scientifically, but I don't really care as long as it works.
When you hear that alternative medicines are 'untested' you have to ask why. Is it because the sellers are hiding something? Let's give this a moment's thought:
The Scientific Method and double blind testing are wonderful tools, but expensive to employ in medical matters. It requires significant numbers of volunteer humans, a large investment in safety mechanisms and documentation, a significant mathematical analysis to derive valid results and much more...
Drug companies invest millions in these studies in hope of billions in profits from their intellectual property (IP). Drug companies do not make money from drugs, they make money from exclusive ownership of IP. In that sense they are no different from software companies or music studios- the actual cost of the media & distribution is insignificant.
OTOH, a company selling vitamins, amino acids, herbs, minerals, etc rarely has millions to spend upon such tests. They never make billions on their products. They have no hope of profiting from any intellectual property. They sell a commodity and compete vigorously to survive. The cost of raw materials, manufacturing, packaging and distribution is nearly 100% of the price you pay.
It is interesting to note that many (most?) drugs originate as herbs and folk remedies. Drug companies continue to search the earth and the sea for any natural substance that may have useful pharmaceutical properties. When they find one, they search for a way to synthesize the active ingredient so that they can patent it. Aspirin was derived from a tree bark that ancient Romans used to treat pain and fevers. Bayer made a lot of money from that and doesn't seem to have offered any of it to the Romans.
Despite these investment millions and government rules and regulation, drug companies still make mistakes and an approved drug can be later found to be useless or harmful. Far more people are killed and damaged by approved drugs than alternative medicines.
The scare tactics that are spread about alternative medicine have the same roots as the other right wing nonsense about a terrorist under every bed and the boogyman at the door. They come from Big Pharma and their paid government allies. Is it a surprise that retiring FDA officials go to work for the companies they regulated, and that company employees get jobs inside the FDA? How can your vitamin company compete with the pharmaceutical lobby? They can't and they may soon be out of business.
...omphaloskepsis often...
It's pretty clear that most of the alternative medicine is pure hogwash. BUT, what those who like to point this out usually FAIL to observe, is the main REASON IT IS SO POPULAR.
The reason is, the fact that "mainstream" medicine is seriously biased by a conflict of interest with the pharmiceutical companies. Alternatives sell because people don't like the funny business going on in mainstream medicine, and the funny business going on in alternative medicine seems at least cheaper and apparently leaves them more in control.
Books like this will have NO effect whatsoever on the problem when they completely ignore its root.
Except the doctors tell there patients it's not going to work. No placebo effect there.
In fact, in every doctors office I've been in, there is a sigh saying anti-biotic don't work with viral infections. Plus the placebo effect doesn't cure anything. It is a temporary relief from symptoms. If you ahve stomach surgery, and they give you a placebo, your still going to be in pain.
And some doctors have been prescribing placebos, this is relatively new, goes against the traditional doctor patient communication, and has cause quite a firestorm in some circles.
Yes, CNN tries to make it sound like every person is getting placebos. Typical media.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Many "alternative" medical treatments are used because of economic status. To a person on a fixed or low income, the cheaper treatment is often the only one available. Visits to doctors and hospitals are very expensive for USA citizens without health care insurance.
For too many people, the slim chance of an alternative medical treatment actually working, is a forced choice. Hospitalization or visits to a qualified medical professional are beyond their means.
I see a great deal of hypocrisy in those who denounce alternative medicine while nodding affectionately at the medical and pharmacy professions who constantly raise their fees and prices.
When any service becomes too expensive, a market arises for less qualified and less skilled providers, and for less useful medicines.
Obviously this guy has never smoked any good weed!
The book is amazingly good, concise and explanatory.
...because the same standards these authors applied to alternative medicine have never been applied to conventional medicine, especially in the realm of mental illness. APA Psychiatrists still use the untested, unproven theory of "chemical imbalance" to prescribe major drugs which CREATE a chemical imbalance, in the name of "controlling the patient" -- not even controlling the symptoms, but the patient him/herself -- doing immeasurable damage. Even if the alternatives are not proven, they are proven to be harmless (with a few caveats). See http://alt-therapies4bipolar.info/ for information gathered from patients on alternatives to drugs for patients with bipolar disorder. Disclaimer: Yes, I wrote the website. All data is gathered from the ALT-therapies4bipolar Yahoogroup, and is anecdotal, because we can't get any doctors or scientists to take us seriously enough to study this. And I personally have been off psychiatric medication for over 5 years, with nobody threatening to commit me (and many local mental health agencies asking me to counsel with some of their patients).
It is interesting that the authors are willing to make blanket statements when there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that alternatives can have a positive effect placebo or otherwise. Actually if the effect is placebo does it really matter? In my case I went to a chiropractor because my back was getting increasingly stiff, and the effect on that has been very good. However an unexpected effect has been that my migraines (previously 2 or 3 per week) have reduced to one every few weeks. Connection between back stiffness and migraines? Placebo effect? I suffer from hypocondriasis and any "cure" would have done? I don't really care as my quality of life has improved out of sight, and it was well worth the money spent. And I'd recommend to anyone to give chiropractic be give a try.
I'm not sick of the proponents for high profit, poorly tested artificial medicines! Neither am I sick of snake oil salesmen!
I'm sick of everybody who treats this issue as black-and-white. There are obvious cases of fraud in both camps! AND obvious cases of benefit.
For example, we "humons" have been using naturally occurring oils to sterilise open wounds or lower the blood pressure of traumatised patients.
Also, modern medicine has indeed done some marvellous things! Penacillin springs to mind as the obvious one (but cautiously contrast it with what drug companies now want to MARKET as the next-wonder-cure).
It's not 1 XOR other! Skepticism is scientific. Blind bias is ignorant.
Books attemping a discreditation of an entire class most likely falls into the latter with loose argument, "witty" dialog, and convenient groupings of loosely related "medicines".
The real lie is that there is a "silver bullet" for every illness. If people live unhealthy lives by having poor diets, smoking, doing drugs (mostly the illegal kind), not exercising, not getting sufficient rest, etc. then nothing will help them in the long run if they know its unhealthy and choose otherwise.
Licensed doctors are often just as guilty as the "alternative medicine" quacks as telling the patient what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear. The sicker people are the more problems they have with prescription drugs because of the side effects and various other problems including liver toxicity and nutrient depletion. Just see what a conscientious pharmacist has to say about prescription drugs: Dear Pharmacist
Although disciplines like acupuncture and chiropractic provide only temporary relief if you don't make lifestyle changes to support a permanent improvement, they are valuable for people who can't or wont take drugs. People may make outrageous claims about the possible results but that doesn't make them useless. I've personally benefited from chiropractic manipulation but it was a consistent exercise and stretching routine that ultimately kept my back and neck pain away.
Alternative medicine may not live up to all the hype that is out there but many people seem to benefit from visiting someone who listens to them and tells them they are getting better. All important battles are won or lost in the mind first. If a person is convinced they are going to die then no doctor is going to be able to help them in the long run. Conversely, if a person believes that they are going to get healthy then they will find a way to get healthy. Our belief system will always determine our ultimate reality. Its not necessarily what people say that counts but what they really believe.
"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
We have HUGE failures, such as episiotomy, that lead to wholesale skepticism toward professional doctors by intelligent folks. IMHO, if the professional medical industry ever gets its shit together, maybe there will be less opposition to standard medicine. But as long as there is widespread and clear quackery in mainstream medicine, you will have additional resistance to it. I am very skeptical of anything my doctor says because the level of trust and the record just isn't there yet in modern medicine.
If you know of an accupuncture study that showed positive results that hasn't been discredited, please give me a URL. But if you had one, you would have, wouldn't you?
Of course, I can understand why you might think I care what you believe, so please allow me to correct this at once. . . I'm not really that interested in acupuncture. There is a slight chance that it doesn't work, but I've seen enough to recognize that it almost certainly, in the right hands, does. But that's not the point here. What I'm fascinated by is your behavior. The amount of denial and anger you and people like you project over these sorts of subjects has always fascinated me. Please note:
calling me names[. . .]
Well let's see now. I called you, "mister". That's not really a bad word. I also described your behavior as, "irrational," which it is and I explained why. Now I did say that delusionals of your type "howl at the world", which I suppose might be taken as an insult. But, honestly, to read your posting style, can anybody blame me?
rather than offering evidence to support your claim that there are studies that haven't been discredited.
As I said, I don't actually care what your level of knowledge is, so I have no motivation to dig up anything for your benefit. In fact, I'd be more than happy for you to remain willfully ignorant. It's sad, but such people are so militant about not exploring beyond their pre-defined worlds that all you can really do is observe. It's like watching a puppy stand on a frizbee while it tries to pick it up. Kind of amusing, and I'm certainly not going to get in the way if I'm not wanted! --I will also point out that I did NOT make the claim you say I did. What I DID say was that your insistence that EVERY study had been invalidated was an irrational claim (because it is both unlikely to be true and unprovable), which is indicative of some kind of psychological denial issue. It's a subtle difference, but important.
Yes, every single one.
--You're REALLY going to cling to that despite the fact that, given the nature of our day to day world, it is impossible to verify such a claim? And we're not talking about quantum probabilities here; we're talking about the existence of research in a world filled with millions of scientists, students and professors churning out hundreds of thousands of papers every year on every imaginable subject. But, yes, this is exactly what you are claiming; executive knowledge about the state of this sea of information. And that, as I pointed out, is the mark of a man trapped in a state of psychological denial who will fight tooth and nail to preserve his world-view rather than remain open to new ideas.
By contrast, a reasonable man wouldn't feel the need to make such a ridiculous, pompous claim. A reasonable man who feels un-threatened by a subject, would be entirely satisfied in saying, "I've never seen a study which proves your point, and I've read a great many of them so I am inclined to believe that I am correct, but if you will offer me other data, I would be happy to consider it." He would NOT say that other data is an impossibility. He would accept that there exists some chance of his not knowing the full truth. This is called, "remaining open". --There is another word for this, and that word is, falsifiable, which IS in fact an important tenet of scientific thinking. A person in denial or threatened by a subject, however, is more inclined to closing himself off to even the possibility of being incorrect, and as such falsifiability is not allowed to exist in his belief system.
--Out of curiosity, I did take a look at Mr. Novella's site. I ran the words, "Dog" "Canine" and "Acupuncture" through his search engine in various combinations. I got back a handful of articles on acupuncture, but nothing mentioning dog studies. Which is funny, because canin
Indeed. And just as someone only versed in modern Western medicine has trouble understanding Chinese medicine, so too would someone only versed in the theory of four humours have trouble understanding either of the other two.
If you mean to equate the theory of humours, which has no present currency, with the whole of Chinese medical thought, which is quite current, I must disagree and suggest that you've missed your mark. Western medicine tried on the theory of humours to see if it fit, and discarded it when it was found wanting. Chinese medicine has likewise tried on different theories and set aside those that do not work. Massive famine and resulting disease at the end of the Ming and the beginning of the Qing dynasties, around the 1630s through the 1640s, prompted a major rethinking of then-current Chinese medical thought on disease and its causes. Current Chinese medical practitioners no longer follow discounted theories any more than Western doctors do.
I think you sell Chinese medical thought a bit short. The body of Chinese medical knowledge is no more "made up" than the body of Western medical knowledge. The concept of "chi" is a theory, much as the Western medical concept that electrical currents in nerve fibers lead to various perceptions is a theory. One might be more familiar than the other, but both are ultimately simply our (as in, the scientific consensus "our" for the respective communities) best-effort attempts at describing the observed phenomena.
I'm not a Chinese medical practitioner. Frankly, Western or Chinese, I don't give a rodent's posterior so long as it works. I'm merely trying to point out that other systems of thought exist -- and that Chinese medicine is indeed a *system of thought*, not just a pipe dream some hobo had on a sunny day. Chinese medical theorizing has been going on for many centuries more than Western medical thought even existed. Europeans were busy burning witches when Chinese doctors were trying to establish a comprehensive theory of illness.
Re-reading your post, I must ask, what constitutes a "scientific medical treatment"? I ask because I really don't know very well what you mean by this term. If you mean Western medicine in general, sadly I must point out that no, it doesn't always work. If you mean medical treatment on the basis of careful evaluation of known facts and observations combined with a hypothesis for the patient's current symptoms (i.e. diagnosis), Chinese medicine (when properly practiced by someone actually trained in the art) can be every bit as scientific as Western medicine.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Western medical theory is also incomplete -- what causes schizophrenia? how does the placebo effect work? etc. etc. Also, how many studies have been run on needle placement and effect (not affect)? How imprecise must one be before an acupuncture treatment is not effective? Acupuncture practitioners (at least, the Chinese-trained ones that I've spoken with) are happy to describe how everyone's body is slightly different, and that therefore it only makes perfect sense that needle placement would have to be different for each different body... Or do you mean something different?
Moreover, bear in mind that Chinese medicine in general, and acupuncture as well, aims for a gradual realignment rather than an immediate fix, and so more than a single treatment might be necessary to see any easily observable changes. For that matter, Western pharmaceuticals in some areas are coming to a gradual similar realization -- sometimes it's better to nudge the system back onto an even keel (smaller maintenance doses), instead of hitting it with a sledgehammer (one big wallop). We see this some in chronic treatment areas such as allergy medications or birth control.
Forgive me for maybe being pedantic, but this isn't entirely accurate, and it looks like you need to refamiliarize yourself with the scientific method. The facts are the facts. There's no matching of facts to facts at all. Perhaps you mean something more like, if you test a treatment and it shows no effect, then that treatment is not effective -- no argument there.
Alternately, if you test a treatment and it has an effect, but that effect is not allowed for by existing scientific knowledge, then that simply means that the effects of the treatment lie outside the bounds of existing scientific knowledge, and that more hypothesizing and testing is required to develop a theory that describes the observations. This is no surprise, and is, in fact, how science is supposed to work.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Well I can't read all the replies but some are good others just banter... anyway....
"THE WORLD IS FLAT!!!!"
or was it....
"THE EARTH IS THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE!!!!"
or was it....
"THE ATOM IS THE SMALLES PARTICLE!!!!"
or was it....
"AUTOMOBILES WILL KILL US. HOW CAN HUMANS TRAVEL FASTER THAN 50mph???"
or was it....
"PLUTO IS THE NINTH PLANET!!!"
Anyway, Science investigates stuff. It never stops to search for new frontiers. Nothing is wrong or right. It only says "we don't know....yet". Is it not us mere non scientists that always interpret a whole lot of stuff around it?
Humanity and Science has been wrong about so many things in the past. Why not here? TCM is thousands of years old (as are most other alternative practices too). They definitely can heal and I think there's a couple of billion people out there who'd agree with me.
I see Western and alternative medicine as a perfect symbiosis. I'd never want to have a homeopath treat me when I have had a car accident or when I need a heart bypass! But I'd love him to help me get through the side-effects of my chemo or help me with my sleeping problems that I don't want to take drugs for. There is no right or wrong.
I think both (or is that all) medicines have one thing in common. They all have the desire to help people get well again. There's enough people out there in need of help. Some medics malpractice and some alternative practitioners are quacks but hey, isn't that always the case?
Read the book for all means! It is probably a good rant. But do me a favour and get it off piratebay or from the library. Don't give an unqualified quack/hack (I'm a little confused as to the right wording here) who can write money for writing such nonsense. If on the other hand you teat it as a comedy...by all means buy it.
All I'd say is for all the banter keep an open mind and for goodness sake do what makes you healthy. Listen to what your body and mind tells you and not some stupid book or your neighbour or your local pharmaceutical company.
There is no "Alternative" medicine. It's just medicine.
Using "science" to support the position you've already decided upon isn't science. It's a clever approach to get people to agree with you.
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
This is just somebody saying how much they agree with a book full of controversial ideas. And they are controversial, even within the scientific community.
Do a quick search of pubmed and you will find that there is, in fact, some pretty good evidence for the efficacy of homeopathic treatments, including the infamous ultra high dilution "placebo" treatments. The problem is that nobody is really sure how they work, but the evidence is there, they do seem to have specific effect.
And this guy's telling us chiropractic medicine is quackery? Do the footwork, folks. A quick search will show you that this is a bunch of bullshit; chiropractic medicine is a valid field of science and practice that uses randomized controlled trials just the same as all the rest of the medical community these days.
Bonus points for pandering to the idiots on slashdot, though. Everybody here thinks they're too smart to get cured by a placebo.
Art Schools Dietzilla
There's a well known model in modern Medicine called "Gate Control", which could be employed to explain why at least Acupuncture might work in some specific circumstances.
In short, the perception of pain is an information which results from the processing of 2 different and competing information :
- actual noci-ceptors (pain detection pathways)
- and other receptors (other body senses)
The whole system has evolved in a way where pain is useful for giving a general alert, but non-pain perception may over-ride it, because a precise information about the environment is much more useful to evade the source of pain.
In every day situation that's why we tend to rub body parts when hurt : the sensory information (rub) over-rides the pain information through the gate-control mechanism.
TENS (transcutaneous electric nerve stimulation) is also well documented and recognized to be able to shut down pain and help some patients with chronic pains (whereas the usage about burning calories as advertised sometimes on TV is contested)
The possible scientific explanation for Acupuncture is that this is simply more of the same, but with a fancy name, weird tools and a whole mysticism wrapped around it.
(To draw a parallel to humoral medicine : picking up "blood" humor for someone who is easily aroused isn't completely wrong - being angry release a couple of hormones [like adrenaline] some of which alter and increase blood flow [adrenaline make the heart pump more]. So indeed blood and angry are associated, except that medieval humoral medicine got the whole model completely wrong)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I am very skeptical of anything my doctor says because the level of trust and the record just isn't there yet in modern medicine.
Are you kidding? Medicine isn't perfect and never will be but modern medicine has doubled life expectancies in the last 100 years, cured/prevented countless diseases, improved quality of life, and saved many millions of lives. It's one of the greatest triumphs of humanity and you are saying the record isn't there? I say you are a grade-A fool if you think that.
http://www.betterworld.com/detail.aspx?ItemId=0393066614
fund literacy around the world.
http://www.betterworld.com/custom.aspx?f=impact
I agree with the authors that most if not all alternative medicine is junk but on the other hand, when was the last time you heard about a medication or treatment that actually *cured* someone from a disease?
I mean, during the last two decades or so, I've only heard about and seen first hand people getting illnesses that can be "treated" but almost never cured (IBD, cancers, degenerative ailments, etc. and I suffer from a few myself now)
Our biggest successes have been antibiotics and vaccines and most of the ones currently in use are the same as or similar to the once that were discovered/invented years if not decades ago.
Where are all the new *real* cures?
On slashdot a few years ago there was an article (sorry don't have the URL) about the top ten phenomena science could not explain. One was about an Irish medical researcher who was pissed of about the number of people touting homeopathy. She experimented rigorously on an anti-histamine homeopathic and histamine producing cells. To her shock they actually stopped histamine production even though the solution used was shown to contain only pure water. She did, of course, repeat the experiments with the same results.
This book rewiew reads like religious dogma. If religion had worked for everybody, science would never have come in being and if medical science worked for everybody, complimentary therapies would not exist.
The bottom line is people cannot get a solution from a modality to what ails them they will keep looking until they find one that does.
Pain is a wonderful motivator (ask torturers).
It would say:
.00001% Natural Flavoring
85% Sucrose
14.99999% Lactose
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
In other words, you can't find a credible study supporting your claims. As predicted. Thanks for confirming that you're dishoenst, rather than just stupid. Now run along and play, son, cuz the adults have important things to talk about.
No, sorry. As I have said from the beginning, I have little interest in acupuncture and certainly no desire to get into a meaningless argument about whether or not it is real. I just don't care. How hard is it for you to understand this? --Well, I already know the answer to that. It is IMPOSSIBLE for you to understand this, which goes back to the original claim that I DID make. . .
I made one claim. ONE. --That you are suffering from some psychological limitation or disability which might be broadly termed, "Denial". The denial sufferer cannot tolerate or even comprehend a universe where people do not think exactly like him. This is why you think I care as much as you do about acupuncture and you believe that my primary goal in having this discussion is to 'defend' acupuncture's validity. Hell, it might all be one giant fraud. I DO NOT CARE. But as you have demonstrated, you are not capable of processing this information, as everything must fit into either black or white, (I found your comments about shades of gray in one of your previous posts extremely revealing.)
Anyway, to sum things up, I have demonstrated my claim using logic and reasoned responses, offering several examples. And you have proven my claim correct, (again), both with this most recent non-answer and your refusal (inability) to respond to even a single one of the points I made in my previous post. Not a single one! --Saying I am dishonest is just weird, because I said a lot of things and as far as I can tell, they are all true and you have not specified which point you think I am 'lying' about. You have said I am "stupid", which is actually quite cute, as the cry of "Stupid" is the world-famous school-yard approach to dealing with having lost a debate very, very badly. --And now you are stomping off in a huff while saying that you are the adult. All of which, I will point out to complete my little study of you, are classic examples of subjective Denial.
But that's okay. Your "predictions" will always be correct inside a logic-free bubble, which is of course both the joy of denial, and its peril, because to everybody else, you look silly.
Now I WILL run along and play, (despite my clearly being far more mature than you), as the old and calcified have "important" things to talk about. To themselves. (You're alone right now, aren't you? That's the other problem with bubbles.)
Actually, I am not that mature. After all, I am enjoying toying with you. Bullies and thugs are fun to infuriate and confuse. Maybe one day I will grow up.
Cheers!
-FL
Hello giacomo007 --
Please re-read my posts. I think you and I might agree more than your post implies. I'm not defending any notion of "non-Western science" -- science, as best I understand it, is science -- observing the world as objectively and quantitatively as possible, and deriving theories to describe these observations as accurately as possible. I fully agree with you about there only being one science. I am also wary of orientalist or exoticist proclivities, which I have observed first-hand while living in Japan and wondering why some of my fellow ex-pats seemed to view everything Japanese, no matter how distasteful (sometimes even to other Japanese folks), through rose-tinted glasses.
Likewise, I'm no proponent of obscure secrets or la-la hokum. After careful reading and observation of my own, I do not think Chinese medicine falls into the same category as crystals and windchimes. From what I have read, Chinese medicine is not the static, dead, dogmatic tradition that you describe, but is instead a living, changing body of thought that undergoes revision as time passes -- much like Western medicine. Someone trained as a doctor in the Chinese tradition has put a lot of time and energy into their own learning, much as someone trained as a doctor in the Western tradition. I am aware that some "adherents" of Chinese medicine in the US tend more towards the exoticist hippie end of things, but I consider these people to be as much practitioners of Chinese medicine as I consider our local organic herb gardeners to be practitioners of Western medicine.
What I *am* trying to do here is point out that the same scientific method can be applied to similar bodies of knowledge (in this case, observations of disease and wellness), and produce very different theories. Some of these very different theories might even stand the test of time (and further testing), ultimately producing distinct theoretical traditions.
Just in terms of astrophysics, to take this discussion out of the apparently emotionally charged realm of medicine, we have multiple contenders for understanding the universe and possibly producing a grand unified theory of everything, such as string theory and the standard model. These are very different theories, derived by applying the scientific method to the same body of observations -- but arriving at different interpretations. This is much like the difference between Chinese medical thought and Western medical thought -- or, more allegorically, much like the blind men and the elephant.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
What, Clinical Journal of Pain and Anesthesia & Analgesia, aren't reputable?
If you are trying to make a credible argument, ALL your sources need to be credible, not just some. I'm certainly not going to be persuaded by a random web page citing selected studies while trying to sell shiatsu services. Does the term conflict of interest mean anything to you?
How about you citing some double blind studies of surgical techniques?
When you can show me how to ethically conduct a double blind study for most surgical techniques I'll be happy to. Surgeons don't typically conduct the sort of study you are asking for because cutting on someone without the intent to cure usually crosses a very serious ethical boundary. It can be done in rare cases but not commonly even with informed consent. So other types of studies are done even though a double blind study is preferable whenever possible.
The first placebo surgery test was for a treatment for angina pectoris called internal mammary artery ligation. This was at one time a popular procedure, but it's not used now...
We also used to take peoples tonsils out regularly and use leaches to remove the bad humors. Some procedures we use now will undoubtedly be proven ineffective. That's how medicine progresses - we learn what works and what doesn't unfortunately by experience and evidence. But there are plenty of surgical procedures with VERY clear benefits and substantial evidence to support their efficacy. One ineffective procedure doesn't make the others worthless.
A 2002 study of arthroscopic knee surgery [mindbodyhealth.com] found that the outcomes for a placebo procedure were as good as those of the "real" surgery.
Again, sometimes particular procedures prove ineffective for particular conditions. It happens. You aren't proving surgery in general is no better than a placebo you are merely proving it for a very specific condition. Useful information but hardly damning against surgery in general.
In a 2004 study [sciencedaily.com] of transplantation of embryonic dopamine neurons into the brains of Parkinson's disease patients...
The placebo effect is real, news at 11.
In no similar study has a surgical technique proven better than a placebo cut.
Ignoring the fact that most such studies would be highly unethical (good luck doing a placebo cut on a transplant patient) every surgical procedure in common use has studies evaluating its effectiveness.
I had LASIK surgery - I'm pretty sure I couldn't see clearly more than a foot in front of my face before the procedure and I have better than 20/20 vision now. Are you seriously going to claim that a placebo cut could affect the refraction of light in my eyes in such a way as to give me 20/20 vision? I'm an engineer so I understand the physics pretty damn well and I'm married to an MD. Explain that one smart guy.
We can argue about what that fact implies, but if you want to be rational and scientific, you can't dismiss it as ludicrous
Sure I can because you haven't presented any compelling evidence to support your hypothesis. If you want to be "rational and scientific" then prove your hypothesis. You posited that "no surgical technique has been proven better than a placebo cut". So prove it. Citing a few random studies of failed experimental or ineffective procedures doesn't prove surgery is worthless outside of those particular cases. That's just science in action. We hypothesize something and then test it to prove if we were right. Scientists are wrong more often than they are right but that's ok - that's how we learn.
If you want to prove that surgery is worthless, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I'll support your effort. But it is up to YOU to build a case for your hypothesis. I don't happen to believe it but I'll listen - skeptically - but I'll listen. Right now you simply don't have any credible evidence that I can see.
Increased life expectancy has more to do with improved diet and improved sanitation than with medicine.
I love how you just proclaim those as facts we should all just accept. Diet and sanitation are unquestionably important factors but if you are going to pronounce them as "more" important than medicine, public health policy, economic development, or even education you need to provide evidence. These are not easily separable issues and frankly trying to separate them is probably a waste of time. Basically you are trying to argue that modern medicine has not been a vital factor in increased human lifespans despite there being tremendous evidence supporting its positive impact.
According to the CDC about 35% of the deaths in 1900 were from pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrhea. Since sanitation is a key part of public health AND medicine you'll have a very difficult time convincing anyone that definitively one is more important or responsible than the other in general. Prevention AND treatment are important. Polio is transmitted fecal-oral but it was finally controlled primarily by vaccine. Other diseases for which we have no effective cure (malaria for instance) we control primarily through public health policy. We use the best tool available for a given problem. Frequently that tool is modern medicine.
Some of the top ten causes of death in 1900 such a diptheria did not significantly decline until a vaccine was widely disseminated. Tuberculosis is treated with antibiotics - sanitation and diet will not prevent infection though they may improve prognosis.
Today heart disease is the number one killer - sadly significantly increased by our modern diet. Cancer is number two largely due to it's increased prevalence in our now older population. Only heart disease, cancer and accidents remain on the top 10 list from 1900 in 2000 and the incidence per-capita of every other cause of death on the 1900 list has decreased. Is medicine 100% responsible? Certainly not. But it IS a major factor and arguably every bit as important as improved diet, public health policy, and sanitation.
Frankly I think you are full of nonsensical opinions, faulty reasoning and your ideas are unsupported by actual facts. If you wish to continue to debate the issue find someone else. I think you are a fool.