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Growth of Pseudoscience Harming Australian Universities
wired_parrot writes "The international credibility of Australia's universities is being undermined by the increase in the 'pseudoscientific' health courses they offer, two academics write in a recent article decrying that a third of Australian universities now offer courses in such subjects as homeopathy and traditional Chinese medicine, which undermines science-based medicine. 'As the number of alternative practitioners graduating from tertiary education institutions increases, further health-care resources are wasted, while the potential for harm increases.'"
I think people that use homeopathic medicine should be allowed to marry.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
How does something like homeopathy even find it's way into a traditional school?
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
what no witch craft...
Seems that Australia is "diluting" its talent.
YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
These "pseudo science" articles indicate that pseudo science works better than science seems to indicate. :vulgar language)
Plecebo works better than the real thing (warning
Accupunture works, doesn't matter where
Accupunture works
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
ROFL. Yes, it's dreadfully inconvenient that scientists insist that something actually work.
my favorite quote concerning alternative medicines is... "If Alternative medicine practices worked, they wouldn't be alternative any more" not sure where it came from.
Well, I skimmed the first chapter of a book on it, anyway. Less is more, right?
Keep offering the courses, but let Penn and Teller teach them.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Eh, not really. Scientists use human perception to form a question, then try to measure what causes it. Just because something isn't measurable now does not mean it can't be measured; if what you said was true, then fun stuff like black holes, dark matter and human intelligence would be considered myths because we haven't found a direct way to measure them yet.
Practitioners and patients of Homeopathy and traditional Chinese medicine seem to believe that they work. Wouldn't it be good to devote some resources towards scientific study of these practices? Even if it's to prove that the placebo effect is playing a part, at least science is advanced. Just because we don't understand whether/how it works doesn't rule out the possibility that there might be something to be discovered. If we want to be objective about it, why not study it?
This sounds like a turf/money battle started by a mainstream academic apparatchik who doesn't want to actually sort through the existing pile of evidence, let alone continue evaluating. Some of the methods listed in the article actually work reliably for some things. Others may actually cause harm. Yet others are placebos so advanced that modern medicine may take decades to catch up. The important thing is to keep using actual evidence to make decisions rather than to just accept the word of reactionaries who gesture vaguely at supposed piles of evidence which, on closer inspection, often say the opposite of what the pseudo-skeptic reactionary claimed.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Fundamentalists exist in science as well. Alternative therapy is outside the domain of science because science insists on being able to measure stuff with a physical instrument (human perception not being good enough). So science has immediately disqualified itself from judging alternative medicine, yet still the science fundamentalists continue pushing their doctrine outside of its bounds.
The reason human perception is not good enough is the placebo effect, which is quite strong (and coincidentally, measurable). Homeopathy does not exist outside the domain of scientific questions just because it doesn't work.
I think you're missing a piece - the measurement of the health of a human is well within the realm of human perception and instrumentation. The goals of standard medicine and alternative medicine are the same: improve the health of a human. If standard medicine works and alternative medicine doesn't, well, you should be able to figure the rest out from there.
Human perception has proven itself to be pretty much useless many times..... But I guess you missed that lesson as you seem to have a pretty screwed up notion off science.
If it works it will be measureable and you can call it 'medicine', if you can't measure even a single thing different when using the stuff it is not medicine.
You can try and label it 'alternative' but it won't change the facts: its junk.
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>So science has immediately disqualified itself from judging alternative medicine
Er.. Science is quite capable of being used to judge the efficacy of alternative medicine. It happens all the time and typically the result is what one would expect.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Is the problem that these schools are teaching non-traditional medicine, or that there is a market for that education? Schools need money to run, and they can increase enrollment by offering courses such as "Eastern Medicine". I don't think this is completely the school's doing- there are consumers out there that swear on non-traditional medicine and practitioners who will perform those services. If anything positive, this non-traditional medicine "medical school" may raise the bar for entry into the field.
As for the cheapening of the science behind medicine? Yes, it hurts. But, at the end of the day, it is science that finds cures to our ailments, not rhinoceros horn powder.
Alternative therapy is outside the domain of science because science
Utter rubbish.
measure stuff with a physical instrument (human perception not being good enough).
Again, utter rubbish.
A trial (simplified): give people (a) a placebo and (b) homeopathic treatment. See which get better and which don't. Doesn't even require anything more than perception. Do I percieve this person as dead yes/no?
The results: homeopathy is no better than a placebo.
If it doesn't make you better, then by what reasoning or intuition is it doing any good at all?
So science has immediately disqualified itself from judging alternative medicine, yet still the science fundamentalists continue pushing their doctrine outside of its bounds.
More tosh. Simplifying, either medicine makes you better or it does not. Science can tell you if it does.
Please, in future learn *something* about science before dismissing it out of hand. And if you don't have the inclination to do that, then please carefully consider your comments about "fundemantalists".
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You mean current Medsci has any scientific research behind it at all? You could have fooled me!
The purpose of existence is to make money.
Two academics write in a recent article decrying that a third of Australian universities now offer courses in such subjects as homeopathy and traditional Chinese medicine, which undermines science-based medicine.
I think that academic scrutiny and study are exactly what these areas of medicine need. While I would definitely argue that there are many areas of these medicines that are placebos at best, I have heard and witnessed accounts of individual remedies, scrutinized by science, which nevertheless empirically appear to be effective. I would hate to through the baby out with the bathwater by dismissing either subject entirely.
I don't want to feel that it's merely conspiracy theory to believe that "the man" / "big pharma" is trying to squeeze out all alternative medicine because it competes with their company. But, in the same sense, I don't want people acquiring argyria en mass just because they keep hearing about colloidal silver on the internet. Presently, US law outright forbids scientific study of these remedies. I believe they need to be studied so that there's conclusive evidence of what works and what doesn't work. And what we discover does work should be allowed in practice. The world of academia can help tremendously with that.
... of worshipping science to the extent of all else.
Some "traditional medicines" are bupkus. Some are not. Just because science has not discovered something does not mean it doesn't exist. To think otherwise is arrogant. I can think of quite a few things in my life that science cannot (or at least does not at present) explain.
There are things about the human body and mind that science does not understand yet. And as long as their mindset continues to be "if I can't see it, smell it, touch it, taste it, or hear it, it doesn't exist" that will continue to be the case.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
If we're going to start acknowledging the horrifying growth of pseudo-science in our midst, can we include the no-proof-required branches of physics?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
All around the world, homeopathy, naturopathy (which may use some real natural cures, but is still based on a rejection of scientific advancements) old-fashioned chiropractic (subluxation crap), and accupuncture don't get laughed out of the room immediately as they should.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Science is not opposed to homeopathy or alternative medicine per se. If the course of treatment cannot be measured by physical measurements, that is perfectly fine. However, if the treatment does not have an effect on outcome of the patient, it is rightly labeled as ineffective. For example, clinical trials of massage and acupuncture have proven the effectiveness of these treatments for specific conditions. http://apps.who.int/medicinedocs/en/d/Js4926e/ and http://nccam.nih.gov/health/massage However, homeopathy specifically the serial dilutions of compounds or extracts in water, has never been proven effective in any clinical trial and goes against basic precepts of chemistry and biology.
some chiropractors now extended their manipulation of the spine to children, and claimed that this could cure asthma, allergies, bedwetting, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, colic, fever and numerous other problems, and could serve as a substitute for vaccination.
Evidence? Studies? Clinical trials? Nothing has been presented to support the claim that chiropractors can cure asthma or bedwetting, let alone the really bizarre claims (a substitute for vaccination?).
There is no conspiracy or closed-mindedness. When evidence that herbal medicines do work, scientists embrace them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_marijuana
You see that long and extensive list of studies? Did you notice that the scientific criticisms were almost entirely focused on smoking as a method of ingestion? Did you notice that the non-scientific criticisms were political, driven by America's far-right government agenda that has been pushed for decades now?
These scientists are objecting to the teaching of treatments that have no evidence to support their use, which have not been the subject of any studies, and for which no statement of efficacy can be made (how do we know these treatments do not cause more harm than good? how do we know that these treatments are not just a waste of time?).
Palm trees and 8
science insists on being able to measure stuff with a physical instrument (human perception not being good enough).
On one hand, I want to make fun of the "soft sciences" like psych. On the other hand, I want to make fun of the alternative loons by pointing out ... practically all pre-1980-ish psych experiments (post 1980 psych students started hauling early home computers into the lab, probably because they were tired of writing down the data).
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I thought it was going to be about 'Global Warming'.
So where is the science to support the academics' rant?
And modern chemistry owes its beginnings to alchemy but we know better now and we don't do that shit anymore. Why go backwards instead of just relegating the outdated and largely wrong knowledge to the history books?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
There are lots of things that work without the benefit of science, lots of things that science is not yet able to measure, and lots of things that science does not yet understand. That includes many things that we take advantage of daily -- even before we start on the stuff which is ridiculed by people like you.
Name one thing.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
That includes many things that we take advantage of daily -- even before we start on the stuff which is ridiculed by people like you
[citation needed]
Are scientists representatives of God?
No, scientists are just people who back up their claims with evidence, collected and analyzed according to careful procedures. Representatives of deities are the people who demand that we believe their claims regardless of the available evidence, because we are supposed to place value on "faith."
Do they really know EVERYTHING?
Did someone claim that scientists know everything? Scientists conclude their publications with lists of unanswered questions, which is what motivates scientific investigations in the first place. Scientists are not claiming that treatments which have not been investigated do not work -- they are claiming that there is no way to know, until those treatments are investigated.
I think a better question is this: do you think that you know everything? If you do not demand evidence, then how do you determine what is or is not true (or which treatments are or are not effective)?
Palm trees and 8
I'd mod you up but I already commented. It's sad how so many otherwise interesting sites are infested with these self-appointed guardians of scientism such as the A.C. you replied to and the troll authority who "answered" you ... they seem to crawl out from under their rocks whenever a story like this comes up.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
There are lots of things that work without the benefit of science,
Er, not sure what that means. Things work or not because of the underlying physics of the universe. Science does not make things work or not.
Science explains things. It gives understanding. That may help devise other things that work by using the modelling powers of science.
lots of things that science is not yet able to measure,
Is there something specifically you have in mind?
and lots of things that science does not yet understand. That includes many things that we take advantage of daily --
Sure. Heck, science doesn't even understand gravity really.
even before we start on the stuff which is ridiculed by people like you.
And here we go. There's your leap. What things are these things that are taken advantage of on a daily basis and are ridiculed by the likes of me?
Do you really believe that Science explains everything? No
No scientist would every claim that - we'd be out of a job for a start. You're setting up a straw man.
Then why can't you accept that some real things may exist outside of the bounds of current scientific dogma.
You're angling to leap from "not everything is explained by science" to "my whacky theories of the world are true".
Just because science is not complete doesn't mean (e.g.) homeopathy works.
fundamentalists... fundamentalists... fundamentalists...
Inigo Montoya would like a word with you.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
the problem with your argument is the definition of "better".
if you're talking about something that can be objectively measured (i.e. "this patient has a temperature of N degrees, let's see if we can bring it down to N-1"), then it's all good. you test the sugar pill versus whatever treatment, and see which does better.
but if you're talking about reducing pain, then it gets complicated. objectively, you can see that a proposed treatment has the same result that a placebo does. does this mean that the treatment is worthless? well, if any fraction of people feel better after the "treatment", even though it's practically a placebo, then what is your argument against those people using the treatment?
don't worry, I know that the problem is with quacks lying about objectively measurable results.
but what do we do in the case of conditions where a "placebo" works very well for a significant fraction of people? shouldn't we fund some research into why the placebo works?
new sig
I started reading the title of this thread and though "please don't be the US".
After all, we have
- global climate change deniers
- anti-vaccination groups
- paleo diet followers
- raw foodism
- a museum that claims dinosaurs and cavemen lived together on the newly created 5 thousand year old Earth.
What a relief to know that the US is not the only developed country with a problem of people making up their own reality.
All Chinese people aren't idiotic (that's racist. You're racist.) but traditional Chinese medicine sure as hell is. It drives A LOT of the trade for products from the carcasses of endangered species. Tiger penis, rhino horn, and elephant tusk, off the top of my head, are some things that morons take when they should be taking Viagra.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Just because science has not discovered something does not mean it doesn't exist.
Every time I hear that argument, I respond with "Science hasn't proven that unicorns don't exist. But that doesn't offer ANY evidence that they DO."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
We owe way more to Hippocrates than we do to Ancient China, and Hippocrates believed that all illness was caused by an imbalance of the four biles, which is absolutely ludicrous and shares absolutely no notions with reality.
Everything today owes everything to the past. To say that the past is in any way better or more important than the present, however, is hugely ridiculous.
GFA/M/S d-- s: a--- C++++ UBL++$ P+ L+++ !E- W++ N+ !o K- w--- !O !M !V PS++ PE Y+ PGP+ t+++ 5- X+ R tv@ b++ DI++++ D+ G
There are lots of things that work without the benefit of science, lots of things that science is not yet able to measure, and lots of things that science does not yet understand. That includes many things that we take advantage of daily -- even before we start on the stuff which is ridiculed by people like you.
Name one thing.
Good troll response would be the miracle of Transubstantiation during daily mass, of course. That LOL funny. I'm betting we don't get anything this witty.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
the problem with your argument is the definition of "better".
I was simplifying for the OP who clearly didn't understand science.
but if you're talking about reducing pain, then it gets complicated.
Yes certainly.
objectively, you can see that a proposed treatment has the same result that a placebo does. does this mean that the treatment is worthless?
Well, ethics aside, placebos aren't worthless treatments. But alternative-medicine placebos aren't any better than regular placebos.
but what do we do in the case of conditions where a "placebo" works very well for a significant fraction of people? shouldn't we fund some research into why the placebo works?
Certainly. The placebo effect is amazing and well worthy of scientific research.
Homeopathy for instance isn't. The science is done and it has been shown to be a simple instance of the placebo effect.
Fun fact: the placebo effect works even if people know they are taking placebos!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I'm similarly confused. How does story relate to Bitcoins or people asking dumb questions that are resolved with 10 minutes with any decent search engine?
-- Using the preview button since 2005
some chiropractors now extended their manipulation of the spine to children, and claimed that this could cure asthma, allergies, bedwetting, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, colic, fever and numerous other problems, and could serve as a substitute for vaccination.
Some chiropractors have also broken people's necks. Do you really want them messing with your children's not-fully-formed spines?
No sig today...
much of it depends on the skills of the acupuncturist and what methods they use. If they just grab some random guy who has studied acupuncture for 1 year and knows from a book where to stick the pins, it's not going to be as effective as someone who has studied from masters for 20 years. Acupuncture basically is a science because they've used trial and error and test subjects for 1000s of years. If you do it right, they needles send an electrical signal to the brain, saying something is wrong. The brain then responds. You can almost think of it as a keyboard for the brain.
Human perception is never good enough for anything. Humans perceive things that are unreal all the time (see The Guardian's experiment on false memories that they recently ran as an example).
Anything that exists can be measured by a physical instrument. Not necessarily at the time that you deduce that it exists (particle physics frequently deduces the existence of particles long before direct observation becomes possible) but even then you can firmly establish the constraints on that physical instrument and thus prove that such an instrument must be buildable.
Unlike some, I am not a skeptic of "alternative medicine" merely because it is alternative. I accept entirely the premise that there may be alternative approaches to medicine that are superior to conventional Western medicines. If a witch-doctor could demonstrate repeatable cures for hangovers then I would want to know how any why, but I wouldn't deny evidence merely because of the label on the packet. However, I absolutely require that such approaches be shown with the same scientific rigour that I would expect of any other kind of medicine (or, indeed, any other kind of phenomenon). Equally, I am highly skeptical of Western medicine where that scientific rigour is absent or dubious. There can be only one standard and there can be no excuses made for any industry, be it mainstream or traditional.
(Equally, in surveys of scientists where a high percentage of fraud is claimed, no excuses can be made for scientists who commit fraud. Fraud is fraud, whether carried out by bankers, Harley Street doctors, scientists or the local shaman. I don't care who, I don't care why.)
My chief complaint for those who pick sides rather than pick standards is that they are not looking at the evidence, no matter what side they pick. Science isn't about "home team" vs. "the other guys", science is about methodology, rigour and standards of evidence. (For those who give a rat's arse, I apply that to all things. I don't like bands, I like songs. I don't like countries, I like factors. I don't like authors, I like stories. I don't give a damn about the source, I care about the results. The source doesn't enter into it. Ever.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
.. it might actually work.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Tim Minchin knocks this out of the park ... alternative medicine, by its definition, has either been not proven to work , or proven not to work. Alternative medicine that has been proven to work is called ... medicine..
Traditional Chinese medicine is metascience, it should properly be grouped with philosophy rather than medicine. Treat it as an enormous collection of hypotheses just waiting to be tested and you discover the true worth. Treat it as a final solution and you'll understand why there are so many quacks out there labeling things "herbal" or "folk" remedies to avoid being charged with outright fraud.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Didn't he tried alternative cancer treatment...
"Alternative medicine" that works is just called "medicine".
Lots of mainstream medical theory originated with folk remedies. Among the examples of alternative medicine that was studied and proven to have benefits are:
Willow bark tea (now called aspirin)
Exposure to Cow Pox to prevent Smallpox (origins of the vaccine)
Manual re-alignment of joints to aid in healing after an injury (now called physical therapy).
Now, the problem is that for every one remedy that works there are a bunch more that "only work if you believe" (placebo effect), or "work but can't be measured" (don't really work at all). Furthermore over time the ones that do work become accepted as legitimate medicine, so increasingly "alternative" medicines just the collection of crap that people believe because the guy who sold it to them had a "trustworthy face".
If a remedy actually works you can trivially prove it by conducting a double blind study (the control group will recover more slowly to a statistically significant degree than the experimental group). If your alternative medicine of choice can't live up to this than that means (with mathematical certainty) that any healing effects you feel are purely coincidental. Believing otherwise is roughly as intelligent as insisting that when your computer got a virus, and I performed a chant and reformatted the hard drive, it was the chant that got rid of the virus, and if you had believed a little more maybe you wouldn't have also lost all your files.
I say give the doctor a chance and arm him. A super-soaker with a single lead filing in the tank should turn that tiger into a red smear if he can wield it properly.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Consciousness.
"...then obviously the treatment doesn't work, does it?"
err... no. Perhaps the treatment wasn't amenable to setting up a blind test. (e.g. DMSO - can't do a blind test because any route of administration causes an intense garlic-like flavor perception by the subject that nothing else can match. Many of the attempts to create placebos are also faulty - the fake acupuncture needle may nevertheless stimulate in the same way as the real thing. Placebos vary wildly in their effects, and better placebos can be engineered. The relegation of all psychological effects to the outer darkness is a primary flaw of today's "double blind" dogma.
If medical science were I.T., they'd insist that only hardware was properly real, and that while software might arguably exist (at least machine code - not that woo-woo talk of OSes, let alone the other stuff) it should be regarded as a mere confounding factor to diagnosing proper problems which obviously means testing empirically verifiable things such as transistors and wires and voltages and stuff.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
The problem is that these alternative therapies are being practiced and taught without first being subjected to scientific evaluation -- it is anyone's guess as to whether or not these treatments are actually effective.
Chinese medicine has detailed models
although they are incompatible with western science which is why many are sceptical about them. But western medicine isn't that scientific either, it's still mostly an empirical field. The majority of modern medication was first found in plants by trial and error, not derived from predictions of a rational model.
These scientists are objecting to the teaching of treatments that have no evidence to support their use
A thousand years of folk knowledge is plenty of statistical evidence.
"Alternative medicine" is a catch-all phrase for pretty much anything that is not a pharmaceutical. There are plenty of things that are classified as alternative medicine that can be proven by science. The biggest problem in alternative medicine is that typically (always?) the treatment is inexpensive and not protected under patent. That means that no one will invest money to prove its efficacy because they are not the exclusive benefactors of the results.
In the US, the law says that anything that is used to cure, prevent, or ameliorate disease is by definition a drug. The only companies who invest the money to get FDA approval are ones that have a patent to control the return on the investment. That means that only drugs will solve medical problems. The pharmaceutical industry has a financial interest in perpetuating your perception that everything 'alternative' is junk. The companies that offer real measurable solutions to medical problems but lack control of the returns also lack the ability to widely promote their solution because 1) they have a ton of competition, and 2) they do not have FDA approval and therefore cannot advertise an actual solution (they also have to fight the perception that inexpensive solutions are worthless).
Disclaimer: I run an 'alternative medicine' company selling products with quantifiable results. I know something about what I am talking about.
Human perception is hard to standardize and thus to communicate reliably (oblig: http://xkcd.com/883/); that's why scientists often recur to mechanical instruments and even those are not always required ("the specimen is alive" and "the patients reported less pain" are good enough in certain applications).
Science is only about knowing as opposed to figuring or having an opinion. All of the scientific method tries to address the question: "can we be sure about it?"; that's its only "fundament". Everything else (blind and double-blind, sampling, error calculation, etc) are techniques to achieve that.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
I share the aversion to homeopathy and am ambivalent about Acupuncture. But let's not throw out everything just because it didn't come from an American drug manufacturer. A lot of conventional medicines started as "herbs" -- the most well known Western example probably being salicin in willow bark, which was known for its pain relief since at least the first century AD, and later became acetylsalicylic acid or Aspirin. Does anyone think Aspirin is a placebo? It came from an old home remedy of ground up bark in Greece around 400 AD (at latest -- perhaps a lot earlier)... Surely it's not actually helping your hangover?
Chinese "herbs" may contain active ingredients either singly or in certain combinations that the established medical community either hasn't discovered or acknowledged yet, or may not have figured out how to make gobs of money from, yet. Or maybe not. But I don't think it does us good as a species to disregard out of hand treatments simply because they've been done for a long time in another country by old guys who don't speak English.
One problem I think Westerners have with Chinese medicine is that the terminology and explanations for the medicine's effectiveness is alien to us. Talk about "chi" and "energy flow" and "hot and cold system" doesn't follow our paradigms. And maybe the explanation is complete fantasy -- an attempt by someone with no medical background to explain their observations. That doesn't necessarily mean that the phenomenon being observed did not happen.
Disclosure: I don't "believe in" Chinese medicine any more than I "believe in" Western medicine. I observe that the Dit Da Jow I rub on bruises has analgesic properties, and that's a good enough reason to use it, even if it doesn't have healing and restorative properties as advertised. I observe that every cholesterol lowering drug my Western doctor has tried has resulted in crippling muscle pain at the dosage she wants me to use, which prevents me from working out and reducing this gut that is probably the main cause of my high cholesterol. So I do not take it, preferring to exercise more and change my diet. (Which would be a very "Chinese medicine" approach.) (I've lost a significant amount of weight from exercise since stopping the statins, which I don't think I could have done otherwise.)
Try to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
There are lots of things that work without the benefit of science
Your phrasing says a lot about your mindset.
Nothing requires science to work. Rather, science tells us what works, and how well.
Science is not some magic battery that powers some things and not others. While some inventions and approaches may be the result of applying the scientific method, there is no power of some sort being drawn off some reservoir of science.
I know that this should be obvious to readers here, but precision in language about these things matters. See also "I believe in X" where X is a scientific theory - your belief doesn't matter. What matters are the observations and the logical chains that lead from those empirical premises. Belief has nothing to do with it.
Check your premises.
Chinese medicines, perhaps, Greek medicines, certainly. But Homeopathy? I don't think so, but my subscription to The Lancet expired sometime in the eighties. Can you give me an example of homeopathy as practiced by modern conventional western medicine?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
So how do you explain all the intelligent people using it?
Because intelligence is not by any means always adequate to overcome fear.
Check your premises.
Here's what's going on in alternative medicine in Australia. Unfortunately this article is behind a paywall, so I'll give you an excerpt. (It helps to understand that when you give a lung x-ray, you have a good chance of finding spots that nobody can really interpret, that usually turn out to be harmless.)
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1110812
What's the Alternative? The Worldwide Web of Integrative Medicine
Ranjana Srivastava, F.R.A.C.P.
Department of Medical Oncology, Monash Medical Centre, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
N Engl J Med 2012; 366:783-785 March 1, 2012
Out of curiosity, an impressionable woman in her 30s attends an integrative medicine exhibition; having recently had a child, she's been sleep-deprived and wants to investigate natural remedies. At the seminar, she wins a door prize — a blood test that promises to diagnose cancer. She was considering getting a blood test anyway and seizes this opportunity for a more comprehensive workup. After all, you can't be too careful about avoiding cancer.
Weeks later, she receives a call from an apologetic but alarmed stranger telling her she has advanced cancer.
“How do you know?” she gasps.
“Your blood test is positive for circulating tumor cells.”
“What does that mean?” she cries.
He sends her a three-page report and tells her to seek immediate help. She spends a nail-biting week awaiting an appointment with the recommended integrative health expert.
Glancing at the report, the expert declares, “You have advanced non–small-cell lung cancer. You need treatment now.” The woman is petrified: Has her teenage smoking habit come back to haunt her?
“Are you sure?” she asks.
“Absolutely. There are circulating tumor cells in your blood.”
Tears streaming down her face, the woman asks, “What now?”
The practitioner prescribes a 12-week course of intravenous vitamin C, at a cost of $6,000, paid up front. Without further discussion, an appointment is made.
[Gets a CT scan, which shows 2 2mm nodules. They could be lung cancer.]
The hunt for a rapid cure brings the woman to my office. Relating her story, she shifts between self-assurance and sheepishness. “I know you find this incredible, but I need your help. I am dying of cancer.”
“There's no evidence of cancer,” I reply, seeking to reassure her.
Instead, her tone sharpens: “But I have circulating tumor cells! How can you say that?”
Incredulous, I try to explain too many things. The blood test is a long way from being validated for clinical use. It was unscrupulous even to offer it. Does it make sense to her that it was sent to an unheard-of overseas laboratory for processing? Why did no one recommend that she see an oncologist?
[Demands a PET scan. PET scan clear, the 2 nodules on the CT have disappeared. Probably transient foci of inflammation. Srivastava tells her, "There is no cancer." Woman still insists she has lung cancer. Demands to see a surgeon. Surgeon refuses to see her.]
"So I use scientific principles in a domain that science rejects."
i don't think you should have said that, its at odds with being a "trained scientist". Can you prove what you perceive in order to humiliate the real scientists? The world is waiting for "proofs" from the homeopathic "scientists".
That Mitchell and Webb Look: Homeopathic A&E http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0 is well worth a viewing
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Chinese medicine has detailed models
A thousand years of folk knowledge is plenty of statistical evidence.
So the Earth is flat? Dead people may reappear as ghosts? Ritualistically sacrificing an animal will result in a good harvest?
The fact that people believe things work does not mean that they work. Herbal medicines probably do work sometimes, but we need to investigate these matters to determine when herbal medicines work, when they do not work, and what they actually do. Leeches were subjected to scientific testing, and it turns out that sometimes leeches are the right approach to a medical problem -- but not nearly for the number of conditions leeches were once used for.
Here's my question for you: do you believe things just because everyone else believes those things? If not, how do you determine what is or is not true? What role, if any, does evidence play in your evaluation of truth?
Palm trees and 8
The saddest example I see of pseudoscience is in the birth communities, medical technology has taken us out of the tragic "good old days" when 1 in 10 babies and 1 in 100 mothers didn't survive a birth. But suddenly everyone thinks it's a great idea to run away from hospitals and doctors and use untrained homebirth attendants, even for high risk pregnancy. In Australia death rates are four times higher for homebirth babies.
Having recently been pregnant and seen the "trust NATURE" mantras thrown at me again and again in online communities, I'm so afraid of who else is being mislead. But the consequences are unimaginable.
spacefem.com
I'd like to hear more about this "science-based" medicine. It seems like a great concept. Unfortunately, the only resemblance conventional medicine has with science is that doctors experiment with various drugs to see if some random combination might have a positive effect.
How many commercials have you seen lately where the voice-over says, "We think this drug works by..."?
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Well - how do you explain the fact that there are a vast number of intelligent people who follow a religion, as well as a vast number of intelligent people who do not believe in a religion? I'm really not saying anything about religion, I'm just saying that your argument is very, very flawed. I will apologize, though for using "alternative medicine" as a catch-all when I was really referring specifically to homeopathy. If you set up a double blind study on a specific ailment and treat one group with a placebo, one group with a homeopathic remedy, and one with modern medicine (assuming modern medicine has a treatment for the specific ailment), then you will find that the homeopathic remedy is equally as effective as a placebo. If you can show me a peer-reviewed study that shows a homeopathic remedy which is more effective than a placebo, then I (and I would imagine a large number of other folks on /.) would accept your argument. I'm not trying to be mean here, I just don't believe that you are making sound arguments, and you're not really addressing my argument directly, either.
So the best you can say about it is that it uses a low proportion of endangered species product while wasting people's time, money and health with bullshit.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I wish I had mod points for this and your other posts. Well put.
wot no sig
Well, the problem is that you've conflated good science with bad science there.
Good science - look for the falsifiable hypothesis.
Things that don't have a falsifiable hypothesis:
-raw foodism
-dinosaurs and cavemen living together
-anti-vaccination groups
-global warming alarmists
Things that do have a falsifiable hypothesis:
-paleo diet (or more specifically, the carbohydrate hypothesis of disease)
If you want to be scientific, you need to have a both necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis, and then ruthlessly attempt to falsify it. When you fail, despite your best efforts, you're probably on the right track.
One big item is gravity. No one really understands how that works; we only know that it seems to be correlated to mass. Why exactly having a bunch of matter in one place (e.g. a planet or star) creates a gravitational field, no one knows. If we knew that, we'd probably be able to figure out how to manipulate gravity (by means other than simply collecting mass and moving it around) and do some really interesting things, such as create anti-gravity devices, or perhaps even exceed lightspeed travel.
Now, don't take this to mean that if some yahoos come along saying "give us a bunch of money and we'll use these magic crystals to modulate gravity waves and make you feel better", that you should believe them.
...and see *if* they work.
In terms of medical science, that means double-blind placebo controlled studies.
Sadly, our tests of these pseudo-scientific medical practices has shown them to come up short:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/04/sham_acupuncture_is_better_than_true_acu.php
OK. Fair enough. I can totally accept that. If my premise is incorrect, and alternative medicine is not meant to improve an objective, measurable, scientifically-derived notion of the health of a human being, but instead is meant to improve a subjective, philosophical, personal characteristic such as "wealth," then it is not science. The whole point of this article is that these universities are providing science degrees for these subjects. If they were philosophy or anthropology then there would most likely not be a discussion like this. I think your argument really reinforces the point of the article.
As if there's no waste and harm in Western medicine. Western health practitioners tend overtreat their patients with more invasive techniques like prescription drugs and surgery, with their side effects and "complications". Acupuncture and herbs can be medically active and effective. Why not apply the scientific method to understanding how these less invasive treatments work instead of demonizing them because they are "traditional"?
Human perception is never good enough for anything. Humans perceive things that are unreal all the time (see The Guardian's experiment on false memories that they recently ran as an example).
I don't want to argue because you're taking a reasoned stance rather than a fundamentalist stance. But just to point out that human perception is all that we've got. It is our only direct input, despite its flaws. Everything else is second- or third-hand. To me it is valuable to understand the only direct input feed we have from the world, and to put it above second-hand sources such as other people's opinions, or constructions such as 'objective reality' (which is something we construct in our imaginations through accumulated impressions and consensus, not something we perceive directly).
Anything that exists can be measured by a physical instrument. Not necessarily at the time that you deduce that it exists (particle physics frequently deduces the existence of particles long before direct observation becomes possible) but even then you can firmly establish the constraints on that physical instrument and thus prove that such an instrument must be buildable.
This seems circular. You are defining 'exists' as something that is measurable by a physical instrument. To me the only thing that exists is my direct perception, and everything else is secondary, for example it is derived from perception through reason and model-fitting in my imagination.
Unlike some, I am not a skeptic of "alternative medicine" merely because it is alternative. I accept entirely the premise that there may be alternative approaches to medicine that are superior to conventional Western medicines. If a witch-doctor could demonstrate repeatable cures for hangovers then I would want to know how any why, but I wouldn't deny evidence merely because of the label on the packet. However, I absolutely require that such approaches be shown with the same scientific rigour that I would expect of any other kind of medicine (or, indeed, any other kind of phenomenon). Equally, I am highly skeptical of Western medicine where that scientific rigour is absent or dubious. There can be only one standard and there can be no excuses made for any industry, be it mainstream or traditional.
I know a witch-doctor (well, several), and I think his cure for one person's hangover would probably be different to his cure for another person's, depending on the case. For your study, you'd want all the treatments to be the same, right? I don't think it's going to happen, not when it is so personal. So I guess we're not going to get the straightforward proof you're looking for. But whose fault is that? If you require very strong independent standards of objective proof, you're excluding all treatments which might work but are difficult to study or analyse.
Anyway, it was a pleasure to discuss this with a non-hostile person.
It's worth noting that the handful of homeopathy practitioners that I've met over the years have a holistic approach to their medicine. I'll try to provide an example :
Western Doctor visit : You sit in the waiting room for an hour before being taken back to a room. They spend 2 minutes to weigh, measure, and get your vitals. Doc walks in and you complain of headaches. He nods, looks you over, and prescribes Tylenol 3 and ushers you to the payment processor.
Homeopathy practitioner visit : You sit in the deserted waiting room for 5 minutes before going back to a room. The practitioner comes in and gets your measurements/vitals and asks you what's wrong. You say you're having headaches. They ask more questions about activity cycle, diet, stressors, and your social situation. They prescribe you a placebo, tell you to quit playing League of Legends until 2am, and get another 2 hours of exercise per week.
There are positives to the methodology that contribute to the observed successes in those that believe.....but the actual treatments are not one of them.
"Placebos don't kill cancerous tumors..."
Baseless assertion. Psychological factors have a huge role in physical illness, from conscious and subconsciously determined patterns of physical actions and lifestyle, autonomic nerve and hormonal signals to the immune system. Placebos affect the disease indirectly, via psychology, but the results are also physical and sometimes profound. You may not be able to heal a broken leg with it, but you could possibly reduce the swelling, and potentially do many other biochemical tricks, including some that look unreasonably complicated and difficult from the outside.
There are many case studies of spontaneous remission of tumors, and they often aren't explainable by the official treatment - that's why they get called "spontaneous." The patient will typically tell the doctor that it was because of prayer or fruit juice or vitamins or laetrille or some other weird thing, and the doctor will be briefly puzzled/annoyed in the few seconds before he is distracted by something else. In the rare event the case is published, the patient's explanation will of course never appear. These are probably mostly instances of successful placebos.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
There are lots of things that work without the benefit of science
Name five.
lots of things that science is not yet able to measure,
Do you mean "measure" or do you mean "quantify"? Because measurement is not as important in science as many non-scientists believe. It is important, yes, but not so important that you couldn't do science without.
lots of things that science does not yet understand
Depending on your definition of "understand". Do you mean entirely, completely, know-everything-about? Then yes, pretty much everything falls into that category. But on almost everything that scientists have ever bothered to have a few looks at, we have at least a general idea of how it works. And - that is the important part - we are continually improving them.
Science basically works like this: Imagine the fact, law of nature or whatever you have is a number between 1 and 99. Instead of writing a book about how god made the number 42 special and everyone who says otherwise needs to die, scientists will figure out an experiment that tells them if the number is less or greater than 50. It takes ten years to build. They still don't know very much, but now they have a better idea than anyone else. Turns out it is less than 50, so the religious fanatics who wanted to kill all the scientists when they started the experiment may be right. Of course they now celebrate their "victory".
The scientists continue to work, and manage to come up with an experiment that can tell them that the number is +/- 10 of any number they choose to test. It is horribly expensive, so they only get funding to run it three times. Since they know it's But they are getting a pretty good idea.
So yes, we have many fields where we still don't know what the number is. But in almost all of them, we are much closer to it than guesswork, and on many, we already know the first 20 decimal places and are trying to figure out the 21st and 22nd.
Then why can't you accept that some real things may exist outside of the bounds of current scientific dogma.
Name five.
Do they really know EVERYTHING?
You don't seem to have any issues using a computer connected to a global network, neither of which has come into existence through homeopathy, praying or interpreting ancient mystical texts.
So here is the $1 mio. question for you:
If you trust scientists enough to put your life into their hands every time you take a plane - because, just in case you didn't know, planes don't fly because of acupuncture or Genesis - then what is your criterion for picking the areas of your life where you trust science, and where you doubt science?
Based on what wisdom and higher understanding do you decide which things fall into the bounds of science and which ones don't?
And, the $10 mio. bonus question: What does it take to convince you that you are wrong?
fundamentalists scientists
You really want to look up "fundamentalist".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
>I find it amusing and depressing that modern medical science has fallen so far. Everything that is known by modern medicine owes its beginnings in ancient medical practices such as Chinese medicine and homeopathy.
Far from having "fallen so far," modern medicine has come a long way since its roots. Polio killed people when I was a child, and I challenge you to find a homeopathic polio vaccine.
>A perfect example of this is aspirin. Hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago, the medical minds of the day would give their patients tea brewed from willow bark to ease their pain. Where is aspirin found in nature? Willow bark.
You seem to be confusing herbal medicine with homeopathy. I have a degree in botany and actually have studied and used herbal medicine (more as a hobby than anything.) Yes, willow bark, Salix sp. contains salicin, which is similar to acetylsalicylic acid. The concentration in the willow bark varies widely from species to species, and willows are relatively difficult to key out. In species with enough active ingredient to be effective, the concentration can vary from 0.01% to over 10% depending on time of year, growing location and other factors. That's a 100-fold difference in concentration of the active ingredient making it fairly difficult to make sure you get an effective dose and don't O.D. Personally, I find it easier and safer to take two 500 mg. tablets. Also, you don't want to give willow bark tea to a child, because of Reyes Syndrome, and I have yet to find the Tylenol Bush.
>Natural cures and remedies are available for most ailments,
No, they aren't. There are no natural remedies for polio, smallpox, yellow fever, scarlet fever, TB, Ebola, rabies, cholera, and a whole long list of others.
>but modern medicine has dismissed the natural treatments in favor of synthetic solutions.
That's because they work better. There is a treatment for breast cancer derived from the bark of the Pacific yew tree, Taxus brevifolia. If your wife, daughter, or sister has breast cancer, you really want them taking the commercial drug under the supervision of a good oncologist, rather than sucking on yew bark. Also, before a synthetic version was developed, the tree was damn near wiped out from people stripping the bark to sell.
>These same synthetic solutions have lead to the rise of super-germs and man-made diseases Mother Nature would have nightmares about.
"Super germs" have come about through the overuse of antibiotics, an entirely different issue.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
There are thousands of years of observation behind Chinese herbal medicine. There is a plausible mechanism of action.
That makes it, not "pseudoscience", but protoscience. To the best of my knowledge, Chinese doctors hadn't discovered double-blind statistically valid clinical trials. That makes their observations subject to improved scrutiny, but not necessarily wrong.
Pre-scientific medicine made some valid discoveries. Indian doctors had figured out that you should boil water before drinking it, and locate the privy downhill from the well. The Chinese figured out that motion was a necessity for health before we discovered anything about lymph circulation. The Greeks knew that being fat was bad for you.
Nor is Western medicine necessarily scientific. The "evidence-based medicine" movement is constantly finding that standard treatments are not justified scientifically.
The sound argument to be made here is that a university should be testing Chinese herbal medicine rather than teaching it.
I'd suggest you start here:
http://www.wright.edu/cola/descartes/mede.html
Check your premises.
but the stuff I use daily is proven beyond doubt in my world-view through careful observation of cause and effect. The only thing missing is a physical instrument to measure the results -- but why should I wait until one is invented when I have direct perception providing observations to work with.
I'd be interested in some examples of things that you feel are unmeasurable but still proven to work.
(repost because stupid /. editor swallowed two sentences because it thinks the "smaller than" symbol starts an HTML tag)
There are lots of things that work without the benefit of science
Name five.
lots of things that science is not yet able to measure,
Do you mean "measure" or do you mean "quantify"? Because measurement is not as important in science as many non-scientists believe. It is important, yes, but not so important that you couldn't do science without.
lots of things that science does not yet understand
Depending on your definition of "understand". Do you mean entirely, completely, know-everything-about? Then yes, pretty much everything falls into that category. But on almost everything that scientists have ever bothered to have a few looks at, we have at least a general idea of how it works. And - that is the important part - we are continually improving them.
Science basically works like this: Imagine the fact, law of nature or whatever you have is a number between 1 and 99. Instead of writing a book about how god made the number 42 special and everyone who says otherwise needs to die, scientists will figure out an experiment that tells them if the number is less or greater than 50. It takes ten years to build. They still don't know very much, but now they have a better idea than anyone else. Turns out it is less than 50, so the religious fanatics who wanted to kill all the scientists when they started the experiment may be right. Of course they now celebrate their "victory".
The scientists continue to work, and manage to come up with an experiment that can tell them that the number is +/- 10 of any number they choose to test. It is horribly expensive, so they only get funding to run it three times. Since they know it's less than 50, the run the 2nd test on the numbers 20, 30 and 40. This gives you the greatest confidence (if they all fail, you know it's less than 10, the first succeeds, but the second fails, it must be between 10 and 20, etc.)
After these experiments, they still don't know what the number is. But they are getting a pretty good idea.
So yes, we have many fields where we still don't know what the number is. But in almost all of them, we are much closer to it than guesswork, and on many, we already know the first 20 decimal places and are trying to figure out the 21st and 22nd.
Then why can't you accept that some real things may exist outside of the bounds of current scientific dogma.
Name five.
Do they really know EVERYTHING?
You don't seem to have any issues using a computer connected to a global network, neither of which has come into existence through homeopathy, praying or interpreting ancient mystical texts.
So here is the $1 mio. question for you:
If you trust scientists enough to put your life into their hands every time you take a plane - because, just in case you didn't know, planes don't fly because of acupuncture or Genesis - then what is your criterion for picking the areas of your life where you trust science, and where you doubt science?
Based on what wisdom and higher understanding do you decide which things fall into the bounds of science and which ones don't?
And, the $10 mio. bonus question: What does it take to convince you that you are wrong?
fundamentalists scientists
You really want to look up "fundamentalist".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Interesting comment on the article:
would require identical subjects, no? Google: acupuncture nitric oxide and surf around for a while.
I agree with
> some of which might be correct and some of which might be nonsense
and that certainly applies to some of western medicine including all of SSRIs. There's something happening, over the last thousands of years, that hasn't been quantified by western medicine.
And "good" western DRs alter their thinking every couple of years as they should. We don't understand systems biology and are only starting to investigate. Dismissing acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine is the mark of ideologues and amateurs.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
What has Pseudoscience given us? Asprin as Willow Bark Tea. Hypnosis as pain management.
What has modern medicine and science given us? Plenty, but demonizing others and blaming your 40% mortality rate on others doesn't help gain you any respect.
There's definitely something to this. One of the problems with healthcare right now is that we don't have the technology to make scientific instruments to tell if many treatments actually work or not; you're usually relying on the patient to tell you if it helps or not, and that's mostly worthless in my opinion if you're looking for objective proof. People are terrible at providing accurate observational data. Just look at what happens when witnesses see a crime; you'll have a different story from every witness, and the video camera that captured it will show them to all be wrong.
So some medical things are easy to see if treatments work or not: does the tumor shrink or go away, or get bigger? It's pretty hard to not be able to measure that. Does the patient die or not? Again, easy to measure. But what if you're trying to treat something that isn't measurable with present-day technology? One big example is pain. How do you measure that? Simple: you don't. It's impossible (with today's technology). We don't have a Starfleet Tricorder to measure pain in patients, we can only ask them what they're feeling. They might be feeling real pain, or it might all be in their heads. Amputees feel pain and other sensations from their missing limbs; the phenomenon is called "phantom limb". Is the pain real? Well, it's real to them, but it's obviously not coming from their missing foot. So where is it coming from? And how do you eliminate it? And how do you tell if it's been eliminated or not, or if the patient is creating the pain completely in their mind? We don't have the technology yet. Another one is fatigue: lots of people suffer from fatigue-based illnesses like lupus and others, which are generally lumped into the catch-all term "chronic fatigue syndrome". How do you measure if someone is genuinely fatigued and unable to function normally, or if they're making it up, or just lazy, or whatever? Simple: you don't. We don't have the technology. Another one is migraine headaches. There are expensive drugs for them, but again you're just going off of what patients tell you. There's no tricorder you can use to measure someone's headache, and say "oh, it looks like this guy is having a scale 9 migraine today. Let's try this treatment and see if that reduces it to a 5."
I think a lot of alternative medicine is for people who regular medicine hasn't done much about helping, either because the remedies aren't highly profitable or patentable and thus can't be made into an expensive pharmaceutical, or because regular medicine just doesn't know what to do about it. So people turn to this alternative stuff because, quite simply, they're desperate, and their regular doctors are ignoring them or throwing their hands up. A lot of people with fatigue problems can probably be treated by dietary changes; this happened with my wife, who turned into a new person when she cut wheat gluten out of her diet. But regular medicine (at least in the USA) doesn't deal with diet much at all; in their mind, food loaded with trans fats and pure glucose is just as good as any other (because calories are all the same, right?), and food allergies and sensitivities are rarely if ever investigated. Of course, the fundamentalists will just tell you "it's all in your head", as if that's somehow supposed to help you when you really are suffering.
>> There are lots of things that work without the benefit of science...
Meaning, there are lots of things whose function we don't have a very clear understanding of. That's fine, as far as it goes. Even a bird can fly without taking a class in aerodynamics.
What a bird cannot do is fly in a vacuum. We know why. We know why because it has been experimentally tested and verified using scientific method.
This is the situation with homeopathy. It doesn't do anything more than we can do with tap water and a pseudo-shamanistic floor show. We know why. We know why because the various claims that have been made for it have been disproved by both tests specific to homeopathy research, and utterly unrelated tests which happen to overlap whatever hand waving homeopaths have thought up.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Seconded. Wish I had mod points.
How is this any different than politicians in the US pushing "Creationism" in US schools?
The reverse is also true. My son does not respond to traditional pain relief remedies; aspirin, ibuprofen, acetaminophen. None of them work on him. A while back he started getting these intense abdominal pains. For two weeks he was essentially bed-ridden. We tried everything we could think of. He saw several doctors and had multiple scans and tests run. Nothing told us what was wrong or alleviated the pain. We then tried an acupuncturist. Before the session was over, his pain was completely removed. Now you could say it was coincidence, and maybe it was. A few months later, the pain reoccurred and within a couple days we took him back to the acupuncturist and again, his pain went away instantly. I believe if there are scientific paths to treat illness, you should take them. In general, I doubt many homeopathic claims, but if something works for you and it's not endangering or it can avoid negative side effects of traditional methods, how can you deny that?
I'm really a low 5-digit Slashdotter, but this ID is where I am now.
That said homeopathic and such therapies have been used to effective in managing the health of communities for a long time. It is possible that such therapy may be useful in managing the health needs in the future. The fact is not science based is not an issue in medicine, because medicine is not really science based. The science in medicine is use primarily to protect doctors from the harm they cause. Since homeopathy and such therapies cause no harm, there is no need for the protection of science
Let's look at psychology which until the 1970's classified being gay as a illness and now revels in filling children bodies with poison. Gay as illness is a religious characterization, and never had any basis in science. The science that was done, and the classification in the DSM was to protect the doctors who wished to damage humans to fulfill a religious quest, not an effort to heal humans. Likewise, the scandals of the fake research and ghost written papers has shown that science has nothing to do with current crop of psychographics. Zyloft has had dozens of ghost written papers advocating Zyloft. A researcher that is not willing to put his or her name to a paper, or writes paper for money, has a huge credibility problem. The fact that a third of the paper for Zyloft are not traditional research is troublesome.
Likewise Vioxx., which kills patients, is not based on proper traditional science, but on paid research by the drug companies. The fake science protects the doctors who prescribed the medicine, and protect Merck from taking full responsibility for those deaths. Again, traditional medicine does not get any of those protections.
In more 'hard medicine' look at heart therapies There were few studies on women in term of cardiovascular health until the end of the twentieth century. Up until that time the focus was on men, and women were considered to be essentially the same. Not completely true. The pseudo research that so characterizes the medicine as the adopted blackshep of the genuine research community was based on what the power wanted to believe is true, rather than what observations indicated to be true.
This debate is mostly about the pharmaceuticals trying to enforce the monopoly of drugs as the primary method to manage human health. Most people who are using traditional methods are just reacting to the real message that 'drugs are bad' and it may be useful for look for other methods, even the effect of those methods cannot be quantified. It is of great benefit to the pharmaceutical companies to put a child on ridlin and guarantee a customer until death does them part, but is it beneficial to the child? And this is not a think of the kids moment. Adults are being injured every day because of the beliefs that drugs are good. Just remember when everyone was taking Pseudoephedrine for even mild symptoms of cough and cold. The amount of damage done is incalculable.
If someone wants to take about the best way to take care of patients, this is a good conversation If someone simply wants to defend prescription drugs as savior of humankind, while there is truth in it we do not need to bow down before the gods of the pharmco. If we want to talk about the decline of the university, I think it would behoove us to analyze how the pharmcos have contributed to that decline in research integrity.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Hogwash, poppycock and santorum!
Stick Men
Good God no, where did you get that idea? BPA has all kinds of interesting effects on the body, depending on the level of exposure. As the exposure level goes down, it may be that hormonal signaling is the only symptom left to arise, and that exposure below that required to cause hormonal signaling is totally asymptomatic.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Homeopathic economics...LOL
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Mine's great, thanks for asking.
Not everything that's unknown is worthy of study. There are so many things that we don't know that we can't possibly study all of them.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Well, science isn't good at giving emotionally satisfying answers to "why" questions. A few generations ago, it was expected that it would be. Modern science is great at predictive models (for the most part), but the promise of explaining the universe in terms of a few simple "first principles" remains elusive.
And people want elegant answers! That's what motivates a lot of people to study science in the first place, after all.
Plus as we've come to understand complexity and chaos, we now know that even if we had some simple first principles, they'd only explain good engineering practice in some philosophically distant way. Understanding the physics of the interaction of individual gas molecules was useful in going beyond the basic gas laws of a century ago, but a good theory of quantum gravity would add very little to the design of a refinery. (It makes me sad to realize that.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Some chiropractors have also broken people's necks. Do you really want them messing with your children's not-fully-formed spines?
I'm glad I'm reading this now, and not back when I was in 2nd grade when I slipped a disc in my neck. I was in horrible pain for the latter half of the day and couldn't sleep, so my mom took me to a chiropractor who reopened his office to see me. He did an adjustment to my neck and the relief was instant, though not complete until some days later when my muscles stopped spazzing out. Admittedly, that was scary.
In this case, it was a win, but I can imagine someone not really knowing what they're doing having paralyzed me.
I think chiropractic has it's place, it's like massage for the bones, but it's certainly no substitute for vaccinations and other medical treatments. If, in the strange event your bones are actually out of alignment, as mine were, fine; beyond that though, it starts sounding quackish.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Really expand your mind by being willing to admit that some of your cherished beliefs may actually be crap and may have no more validity than the beliefs of others whom you characterize as foolish
Which cherished belief do you refer to? The belief that chiropracty is bunk? Or the belief that the scientific method is the only way to determine objective reality?
The first one is easy to admit. Chiropracty may in fact not be crap. Go get some data and let's talk.
The second one is a lot harder. How else do you propose that one determine between truth and falsehood besides testing?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I think you're missing a piece - the measurement of the health of a human is well within the realm of human perception and instrumentation. The goals of standard medicine and alternative medicine are the same: improve the health of a human. If standard medicine works and alternative medicine doesn't, well, you should be able to figure the rest out from there.
Seems reasonable. I'm completely open to testing the healing power of prayer. Double-blind study, various religions, an assortment of deities. We don't even have to propose a mechanism of action: you either get a result or you don't. If we can prove prayer helps patients, then we can ask whether it's a) some paranormal stuff humans can innately do and there's no god involved b) an intercession with a higher power and c) what sort of mechanism is actually interacting with the body to achieve healing.
But these studies have been done over and over and prayer doesn't work beyond a placebo effect. Certainly there is a mind-body connection that can be utilized in medicine, i.e. helping the patient help himself, but there's no evidence of prayer or faith-healing working.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
In general, there's nothing wrong with the concept of eating as our pre-agricultural fore-bearers did. What's open to question is whether it's the best way, which is the claim at issue. Hunter-gatherer societies don't have to live to be 100, they just have to live and be healthy long enough to reproduce, get their children to reproductive age, and plug them into their culture. That left a lot of slack in the system as to what kind of diet would work. Some worked just fine. Many pre-contact indigenous Australians could expect to live to 70, baring accidents or warfare.
Luke, help me take this mask off
So people wonder why there is the preponderance of people studying the likes of Homeopathy, Chinese Herbal Medicine, Accupuncture, Chiropractic Studies... But I don't think it's a mystery. It's really an extension of the primal "need" of societies to have shaman and oracles, and for people to aspire to be in those positions in society.
Staying alive is hard, staying healthly is even harder. There's no textbook that can tell you how to do those things. Sure, there are lots of theories and scientific practice that goes around, but of course none of it is 100% appplicable to your situation. So you seek out advice and treatments, from... and this is where it gets interesting.
Of course "western" medicine and science has conquered quite a bit of the big-ticket stuff that has ailed the human race, but you have to look under the hood a bit to see exactly how this has been done. Sure there's some anatomy and bio-chem going on, but to a large extent modern medicine has been just about refining protocols. The stereotypical protocol is something like this: if you have these symptoms, and I make this diagnosis, do this treatment (often a dose of a chemical) for this amount of time. How was the treatment found? Usually at first purely by trial and error (in fact many therapies are initially "off-label" drug use), and later by refinement using differential testing... That sounds very scientific, but the catch is, how was the diagnosis done? That's a big part of the protocol and then you start to realize that most of western medicine is really just probablisitic. If you have these poorly defined symptoms, you probably have this diagnosis and this treatment probably helps, but if it doesn't, this treatment probably helps, etc, etc.... You can't do a clinical trial on yourself, and not everyone is the same... In this light pseudo-science is just a different set of probablities, coupled with a strong history and the equally strong placebo effect (w/o the scientific backing). It's just like "western" GP dispensing anti-biotics for a cold (but probably less harmful)... If medicine was practiced by science instead of protocol, by they time the virus or bacteria was cultured and analysed, you'd be over it and on to your next ailment...
But that doesn't answer why do these alternative medical practioners exist at all? I personally believe it's a combination of two things: a certain segment of the population aspires to be the folk who are consulted for advice and the opportunity to "buy oneself" into a status profession like a medical profession. But what if you aspire to be "consulted", but don't have the money or the academic background to get into medicine? That's right, you get yourself into pseudo-medicine. It's almost the same status and you get to fulfil your need to be the authority consulted for advice on being healthy.
But why do the patients come to them (and the TV talk shows interview them)? It's because they tell the patients what they want to hear (as opposed to many "western" doctors which apparently aren't trained to listen very well and as a group tend to treat small ailments in binary fashion as either "in-your-head" or "we-have-to-order-lots-of-invasive-tests-to-make-a-diagnosis"). You can call it holistic medicine or whatever you want, but often folks are just seeking the small advice about staying healthy and loathe the binary decision tree protocol. If standard "western" medicine would do a better job at offering advice, these types of alternative medicine practices wouldn't be as successful as they are.
And for the the people wanting to give advice? They'd have to seek out some other status profession... Maybe pseudo-techno-geek? ;^)
Wow, so confident that alternative medicine doesn't work. So how do you explain all the intelligent people using it?
Fads.
until a scientist can get in your head with you and see your perceptions, science will never move forward into this domain.
Why do you think it's necessary for a scientist to "get into your head"? If you're making a claim that X treatment has an effect on outcome, all you have to do is measure the outcome.
If all you're claiming is that alternative medicine can change your perception of the disease process, then I don't think you'll find many who would object to that. If you claim that alternative medicine can change the outcome of the disease process, that can be studied in scientific terms.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
In the US, the law says that anything that is used to cure, prevent, or ameliorate disease is by definition a drug.
I guess it's good to know that (insert random surgical procedure here) is a drug. No, sorry, you don't know what you're talking about, you have no clue.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
So how do you explain all the intelligent people using it?
[citation needed]
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Totally fair point. But I still believe that providing a science degree in acupuncture is misleading. A biologist studying why acupuncture worked so well with your son using scientific methods is certainly science. But the practice of acupuncture itself is not scientific; as far as I know (and I may not have the most up-to-date information, so please excuse me if that is the case), there are no known mechanisms which can explain how or why acupuncture works, and indeed, again to the best of my knowledge, when double blind studies are performed comparing acupuncture to standard western medicine there is no statistically significant correlation between the application of acupuncture and positive effects beyond those of a placebo. That being said, acupuncture is the only thing that, at least temporarily, alleviated some joint pain my mother was experiencing. But anecdotal evidence is not scientific evidence. It's because of these reasons that people are up in arms about acupuncture degrees being classified as science degrees.
Vioxx has side effects, but then, hey, quite a few chemotherapy drugs have even worse side effects. The brouhaha about Vioxx was that it was overprescribed. IMHO it should have never been taken off the market. There are quite a few patients for whom the potential side effects are acceptable, given their quality-of-life improvements. IOW: they gladly trade off risk of death for better life before death. I think this decision should be ultimately left to the patients -- for some of them there are no alternatives to Vioxx. And I have nothing to do with pharma anything.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
many current sciences do much of their work without them (psychology, anthropology, social sciences, to name just a few).
Ekhm, I think mathematicians would like to have a word with you. Computer scientists, too. They don't need any instruments for measurement, all you essentially need is a comfy chair and paper and pencil. Instruments come not for measurements, but for reducing the tedium.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Good morning, Mr. Patient! Please rate your pain today on a scale of 1 to 10...
You simply do that for a population of patients who get the test therapy and a population that gets a placebo. There's this magic stuff called statistics that lets you tease out how likely any difference between the populations is a result of chance. When it's more than 95% likely it is NOT the result of chance, we get interested.
Yeah, why not, but here's the thing. In order to start using a treatment, we generally insist on proving it works at least as well as the stuff we already have. If you propose people eat orange peels to cure cancer, it would play out like this: Group A eat orange peels. Group B gets chemo and radiation. Group A's average survival time is dramatically lower, and your proposed treatment is quickly binned. Apply to your placebo argument. You have some therapy. I have a sugar pill. They cost about a penny each. Your therapy involves paying some quack to give you water at a high price. Both our treatments work at about the same rate (which is to say not at all--they are placebos). Which should we use? The cheap one. Duh.
We should not encourage the use of expensive therapies that don't work any better than a placebo because they are essentially scams designed to separate the desperate from their cash. This is a bad thing. Don't do it.
until a scientist can get in your head with you and see your perceptions, science will never move forward into this domain.
Why do you think it's necessary for a scientist to "get into your head"? If you're making a claim that X treatment has an effect on outcome, all you have to do is measure the outcome.
If all you're claiming is that alternative medicine can change your perception of the disease process, then I don't think you'll find many who would object to that. If you claim that alternative medicine can change the outcome of the disease process, that can be studied in scientific terms.
We cannot clone a person in an instant to let the two outcomes unfold, both with and without treatment. If an alternative treatment corrects a problem before it becomes measurable with current instruments there will be nothing for science to measure -- so no scientific proof available. Statistics can't be used when we can't measure the initial condition either. Then the only option is to get into the practicioner's head and figure out what he/she considers that he/she is manipulating and measure that. Science cannot yet get into someone's head. So unfortunately science is not yet able to help us determine whether or not the given treatment is valid or not, as it does not yet have the tools. The only forms of proof available are through personal observation with personal perceptions. This has been more than enough proof for many historic cultures, e.g. Chinese, Tibetan, Indian, etc, but it is not considered enough for Science. So all Science can reasonably say is "I can't answer this question because the required measurements cannot yet be performed".
Not arguing either way, but how how about using exercise to treat depression? - link here
It works (see here) but is viewed as an "alternative therapy".
If I was to walk into a doctor, get told "you have clinical depression", and the medicine was "go out for a bike or run every day" I would personally be quite happy - but it would be very unconventional given how many people I know on antidepressants.
They use tools, yes. Heck, you could argue that a pen is an "instrument".
The GP argument was that instruments are fundamental and that science is limited because there's things we don't have physical instruments for.
Of course we use instruments. But "uses an instrument" isn't a very good definition of what science is.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You are very wrong, the goals of standard and alternative medicine are completely different.
Standard medicine is there to improve the health of man kind
Alternative medicine is there to improve the wealth of man;
I have to assume you're not referring to the pharmaceutical industry in your description of "standard medicine" (maybe it often falls into the "alternative medicine" category). I think there is plenty of evidence that,
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
It's actually even worse than that. As illustrated by the Red Yeast Rice discovery, the FDA will even effectively ban natural, healthful products in order to protect the pharmaceutical's industry's ability to market expensive, patented alternatives.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
While this is true, there are two aspects to "alternative medicine":
1. The completely made-up "magic" stuff (e.g. wearing magnetic wristbands will make you more energetic). This is the part we tend to focus on and make fun of.
2. The "medicine" part... This is the part we should focus on and worry about.
Some of these "medications" have physiological effects that are real. However, they are frequently not well-studied, are completely unregulated by the organizations that are in place to ensure the safety of our medicines, and may have important, undocumented interactions with other "alternative medicines" or regulated drugs.
Seriously, do people wonder why they are consuming a whole plant, instead just single chemical it contains that has valuable medicinal properties?
Tim Minchin knocks this out of the park ... alternative medicine, by its definition, has either been not proven to work , or proven not to work. Alternative medicine that has been proven to work is called ... medicine..
Actually, acupuncture has been proven to be efficacious. However, even randomly performed acupuncture has been shown to perform as well as properly performed acupuncture.
As well, some homeopathic formulations have been shown to be efficacious. All of the zinc cold formulas have scientific studies showing that they're more effective than placebo, and yet are homeopathic... of course they're at only 10% and 100% dilutions, not the crazy dilutions that some other things are at. (How can they contain some of the original substance if they're homeopathic? It turns out that homeopathic treatments can contain any GRAS substance available, and zinc acetate is GRAS.)
Of course in the later case, the people selling cold treatments are more exploiting homeopathy to provide cheap treatments, rather than having to go through extensive drug trials... so, one could easily make the argument that they're actually only homeopathic in the legal sense...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
If you think about he dilutions used in homeopathy, then that would mean the planet earth has already been "treated" for every conceivable ailment.
Every time this topic comes up I always think of the old James Randi joke: "A homeopath recently overdosed. He forgot to take his medication."
If the effects of homeopathy cannot be detected or measured, then how do you know if the professors are doing it correctly?
When my wife was studying for her BS in nursing, she had to take a course in which nonsense like "touch therapy" and such was discussed in a completely non-skeptical way. She was horrified and so was I.
We cannot clone a person in an instant to let the two outcomes unfold, both with and without treatment.
Very true!
If an alternative treatment corrects a problem before it becomes measurable with current instruments there will be nothing for science to measure -- so no scientific proof available.
You can say the same for conventional medicine. Diet and exercise can fix problems before they happen, and yet this is amenable to statistical analysis. Why then do you claim alternative medicine is not amenable to statistical analysis?
Statistics can't be used when we can't measure the initial condition either.
Sure it can be. Take a random population. Randomly assign them to two groups, one that gets alternative treatment and one that gets a sham treatment. No diagnosis is necessary.
At the end of a sufficiently large time period are there significantly more people alive in the alternative treatment group? If so, you've just demonstrated the efficacy of an alternative treatment.
Not only does this method not require measuring what goes on in a person's head, it doesn't even require measuring what goes on in the clinicians exam room.
The only forms of proof available are through personal observation with personal perceptions.
Which, as science has shown us, is no proof at all.
This has been more than enough proof for many historic cultures, e.g. Chinese, Tibetan, Indian, etc
Thankfully, we've learned a lot since then. Why should we go back to the dark ages before empiricism?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
What a person believes can keep them healthy, be it a belief, ritual, or drug.
Are these courses a placebo? I don't know, I've never had acupuncture but I
believe it has merit (a belief) and can block signals to the brain.
The subject courses and other avenues can (and should) be used according to a patient's belief in conjunction with "stuff" that works.
Or a magnetic field as well - which decreases in strength by 1/d^6 - not squared, cubed, double-squared, but just raised to the power of six, which suggests that what would seem to be empty or solid space at our dimension, would be like swiss-cheese at sub-atomic scales.
I'd imagine both cases are a form of induction - you create a field in one point, and adjacent points realign or stretch to balance out the differences in gravitational or magnetic potential and alignment. There are infinite ways of trying to produce a visual way of representing what is going on - superstrings, vortices, sinks and sources. It's just a matter of finding the right experiment.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Five things we don't understand:
quantum entanglement, gravity, protein folding, quasi-period crystallization, mystery rock movement in deserts (Why can't someone just put a satellite phone and webcam on a observation box and solve this once and for all?)
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there are no known mechanisms which can explain how or why acupuncture works, and indeed, again to the best of my knowledge, when double blind studies are performed comparing acupuncture to standard western medicine there is no statistically significant correlation between the application of acupuncture and positive effects beyond those of a placebo
The part of accupuncture that work is starting to be known. It's actually playing with well known nerve tricks. And although doing an "accupuncture placebo" is difficult (its difficult to organise "needles" vs. "no needles", unlike making pills that can contain a drug vs. only sugar. Its still pills in both situation) studies tend to show some effect in some specific cases.
One of the key mecanism behind it, is an actual neurophysiological phenomenon called "gate-control".
Alert and information stimuli tend to be incompetition. In practice that means that sensory information can override pain information comming from the same body region. (The neural network responsible for that phenomenon in the spine is well documented). That's why we tend to rub the body part when we're having pain (like massage a leg after having hurt it). It really soothes the pain because of the competition of the sensory stimulus (the rub) over the pain.
Another phenomenon is the "referred pain". Sometime, when both nerves from the surface and the internal organs arrive at the same region, the brain tend to confuse them an map everything to the surface, because the brain is used to the fact that information comming from this way usually comes from the skin (because getting surface stimuli is a normal everyday stuff, whereas its rarer to get stimuli from the internal organs, usually only when you're sick, so the brain is used to interpret the informations that way). Thus for example, when having a hearth attacks, people refer the pain to the left side of the neck, the left shoulder and the left flank. Because the nerves coming from these region end-up at the place (cervical nerves plexus) as the nerve (phrenic) coming from the sides of the hearth compartment (perdicard), and the brain is used to the fact that when "pain" info comes from there, it's usually due to you having hit your shoulder rather than a hearth attack.
When you combine those too, it means that you can alleviate pain including internal pains, simply by making a sensory input at the correct place.
This could work with lots of stimuli. Including skin contact (that's how massages help ease muscle pain). Including electronic nerve stimulation (that's the principle behind TENS), etc.
And that works also for accupuncture: the needles are really small. So tiny, that in fact they don't cause much pain. They mostly stimulate the skin, and thus through "gate control" will override and mask most pain, including pain coming from internal organs ("referred pain").
Now, in addition you need to understand that a lot of pain phenomenon can get self-sustaining:
- that can be local chemical change in the spine. that's how phantom limb pain (pain referred to a limb which actually isn't there anymore but was amputated, or replaced with a prothesis), specially before surgeons started to systematically do spinal or regional anesthesia in addition of full narcosis. even if the patient isn't hurt (due to full narcosis), the pain information from the amputation could reach the spine where the spine gets increasingly sensitised. (also, it doesn't help that an absent limb can't send any sensory information and thus no gate control at all even with the normal basal level of stimuli).
- there can also be some negative feed-back : sore muscle are painful. but the pain increases muscle tenderness. and contracted muscle in turn increase the pain. But by stoping the pain (either with drugs or massages, etc.) you break the self sustaining cycle and the muscles start to relax and stop causing more pain.
Thus by using accupuncture, not only do you momentaly cause a decrease of pain, but you
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Well, while is is true that the descartian way of thought closes some doors, it opens many more. People are too willing to have faith in some treatment because they want it to work. Often belief is enough for it to present results, but you don't need an elaborate placebo "science" for that. Some german doctors were even prescribing placebo/vitamin pills to patients who thought they were sick and obtained great results (I believe there was a slashdot article about it). Unfortunately I happen to be studying medicine in one of the few serious institutions around the world that include homeopathy as an obligatory subject in medicine. And whenever I bring up the subject, someone claims that homeopathy works because they know someone whose symptoms were cured and improved. People really do underestimate the placebo effect.
"I decided I could write something better than everything out there in two weeks. And I was right." - Linus Torvalds
:...So how do you explain all the intelligent people using it? ..."
Umm. I have to revise my definition of "intelligence". methinks.
Instruments, as in instrumentation, that's the stuff that's usually meant for measurement. If you insist that a pen might be a scientific "instrument" in a general sense, then I'd say a leather sofa and the leather toilet seat is, too ;)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
There are lots of things that work without the benefit of science
Sure it is, but they work.
The same way a course in "Star Trek" makes its way into Georgetown University. Or "Art History" or "Golf Management" or dozens of other courses at dozens of other universities. Because higher education stopped being about actual education and more about a) making money and b) making the students feel good about themselves.
Probably started around the time Philosophy classes stopped reading and teaching Neitzsche, Bacon, Aristotle, and Kant, and started being about... well, slacking off, wondering randomly about whatever, and getting high. Biggest contributing factor, IMO, was when people started to feel they need college degrees, but weren't smart enough or dedicated enough to actually study seriously. So, colleges started making up stupid courses people could take, without requiring them to actually do any work. This allows everyone to get a degree, but makes half of them worthless. But hey, now most people at least have a college degree, right?
First, since when is art history a made up course to only make money? Just because it might have been filler for your course of study doesn't mean it's insignificant to others who are in creative/arts side of the university and need to understand the history and driving forces in their field. Second, when was the last time you looked at a current Philosophy course catalog? Still digging away at everyone from Plato to L. Ron Hubbard. Not sure what you would classify as a university, but there aren't a lot of slack courses at the one I attended and taught at. Insightful my fanny!
My relationship with my wife. There are obviously things that "work" without science, but they work. As opposed to homeopathy, which we know doesn't work, because we have checked.
You don't know anything at all about science, why are you talking about it? Science doesn't deal with knowing positives at all (outside of a limited area such as maths, where knowing is actually possible). Science deals with theories (no, any wild idea is not a theory), and the process of falsification (proving that those theories are wrong.
Did you see that last word? Science doesn't actually (with the mentioned exception) actually do much proving of anything at all, but it dis-proves, falsifies, a lot of stuff. You see, there is exactly an infinite things you can not prove. I can not prove that there are no flower-patterned tea cups filled half full with Whiskey in orbit around Pluto right now. I can't prove that they do not exist. Assuming they do is moronic however. Likewise, it is actually impossible to prove that homeopathy works, however it is quite possible to prove that it doesn't work. We have well established procedures in place to see if stuff works. There is lots of technical jargon like double-blind etc, but it all basically comes down to this: Let's give it to him and see if he gets well. If he doesn't (objectively) get well, it didn't work.
When it comes to homeopathy, nobody ever got well. Seriously. Nobody. Assuming it works is as dumb as assuming that there are in fact half-full tea cups flying around Pluto. In fact, it is dumber, since I haven't yet proven that there are no such flowery cups.
don't worry, I agree with you :)
but I liked serviscope_minor's reply more. i.e. I think we should try to understand why placebo's work, and actively use them when it seems they have some effect; obviously, we should recognise them as placebos and not pay more than they're worth.
new sig
what is the stuff you use daily, and how do you know that something is happening if you can't measure it?
by the way, if the patient says they're feeling better, that's something you can measure (and you can write it down, like SecurityGuy told me above).
new sig
Wow, so confident that alternative medicine doesn't work
Yes, It's been tested. They got the treatment. They didn't get better. It didn't work.
Citation please. I see nothing anywhere that says that is true of magnetic fields, and this is the first time I've ever heard of it.
Well, that depends on what you'd want to study. I tend to be of the school of thought that you want like treatments for like causes, not necessarily like treatments for like effects. Thus, if there are N ways to get a headache, I would expect N treatments. In other words, I would expect that if I looked at the underlying cause (which will presumably be electrical, chemical and/or blood pressure related, where any possible magnitude and permutation of those is entirely valid) that if two people had absolutely identical underlying causes that the treatment would always be absolutely identical (ie: the treatment isn't random) and that if I monitored that underlying cause, there would be a change in state between before treatment and after treatment.
This isn't too difficult to study, merely time-consuming. The law of large numbers only works if, well, you've large numbers. In science, you'll sometimes see people talk about the "confidence level" or the "sigma level" of a result. The systems are slightly different but they boil down to the same thing - the odds that what you are getting isn't a real result but just pure statistical fluke.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation
The more numbers you have, the greater your confidence that what you are seeing is real. Now, my way of thinking is absurdly simple - if you can demonstrate a high level of confidence that f(given treatment, given underlying cause) = (given underlying effect) and f(!given treatment, given underlying case) = (!given underlying effect) then you have established that the treatment - when applied to that cause - produces that effect. How it does so is a matter for theorists.
Now, I'm very careful to state "underlying cause" and "underlying effect" because there can be zero correlation between what underlies a symptom and the symptom itself. That is entirely valid -- and rather common. The greater the distance between what is actually happening and what is actually being observed, the greater the chance of you missing whatever is actually going on. True, you can't always make direct observations of the underlying cause, so you do the best you can and minimize the gap. You can safely ignore any study where the gap is ignored or even increased because you know for a fact that the researchers cannot have considered the uncertainties introduced and therefore cannot have an accurate idea of how confident you can be in the results. If you don't know how good the results are, what use are they?
Now to go back to your other point:
To some extent, I've covered this in discussing the level of directness (or lack thereof). However, it is worth examining this point a little closer. Yes, as Descartes (and indeed R. D. Laing) noted, human perception is indeed all that we've got. Furthermore, indirectness (as noted) increases the number of places errors can be introduced. As a result, you want to keep things as direct as possible.
Equally, though, quantitative data can be more precisely compared than qualitative data. When comparing qualities, you introduce all kinds of other types of error. Unquantifiable kinds. It's another reason I regard symptom-based treatments
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That would be easy to solve with a new law
Are you a politician?
I dunno, but are you arguing for total deregulation of medicine?
Yes. I want to be able to make my own decisions about whether a person is competent to be a doctor. I don't need Big Brother's "help", but thanks for offering.
Confucius didn't have much to say on the issue of homeopathy, he was a philosopher. These days he'd gotten a job in the talk radio industry.
The whole concept of pseudoscience is the study of things outside basic scientific principles.
Arguing about it using scientific knowledge only proves to show an inability to understand the concept.
It's inherently only ever provable, the fact that this may never happen is beside the point.
If only life were that simple. Sadly, we have no way of knowing if one person's five is another person's five, or their ten, on the scale.
I don't think anybody here is claiming that a degree in nutrition is a scam. We're talking about degrees in homeopathy. Also I don't know where in Western medicine food allergies aand sensitivities are "rarely" investigated. In my experience (.au, us, and uk) allergies and sensitivities are well known and routinely investigated by most general practicioners.
sustainable living
I've heard that about the UK. Over here in the US, our experience has been that food sensitivities are completely ignored by GP doctors.
Poppycock. America has been trending left for a century, and if Obama is re-elected we'll be in leftist slavery before he leaves office.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I think that "The Demon Haunted World" should be required reading for anyone who wants to criticize science in favor of pseudoscience.
I find this really frustrating because I am trained as a scientist and I use that model to understand what I perceive. So I use scientific principles in a domain that science rejects.
Then at the risk of offending you I feel I must point out that you are demonstrating you have learned nothing significant from your scientific training.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
"When it comes to homeopathy, nobody ever got well" Well, it might work for dehydration...
Like the other guy, your examples are not anti-science or science-is-so-limited in the least.
All of these are areas where science has given us better understanding than any other approach, and is still moving forward.
We do not yet fully understand these topics, but we do understand quite a bit of it, and a lot more than we would without science. And given time, our understanding will improve.
I fail to see how any of these qualify for a general criticism of the scientific method. Just because you are still on the stairs doesn't mean that walking doesn't work or that the kitchen doesn't exist.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Actually, I seem to remember several studies have produced statistically significant negative results. The studies found that praying for people actually made them slightly less likely to recover. If I remember correctly, the scientists conducting the studying said the effect need further study but hypothesised that the patients and their praying guardians tended to be overly optimistic about their chances and were more likely to refuse treatments that had more serious side effects in preference for less effective treatments with no side effects.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Many people think that the word "homeopathic" means "natural medicine" or "herbal medicine" because it is marketed as such.
America has been trending left for a century
Thus explaining the massive increase in the training and use of paramilitary law enforcement squads, the numerous attacks on the bill of rights, and the various favors and hand-outs the government gives big corporations? For decades, the executive branch of government has been expanding its power, to the point of being able to make and enforce laws. You think Obama is on the left? Then perhaps you can explain his support for ACTA, for the DEA and other war-on-drugs efforts (under his administration, the DEA has unilaterally declared numerous drugs to be illegal, without any democratic process), his support for killing citizens without due process, etc.
In America your choices are "extreme right wing" or "right wing." Leftists are few and far between.
Palm trees and 8
Good points. I know next-to-nothing about acupuncture, but I do know it requires a lot of study. It's not just poking needles in random places on people. So a "degree in acupuncture" I could see and agree with. A "SCIENCE degree in acupuncture" I'm not so sure. It depends on what the implications are behind the "science" label. I think there is a science to acupuncture, it's just not something that we can define using Western understanding which hasn't been through the rigors we place on Western medicine.
I'm really a low 5-digit Slashdotter, but this ID is where I am now.
The Scientific Establishment feels threatened - that's why they are fighting so vigourously.
Just like faster than light, and alternatives to Einstein's theory, and how they used a claim of a bad cable to whitewash result that showed faster than light effects.
Look at the mainstream Cancer Establishment, still using barbaric toxic chemotherapy with nothing else to offer - the only thing they have to offer is a different way to die.
It would be like using amputation for weight loss.
This all makes leeches look good - in fact leeches are useful (I mean the animal, not the members of the Medical Establishment).
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Disclaimer: I run an 'alternative medicine' company selling products with quantifiable results. I know something about what I am talking about.
Then post something that is quantifiable, and stop being an AC. I don't disagree with some of your comments, but you can't just toss out a statement like this w/o additional evidence, and expect to be taken seriously.
Just another day in Paradise
Magnetic field strength decreases with the cube of distance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet
I must have been thinking of some other formula to get power of six, but still, it's fascinating that the magnetic field is bipolar while gravity is basically monopolar.
The "strong nuclear force" doesn't diminish with distance
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Yup! Those "feel good about yourself degrees" with no jobs and no contribution to society...except the coffers of the universities. Then the students run up huge debts getting advanced degrees in "feel good about yourself" because they didn't have enough ambition to earn a real degree and then demonstrate against "the system" because they can't find work and can't pay their bills.
Why would the organizers of this study even tell the patients which group they're in? Hell, you probably shouldn't even tell the patients they're part of a study. Just pick 100 random suitable hospital patients; pray for half of them; don't pray for the other half.