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Jimmy Wales To 'Holistic Healers': Prove Your Claims the Old-Fashioned Way
Barence (1228440) writes with this excerpt from PC Pro: "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has issued a sharp response to petitioners calling for his site to "allow for true scientific discourse" on holistic healing. The petition, currently running on the Change.org site, claims that much of the information on Wikipedia relating to holistic approaches to healing is "biased, misleading, out of date, or just plain wrong". It has attracted almost 8,000 supporters at the time of publication. Wales's response to the petition, posted on the same page, is far from conciliatory: 'No, you have to be kidding me,' he writes. 'Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful. What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of 'true scientific discourse'. It isn't.'"
Mmmm... Tapas!
Once it's been proven to work?
Medicine.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Despite all of Wales' attempts to raise funds for Wikipedia, this is (by far) the best one.
Good response from Wales.
There are a lot of dumb motherfuckers out there, stay vigilant in making sure they don't put dumb things on Wikipedia.
On one hand, you have people pushing crap that's not even in the realm of plausible pseudoscience (like that pressure cooker doodad which was supposed to change the molecular arrangement of water molecules). On the other hand, you have the realm of vitamins and other alternative treatments which may not necessarily be shown to be effective in FDA-approved studies, but seem to offer genuine anecdotal evidence to their benefits. It seems like the happy medium would be to just stick these things in the category of "Unproven Quackery" and be done with it.
âoeAnti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'â
â Isaac Asimov
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I'm betting their rebuttal goes no where, because frankly, it's too difficult to scientifically evaluate the methods in a controlled environment.
Even without a placebo effect, there are probably a few instances, statistically speaking, where scientifically, there are things going on that are beneficial to the 'patient'. I'm thinking more accupuncture and accupressure here, rather than energy stones, but when your purveyors likely have no interest in scientific methodology on any level, you're essentially dealing with a brick wall of rational thought.
If you have a crazy idea about feet rubbing, or magic water, or dream catchers, publish papers from research you do. once you can show your efficacy, and it can be repeated, you win. Until then, eat a big bag of jungly dicks, you dont get equal time. Its like creationism for modern liberals to believe that your favorite yogi can increase your chakra levels with crystals and that you should teach it in schools and have it sourced on equal footing in the encyclopedia of the world. Nope. Research, results, reproduce, or gtfo :)
Well at least you can still use the internet to whine about the internet. So stand proud that the big bad sites haven't taken that away from you yet!
The wiki and the internet in general is by nature susceptible to plagarism , misinformation and the etc. The balancing factor is the presence of a relatively few knowledgeable individuals who keep check on malicious activity. Any open forum is and will be susceptible to manipulation for and by vested interests.
>> claims that much of the information on Wikipedia relating to (whatever) is "biased, misleading, out of date, or just plain wrong"
Er...no shit? Personally, I subscribe to this view: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
All of the information on Wikipedia is "plagiarized" by design; it's not a place for original research it's an encyclopedia.
Most of the information on Wikipedia is "biased, misleading, out of date, or just plain wrong."
[citation needed]
Even worse, most of it is plagiarized, drawing eyes away from the books, smaller sites and other sources that produced it.
Evidently, you do not understand what "plagiarism" means.
It depresses me, that it is the full-time job (or equivalent) of some people just to continually undo the pseudoscientific hogwash these people vandalize Wikipedia with.
I always take what I find on Wikipedia with a grain of salt.
But mr. Wales attempt to raise the bar is welcome, it's just not very easy to do it. As long as Wikipedia is as open in its nature as it is now, it will always remain something of a rogue place for opinions vs real scientific facts.
Wikipedia has also been accused with moderators treating it like it was their private domain, and the older more established moderators reign superior over the wannabees, so much so - I've given up any attempt to add anything to the site, as it's usually futile, even if peer reviewed and fully documented (no, not talking about oogey boogey science with crystal healing and all that jazz), but down to earth - time proven, document-able peer reviewed facts.
I think the entire Wikipedia needs to be reviewed, cleaned up and get a better moderation system
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Most of the information on Wikipedia is "biased, misleading, out of date, or just plain wrong."
Based on.. what? Your comment seems biased and misleading and could possibly be just plain wrong. Is your comment just based on your personal impression? Have you actually gone through and examined most of all the content available on Wikipedia? No? Well, gee.
Even worse, most of it is plagiarized, drawing eyes away from the books, smaller sites and other sources that produced it.
And yet, while doing that it makes it much more easier to find both the sources and relevant information. If Wikipedia didn't exist finding all that information would be a major hassle, especially considering a lot of the sources mentioned are behind various paywalls, only available in physical forms or whatnot.
"Proven. To. Work." Period.
Wales is entirely correct to try and protect the integrity of information presented on his site. I would feel exactly the same way.
To be fair, most information is biased, misleading, out of date, or just plain wrong. this is not an online only issue, and certainly not a new issue.
No, most of it is correct. Do me a favour and check the release date for Pink Floyd's "The Wall".
The majority of information is easily obtained and easily checked. What you're referring to is a comparatively small number of specialist areas, and perhaps the occasional unimportant hearsay on a page about a person or product.
My favorite yogi taught me that it ain't over until it's over, and that it's deja vu all over again.
The placebo effect is well known in medicine.
By using common sense, Jimmy Wales is taking away placebos that were actually effective!
Hence, his actions are detrimental to medicine.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
The wiki and the internet in general is by nature susceptible to plagarism , misinformation and the etc. The balancing factor is the presence of competing vested interests. Any open forum is and will be susceptible to manipulation for and by vested interests.
FTFY
Dear AC, people really believe things. Really. They have values.
The holistic "healers" really believe that they have science on their side, or that they are being scientific. It is just like Ken Ham, and Lord Monckton.
That is what makes the situation sad. Not everything is about money.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
All of the information on Wikipedia is "plagiarized" by design; it's not a place for original research it's an encyclopedia.[1]
1. ^aAnonymous Coward
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Really? So now the Global Warming articles can finally include real science?
On a Swedish now defunct website for political discussion there used to hang out a Crazy radical feminist woman who had a Universal Theory of science.
In her opinion, it was impossible to say what is science and what is not and as such nobody has the power to say that something is scientific and something else isn't. To her, everything is scientific and the people who disagree are proponents of "scientism".
This tied in with the radical feminist angle because she also argued that science as it currently exists has been overtaken by men and now serves only male and masculine purposes such as technology and weapons. She elaborates that male science is destructive because it picks things apart to understand how they work and it creates destructive inventions.
She says that female science, by contrast, does not pick anything apart. Instead it would look at things and examine them as a whole, and come to answers using hermeneutic analysis. (hint: it means you sit around and talk about it for a long time)
Her ultimate point is that she believes it is not right to call something non-scientific simply because it cannot be empirically tested.
She also got into weird and ultimately bizarre postmodernist arguments such as if someone believed a partcular treatment actually helped them, then the treatment was effective. She was strongly pro-homeopathy, crystal healing and whatever.
(she also drove everyone insane by writing in 50 word sentences)
The charlatans are taking the argument to the wrong place, on purpose. Wales comment is spot-on. Get your results published in scientific journals and they will be noted in Wikipedia. Regardless of your opinion about the management of Wikipedia, it is trying to be an encyclopedia, of sorts. As such, it is NOT the place where scientific discourse takes place. That is elsewhere. Once the scientific discourse happens and the scientists come up with some settled science, THEN the encyclopedia will summarize it.
An anecdote serves, at best, a rough start in forming a hypothesis. But an anecdote is utterly useless outside of that context.
Decentralized information is extremely hard to access quickly. Wikipedia not only makes it incredibly easy to get a 20,000 ft view of just about any topic, but they cite a lot of their sources so that if you want the deep down on the topic you can access the sources for more info.
And the claim that Wikipedia "controls" anything except for their little piece of the playground is absurd. You're free to start an alternative wiki-- there are already zillions-- just dont think you're entitled to be popular.
Wake up Wikipedia!!
Considering the quality of the articles being used to debunk some of those techniques, I think they're well within their rights to point out the hypocracy of the situation. Just beause people don't believe in holistic healing, doesn't mean that the standards should be lower.
Yes, there is a burden of proof on the holistic healers to prove their case, but that doesn't make it OK to misrepresent and generaly put up information that's known to be inaccurate as a method of debunking it. Debunking should be done on the basis of science, not on the basis of misleading, out of date or incorrect information. Give them the best platform you can and let them fail on their own lack of merit. Doing anything else just reinforces the notion that there's a conspiracy against them.
So what you're saying is ... "Citation Needed" ?
Nice to see the Objectivist pornographer quoting lunatic charlatan Ayn Rand.
Asteroid strike, nuclear war, conventional war for that matter, rampant disease, runaway GMO's, global warming, etc.. these are not what will destroy the human race. Willful ignorance is what will, along with it's partners, superstition and religion. More and more it seems people are rejecting the last thousand years or so of progress and turning back to these things. The Human race is in danger of falling in a new Dark Age if this keeps up.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Err, do you know how many books Ken Ham sold, and how much $$ the stupid creationist museum raised and how much it is still sponsored by the state?
WHere are the people decrying Wales for "censorship"? I take it he's free to do with his data as he wants? Will that maxim apply for the next guy?
"No, you have to be kidding me. Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful.
Wikipedia's policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals - that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately.
What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse". It isn't." - Wales
Personally, my father is a professor researching the effectiveness of 'alternative medicine', specifically massage & chiropractic techniques for back pain versus pain killers. His research has shown it's effective for back pain, but it's still called alternative medicine right now. What it won't do is cure cancer. And this petition is for 'energy work', which I find very unlikely to be any more successful than a placebo.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
What does this mean in this case?
I suspect it means is that alternative medicine proponents want to strip [citation needed] from statements of fact in AM-related articles and strip contradictory statements and refutations from AM-related articles so they read as more statements of truth than as unproven, questionable or in doubt.
I haven't read any AM articles, but given the wide variety of information in Wikipedia, it would seem unlikely they're just outright removing AM articles. I mean, the point of WP isn't that everything in it is verifiably true, but there is information about things even if the things themselves are false.
The burden of proof is on the challengers to the status quo. Debunking is an inherently inefficient way to spend our research resources.
How many of the articles posted on Wikipedia do you think Jimmy Wales confirmed through experimentation?
Not to say I believe in the "Emotional Freedom Technique", but all his protests amount to is an appeal to authority, and the authority he's appealing to doesn't seem too authoritative these days.
There's still an article about String Theory on his site, despite the fact that the LHC has pretty much confirmed that the theory is a bunch of navel gazing bullshit...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
"Most of the information on Wikipedia is "biased, misleading, out of date, or just plain wrong.""
False.
"Even worse, most of it is plagiarized"
no it isn't, and when it is it is removed.
"Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter et al. have concentrated the internet from a decentralized system of peers to a system not unlike old school TV, but participatory: a few big centralized forces control everything, and we participate out of fear that we would miss out otherwise."
Don't confuse you inability to think beyond those source for no one being able to think past those sources.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That doesn't demonstrate that it's all about the money. Some preachers know that they're selling BS, others actually believe their derp. I think Ham is an emotional thinker, and actually believes the nonsense he spouts.
Dear AC, people really believe things. Really. They have values.
The holistic "healers" really believe that they have science on their side, or that they are being scientific. It is just like Ken Ham, and Lord Monckton.
That is what makes the situation sad. Not everything is about money.
The placebo effect is very real, it really works, and that's what this is, ie. placebo in the guise of "Energy Medicine" instead of a sugar pill.
Yes, it can cure, it can help people, but not people with real diseases/illnesses.
In no circumstances should it substitute proper science if there's something seriously wrong with you.
No sig today...
Yes, there is a burden of proof on the holistic healers to prove their case
Their "case" boils down to "placebo effect". Wikipedia already has that covered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
No sig today...
Aww, poor butt hurt troll. Reality disagrees with you, so you whine on slashdot.
That's no excuse for having a lower standard for skeptics. IMHO, skeptics are often times as bad as the people they're debunking, they're just luddites that are challenging it just to challenge it. I don't personally see that much difference in terms of intellect between them and the anti-vaxxers that won't accept any level of evidence.
Hand waving things away is hardly scientific and it's something that just fuels the fire.
Wikipedia is excellent for gaining an introduction to topics. Now citing it in a school paper is absolutely ridiculous, but if you don't know where to start researching, its a godsend.
Proven by who? The FDA? Lol what a joke.
And any scientist worth his salt knows you can't prove anything, only disprove things.
General information is often correct, someone mentioned release dates, ect. There's an obvious agenda on Wikipedia and there's not very much useful, specialized information. Everything on it is mainstream, that is to say it's akin to a public school text book. You could for example set up a Wikipedia about alternative theory's on the Universe, complete with references to notable scientific experts. The page would quickly be edited and references called into question. The page may be refiled under a misleading location. It could even be outright deleted. You have to ask yourself, should I place trust in a site that files all religions under "Myth"? Or, should I place trust in a site that does not allow any discourse between other points of view? Mainstream science is continually churning, continually being re-written, re-theorized, dis-proven and re-proven again. Wikipedia places complete trust in this one flawed position. Therefore I find myself using Wikipedia less and less.
Not all vested interests are financial in nature--a person is vested if they have any kind of personal stake in the issue. Many people essentially stake a large part of their personal identity and self-worth on the efficacy of these practices and thus have a vested interest even more powerful than that inherent in financial dependency.
All too often "they have values" is just a nice way to say "they lack the strength of character and moral integrity to critically examine their own beliefs for fear that doing so will destroy their self image".
So, we see crap petitions like this or like all the petitions for states to secede and yet we wonder why change.org or "We the People" aren't taken seriously?
[...]people really believe things.
Not everything is about money.
Can't it be both?
He seems to have "believed" a lot of things where it's convenient and then suddenly not believed them when it's looked like he may get into trouble. Take his backflip on his cure of AIDS for example.
When he's not running an "angle" he's for hire. If the "Arthur Daly" character in fiction had been as ridiculous as Monckton is in reality the writers would have been asked to tone it done and make it more believable.
To be fair, most information is biased, misleading, out of date, or just plain wrong. this is not an online only issue, and certainly not a new issue.
"Everything you know is wrong."
That's a pretty good first approximation for just about everybody.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Research clearly indicates that fake therapies can trigger the body to heal itself. In acupuncture studies, sham needling often has very high efficacy, some times higher than needling the proper points, and sometimes similar or higher efficacy than traditional medicine. It does this with far less side-effects. If it works better with less harm, it should be used - even if we don't understand it.
Medicine is a practice. There are many things modern medicine does not understand. Physicians often follow a treatment path without understanding the underlying mechanisms of the disease (e.g. autoimmune disorders) or treat to simply alleviate symptoms. Someday we may have the body figured out but that day is a not today.
The Placebo effect is probably one of the more powerful tools available.
From the NY Times:
In the study, published in the May 4 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, German researchers divided 302 migraine sufferers into three groups. The patients were told that one group would receive acupuncture "similar to the acupuncture treatment used in China," and that the second would receive a type of acupuncture that did not follow the Chinese principles but "has been associated with positive outcomes in clinical studies."
The patients did not know which group they were assigned to. A third group was put on a waiting list and received treatment later.
Although the patients in the second group were unaware of it, they received a faked version of acupuncture.
The treatments went on for 12 weeks, and success was defined as having 50 percent fewer days with headaches in the weeks after the end of treatment.
By this measure, real acupuncture succeeded with 51 percent of the patients, and the sham procedure succeeded with 53 percent, a statistically insignificant difference. Only 15 percent of the waiting list group attained the 50 percent reduction in headache days.
The effectiveness of both the sham and the real acupuncture, the authors write, is about the same as treatment with drugs and has fewer side effects. The results, they conclude, "may be due to nonspecific physiological effects of needling, to a powerful placebo effect, or to a combination of both."
But if wiki calls out Energy Medicine as the placebo effect, it'll stop working for those that read it.
In this study, however, docs told patients they were getting placebos. Eighty patients with irritable bowel syndrome were instructed to take two sugar pills daily. The bottle even had "placebo" printed on it. After three weeks, 60 percent of the placebo group reported relief from symptoms, compared to 35 percent who’d received no treatment at all.
Yes it can. Why do you think medical drugs to treat 'real' diseases need to be tested against it? Placebo does not equal background noise, it is an effect above the background noise.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Wikipedia is good for well-researched information. Information about pharmaceutical drugs, neuroscience, exercise, biology, physics, mathematics, animals, cosmology, etc. is usually pretty straight. Information about religion, spirituality, and so on is usually also well-researched.
When you get into practical alternative theory--not just spirituality systems, but applications of alternative medicine, spiritual healing, and so on--you start to get into the weird stuff. Wikipedia tries to distance itself from un-scientific claims: they'll tell you that meditation has been shown to induce calm and give people control over their blood pressure (biofeedback has been shown in controlled studies to allow for control over heart rate and blood pressure), but provide a cultural context for claims about having visions of the future or pulling energy from the spiritual realm or whatever.
The problem comes when it's hard to separate out pseudoscience from real science. Dietary supplements and alternative medical procedures get elbow-deep in this: acupuncture does not, as far as we have ascertained, do anything by balancing Xi; but some studies have shown that acupuncture is effective for treating certain minor nervous conditions or whatnot. Other studies debunk this. Explanation may lie in placebo effect. And so on. Now what? Never mind when you have things like whether or not a certain vitamin or concentrated extract of a given root does anything--milk thistle extract is actually used to treat liver damage, and Valerian acts like benzos, but will walnuts prevent cancer? We change our minds on the walnut thing every other week.
Awareness is useful. Knowing that some people believe meditation can increase physical stamina, for example, can be useful: when there's nothing else left, you may as well sit down and start chanting to yourself. I mean if you're trapped under a collapsed building, why the hell not? Rescue's going to come either way (or not), and maybe you'll slow your metabolism and last a few more hours, or at least amuse yourself. On the other hand, it's probably good to know that this mushroom that people think has special healing properties is viciously poisonous, so you shouldn't try eating it.
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Yes. Prove elliptical orbits with epicylcles. Relativity with Newtonian Arcademicism, I mean, Acadermicism (...city, ... whatever). And so on. Plate theory with ... who knows what. Meteoric extinctions with gradualism.
Maybe not. Meanwhile, pragmatic empiricism - despite the abuse - seems to still have a lot to offer, besides all that has already been taken from it, historically, and incorporated into sanctioned academic dogma. After the "necessary" facelifts, makeovers, rewording, and cross sanctioning.
In that case, maybe the researchers should stop bugging shamans and "faith" healers and such - the world over, 24/7 - to reveal all their workings and their remedies - so they can send them away to be "purified" and patented away from public access and benefit. Not happening, in a world of increasing "unnaforable destitution" and deprivation.
Besides, Isn't there a handful of rfather reputable academic research papers to the effect that about 40% of the healing effect of medication - or just plain old treatment - seems to accrue from some sort of "placebo effect"? If that is as the peer-reviewed experiments and studies executed and published in the most accredited spheres of science and academia seem to indicate, then shouldn't all claims to analytically isolated chemically and mechanically restricted pharmacological and severely alopathic healing depend on it's effect beyond the 40% mark, for it's real efficacity to be validated?
Well, never mind. Science is greater than practically all scientists. And even more of academia. Thanks, partially, to all those insistent deluded dreamers that "never really fit in". Big and small. Great hypothesizers and obsessive "petty" data gatherers and hoarders. Those who tend to make everyone in the classes and councils feel unforcomtable for all the wrong reasons. The same councils and councils that unreservedly slop in slaveholder's, millionaire's, billionaire's, corporate and military funding and endowment. And chair creations and referrals.
People always tell me wikipedia is not reliable because anyone can edit it. I'm like... so you'd rather a Web site anyone can pay $8 for and put whatever they want on it?
They seem to not like the statistic that Britannica and Encarta have more factual errors per article than Wikipedia.
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There is a deeper debate lurking here: how do we arrive at valid knowledge ? It is not as simple a question as you might think.
And there is an article on "Emotional Freedom Techniques" which looks to be fairly factual, as well as critical.
I don't think geocentrism, flat-Earth theory, or phlogiston get an unbiased, up-to-date treatment on Wikipedia either.
Quoth Wales:
It is noteworthy that Wales is not arguing for excluding pseudoscience from Wikipedia on the basis of Wikipedia's own guidelines. According to Wikipedia itself, status as pseudoscience is not a criterion for exclusion from Wikipedia. Rather,the criterion for acceptance is NPOV. Wikipedia's guidelines permit dishonest, fictitious and untruthful content so long as it is NPOV.
Because the rules of Wikipedia would allow the inclusion pseudoscience this is a "gotcha" for Wales, revealing a fundamental limit in Wikipedia: With NPOV, the contents of Wikipedia can never be more veridical than is the social consensus. A purportedly objective guideline which immediately reduces to subjective value judgments, NPOV is a ruse; What constitutes "Significant views," or "reliable sources on a topic" is in the eye of the beholder. Or, as Wales would have it in this case, whatever he says they are.
Wikipedia was an unexpected success because the popular expectation, a priori, was that if you just let anyone edit an encyclopedia then predominantly non-experts would contribute falsehoods. A posteriori, after Wikipedia had actually worked, the reasoning about why it had was that it was unexpectedly accurate because, well, experts are really not so good at getting stuff right anyway, and maybe spontaneous social organization really does work better than structured regulation and those dead Austrian economists and their crazy Libertarian fan club might actually have been right about something.
Though perhaps the secret to Wikipedia's success is not really that open encyclopedias are unexpectedly accurate, but rather that accuracy is not, as had been assumed, paramount. Rather, it is the appearance of accuracy which is essential for success. NPOV is a codification of a strategy for creating the popular appearance of accuracy without achieving genuine accuracy. Wikipedia is winning the encyclopedia contest by gaming the system. It matched the same flawed criterion function for accuracy as used by its customers, the test of asking: "is this what respectable people believe?" So now Wales has the problem that, according to the very rules of Wikipedia which have been the recipe for its success, it must permit pseudoscientific content which is popularly believed. This explains why Wales can shoot that down only outside of Wikipedia's own guidelines.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
The LHC as proven no such thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Note at how it's a description of the theory, and it talks about it in a scientific way.
These holistic idiots want to be able to say there shit works and remove any science that says otherwise.
You would have a point if wikipedia claimed string theory was a fact; which is does not.
And he isn't appealing to authority. He is saying get the science to prove it, which is completely different.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Based on.. what? Your comment seems biased and misleading and could possibly be just plain wrong. Is your comment just based on your personal impression?
It's a common phenomenon on Slashdot. If you complain about Wikipedia (or the government, or whatever) saying there are "obvious flaws", you'll get modded up. But once you reveal specifically what it is, then you'll get modded down because a minority on Wikipedia is probably still a minority here.
Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter et al. have concentrated the internet from a decentralized system of peers to a system not unlike old school TV, but participatory: a few big centralized forces control everything, and we participate out of fear that we would miss out otherwise.
I won't even get into the rest of the comment because others have done so better than I can. But calling Wikipedia "centralized" is just plain stupid - it's Creative Commons specifically so it will REMAIN decentralized - although the servers are in Florida, it's mirrored and forked all over the place. And even within Wikipedia, everyone is in different groups with different goals. It's as close to 100% decentralized as we can get without hosting it on an Osiris Portal, registering on Namecoin, and having zero actual visitors.
The placebo effect doesn't cure anyone of anything.
It may allow them to feel better. The strength and length of the 'feeling better' will be determined by a lot of factors.
It SEEMS, based on research, that when you have a problem your brain keeps alerting you with an increased awareness of a pain. Once you have done 'something' the brain ignores the pain for a little while.
That was a very small nutshell. There are some interesting neurological papers and blogs on the topic.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Medicine is the SCIENCE of healing. When alternative "medicine" scientifically demonstrates its efficacy and safety, it is just called . . . . medicine, no scare quotation marks needed.
There is a reason that the FDA has such a stringent approval process for drugs, medical procedures, and devices. It is because doing good science is hard. Alternative "medicine", while it is practiced by people of all political persuasions, has become to the left what young earth creationism and climate change denial has become to the right. Now we are seeing outbreaks of infectious diseases in the United States that were once largely eradicated by vaccination programs.
Thank you Wikipedia for keeping the charlatans honest.
My experience has been the precise opposite: The vegetarians I know look young and healthy.
Of course, the vegetarians I know also exercise regularly.
It can be hard to control for a single variable, and to weed out selection bias, when your sample size is limited to the people you bump in to on a regular basis.
Not sure why you got down voted. I'm a big Tim Minchin fan -- great video!
However that video trivializes the weakness of any applied philosophy -- knowing its limitations, its strengths AND its weaknesses. There are things that Science will NEVER understand because they are outside its domain i.e. What happened "before" the "Big Bang." There is NO experiment that can be done to lend new knowledge. The proper solution is to augment the linear Scientific process with the non-linear Intuitive process.
For example, Scientists have (yet) to (re)discover the 6 fundamental forces, white holes, the bi-nature of time, what happens to your consciousness before you were born, what happens to your consciousness after you die, the true nature of the subconsciousness (sic.), etc. But just because Science -today- is unable to find answers does NOT imply that you can't know those answers BEFORE hand. ALL OBJECTIVE TRUTH IS BUILT UPON THE SUBJECTIVE.
Feynman called it "Cargo Cult" Science -- to _assume_ that there is only _one_ way to have answers.
Proof of this will come in 2024 when your POV (point of view) will be turned upside down. See my .sig for details
--
(Public) First Contact is coming 2024. Are you prepared to have your perspective shifted?
The placebo effect is very real, it really works, and that's what this is, ie. placebo in the guise of "Energy Medicine" instead of a sugar pill.
Yes, it can cure, it can help people, but not people with real diseases/illnesses.
In no circumstances should it substitute proper science if there's something seriously wrong with you.
It depends on what you mean by real diseases or illnesses. Mental illnesses such as phobias, depression, or anxiety disorders, and partially mental symptoms like pain and nausea, can be treated pretty effectively with placebos and other holistic approaches like exercise and meditation. For example, we know cursing up a storm to be a pain-relieving exercise (as long as you use swear words sparingly the rest of the time). I would almost prefer people turn to some of these things first rather than drugs. But yeah, what makes me wary of the Change.org petition are the references to specific techniques, which probably require expensive certifications for practitioners so that patients have to pay an arm and a leg.
Sure enough, after I typed this, I looked up Wikipedia's page on "Thought Field Therapy" and found this:
[Roger Callahan, the inventor of Thought Field Therapy] also asserts that his most advanced level, Voice Technology (VT) can be performed over the phone using an undisclosed "technology". Training for the advanced VT is provided by Callahan. The fee listed on Callahan's website for this training is $100,000. Trainees must sign a confidentiality agreement not to disclose the trade secret behind VT.
I disagree. Placebo effects do cure people. Just because a symptom is subjective does not mean it is not real.
If I have a subjective symptom like pain, take some placebo pills, placebo acupuncture, et cetera, and I feel better, then to some degree I have "cured" the pain. People will often dismiss it as saying, "it's all in your head", but so is all pain and many subjective symptoms. Many legitimate pain relievers work on your brain.
The whole reason the FDA demands to test medicine designed to treat subjective symptoms against placebos is not because placebos do not work; it is because most honest to goodness medical treatments carry some risk, and if they cannot demonstrate much greater efficacy than placebos, they are exposing patients to increased risk without any increased benefit. If doctors could just give someone an IV drip, tell them it was morphine, and have them experience a placebo effect as strong as a real morphine drip, there would be no need for actual morphine.
But it is important not to dismiss patients' subjective symptoms as unreal or "all in their head". Regardless of the objective evidence, the subjective symptoms are real.
> and the anti-vaxxers that won't accept any level of evidence.
OMG What year is it? People are still talking about Vaxes in 2014? When was the last one even rolled out? Shit, I almost took one home from a scrap heap... 14 years ago.
My god let VMS die already.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The burden of proof is on the challengers to the status quo.
Wait, you mean I don't need to prove that God is real? You need to prove he isn't?
I can't think of an xkcd off the top of my head, but this Mitchell and Webb sketch seems to sum things up nicely:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0
Maybe sugar has healing properties? It actually seems a little plausible to me that adding some simple sugars to your digestive system might help your gut out.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
A modern Plato vs Democritus.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
. Just beause people don't believe in holistic healing, doesn't mean that the standards should be lower.
Yes, there is a burden of proof on the holistic healers to prove their case, but that doesn't make it OK to misrepresent and generaly put up information that's known to be inaccurate as a method of debunking it
This! This is why there were intelligent people on both sides of the evolution "debate" for so long, until the talk.origins FAQ matured (now there's really no excuse). So much BS and known false crap was taught in high school science classes and would turn up in casual searches back when the internet was young, that it was quite easy for someone from a religious background to assume that "evil-ution" was some big scam.
It's only because of the many people on talk.origins who respected the other side as intelligent people, and listened to their arguments that real debunking of the creationist position happened. It turned out that what many people had been taught about evolution (and still are!) was in fact wrong, and they were right to be skeptical of evolution based on what they had been taught. Once some intelligent, adult debate happened back on the place we don't speak of (unsurprisingly, it took a while), people realized that what they really needed to debunk was "bad high school-taught evolution myths", and 99% of skeptics would be convinced by explaining the actual science. (You wouldn't believe some of the BS taught in schools in the US South, apparently sincerely, as the science of evolution.)
For Holistic Nonsense there's a different problem. I don't know what it is, but you can bet there's some equally non-obvious fundamental misunderstandings at work here, and the only way to convince believers in that BS is to understand why they believe it, and address the root of that belief in places like Wikipedia. Calling them stupid won't convince anyone.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The placebo effect only shows its measure in subjective tests, and almost always with pain issues. Every single objective test that's done on placebos, for example measured range of motion in arthritic patients using no treatment, placebo treatment, alternative "medicine" methods shows no objective improvement, merely subjective improvement (the patient thought they felt less pain).
The placebo effect is purely mental, there is no there there when talking about the placebo effect as a physical, objective effect fixing the underlying problem.
Placebo effects can help people in mild chronic pain issues, but when you start getting up to even moderate pain, without treating the source of the pain and just giving people sugar pills can actively cause more harm by making people think they are being improved by a treatment that isn't fixing the underlying problem that doesn't really fix anything. The placebo has *no* curative powers what so ever. It's purely subjective.
That doesn't demonstrate that it's all about the money. Some preachers know that they're selling BS, others actually believe their derp. I think Ham is an emotional thinker, and actually believes the nonsense he spouts.
I don't. He cherry picks too much - especially when confronted with conflicting biblical "evidence" where he either ignores the conflict or cherry picks himself off into a different direction.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
All we need now is for Andrew Schlafly and his Conservapedia to welcome those scorned by Wikipedia to come to them. Should go nicely with their other crap (see evolution, global warming, anything related to Obama and just about everything else near and dear to the far-right).
"But we decide which is right, and which is an illusion"
good for jimmy, he has the guts to stand up against pseudo science, I didn't make that donation for nothing.
There are things that Science will NEVER understand because they are outside its domain i.e. What happened "before" the "Big Bang."
Who says science can't reach beyond the Big Bang?
Scientists have (yet) to (re)discover the 6 fundamental forces, white holes, the bi-nature of time
Probably because you just made them up.
Proof of this will come in 2024 when your POV (point of view) will be turned upside down. See my .sig for details
Interesting use of the word "details," there.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Now we know who Jimmy Wales is working for. More and more it is obvious that Wikipedia is in the back pockets of big corporate conglomerates, and now we know big pharma is in on it, too.
Fuck you, Jimmy, you goddamn sellout. Everyone knows modern medicine is a fraud. Steve Jobs died at the hands of modern medicine, when his holistic healing was working just fine before he was conned into foolishly allowing modern doctors to kill him.
Actually a large part of the placebo effect does not necessarily 'work' so much as convince people that it works, and since so much of even empirical medicine is self-reported, we see a large effect.
This is why faith based magicks (both fancy hat and pixie dust varieties) are so pernicious. They do not have to convince people they work, it is an assumed prerequisite that they do.
Well he earned another $20 for the Wikimedia Foundation from me with that comment.
The word science has an interesting etymology. One branch follows modern sciences such as physics, but classically pre the formation of the modern philosophy of science, the word also meant a reliable body of knowledge and discourse about it. Rigorous discourse should be fine, but a word other than science is needed, and a clear philosophy underlying said discourse. Much of the way our reality works is beyond what science can touch, since so much only happens once, or involves more variables than can be controlled in an experiment. I tend to explore these things through mathematical thought experiments, modelling what a human experimenter could see, and thus tend to be aware of 'aliasing issues' where too few observations allow false 'truths' to be inferred without contradiction. Proper scientists, as my last word, try their utmost to blow their results to kingdom come, and only accept what remains. Ask these 'holistic science' people two things: what are the limitations of their scientific methods, and what steps have they taken to try and disprove their claims. Unless, as we see in our physics textbooks, one can say 'this has survived every experimental test we've thrown at it', then a claim can't be said to be scientific in my book. (This means I throw much of biology and medicine outside what I consider scientific, but I am happy as a hardliner when it comes to what is scientific, and I am happy that there are other reliable bodies of knowledge that work differently.)
John_Chalisque
I do remember reading a study where the replaced the morphine drip with saline solution and the pain relieving effects did not diminish at all. If I remember the study right they had to start with the morphine and reduce the amount until it was all saline to get the same effect. Starting with the saline did not do the same thing.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Or perhaps a small amount of sugar sometimes cures irritable bowel syndrome.
My god let VMS die already.
What is the problem with VMs? I use one all the time when I browse some areas of the internet that I don't want to appear in the history of my main browser.
lucm, indeed.
The real "Placebo effect" is me clicking on the dislike button in Pandora.
lucm, indeed.
I'm sure she drove everyone insane by just writing... at all.
Great information from the folks over at science based medicine: "science-based medicine heals a person regardless if their conscience or not."
Alternative medicine only works if the patient is aware of the treatment, and therefore can self-report a bias towards working...
Ham's lost in a sea of factual relativism. For him, facts and reason are ephemera, servants to be abused or discarded if they fail to serve the glorification of his own views. He parted ways with dishonesty long, long ago, if he ever met it.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Slashdot is not a reliable source.
I'll give you a few days to find a better source, or I'm going to revert.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
If you don't care about logic or rigorous argument, then of what value are your contributions here?
Dismissing a sound, logical argument by labeling it 'Pedantry' is simply another form of fallacy.
For the same reason you indulge in whatever your vices are. Human drives are powerful, and can be vastly different in different people.
I can eat a perfectly reasonable, balanced diet and still wake up STARVING. So hungry that I wake up after less than four hours sleep with an intense pain in my stomach. Because my drive to eat is as strong as your drive to drink, take drugs, smoke, watch porn, play video games, exercise (yes some people over-exercise), ... whatever it is.
I never eat much at one time, but I can easily eat essentially continuously and I am not sated on any diet I've ever attempted. And most diets are pointless because they simply push up the craving level until it is impossible to resist. (Because of this my "solution" is more exercise, and accepting the fact that my healthiest state is one that is heavier than that for most people. I'm OK with that, not that I have a choice.)
That's assuming you actually want to know why some people don't follow your "simple" dictum. Cause it ain't that simple.
I suspect, however, that you are just a judgemental, hypocritical asshole who would rather belittle other people for obvious shortcomings than face your own deep issues.
Some here have posted that it's incumbent upon the alternative folks to prove their cases. While in a perfect world, that may be the case, but some of this crap has already found its way into hospitals, and insurance plans. So, we're already paying for it.
Quick example... My wife recently had elective surgery, and spent two days in one of the best hospitals in Virginia. One of the nurses came by, and offered to do something she called "healing touch". My wife initially declined, but once told there would be no charge, she accepted. She later told me that she accepted it only as a nice gesture, and while it felt nice, she didn't believe it did anything, but might have a placebo effect for some. My own mother-in-law (a former nurse), when told about this, said she believed in it...sigh.
Just another day in Paradise
I only "need" to prove God's existence if I want you to accept Him on logical grounds. Science is based on rational argument; religion is based on faith without evidence or reason. No honest person will tell you that they can prove God's existence by reason.
WTF are you on about.
You can't not prove something.
It's up to the 'alternatives' to prove they work.
Unless you're replying to the wrong thread. In which case, carry on!
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Alternative medicine and treatments allow the pracitioner to continue to delude themselves by blaming their client if thier treament didn't work.
I can't tell you how many times I've seen people go to some alternative treatment like hypnosis, reki, etc and not get a result and then the practotioner basically tells them that it didn't work because the client didn't want it to work or that the client didn't do something right.
To me the pracitioner is supposted to be the subject matter expert. If the client is doing something wrong it's up to them to spot what's going on and catch the issue. When someone puts down the money, does exactly what the practitoner asks and theres no result, then to get a response that the client wasn't invested in the process or that he didn't want it to work, it's just an insult and allows the practitoner to delude himselves that his manner of BS works it's just the client who is defective.
The other worse part, which you see in alterative treatments is that the practitoner basically tells you that you have to subscribe to some BS spiritual fairy tale and agree with his spritial beliefs in order for his or her quckery to work. I've known chicks that went to hypnotists to lose weight who tell me that the practioner tells them about spirital higher beings assisting the process and that demons are attached to them and thats why they can't control what they are eating. I've heard some crazy BS. And to call that medcine, sheesh.
Depends on how you define "status quo". Magical thought was the original status quo. And good luck proving the absolute non-existence of something. When science closes up holes, people will still worship the God of the Gaps.
Every time Jenny McCarthy plants her stilettos on a soap box and decries getting vaccinations for children "Because it causes Autism" is a bold faced lie, and she does it all the time. The one study that suggested a link, was redacted by the British Journal, the doctor who wrote the article and did the 'study' was censured, fined and lost his license to practice because 1) the claims could not be replicated, 2) the science was junk and 3) he was found to have a financial interest in publishing his 'study'. This does not stop Ms. McCarthy though. She repeats the lies over and over, and as a result, hundreds of children have died of diseases we thought were conquered in the 1950's, but are coming back because children are not getting their shots, because of the perpetuation of a lie. How she hasn't been sued up to this point is beyond me. She isn't a doctor. Getting beyond that. Alternative medicine is ok if it is shown to work. But I want proof. There are still home-grown self-taught engineers out there creating perpetual motion machines every day. The physics says its not possible, but that doesn't stop them from trying to sell their stuff every day. I've seen 'alternative cancer therapy' clinics operating out of Mexico, and people pay a lot of money, and die anyway. And so now we have Jimmy Wales insisting on proof, and people getting upset because of it.
> and the anti-vaxxers that won't accept any level of evidence.
OMG What year is it? People are still talking about Vaxes in 2014? When was the last one even rolled out? Shit, I almost took one home from a scrap heap... 14 years ago.
My god let VMS die already.
Firstly, it's Vaxen. I get misty just thinking of the old days.. and of course we had them running BSD, because BSD! It came from Berkeley == must be good!
Perhaps they needed sugar. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Science mete Dumbass, Dumbass meet Science. Now Dumbass go ahead and proceed with your challenge.
We'll wait.
Wikipedia's information about atheism sure isn't. It's a hip-deep morass of misconception, finger-pointing, and utter nonsense. Even the etymology is incorrect. Doesn't inspire much confidence in how it treats superstition such as Christianity, Islam or Judaism, I'll tell you that.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I just flashed back to Usenet.
This all begs the question of value. People tend to not be aware of allot of things for allot of reasons. I hold no bias either way as I value any perspective really.The problem I see creeping into Society is some absoluteness that is just a part of a belief system. Was not the Inquisition based on a type of absolutism. I will simply pose the question as to how, eventually, are we not going to be in the same situation? Can you encapsulate Beauty in words? or Humanity? or Virtue?
Fuck aye! They can take our lives, but they'll never take ou @.*
, 0(*j
no carrier
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
Oh noes, teh wikipedi0r are full of rongz!!!eleventyone!!!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"A small (~5ml) amount of mono- and/or disaccharides is known to enhance the ingestion of pharmaceutically active substances"
Poppins, M [1964]
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Its possible I'm thinking of a different study, but that study may be flawed by the way placebos were explained to the patients making the patients believe they can still have some positive effect despite being just sugar pills.
I didn't think to click through to the abstract of the paper on that study, and here is the key quote
Patients were randomized to either open-label placebo pills presented as “placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes” or no-treatment controls with the same quality of interaction with providers.
So patients were told that the pills they were being given have been shown to "produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms", and presumably the "control" group that didn't get any pill at all didn't told that. Perhaps the control group should instead of the sugar pills been given some meaningless task perform and been told it has the same positive effect as the placebos.
It also seems this study suffers from not being double-blinded.
What degree of errors though? That Arnold Schwarzenegger is listed as 279 pounds, but listed as 280? Or that he was in the movie Beaches as an uncredited extra?
One's so close to being true that it just doesn't matter, the other is so far from wrong it's in the next county.
I'm on Wikipedia's side here, but I think saying "more factual errors" is kind of a wonky thing to try to quantify.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of 'true scientific discourse'. It isn't.'"
Sir Isaac Newton led a false life as a heretic and everyone at the time knew he was a lunatic...
Just sayin
I can't find it now. I believe it was Eddie Izzard who had a very funny, spot on rant about alternative medicine.
To paraphrase:
"There is no such thing as 'alternative medicine'! There is only 'medicine'. If there is a herbal remedy it can be tested and proven, or not. Anything proven becomes 'medicine'. The rest is, and I'm sorry, but just soup!"
It's Unknown Soldier, he's Slashdot's equivalent of the Time Cube guy. Confusingly, he's occasionally up-modded, but usually only when his tirades only hit his normal anti-science and anti-atheism points, not when he starts to go on about insane physics and predictions as he did here.
is the response of the patient.
The observer is the observed.
If it works -- it works. If it doesn't, try something else.
Just because it came from { insert mega$$ pharma brand here } doesn't mean squat. 'Science' is just another form of religion, you { 3rd person plural } just have not figured that out yet. We're not talking planetary physics here { which is a fairly removed level of observation, by definition }, we're talking about , and people are energy, and energy, well, does some curious things...
When you get there, you'll see the absurdity of some of these "but I read it in xxxx the other day" bs. arguments... A lot of Oriental herbal medicine is a good example. The first reaction, because it's not Mega$$$ pharma brand, is, "it's all bullsh!t". Then Western science grabs an electron microscope and, oh look, it interacts with these receptors and oh by golly, _this_ is how it works. No kidding. You don't think 5,000 years of trial and error arrived at the same conclusion by accident? Just because they didn't "know", know, they figured out a vector that addresses a particular concern. Who cares how they got there?
So give people some space, to figure this out on their own. If it works, it will be here next year. Or a decade later. If it doesn't, some people get rich, for a while, and some die, and so it goes... Mega $$$ pharma are not immune from blowing smoke up your @ss to make a few bucks. At some level, it will /always/ be trial and error... there is absolutely no guarantee, of any kind, capital 'S' science, or not.
How about some super-duper quad-power TESTOSTERONE AGE CURE, anyone? I can get 'em for ya' cheap. Dr. Whoozles from famous University guarantees they WORK! Call NOW.
Operators are standing by. In nice shiny white lab coats!
Not necessarily...see this report http://www.scientificamerican....
In this study, however, docs told patients they were getting placebos. Eighty patients with irritable bowel syndrome were instructed to take two sugar pills daily. The bottle even had "placebo" printed on it. After three weeks, 60 percent of the placebo group reported relief from symptoms, compared to 35 percent who’d received no treatment at all.
When a doctor prescribes a placebo, he generally knows what he's doing and will monitor the condition. The course of action will be based on well proven tests and knowledge. A placebo is more often given just to placate a patent.
When a "healer" gives a placebo, he has no clue what is actually wrong with the patient and is just taking their money without actually fixing their problem.
There's a big difference there, one is a scientific approach mixed with beside manner, the other is pure charlatanism that might work entirely by accident. Placebo's may work on a minor problem like IBS, but when you've got an infection sugar pills and prayer wont help 1 iota. The problem is, a healer will use placebo's for both.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The placebo effect doesn't cure anyone of anything.
Yay! I don't have to be the only person trying to explain this anymore.
Unfortunately, it's borderline impossible to explain to anyone. Even people who wouldn't believe for an instant that a homeopathic treatment can cure anything are all too happy to get behind the idea that the body can cure itself if only the mind is tricked into believing it is receiving an effective treatment. Somehow they don't realize that that belief is just more bullshit "mind over matter" mystical thinking. I suspect it has something to do with smart people being all to happy to think about how dumb everyone else is, and somehow the idea that "people are so dumb that they'll improve even when given a placebo" plays into that, but who knows.
(she also drove everyone insane by writing in 50 word sentences)
Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't Swedish use compound words like Germanic languages?
I mean she could be writing 50 word words.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I didn't know technology and weapons had a gender!
You can't not prove something.
I can. By not even trying to prove Newton's first law of motion, I have hereby not proved Newton's first law of motion.
In fact so have you, at least in the post I am replying to, since you didn't even address Newton's first law of motion in this post.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Science is not based on logical argument alone. Physical evidence happens to be required too. An argument alone, without evidence, is metaphysical masturbation.
If a million people believe a stupid thing,
it is still a stupid thing to believe.
-- Anatole France
I would kindly ask Mr. Wales to reconsider the "facts" about psychiatry he allows to be disseminated via his pet project.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion is a 1998 book by American author Ken Wilber. It reasons that by adopting contemplative (e.g. meditative) disciplines related to Spirit and commissioning them within a context of broad science, that "the spiritual, subjective world of ancient wisdom" could be joined "with the objective, empirical world of modern knowledge". The text further contends that integrating science and religion in this way would in turn, "have political dimensions sewn into its very fabric"."
And see also stuff by Charles Tart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
The mystery of consciousness (where it come from, what it means if anything, where is goes, how it changes, and so on) remains a fundamental unknown and maybe unknowable of our lives on this plane of existence. The uncertainty ranges across all sorts of religious ideas to also include things like whether we are living in a computer simulation or computer game of some sort. That mystery is intertwined with the great mystery of everything.
Both links above are Wikipedia links to show Wikipedia can be useful as a starting point, if you go to it aware of its limits including expecting bias. Here is another example of an article on economics which it seems to me is being aggressively policed for years by a "deletionist" who won't let anything but pro-mainstream-Capitalist economics be on the page regardless of whether the other material includes a citation from a notable published source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
To avoid being misled by Wikipedia, especially on health issues or economic issues, one must be aware that Wikipedia does suffer from some sort of mainstream bias most areas. Looking at past versions of the pages or related discussion can sometimes help overcome those biases. Example including a recent edit war of reversions in the last month or two:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde...
One alternative to Wikipedia was Google Knol. Aside from being owned by a for-profit with a history of abandoning projects, there was something good to the now-defunct Google Knol with the notion of articles from a point-of-view authored by either one person, a small group, or everyone. Peer review is a form of censorship (several essays on on it on the web), PhD training produces "Disciplined Minds" (the name of an enlightening book), and peer review is getting more problematical with increased competition for funding (see Dr. David Goodstein on "The Big Crunch"),
Related things I've written:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...
And also, on trying to think more deeply together about health and other issues:
https://www.newschallenge.org/...
http://opengov.newschallenge.o...
http://www.changemakers.com/mo...
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
More on the important of discussion by Hugo Mercier:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes....
"We do not claim that reasoning has nothing to do with the truth. We claim that reasoning did not
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Says so in the Bible. Proven.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Please note that the petition does not refer to holistic healing, or alternative medicine. It refers to ENERGY PSYCHOLOGY, most especially the case of EFT, which is designed to change negative emotions. The people who have signed the petition are actively working with people who suffer from emotional problems and have plenty of evidence, including plenty of research studies, that what they are doing works. Once again, the Wiki attitude to this is highly illogical and overemotional. It is not rational. It tallies with the "Alchemist Denial" which is prevalent on Wikipedia - leaving out the FACT that many of the "fathers of modern science" were interested in, and highly active in, metaphysics of one kind or the other. Denying simple facts and starting to shout abuse - is that scientific? Really?
Love without logic is insanity. And vice versa.
...the powers that be in the US would take a similar approach with other things like evolution vs creationism in schools and all the hoo-hah surrounding NDTs Cosmos series...
"Prove it", meaning, prove it by means OTHER THAN throwing a bible in my face and saying "See? Here it is written! IT IS THE TRUTH!!!!1!1!!!"
Yeah, well, fossils, motherfucker - the only thing I've ever gotten from your book is confused and wondering where all the historical evidence is to correlate the story.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
The USA does not have a functional health service for all it's people. As a result a large number of desperate people clutch at the weak straws of holistic medicine because medicine that worked is priced beyond their reach. Holistic medicine is usually made of very low cost components, has zero efficacy, and is often dangerous to the user either as a direct toxic procedure or because it diverts a person from effective meds. That said, incurable illnesses kill you no matter what you do.
The USA has an effective medical system for those who can pay for it, via cash or insurance. The touted claim that hospitals will provide services for those who cannot pay as helper of last resort is true in a narrow sense that you will be given palliative aid as you die after the tests and early work to diagnose and perhaps to save you were blocked by your economic situation. Even the so-called Obama reforms are a poor start, but they are a start, and they might in time reach a system as good as the French, German, Canadian, or even the Cuban system, as measured by age at death stats. I figure better health care makes you live longer, so longevity assesses systems. The USA has many different populations, white, black, fat and skinny, Jewish, Christian, men and women, etc. etc., and all have their own longevity tables. Some are quite bad, like poor black and South. Rich northern educated Jewish white men do better.
But overlaying this is the undeniable fact that universal health care raises the longevity chart of every group, not just saying the USA = best, the USA is the most costly, which means Americans are the most cheated group on earth by their medical services, because all the others get more bang for their buck - or Kroner or whatever.
Do the proof the same way the large pharmaceutical companies do. Cheat on the data, file misleading patents, have your people appointed the head of the FDA, promote for unapproved uses and charge exhorbiant fees, pay fines in the billions while making tens of billions. It's easy!!
Seriously though the biggest problem is that we are abandoning the scientific method in so many areas that we are dooming ourselves. The double blind protocol needs to be expanded. If a company comes up with a new drug or old treatment it should go to a university for testing. Neither the company nor the university should know about each other.
My god let VMS die already.
Not any time soon: http://www.hp.com/go/openvms/r...
VMS is to HP iron what Z/OS is to IBM mainframes. VMS will die when HP exits this market. And given that most of the VMS customers are banks and financial institutions, their customers aren't running out of money, and aren't looking to migrate to other platforms.
It's a lot easier to keep pain suppressed than to get it suppressed in the first place. My guess would be that morphine is better at suppressing pain than saline placebo, but once the pain is down placebo was enough to keep it there.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The Bible's definition of faith: Hebrews 11:1
Proof of God's existence by reason, evidence:
Romans 1:20
Hebrews 3:4
Love this. Many of these have been touched on in the discussion. Scientology is the mack-daddy of them all!
The Venn Diagram of Irrational Nonsense...
http://crispian-jago.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-venn-diagram-of-irrational-nonsense.html
this whole premise is dog crap (i would know, I just picked up a bunch of it!). So medicine that has been "proven" to work, that in many cases ends up causing more problems than it solves (yes there is PROOF of that) is somehow more legitimate than alternative medicine?
I agree that you can't just goto wikipedia and make a bunch of claims and expect it to be accepted as science or valid. Like anything else, peer review and studies with real live human beings is necessary for any real validity. Even then the body of knowledge is growing much faster than it can be proven.
Wikipedia is not the place for a debate or discourse. It's the place people come to look for things as close to fact as we can get them.
Cinnamon oil, mustard poultice, licorice root tea, green tea, honey, cumin, are all useful home remedies with medical effects well beyond the placebo effect. Just because they cannot be patented by Big Pharma does not mean they are ineffective. At issue here is the tens of millions of dollars it takes to run a full set of placebo-based double-blind studies. There is no profit in running these studies for home remedies.
There is a competition between "ethical" pharmaceutical companies that require a doctor's prescription for there products and the OTC suppliers like Life Extension, who have extensive research on animal models and metabolic pathways. If a Pharma company takes over an OTC formula the price goes up by a factor of ten. Lots of prescriptions could be safely delivered OTC at great savings to the consumer.
I don't support homeopathic remedies.
... therefore is apt to improve or decline over time depending on the general moral aptitude of the members.
British Medical Journal says multiple repeated gold-standard placebo controlled studies prove it works.
"Scientific" people say that it's witchcraft, and can't accept the findings by standards they demand.
The problem is not science, it's people. I've seen stuff that most people would insist is impossible, yet I saw it. The bee isn't supposed to be able to fly, but does.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...
You seem to think logic == reason. Silly.
This fellow is either the best logician of that millenia or of all time. And he did demonstrate some logical problems in logic and i suppose you do not find it useful to notice.
Congratulations. You managed to out-stupid someone who thinks it's a bad thing that Wikipedia has an article about string theory. Have a cookie.
Alternative "medicine", while it is practiced by people of all political persuasions, has become to the left what young earth creationism and climate change denial has become to the right.
You clearly don't understand why people pursue alternative medicine. To give them credit, the Wikipedia page on this topic discusses some of the reasons. But for some, the most important one has to do with medical ethics in the USA.
In short, we have a big problem with it.
When the medical profession is in a position of influence with respect to deciding that people have to go to them for access to many drugs, they are in, what, in ethics terms, is known as a "position of conflict of interest".
It may interest you to know that many drugs not available except with a prescription in the USA can be readily obtained in some other countries without a prescription. I have seen this in travelling overseas.
Hence, the situation we have in the USA that a well educated person, even a scientist, a keen and careful observer, with a strong background in biology and chemistry, a lifetime's experience with the medical quirks of their own body, and all the amazing resources we have today for doing medical research, still has to go to the medical profession to get many drugs that could be beneficial to them, simply because they don't have a piece of paper licensing them to make their own decisions.
Does that seem like a policy that is consistent with the notion of living in a free country? Shouldn't the concept of freedom imply that reasonable individuals should be free to make their own decisions?
Having to get a prescription means having to take the time to travel to a doctor's office, it means a potentially long wait in a waiting room probably full of coughing people, probably getting exposed to every disease in town, all to get something that in another country one might just be able to walk down to the pharmacy to get.
Even after all that, there is a decent chance that the medical professional will make a mistake in the handful of minutes that they actually spend interacting with one. Many medical professionals try to apply statistics to individual cases without having time to get all the data needed to tell them whether or not that is appropriate. I've had doctors and dentists make some major blunders, and probably most people will experience this at some point in their lives. Medicine is art layered on science, and many people who can memorize the science simply aren't very good at the art.
Supposing you survive the mistake, you'll have to go back and repeat the whole process over again.
All this happens because medical professionals have decided that only members of their priesthood should have access to what are effectively treated as holy materials. The medical profession makes money as a result of this decision, by creating an artificial demand for their services. There is a clear ethics problem here.
Every US medical professional benefits from the blindness of the profession to this ethical issue, and thus, becomes an accessory to unethical practices.
A fundamental right to ethical government certainly exists. Even the appearance of ethical conflict of interest must be avoided whenever possible. As a corollary, a right also exists to expect ethical conduct from any professionals (such as medical or legal professionals) officially in a position to influence government policy. Here too, even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided.
In the case of access to many drugs being limited to the issuance of prescriptions by the US medical profession, we have a prima facie case of unethical conduct on the part of the medical profession, and thus all the current laws relating to medical prescriptions are illegal.
This problem, of course, doesn't affect the politicians. So long as they get their lobbying contributions, they quickly become rich enough to not have to deal with the hassles ordinary people encounte