You're certainly free to go see the local chiropractor or reflexoligist or scientologist or whatever phony cult you want to join in on, but let's at least be realistic about what we're talking about, and acknowledge that it's not an evidence-based procedure.
It's not a matter of being closed-minded. The claims of chiropractic have been investigated thoroughly, and have not been supported by the evidence. The closed-minded position is to see that chiropractic is fraudulent, but continue to cling to it.
Of course they did. You don't need science to notice improvement.
But you do need science to correlate improvement with the efficacy of the method. That's the whole point. The variance in an individual's response is relatively high, especially when you're dealing with fake techniques. In such an environment, it's not trivial to separate degrees of effectiveness.
And it's as dichotomous as that? Either you get one or you don't and nothing else matters?
Ultimately, the dispute is rather simple: I ascribe much more value and complexity to the placebo effect and much less to the mainstream, mostly chemical approach than you. I also put much less belief in such a monetized branch of industry as pharmacology. Pills are not made to help you; they are made to get sold (and this includes various forms of alternative medicine as well, mind you). The expected result is that these two goals correspond, but in practice they rarely do. Market failures are everywhere.
I don't think the claim is that pharmacology is free of corruption or that all pharmacological science is sound science. The essential claim is that the attitude of producers and consumers of medicine needs to be scientific -- that is to say, the parties need to behave as though they care about evidence, biases, experimental procedures, and so forth.
Bad drugs can and do slip past this process through corruption, incompetence, et cetera, but if someone isn't bothering to perform these procedures at all, then their drug has to be presumed bad to begin with.
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A limit of time is fixed for thee
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
That is "all it takes" - that's why they have to placebo-control clinical trials of pills. That doesn't mean that all placebo effects are created equal.
Ultimately, the dispute is rather simple: I ascribe much more value and complexity to the placebo effect and much less to the mainstream, mostly chemical approach than you. I also put much less belief in such a monetized branch of industry as pharmacology. Pills are not made to help you; they are made to get sold (and this includes various forms of alternative medicine as well, mind you). The expected result is that these two goals correspond, but in practice they rarely do. Market failures are everywhere.
Look for example at AIDS survival rates. Back in the 80s (or today if you're in Africa or someplace drugs aren't available) it's several months. With anti-retroviral drugs, it's decades. That's not placebo. That's pills that are helping a huge number of people.
Certainly there are cases where pills are sold for the sake of being sold. I don't disagree at all. However, I'd much rather put my trust in an industry that helps a whole lot of people than alternative medicine that helps no one beyond placebo.
Testing the impact of antidepressants, for instance. With AIDS, the question is rather simple: you have a virus and it will eventually kill you. But there are various diseases out there with no simple causal agent to fight, with no simple symptoms to subdue and whose treatment will have a much stronger impact on a person's mental functioning and general well-being. Take hypochondriasis as another example.
Sure, there are conditions which are harder to pin down, and for which available treatments do not significantly out-perform placebo. However, there are also a great many diseases which are very "simple" (as you call them) and for which actual treatment vastly outperforms both placebo and any of the many fraudulent "alternative" treatments.
What does not exist, however, is a disease for which poking at someone's foot according to a big chart on the wall is similarly superior to "mainstream" treatments.
And even for such a simple disease as AIDS (in this regard), it will still be very difficult to determine the overall impact of the treatment. Quality of life during the life extension? Risk of resistance development? Interaction with other diseases? Impact on general well-being, including indirect effects?
Do you think any "alternative" medicines are going to come close to anti-retrovirals after taking any of that into account?
Can you imagine a pharmaceutical company getting away with selling something they know doesn't work? They do a test that shows that their pill doesn't do any better than the placebo at managing pain, but they market it as a pain reliever anyway? Because that's exactly what things like alternative medicine companies do. This is being ignorant of your own product at best and being willfully deceitful at worst.
I have had a health condition for a long time and have taken supplements and herbs for years. I have personally benefited from taking alternative medicine. But, you must be careful what you take in high doses or long term, especially if your already really health compromised like me. You should preferably cycle different herbs, this is good advice for anyone that takes herbs a lot. Taking supplements long term (years) especially at high doses probably is not a good idea, even though you may be benefiting from it.
I will give an instance of a very powerful supplement that helped my digestion. I was taking enzymes and they really helped my digestion a lot. I mean that. They are extremely powerful in helping me digest food. But I started taking more than the recommended dose, and because my health was already greatly effected from before, it all had a really bad affect on my health. So my health got worse again, and and absolutely knew it was those enzymes because of my symptoms.
Supplements can cause problems in your body and sometimes it takes years before it's found out. Like if you take to much calcium you end up getting calcium in your tissues. But for instance of you take a moderate amount of a multi-mineral you can probably benefit from it without the negative effects of just taking calcium. Again only taking small amounts. We have to remember that minerals and especially trace minerals have been lowered in our food over the years due to our current farming practices. Vegetables and plants can't make minerals, like vitamins. Minerals are essential. So taking a multi-mineral in moderate to low amounts is probably a good idea.
What I have learned is supplements can be very beneficial in some cases, and even more effective and healthier than any prescription drug but you must exercise caution. In my view, supplements are drugs some are benign and some are bad if taken by the wrong person. But, most all supplements will not hurt you if you are a healthy adult and in moderate doses.
On the other hand I must point out that prescriptions can be very dangerous. And have side effects too. And they can also cause undetected health conditions that show up later in life. We are still really evolving the uses, methods and science of the drugs, supplements, medicines, and foods that we use for our species.
Fibromyalgia? I'm not exactly well-read in this subject, but I know some people IRL who found themselves helped with various alternative therapies. Conventional remedies typically helped as well, but they came with very severe side-effects. Any remedy is also going to lose some efficacy if the patient resents it, for instance because of the way it was produced, because of who produced it or because he thinks it's going to turn him into a zombie.
I've seen milder cases of Fibromyalgia treated with oxigninated (sp?) water.
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Out of the blackness and stench of the engulfing swamp emerged a shimmering figure. Only the splattered armor and ichor-stained sword hinted at the unfathomable evil the knight had just laid waste.
Am I to believe that an Angel of Serenity (a 7 drop mediocre reanimation target) is going to have the SAME value as a Hallowed Fountain? 15 bucks each? Sorry, not going to happen. Not now, not ever.
6 bucks for a Sphinx's Revelation? The value will tank by at least 50% as most of the spells of it's nature (post-Stroke).
In 3 months, say January 1st, it will be interesting to see how much you overpaid.
I've seen milder cases of Fibromyalgia treated with oxigninated (sp?) water.
All water is oxygenated to different degrees. I've seen technological problems treated with yelling, doesn't mean it had anything to do with the troubleshooting ultimately working.
'Alternative medicine' is a euphemism for quackery.
So you are saying all of our medical advances at one time were quackery?
Almost every way to treat something today was considered alternative medicine at one time or another.
Not the way that 'alternative medicine' is referred to today. There are new advances all the time, but they are not called 'alternative medicine'. There's a difference between experimental trials and procedures and 'alternative medicine'.
I tried herbs and acupuncture. It works. But I don't know about those that involves, religious rituals, magnets, and stones. Herbs had been used by humans and is very effective in curing minor sickness.
"Alternative Medicine" is far too broad a term. It includes everything from homeopathy (which is frankly quackery and can't work) to acupuncture (which I'm far from sold on, but which at least has a physical basis on which it COULD work and so at least isn't easily dismissed out of hand) to some herbs and chemicals which demonstrably do work but for whatever reason aren't being promoted by doctors at the moment (elderberry as a cold/flu treatment).
I think the above pretty much sums up my stance on it, come to think of it.
It's all dependent on the claims made. If a Reiki healer (e.g.) claims to be able to cure cancer, I'd want double-blind trials and all the other proper controls. If they just claim to be a fancy wooed-up massage, I'd be okay with that. Why ruin the pleasure of feeling relaxed and at peace after a soothing massage? As long as it wasn't a substitute for, say, chemotherapy.
Although I suspect they wouldn't be able to charge as much money for the sessions...
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Do I Contradict Myself? Very Well Then I Contradict Myself.
I believe the best way to go is to find a balance between modern medicine and alternative healing. Everyone's different and people often underestimate the powerful effects that mood and nutrition can have on the immune system.
How do you determine that a treatment works? How do you determine this for an affordable cost?
If that is your stance, I've got a hundred different options to treat every ailment you have. Some of them work, but I don't have the money to find out which ones. Want to buy some?
Keeping an open mind when studying a material is always good, having a closed mind when it comes to things that sounds too good to be true without evidence is wise.
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Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
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Closed minds will forever remain in the dark..
It's not a matter of being closed-minded. The claims of chiropractic have been investigated thoroughly, and have not been supported by the evidence. The closed-minded position is to see that chiropractic is fraudulent, but continue to cling to it.
You refuse to listen to reasonable, evidence-based objections to your claims, and you accuse us of being closed-minded?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
But you do need science to correlate improvement with the efficacy of the method. That's the whole point. The variance in an individual's response is relatively high, especially when you're dealing with fake techniques. In such an environment, it's not trivial to separate degrees of effectiveness.
No? Did I say it was?
I don't think the claim is that pharmacology is free of corruption or that all pharmacological science is sound science. The essential claim is that the attitude of producers and consumers of medicine needs to be scientific -- that is to say, the parties need to behave as though they care about evidence, biases, experimental procedures, and so forth.
Bad drugs can and do slip past this process through corruption, incompetence, et cetera, but if someone isn't bothering to perform these procedures at all, then their drug has to be presumed bad to begin with.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
That is "all it takes" - that's why they have to placebo-control clinical trials of pills. That doesn't mean that all placebo effects are created equal.
Look for example at AIDS survival rates. Back in the 80s (or today if you're in Africa or someplace drugs aren't available) it's several months. With anti-retroviral drugs, it's decades. That's not placebo. That's pills that are helping a huge number of people.
Certainly there are cases where pills are sold for the sake of being sold. I don't disagree at all. However, I'd much rather put my trust in an industry that helps a whole lot of people than alternative medicine that helps no one beyond placebo.
They're not extending AIDS patients' lives by 20 years with placebo.
Ah, so the system works great for AIDS but not for these unnamed other diseases? I see how this game is played.
It's very easy to test. You compare the people getting anti-retrovirals to the people getting Yahya Jammeh's magic balm rubbed on their foreheads.
Then I'm not sure I understand what you were talking about.
Sure, there are conditions which are harder to pin down, and for which available treatments do not significantly out-perform placebo. However, there are also a great many diseases which are very "simple" (as you call them) and for which actual treatment vastly outperforms both placebo and any of the many fraudulent "alternative" treatments.
What does not exist, however, is a disease for which poking at someone's foot according to a big chart on the wall is similarly superior to "mainstream" treatments.
Do you think any "alternative" medicines are going to come close to anti-retrovirals after taking any of that into account?
I will give an instance of a very powerful supplement that helped my digestion. I was taking enzymes and they really helped my digestion a lot. I mean that. They are extremely powerful in helping me digest food. But I started taking more than the recommended dose, and because my health was already greatly effected from before, it all had a really bad affect on my health. So my health got worse again, and and absolutely knew it was those enzymes because of my symptoms.
Supplements can cause problems in your body and sometimes it takes years before it's found out. Like if you take to much calcium you end up getting calcium in your tissues. But for instance of you take a moderate amount of a multi-mineral you can probably benefit from it without the negative effects of just taking calcium. Again only taking small amounts. We have to remember that minerals and especially trace minerals have been lowered in our food over the years due to our current farming practices. Vegetables and plants can't make minerals, like vitamins. Minerals are essential. So taking a multi-mineral in moderate to low amounts is probably a good idea.
What I have learned is supplements can be very beneficial in some cases, and even more effective and healthier than any prescription drug but you must exercise caution. In my view, supplements are drugs some are benign and some are bad if taken by the wrong person. But, most all supplements will not hurt you if you are a healthy adult and in moderate doses.
On the other hand I must point out that prescriptions can be very dangerous. And have side effects too. And they can also cause undetected health conditions that show up later in life. We are still really evolving the uses, methods and science of the drugs, supplements, medicines, and foods that we use for our species.
Hope that helps.
Peace!
I've seen milder cases of Fibromyalgia treated with oxigninated (sp?) water.
Autosuspension for promotion of illegal activity.
All water is oxygenated to different degrees. I've seen technological problems treated with yelling, doesn't mean it had anything to do with the troubleshooting ultimately working.
'Alternative medicine' is a euphemism for quackery.
So you are saying all of our medical advances at one time were quackery?
Almost every way to treat something today was considered alternative medicine at one time or another.
Not the way that 'alternative medicine' is referred to today. There are new advances all the time, but they are not called 'alternative medicine'. There's a difference between experimental trials and procedures and 'alternative medicine'.
I think the above pretty much sums up my stance on it, come to think of it.
Although I suspect they wouldn't be able to charge as much money for the sessions...
Very Well Then I Contradict Myself.
If that is your stance, I've got a hundred different options to treat every ailment you have. Some of them work, but I don't have the money to find out which ones. Want to buy some?
Some of the vitamins stuff is good for you, but if you go overboard you may just be investing in expensive urine.
So have I. Although (luckily!) tea tree oil has undergone scientific testing, so it really really works, thanks to terpinen-4-ol. Yay science!
Very Well Then I Contradict Myself.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.