Posts by Stephen Judd
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Que
I think you and Haywood are competing for branding mindshare in the David space.
-
To derail onto something we can all agree about: yes, I had all those songs at primary and intermediate school too (ie from 1975 until 1981). I seem to remember official Ministry of Education song books that were regularly issued. I'm guessing someone had been told to include popular songs and so be relevant to the kids but hadn't really thought the whole thing through. The long term effect was to leave me with a lasting hatred for Neil Diamond.
-
Can't really understand the tension between treatment options. It has always puzzled me why 'science' should automatically have precedence over much older paradigms that gave us acupuncture or herbal treatments.
I don't find that a puzzle at all. Science is, well, science, ie a systematically tested, repeatable, reassessed body of knowledge based in observation. All the other stuff, in one way or another, is not. If it does acquire all those things, then it becomes science. Is it really that odd to give precedence to those treatments whose claims are based in a systematic evaluation of evidence?
Which reminds me, I want to defend doctors against a canard I've read more than once in this thread -- that other practitioners are "holistic", whatever that is, and doctors are not. Bollocks to that, I say. My personal experience with my doctors is that they want to know about me and how I live, they consider different causes, they look at lifestyle stuff, etc etc. And if you have ever looked at a medical textbook, you'll see that their model is one that sees the body as a number of complex systems that interact in complex ways.
Homeopathy can be quite effective with fears, phobias or addictions.
I would expect something that works entirely on the placebo effect to be most efficacious with mental conditions.
-
steven, here's a quote from an acquaintance in another online forum:
I'm a grad student in neuroscience at a major hospital. My adviser is a MD PhD neurologist. Every week, there's a morning case conference where all the neurology attendings and residents get together and present all the new cases that have come in in the past week.
Every single week with little or no exception, one of those cases is someone who died or became a paraplegic due to the actions of a chiropractor.
-
Kyle, I'm happy to be consisently skeptical on all fronts.
In the US, where a lot of the more skeptical writing originates, osteopathy has made some whacky claims, particularly in its early days. Like chiropracters, their theory is that spinal misalignment is the cause of all sorts of ailments. So the original founder claimed he could treat whooping cough, for example, through manipulation. I bet even the people who have obtained relief from an osteopath on this thread would hesitate before trying osteopathy for an infectious disease.
Wikipedia tells me that having embraced evidence-based practice, some branches of osteopathy are nowadays are more or less indistinguishable from conventional medicine, except perhaps in bedside manner. I don't know whether NZ osteopaths are like that though.
It seems to me quite plausible that a practiced masseur with good anatomical training and a nice manner can get real and repeatable results with back and joint pain no matter what theory is used to explain their techniques.
Finally, lots of things get better on their own, and the last treatment to be tried gets the credit. This of course applies to conventional medicine as much as it does to woo-woo therapies :D
-
Are those little yellow pills of an extract from the crocus bulb?
Nah, that's colchicine (sp?), which you can take for an acute gout attack.
My Dad tells me allopurinol is the shiz. When you're a wine-bibbing meat eater who grows every kind of purine-rich vegetable there is, the gout diet is a real downer. Since the allopurinol he's been enjoying the fruits of his labours with nary a twinge.
-
Anyone who did computer support at a university in the late 80s or 90s remembers the horror and misery on the faces of graduate students who had inexplicably put everything they valued on one corrupt, unreadable floppy.
-
I don't have an opinion on the efficacy of going to sea for "troubled" youth, but I know that if anyone were to propose it seriously, then regardless of its merits the usual suspects would immediately start moaning about the waste and injustice of rewarding villlainy with a lovely cruise. Cause the point of boot camp is putting the boot in.
-
It struck me that Comesky's defence was so obviously distasteful and ludicrous that it might be a deliberate attempt to subvert his duty to the client.
-
Here's a wee anecdote from a friend of mine who's a prison officer. A prisoner stabbed one of his colleagues recently -- luckily, the wound was not severe. The prisoner said later "I only stabbed you a little bit, because I like you." Same friend of mine observed that Mt Eden was a bastard to work in because its antique plan made it easy for you to be surprised.
So yeah, there are some very challenging design problems in prison layout.
Maybe they can be met using shipping container modules, maybe they can't. I wonder how thoroughly this has been investigated.