Posts by Peter Ashby
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I'm not trying to argue with your recollections of the event Russell. I'm only pointing out that with an n=1 you cannot know what you are asserting was the only possible explanation. You may indeed find it highly suggestive but I would suggest that this is coloured by your obvious relief. Our youngest had very bad colic for the first 4ish months of life, her little stomach would go rock hard after every feed and she would scream until we could manage to use a syringe to squirt good old fashioned gripe water down her throat. This did not always work however and then I would wander around with her draped over my shoulder screaming in my ear until she would finally belch and with a sigh drop off to sleep. This frazzles the nerves something shocking.
So I have some inkling of how this seemingly miraculous healing must have struck you. I am also a scientist and know that the conclusions you are trying to draw from it are completely and utterly unsupportable by this tissue thin 'evidence'.
For one thing you are assuming that this was the only possible therapy, that it was entirely safe (your son was fine this is not evidence of its safety overall) or that it would have got better on its own. Babies are both more delicate and much tougher than most people realise and time is a great healer for them.
I suspect that part of the difference in our cases is that our difficult baby was our second and thus we were more experienced whereas this was your first where you are finding it all out as you along. Our youngest was a bit of a trial but it was okay since all the rest of it was a fully known situation filled with tested techniques honed on the eldest.
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I swear, I'm not exaggerating what took place. The Skeptics and I agreed on "Interesting and worthy of further exploration" as a form of words afterwards.
Or, the unconcern of the medics you noted meant that was something that would indeed resolve itself in time if left alone. Cranial 'osteopathy' is a nice sciencey sounding term for futzing around with the bones in a an infants skull, because you can.
This exemplifies what is wrong with Chirpractic and Osteopathy, the cracking of bones because they can in the service of discredited magic thinking because they can and because nobody has got around to stopping them.
The reality is that governments don't want to stop them because in places with public medicine they save the government money by soaking up a large number of the worried well, those who are too impatient to wait for their natural healing processes to the job or to change the damaging lifestyles.
Which again would be all fine and dandy, except that some of the things they do are dangerous, they overstep their abilities and knowledge and being already deep in the Woo they peddle all manner of stuff including anti vaccination propaganda and they are wont to tell people to come off their meds.
If they stuck to bad backs and stiff shoulders I would have no problem with them, trouble is they don't.
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Russ, the Cochrane Review is much better than any given individual study and they concluded from all their data that nothing works better than placebo. That includes scientific physiotherapy. The truth is that we have no good therapies for bad backs.
Also your personal anecdote does not equate to evidence since your n = 1 which means the stats is a no go. Which is why we have Cochrane reviews. I smell a confirmation bias allied with not wishing to think that you may have wasted your money.
Last time I had a bad back and it has been bad enough to lock me up completely, I cured it by digging the garden after it had calmed down (time + ibuprofen). I run and do various core body strength exercises as part of my warmup and I have had absolutely no problems since. No professionals were consulted or paid, not even a physio and I have numerous anecdotal examples of personally being put back together again by physios. Just not for my back.
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@Ross Mason
One Osteo who knows when he is beaten does not a profession exonerate. That he knows some real medicine does not excuse the major, pre scientific, mistake that underlies his other diagnoses and treatment modalities.
I do not doubt the good intentions and desire to treat of many who become Chiros or Osteos, they are in fact victims too. Would that they had all become Physios, or Chiropodists/Podiatrists. But not everyone can get into those courses.
Spinal manipulation is not only dangerous it is unnecessary and not only does not achieve the desired aims but cannot because the biology does not work that way. Some of it is not even wrong.
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@Sacha
Acupuncture is not in and of itself dangerous. The problems come because, like homeopathy and Chiro etc it often comes all wrapped up in anti science, anti medicine propaganda that tells patients not to take their necessary meds and peddles anti vaccination tracts. That offered by GPs should be immune from this of course.
Osteo on the other hand is just as dangerous as Chiro. They do not differ fundamentally. Both are based on an utter misunderstanding of biology. They are not even any good at treating bad backs. Neither is any other therapy beyond vertebral fusion for the worst cases. Physio is as effective, the difference is the physio is much less likely to harm you, is better regulated, fully integrated into modern evidence based medicine and so more likely to refer you on instead of trying to treat what they cannot etc.
We have bad backs because humans are not fully adapted to bipedalism yet and because in the modern world we don't do enough physical exercise and spend too long slumped in chairs and lying in bed at the weekends. I can no longer read in bed, I must get up and sit myself in a chair. The consequences of not doing so have been thoroughly impressed upon me. If I am insufficiently active various bits of me play up. Thus it is for all of us, use it or lose it. It's just that many think they should be able to live sedentary lifestyles pain and discomfort free. Chiropractors will tell you that regular visits for prophylactic manipulations will enable this. Your GP will tell you to take two ibuprofen before bedtime, take more exercise and lose weight (which will work, it did for me). But guess which most people will choose, even if it costs you more?
Add in that bad backs are something that often improves on their own, coincident with visits to the Chiro and combine with the fact that we are each an n of only 1 and we suffer from confirmation bias and remembering only the positive correlations and that Chiros deal only with glowing patient testimonials because trials are expensive and tend to give the 'wrong' answers and what do you get?
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GPs will also give you acupuncture and recommend homeopathy. Some do it in the knowledge that they are comforting placebo and nothing more, many do them for money knowing this and some are True Believers. I'm not sure which ones are worse.
Treat GPs as gatekeepers/triage for the specialists and get passed on up if doubtful. The specialists should be current in the literature.
Oh and buy Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science and read it hard.
And finally, stay away from Chiropractors and Osteopaths. They are demonstrably dangerous:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/edmonton/story/2008/06/13/chiro-lawsuit.htmlSee a physio, for one thing if they misbehave or mistreat there is a real regulatory body that can properly stop them practising. That is NOT true for Chiros and Osteos, the latter are often Chiros who have been 'struck off' by the Chiro Society, so they relabel themselves and carry on.
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What is interesting is that what is happening is more than ignorance + desperation. There is a also a large helping of the sort of magic thinking that falls from the dictum that the any sufficiently advanced tech will appear to be magic. Biotech and modern Biomedicine has reached this stage for a large segment of the population. They have seen the hard science on stem cells and inhaled the promises of what they will be able to cure 'in the future'. They saw it in the past, so its now that future, right?
issues of tissue typing, immune rejection, cancer risks etc from stem cell injections get forgotten even if they were known about. That must all have been solved by now if they are offering a paying product, right?
Miracles that are given away are pretty much worthless. You should hear people here in the UK bitch about the side effects of life saving high tech treatments that didn't cost them a bean.
Is this going to be a regular series Russ? are you morphing into NZ's Ben Goldacre?
Also there is apparently some (disputed) evidence that hyperbaric O2 is good for MS. But MS is one of those diseases that get better then relapse then get better so clean data acquisition is hard. You wouldn't get me in one, I saw that James Bond film.
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You guys are aware that old Iggy, in skinny topless glory of course, is all over the place here in the UK selling . . . Car Insurance . . .
Aren't you?
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Russ you Aucklanders are officially wimps when it comes to a proper climate. I remember cycling to school in Auckland (Lynfield College if you want to know) and when the temperature was bellow about 15C you would see people decked out in hat, scarf and gloves. I was born in Scotland and we moved to Auckland from Dunedin.
Here in Dundee it was 13C when I stepped outside at 7am for a run, clad in split shorts and a technical tee. Light SW wind (think NW for NZ) and I could easily have done it in a singlet would have been less sweat. When we go out later I will NOT be wearing a coat, in fact I will not even be taking a coat, an umbrella, but no coat. It's not October yet.
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The Dunedin merger was equivalent in scale to the Auckland's. It was one thing to extend the boundary to include all the peninsula, and even Port Chalmers. The reasoning for swallowing Mosgiel and most of the rest of the Taeiri Plains was getting dodgy, that was before the boundary went all the way out over the Rock and Pillars to encompass Middlemarch for goodness sake.
We had just bought a house in the old St. Kilda Borough down by the beach only about 3months before the amalgamation (we didn't bother to change our DCC Library cards). I could see the logic of Dundedin amalgamating with St. Kilda, it was indeed past time. But Middlemarch? It was and remains a nonsense.
I don't see why they couldn't have borrowed London's governance structure. That would even have allowed the election of a super mayor but kept the local representation intact while enabling the sort of regional cooperation supposedly needed. This is instead all about Empire Building and ideological purity and damn the consequences.