Posts by dyan campbell
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Because back in the day people had no way of sensing electricity - short of static friction/lightning - and no understanding of how it worked. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to assume that the energy flows bit is, basically, guessing. Voltage potentials along neurons were somewhat difficult to observe before the twentieth century.
The World Health Organisation re: Acupuncture)
Darwin wouldn't have had a clue what a gene was, let alone how genetics work but it didn't prevent him from coming up with the single most important idea in genetics.
Tibetan medicine is even older than Chinese medicine but there in the Medicine Tantras are descriptions of seven different types of organisms that cause disease.
Tibetan medicine also details which foods are low gylcemic index and which are high. With their medicine tantras they were able to treat diabetes (type 1, as type 2 was non-existent) with considerably more success than any other type of physician before Banting and Best cracked it.
The detailed descriptions of the biochemistry of digestion are quite remarkable. And although no one 2,600 years ago would have had any way to map any of this, there it is in the ancient medicine tantras.
Interesting note: I had quite a serious duodenal ulcer in 1980 - even before cimetidine was widely available - and the dietary advice given back in my era was quite wrong. Milk is pretty much the last thing you should drink; the high protein content causes the production of pepsinase. The dietary advice found in the medicine tantras for treatment of duodenal ulcers is absolutely correct, as is the advice for diabetes, and many, many other ailments.
Dismiss it if you want. That's why Sydney Brenner coined the term "Occam's Broom". It's so convenient for sweeping any evidence that doesn't fit your theory under the carpet...
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It is somewhat unreasonable, however, to link however many thousand year old "maps" of "energy flows" in the body to the electromagnetic fields produced by the biomechanical and chemical interactions of the human body.
Why is this unreasonable?
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Not better than placebo it doesn't. We now have a number of different placebos for acupuncture, the absence of which held the analysis of its effectiveness back for some time. When you compare acupuncture with either sham acupuncture or random placing of the needles there is no difference.
Demonstrably untrue:
"Conclusions Acupuncture plus diclofenac is more effective than placebo acupuncture plus diclofenac for the symptomatic treatment of osteoarthritis of the knee."
So given that a number studies on acupuncture have been performed, I would be astonished if a list like Diane's could NOT be compiled.
Occam's broom.
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You do know the origins of 'Traditional Chinese Medicine' (TCM) don't you? It did not exist prior to Chairman Mao except as a random bunch of local witch doctory.
That's wildly inaccurate Peter. The oldest medical textbook in the world (detailing physiology, pathology, prevention, diagnosis, treatment) was written 800 BCE in China, as was a later, more detailed text "The General Treatise on the Causes and Symptoms of Disease" (581-618 CE) which consists of 50 volumes, divided into 67 categories, and lists 1,700 diseases and syndromes. Most of China may have been very poor before Mao, but there were some educated people. My cousin's family were highly educated (and obscenely wealthy) Mandarins, and her Gran fled China (penniless and in a hurry, during the Boxer Rebellion) while Mao as still a schoolboy. The Chinese weren't all hicks and bumpkins before the Great Leap Forward.
The arrival of Western Medicine in China is largely due to the efforts of Canadian physician Norman Bethune who "In 1938 Bethune travelled to Yan'an in the Shanbei region of Shaanxi province in China. There he joined the Chinese Communists led by Mao Zedong in their struggle against the Japanese in the Second Sino-Japanese War."
Peter, Lucy you are both insisting that acupuncture is bogus but have you searched Med Line or Pub Med for studies? Peter, you said that the NIH had spent an enormous sum of money investigating alternative therapies and had not turned up nothing useful, but this is also incorrect.
The studies being done on the Tibetan Materia Medica are particularly interesting to me as I wrote a piece for New Zealand Doctor about Tibetan medicine many years ago. (And one for Russell's Planet Magazine come to think of it). I was, like Peter and Lucy, expecting Tibetan medicine to be largely shamanism but was surprised to find quite the opposite, and that their medical training takes 7 years - including many written exams, 2 years of supervised internship and (this would be useful in the west) rigorous screening of medical students for their motives for wishing to become doctors. Those who are motivated by a wish to achieve social status are denied entry into medical school.
Lucy, you say no alternative medicine has ever modified their methods, but what do you consider "alternative"? Chinese, Tibetan, Canadian, French, German? Are these alternative? French and German and Canadian medicine all employ methods that would be considered "alternative" in England or NZ.
Effects of electro-acupuncture on anovulation in women with polycystic ovary syndrome.
Changes in cognition induced by social isolation in the mouse are restored by electro-acupuncture.
Acupuncture relieves pelvic and low-back pain in late pregnancy.
The effect of Padma-28, a traditional Tibetan herbal preparation, on human neutrophil function.
Tibetan medical interpretation of myelin lipids and multiple sclerosis.
Medicinal plants used by Tibetans in Shangri-la, Yunnan, China.
Effect of hepatophyt on the choleretic function of the liver damaged by tetracycline -
For reasons given upthread, I'm willing to try some alternatives - but part of being scientific is not to change too many variables at once, hence my giving the 'trusted scientific methods' a very long run.
Advocates of the anti-inflammatory diet are about as credential rich and western trained as sci/med types can get. Anderw Weill trained at Harvard med school and Jon Kabat-Zinn is Professor of Medicine Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
Things change slowly in medicine, and things we know change all the time. When I went to school my biology prof was fond of saying "a sugar molecule is a sugar molecule is a sugar molecule" - riffing on the quote from old Gertrude Stein "a rose is a rose" etc. but it turns out the conventional wisdom was wrong and fructose is not metabolised the same way as sucrose, lactose, dextrose...
In my Mum's day, doctors said smoking was something everyone should do to maintain good health.
It's well known that when an injured person goes into shock, letting the shivering occur actually increases the chances of survival... but patients are still wrapped up in thermal foil blankets. A doctor friend of mine says there will probably be a 40 to 50 year lag between that established fact and the way emergency teams respond to a patient in shock.
When I was hit by a car several years ago, 8 km into a run, on a hot day, lying on red hot ashphalt, shivering with shock, they wrapped me in the inevitable foil blanket. I asked them to take it off, begged them to take it off... they refused... so I screamed those B grade horror movie screams and they took it off... if I hadn't been conscious to do that they almost certainly would have cooked my already overheated liver and kidneys...
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__I'll see whatever it is chiropractors and osteopaths can for a sore back, and raise you polio, smallpox, scarlet fever, and tetanus. Oh, and modern public health__.
Tell it to an engineer. Good sanitation and water supply have saved more lives than doctors ever have.
Yes, clean water has saved more lives than any other single human advancement, it's true. But let's not forget the contributions made by virologists Jonas Salk (polio vaccine) Edward Jenner (smallpox vaccine) Emil von Behring (tetanus vaccine) - I don't know who came up with the scarlet fever vaccine. Oh, and doctors can be pretty useful...
Would Alanis Morrisette find this ironic? My Dad (a retired civil engineer) caught typhoid in Nepal (when he was 83) working as for Engineers Without Borders.
He is now 86 and very grateful for modern medicine, especially antibiotics and IV fluids...
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The NIH in the US have burned through USD1 billion in assessing alternative medicine really hard to try and extract useful, working, safe therapies from it. They have found nothing, nada, not a bean.
Er, not so Peter. From the NIH:
"According to a panel of experts at a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Consensus Conference in November 1997, acupuncture has been found to be effective in the management of chemotherapy-associated nausea and vomiting and in controlling pain associated with surgery."
And from Johns Hopkins:
Massage and Acupuncture Relieve Pain After Cancer Surgery
"If you or loved one face surgery for colon cancer, you may want to consider adding massage and acupuncture to the usual care provided."
Acupuncture is not really "alternative" therapy where I come from - Canada is has a very Chinese heritage, and acupuncture has long been accepted as mainstream medicine. My Mum, pregnant with my sister, opted for acupuncture and moxibustion waaay back in 1946 to control "morning sickness" (*all day all night sickness) after refusing to believe the conventional western doctor who told her that if she took up smoking cigarettes it would calm her nerves and that in turn would quell her nausea. As cigarette smoke was one of the things making her sick, she decided that taking up smoking was probably not going to make her nausea go away. And she always thought cigarettes were bad for a person - gave them bad teeth, bad complexions - long before anyone in the medical profession believed it.
I don't know anything about chiropractors or osteopaths, so I can't comment. My husband Paul is a physiotherapist (one of the best, if I do say so, in my own biased way) and he is horrified at the thought of "cracking" a neck. You can do a lot of damage that way. Pain can be alleviated by an anti-inflammatory in the short term, and the underlying cause should be treated very carefully and gently in the long term.
A lot of people don't like physiotherapy treatment because it is not passive - you are required to do quite a bit of the exercise in many cases - and often the pain gets worse before it gets better. In cases where there pain is referred out to a different part of the body from where the problem originates (neck joint referring pain to the shoulder, or sciatic pain referring pain down the leg etc) the treatment will make the pain more intense as it moves closer to its source. When the pain finally moves up to where the injury actually is the pain disappears.
Not all physiotherapy is painful, but some of it is. It's very effective if you genuinely want to relieve the underlying problem.
A caution about anti-inflammatory medication: they relieve the pain, but by doing that they can trick your body into thinking an injury is gone - and because of that absence of pain you can injure yourself a lot more. Which is not to say don't take them, but don't be fooled into thinking you can thrash whatever injury you had - the healing process still needs to take place. Keeping moving is usually a good idea yes, but skiing/running/pitching with that injury, not so good.
Peter, you say a lot of alternative therapies are no more effective than placebos - but the same is true for a lot of allopathic drugs.
Ben - I think it was Ben - your thinning skin from steroids might be helped by an anti-inflammatory diet
and also by avoiding sugar (including alcohol) and possibly a topically applied vitamin C cream. This approach may very well help any underlying rash that the steriod was used for in the first place.
The role of "alternative medicine" and "mindfulness" as well as a nutritional approach or "ortho-molecular" medicine became very interesting to me when I was a student (biochem/medical ethics etc) and met Linus Pauling. Very interesting guy. I always liked Nobel laureates.
Jon Kabat-Zinns is also an interesting guy with nearly as impressive credentials (no Nobel prize though),
If you have ever sat with someone who has been vomiting so hard and so long they haemmorage a blood vessel in their throat and start gushing blood, you would be grateful to any nutball who can make that stop. I have seen AIDS patients in that state respond brilliantly to aromatherapy. To see someone who has been vomiting/soiling themselves for 12 - 14 hours straight, puking up fluids faster than they can be IVd in - to see that stop and have them sleep soundly for several hours, and wake up asking for soup - well, I'm prepared to endorse the crazy lady with the lavender/mandarin/bergamot potion who used to volunteer for us. They weren't cured, obviously, but a 36 hour reprieve from that kind of misery is pretty valuable in the last days of a patient's life.
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Ignorance is such a powerful weapon preyed on by quacks.
Ignorance doesn't make people nearly as vulnerable to quacks as desperation.
What is it about Mexico? Could be in the water. Maybe the Spanish inquisition? The conquistadors and their imposed catholicism? Gold GolD GOLD!!! There is still plenty there for the quacks anyway.
The thing about Mexico is the lack of regulatory bodies and laws to protect those desperate enough to try literally anything.
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"The Later Collected Robert Service" was the first book my uncle sent me from Canada!(You bet I still have it.) Hey, they're ballads and they're OK!
And one of my Big O neighbours - since escaped to parts even further south- had this as his party piece! I kid you not!
Actually, I'll onsend this post to Mike Y - he'll love it!Robert W. Service loomed large in my childhood - my Granddad, like him, had been a Scottish immigrant who fell in love with Canada, then served - in late middle age and with a Canadian Regiment - at the front in WWI. My Grandad loved Service's war poems.
After the war Robert W. worked in a bank in Victoria, BC - and that building became government offices, where my Dad (a civil engineer) had a lovely old corner office which he always hoped might have been the very one Robert W. had.
Country Joe McDonald set several of Robert W. Service's war poems to music in 1969 or thereabouts - I spent years and years trying to find the record (I'd had it as a kid and lost it somewhere) and in the end I just wrote to Country Joe and he sent me a copy, bless his generous heart.
You'll note the line "the marmites are a-soaring" - they were huge round shells, named after the French cassolet pots, which they resembled. A while back everyone here was wondering where the word "Marmite" came from - welll, when you make cassolet you dredge the meat in flour, salt and pepper then cook it in oil until it's tarry and dark - there's the base for the fragrant gravy - that's where the name - and the idea - of Marmite comes from.
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Ooo fuck Dyan - you emphatically win!
Heh, well to be honest I grew up on the west coast which is the "banana belt" of Canada. The temperatures are pretty mild. But can rain for 40 days, 50 days at a time during the winter. It's awful.
I had an uncle who lived in Alberta for 35 years of his working life.
My Mum grew up in New Sarepta, a tiny village in Saskatchewan - it's much colder on the prairies than the coast - and she said if you breathed in the air at the wrong time, with your nose and mouth uncovered you could hurt yourself as you would get ice crystals in your lungs. She also said you couldn't make a snowman or a snowball as the snow was too cold, and it was like very dry sand.
This is a pretty famous (if rather bad) Canadian poem.
Robert W. Service's war poems were rather good, though.