Posts by B Jones
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Potentially, Sacha. But if they're like the insoles I'm familiar with, they moderately pad your feet and make you more comfortable as you walk. Plus, you're more likely to remember your fatiguey days over the course of a couple of years when they have an explanation attached to them, than just a random bad day when you didn't forget your insoles. Confirmation bias is quite an effect.
What you need is for someone to randomly swap them with non-magnetised insoles, maybe daily, and for you to rate and record your fatigue each day, maybe on a simple scale, consistently without knowing whether you had the magnetic or control insoles in. Then, after a bit of data collection, you might have a clearer picture of their real effect on you. And then, a bit of maths to make sure that your results couldn't be explained by chance.
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I dunno, the fifth or sixth one in my linguine puttanesca last weekend didn't have much of a purpose.
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You'd think somewhere else might be more effective. But only marginally.
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If you're making a claim at a population level you need a proper sample size. But mostly what fans of alt med say is that it works "for them". If you want to know if it really works for you, it's not hard to test if you blind yourself somehow. Whereas you might discount someone else's result as being a function of their different physiology, disbelief, whatever, even if the sample is huge. We all know people who react to real meds differently, and they're well tested.
Of course, once you've spent money on a product and taken it home, there's not much point in finding out it's ineffective - other people's data is useful to see whether you should take the risk in spending money.
I recently read a theory that alt-med and anti-vaccination etc is more of a thing for lefties than righties because of its relationship to power - ignoring medical advice is sticking it to The Man. Whereas righties like the pseudoscience that supports powerful interests - creationism, climate change denial, etc. It's plausible.
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It's one thing to let your patients do coffee enemas or whatever floats their boat, because you'd rather they do that than ditch you and run off to a clinic in Mexico; it's another to treat unproven medicine as equivalently deserving of the status of proven medicine, or funding it accordingly.
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This is very very pretty and useful, and may have already been posted somewhere here:
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snake-oil-supplements/ -
Is it boxers or rugby players who use magic water to fix up injuries mid-match? Another field in which real drugs are restricted for good reason, so placebos like power balance bands abound.
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Sue Kedgley is anti-vaccination, and is at least partly responsible for the spina bifida of several babies conceived and maybe born over the last year whose could health problems could have been avoided had the recommendation to fortify bread with folate been implemented rather than panicked about. They need to ditch that stuff if they want their science-based policy to have any traction with anyone who cares about that sort of thing.
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My midwife sisters have homeopathy kits & Bach's Rescue remedy as part of their midwifery bags - and, intensely practical as that craft is, they wouldnt've stayed there, if they hadnt helped some of their clients.
Homeopathy and rescue remedy, like a lot of alt med stuff, finds its way into midwifery not so much because it works (there's no evidence, as opposed to anecdote, that it does) but because there are no ingredients that stand any chance of harming a baby. There is a big demand amongst pregnant women for things to help with the many little problems you get with pregnancy (sickness, sore joints, mood disorders, and so on) and a long list of life's little helpers like voltaren, aspirin, some antidepressants, cold and flu meds, etc, that you can't take because the risks to the baby are either established or unknown. Homeopathy fills the gap because no-one can say it's unsafe (because it's water, or in the case of rescue remedy, flavoured brandy), and a placebo effect is better than nothing.
A placebo isn't an imagined effect, it's a real effect that depends on your knowledge of what treatment you've taken. You can't tell if something's a placebo or not unless it's been replaced by a control without your knowledge and you've noticed the difference.
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Graeme, that reminds me of the argument of one of the judges in the Quilter case - gays aren't discriminated against, they can still get married, just not to someone of the same sex. Theoretically fair, but when applied to the real world, less so.