Posts by B Jones
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Now I can't get Lily the Pink out of my head. It's a lovely reminder of the days of patent medicine - most efficacious in every case, before we had things like MedSafe and the Fair Trading Act.
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There are studies coming through that provide small amounts of support for homeopathy's effectiveness. New Scientist has a few articles.
It has more about studies that disprove its efficacy.
Evolution was a theory inspired by consideration of a significant body of evidence (fossils etc) that was inconsistent with the previous model. It's since been backed by even more evidence. Comparing that and homeopathy is, well, I think I'd have to stop being polite if I were to finish that sentence. Critics of the one and supporters of the other have a basic misunderstanding of what constitutes evidence, though.
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Also 'scientific' medicine doesn't have such a great record in some areas. For example, anything around fertility is best dealt with - in my opinion - by Chinese approaches (or in conjunction with). Homeopathy can be quite effective with fears, phobias or addictions.
Some things are hard to fix. In those fields, mainstream medicine doesn't have its usual advantages over methods that haven't been formally tested. Fertility is a huge field, some of which is straightforward (contraception, say) and some of which is tricky (15% of infertility has no known cause). Chronic pain's another difficult area. I can see why if you can't find an answer in one field, you'd look in others. You might do as well, simply by chance.
Homeopathy, well. It's everywhere in pregnancy care literature. Not because it's more effective than, say, folic acid supplementation or 2000 years of trial and error on how to conduct a caesarian without killing the patients. It's because unlike treatments that have active ingredients in them, it's absolutely risk-free, and nobody likes risk when there's babies involved. Long, personal consultations are nice, but when they deliver a concoction diluted to one molecule of substance in a volume of water the size of the entire planet, they're only going to generate a placebo. Which is a real effect (and handy when you're dealing with mental issues like phobias), but still.
Herbal treatments are old, but so is surgery (trepanning). What you've got with modern medicine is those parts of the older traditions which have been subjected to such thorough testing we're confident that they work better than a placebo. Animal magnetism didn't survive that test, but magnetic resonance imaging did. I'm happy to accept there are things that haven't been sufficiently tested to write them off, but the testing is still vital.
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Flowers even, they do have a profound effect on the female psych
Man, you can't be on a skeptical high-horse one minute and expect to get away with something like that the next. Come on, where's the double-blind placebo-controlled studies? Which flowers in particular? Are roses profounder than gorse-blossoms? What about conifers or other non-flowering plants? Is the effect really more profound on females than males? Are they any more effective than other random acts of kindness? Would a picture of a flower work?
;-)
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If the nice people at Freeview could add that "book programme" function to their boxes, that would make life a whole lot easier for me and my DVD recorder. Unless I leave my freeview on, and on the right channel, I can't set it up to record a programme when I'm not there.
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it's that the latter doesn't seem to have quite learned to look at the body as a complex system of interrelated parts, and insists on treating the local symptoms rather than the causes
Really? Every medical professional I saw recognised my leg pain and numbness in my feet as being a symptom of an injury to my back, which hardly hurt at all on the site of the injury. I think that example (sorry I got confused with that and magnetic underlays before) sounds like a case a clever osteopath that understands more about physiology than a bad physio, rather than the benefits of osteo over physio as specialties.
There are plenty of examples where a problem at one site manifests as a symptom at another, and to which conventional medicine responds appropriately. Pain radiating down one arm being a sign of heart attack, say.
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Medical research yes, anecdotes, not so much.
Homeopathy began with a kookyish theory (like cures like) and while it hasn't exactly developed over a century of clinical experience (I think it's gotten kookier), there are many adherents and practitioners today and there are bound to be plentiful anecdotes of its efficacy. Most pregnancy books have at least some of their text dedicated to homeopathy, for example.
The only way you can tell the difference, objectively, between a thoughtful skeptical anecdote and an entirely credulous one, is by collating lots of them and turning them into data. If 55 of a sample of 100 people report feeling better after treatment x, then that's useful. Two out of two is less so.
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That's a little hard to verify,
But so is your magnetic example, Giovanni, from the point of view of everyone who doesn't know you personally.
Personal anecdotes are a significant way we exchange information, but they are pretty useless in developing an accurate picture of risk. We count the hits and forget the misses (miracle cures), or we focus on the horrible exceptions and forget the subtle improvements (vaccines).
My own anecdote about chiropraxy is that one hurt a family member so badly he thought he was either going to pass out, or hit the chiropractor. Being a kiwi bloke, he didn't complain, he just never went back.
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Finally, lots of things get better on their own, and the last treatment to be tried gets the credit.
That, absolutely. I've done several rounds with a lumbar disc injury, tried physio, found that the standard treatment either has no effect or makes it worse, and experimented with a few ACC-funded but not-proven things the physio suggested when the first line of treatment sent half my leg numb.
Acupuncture was a hassle, and perhaps had a temporary effect half the time. Ultrasound was less annoying, but no obvious benefits. But it coincided with getting better.
So the last two times I've hurt myself I've run a control - gentle exercise, no lifting and no physio. I get better faster and it costs ACC less.
I had no shortage of people suggesting other random remedies out of general helpfulness, the most extreme of which was breaking a toe, which apparently resolved some guy's chronic unexplainable pain. People record the hits and forget the misses, so stories like that abound. They're a poor indicator of how likely they are to help the next person, though.
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It's certainly enough to allow me to think I'm not imagining a benefit.
Hell, an imagined benefit is better than no benefit. The placebo effect is a real phenomenon. If standard medical care can't find the source of chronic pain or treat it effectively, then it's legitimate to depart from double-blind randomised trial territory and find out what works for you.
The thing is to make sure that providers of more, ah, subjective care know how to spot problems that there are effective treatments for, and quickly refer them in the appropriate direction. And that they don't make claims that aren't substantiated by research.