Theodoric barber of York had innovative medical ideas that may make a comeback.
Posted on 03/17/2010 4:30:21 AM PDT by mattstat
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine was tacked forcibly onto the National Institute of Health after Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) thought more attention ought to be paid to beeswax.
As a curative agent, I mean. Those two, and others in charge of us, thought it would a fine idea if we paid to put alternative therapies to the test.
And they’re right: it is a good idea. Some potential palliatives can be dismissed immediately—for example, massive doses of arsenic to treat toenail fungus. But most cannot be brushed off without some evidence, because even the most ludicrous sounding treatment might be helpful.
Have a claim? Put it to a controlled test. Pass that test and all benefit. Flunk it, then admit defeat; or at least keep quiet and move on (which never happens, naturally).
The three treatments that have received the most exhaustive testing are acupuncture, chiropractic, and homeopathy. They have been subject to endless experiments, found wanting, but never found lacking proponents.
I worked for several years at Cornell Medical School’s Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine, where I read over a hundred papers that made extraordinary claims. The best evidence for the efficacy of any of these treatments is statistical. But the more experiments any treatment undergoes, the more its signal fades into the noise. You have to wear cheap statistical magnifying glasses to see positive effects.
However, I do not say, and it not true, that these treatments have no benefit. They surely do...
(Excerpt) Read more at wmbriggs.com ...
Homoepathy (a.k.a Homeopathy) is stupid German quack medicine.
Or rather getting back to nature.
Yeah. A lot of those Homeopathic “medicines” are diluted so many times with distilled water that not one MOLECULE of the original “active agent” is left. And to the no brains who believe in this voodoo, the MORE dilutions the greater the potency. Just very expensive distilled water.
Look for every form of new age crap to make it’s way into legislation to be paid for by insurance.
The truth is that if Obamacare is passed, people will end up doing more alternate medicine just to be well.
Theodoric barber of York had innovative medical ideas that may make a comeback.
4. If people want to buy Miracle Mouse Milk Snake Oil Additive for their car, that’s fine with me. If they want me to pay for the medical equivalent, the answer is, “No!”
Defund collectives. Delegitimize when appropriate. Dismantle when necessary.
Slight contradiction there.
Curiously enough, some evidence for the efficacy of homeopathic has been found, and theoretical basis proposed. Much like the placebo effect, it cannot be dismissed entirely as hokum. The placebo effect is well known, and has been shown to be the only effective agent in pain killers, and possibly (recently), in anti-depressants.
Evidence from computer analysis of trees of links of “active ingredients” to homeopathic cures for specific maladies have produced correlations (”13 Things Thad Don’t Make Sense”, Michael Brooks).
Some studies of histamine dilutions at the level of homeopathic solutions show an effect at a statistically significant level.
An explanation could be in the complexity of liquid water itself. Liquid water is composed of multiple arrangements of collections of H20 molecules, and the arrangements are conditioned by chemical environments. Liquid water is odd. It is not just a collection of isometric molecules, but a collection of beads of aggregates of chains and rings of H2O molecules, these collections may have a memory, and variants of these beads could have different biological effects. A stretch, but not as immediately dismissible as one might believe.
A number of skeptics have been turned by personnel experience.
One taxpayer dollar, minced and dissolved, run through ten dilutions, will then be worth ONE BILLION DOLLARS.
Not according to some respected studies. Also, the placebo effect does not work on many maladies, it is mostly in pain remediation, and recently discovered, anti-depressant action, where it seems almost entirely placebo. Doesn't work to cure an ear infection, chicken pox, cancer, etc., where as homeopathy has.
Respected by whom, the homeopathy quacks?
Most curious and likely releated among Brooks topics was the placebo effect.
The placebo effect is another unexplained phenomena: Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.
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