Hard News: Miracles just rate better, okay?
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There is another aspect to homeopathy, and it's the investigative methodology, the whole person approach - my GP seemed to consider that aspect of it the most valuable, and lamented that it wasn't being taught in medical school. He even wrote a book about that. I would be surprised if things hadn't changed on that front in medical schools worldwide.
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papering over the quacks...?
seems it boils down to different strokes for different folks. And as we were never issued with owner's manuals for the electrobiochemical bacterial colonies we have oversight of, we make do with whatever work arounds are individually effective... who knows what other system hacks and backdoors are in there, and yet to be discovered - blinkering would seem counter-intuitive,
an open mind is a healthy mind!yrs light-heartedly
Commander Codeine
all matter is energy -
But then again, a birth which works well is still a very natural experience, and in the most part not too different from how it was done hundreds of years ago. Informed by some Western medical science, but still often using traditional techniques.
Where there's complications of course, it rapidly changes.
The over-medicalisation of birth is huge issue, especially in the US - I mean, home birth, even *with* a doctor or midwife, is illegal in a lot of states. I find that hard to believe. So you get concepts like"freebirthing", i.e, giving birth without any medical aid whatsoever. There has to be some sort of middle ground.
Now my children barely get through the door of all the GPs we've been to see in New Zealand (that is to say, quite a few) and it's amoxycillin a go-go.
Placebo use of antibiotics - for viral infections - is almost certainly more damaging to the general public's health than the entirety of adverse effects from alternative medicine (aside from anti-science type campaigns.) It makes me despair for humanity a little.
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I might have said "wow, bringing out the heavy artillery, eh?" Or not. These things are spur of the moment.
But in the first case, the actual one, people very rarely die from untreated insomnia, and you don't get side effects from sugar pills, so the calculus of busy-bodying concern vs conversational politeness was pretty clear.
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But in the first case, the actual one, people very rarely die from untreated insomnia
Actually, insomnia can lead to depression (and not just the other way around) and is increasingly considered a potentially very serious ailment.
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and there's no sensible reason to correlate age with correctness
Keir, You misunderstood the preceding posts. I wasn't correlating age with correctness, I was pointing out to Lucy that Darwin's understanding of heritable traits came long before any knowledge of genes, and went on to say that Chinese medical knowledge was preceded by the even older Tibetan medicine tantras. I didn't mean to imply that their antiquity made them any more correct, or that the age of a discipline correlates to its accuracy, just that it is astonishing when extremely old texts are correct.
The grasp of principles made by anyone before there is any method of collecting empirical data impresses me. There are many, many example in modern (and ancient) science. If you read Lewis Wolpert's A Passion for Science , Melvyn Bragg's On the Shoulders of Giants or Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield's Frontiers of Complexity you will see how many discoveries were based on hunches. BenWilson was absolutely right when he wrote
I think the way in which scientific discoveries are made is incredibly mysterious, rather than organized and scientific. What scientific methodology provides is a way in which to verify these discoveries.
and if you read Wolpert's, Bragg's or Coveney and Highfield's books you will see this astonishing prescience repeated many times in the history of scientific discoveries. Are the Chinese so stupid that it's impossible to believe their scholars could not have achieved this as well as white scholars?
Richard Feynman wrote about his late wife Arlene who asked him, when he was working with Oppeheimer, if radiation could penetrate solid matter, wouldn't it damage living cells and make him sick? Both Feyman and his wife were in their teens at the time, and back then Feynman laughed indulgently and reassured his young bride that radiation passed through the body quite harmlessly. Years later, after seeing many of his colleagues die of cancer, he marveled at her remarkable insight. Feynman also succumbed to cancer in his 60s. Arlene died while still in her teens, of a textbook case of TB that was missed by her doctors. But Feynman's point was the same as mine: sometimes a brilliant insight precedes empirical data.
in fact if you start saying that humours beat the germ theory based on age you will get laughed at.
The Tibetan medicine tantras describe "organisms that are invisible to the eye" that can correlate to intestinal parasites, bacteria, viruses and... a couple more agents that can not be correlated to anything we recognise in the West.
The Tibetan medicine tantras are really quite remarkable. I am keen to read this paper once it's published, as it is explained by someone who understands both the fields of Tibetan and Western medicine much better than I do. Tibetan Medical Interpretation of Myelin and Multiple Sclerosis.
also, isn't it interesting there's lots of popular interest in the medicine of yer eastern courtly cultures, but comparatively little interest** in how people in the Amazon deal with illness, despite the fact that the Amazon is proverbially fruitful in terms of drugs?
Well, the Tibetan medicine tantras are conveniently written down and are found in one single culture, one language while the indigenous people in the Amazon are estimated to have been more than 2,000 (approximately 500 still existing) completely different tribes, each with their own separate and distinct culture, customs and language. Perhaps the greatest barrier of all to collecting that information about traditional medicine from the tribes of the Amazon basin would be the absence of any written texts in any of the (many) languages. But you are wrong when you say there is no interest though there are relatively few ethnobotanists prepared to make the journey and do the research, as it requires many years of travel and living with various tribes.
* Hobsbaum and Ranger are I think the authorities here but in particular if you look at British hedgewitchery, the traditional medicinal system I am most familiar with, you will find that it is mostly made up as people go along and things are traditional if they go back 20 years or so.
Keir, do you mean Eric Hobsbawm the historian? If so I have read his book "The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century" but I am not sure if he is who you mean. I have read just about every ethnobotanist I could find who has written about the Amazon, but have not heard of Hobsbaum. Are the Hobsbaum and Ranger different people than the historians Hobsbawm and Ranger? If they are ethnobotanists I would love to read their work.
Richard Evan Schultes and Wade Davis are probably the best known ethnobotanists with respect to the tribes in the Amazon basin, and I have read quite a bit of what they have published.
the traditional medicinal system I am most familiar with, you will find that it is mostly made up as people go along and things are traditional if they go back 20 years or so.
It's interesting you say that. Ethnobotanist Wade Davis writes about the vast differences in medicinal uses of plants between, for instance the Waorati and the Chuichaua.
The Waorati had comparatively good health - no internal parasites, virtually no secondary bacterial infections, no evidence of ever having been exposed to smallpox, chickenpox, polio, typhoid, syphillis, gonorrhea or tuberculois. In short, they had been exposed to very few diseases brought by the Europeans. They did, however, suffer from the hemorrhagic virus that causes yellow fever and the resulting hepatitis was virtually endemic. They also suffered from herpes simplex A, fungal infections and a host of external parasites such as scabies and lice. They also suffered from wounds from injuries, and various snake and insect bites. They also used a variety of chili pepper to bring people down from hallucinogenic intoxication.
Shultes and Davis catalogued 35 plants the Waorati used to treat these ailments, each specific to their purpose - pain from broken bones, pain from spear or puncture wounds, pain from childbirth. They employed many different plants to use for each of their complaints - hepatitis, parasites, herpes simplex A etc, but they used comparatively limited number of plants; the plants used were employed for their highly selective uses, especially when compared to the Canelios Chuichaua.
The Chuichaua in contrast to the Waorati had been exposed to and ravaged by European diseases. and had selected many hundreds of plants used for dozens of conditions. This forced ethnobotanist Wade Davis to ask himself if the Waorati's - and the Yanomamo's - another recently contacted tribe - if their relatively selective and limited use of medicinal plants was perhaps typical of pre-european contact? If so, then the vast collection of medicinal plants used by the Chuichaua and other far more acculturated tribes was the direct result of accelerated experimentation that had been in response to the arrival of European diseases. Wade Davis writes "this idea, while challenging to the notion that indigenous knowledge of medicinal developed slowly over hundreds of years in no way denigrates native healing practices. On the contrary, it revealed native healers, including the Waorati as active medical experimenters whose work reflects the social and medical needs and whose laboratory happens to be the rainforest."
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sometimes a brilliant insight precedes empirical data.
How can you tell if it's a brilliant insight without empirical data?
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@Dyan
Actually, Feynman would have been in his mid-20s (not his teens) when he wrote that to his first wife. He worked on the Manhattan project after he finished his PhD. He was young, but not THAT young.However, if you want to quote Feynman you should also see what he has to say about "cargo cult science" - especially before you use cute little phrases like "Occam's broom" to dismiss an entirely serious statistical argument.
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How can you tell if it's a brilliant insight without empirical data?
Isn't the history of particle physics based on insights that are followed sometimes a great deal later (if at all) by actual empirical data, and does it not in fact remind us constantly of the ultimate limits of empiricism?
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@Dyan
Actually, Feynman would have been in his mid-20s (not his teens) when he wrote that to his first wife. He worked on the Manhattan project after he finished his PhD.Richard, you're right, I stand corrected. Feynman was 24 when he went to Los Alamos, and Arlene was around that age when she died. I should have known this, as a friend of Feynman's told me that I reminded him of Feynman very much. I was delighted, as this was the nicest compliment anyone ever gave me, so I've read everything I could find about the guy.
However, if you want to quote Feynman you should also see what he has to say about "cargo cult science" - especially before you use cute little phrases like "Occam's broom" to dismiss an entirely serious statistical argument.
I haven't dismissed any entirely serious statistical arguments. I was quoting Sydney Brenner's famous phrase that describes the reaction to anything that contradicts a particular point of view.
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"cargo cult science"
is a pretty cute little phrase itself...
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I haven't dismissed any entirely serious statistical arguments. I was quoting Sydney Brenner's famous phrase that describes the reaction to anything that contradicts a particular point of view.
You have -- I pointed out that if you do enough studies on acupuncture, you would EXPECT that some of those would confirm the validity of acupuncture with an apparently high degree of significance. even if acupuncture has no actual impact on healing and health. (E.g. if you do 1000 studies, it is likely 10 of them will look like positive results at the "3-sigma" level, even if no-one has made mistakes, or simply failed to control for hidden parameters that biased their results.)
Simply rattling off a medium-long list of papers is not enough -- even a sceptic (if they think about it) should expect that those papers would exist, given the number of studies that have been done.
If you really want to rebut this criticism, it would be much better to point to a handful of independent studies of the same effect that replicate each other, and make a serious effort to track down and eliminate variables the previous studies did not control for.
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@ian
"cargo cult science" is a pretty cute little phrase itself...
You're right :-) But Feynman actually develops this idea at some length, and it is undoubtedly relevant to this discussion. It's worth a read.
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I haven't dismissed any entirely serious statistical arguments. I was quoting Sydney Brenner's famous phrase that describes the reaction to anything that contradicts a particular point of view.
At the risk of embarrassing myself, wasn't Brenner referring to a scientist putting aside theory for the time it takes to conduct an experiment?
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Placebo use of antibiotics - for viral infections - is almost certainly more damaging to the general public's health than the entirety of adverse effects from alternative medicine (aside from anti-science type campaigns.) It makes me despair for humanity a little.
Nicely put.
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Cargo Cult Science:
http://yost.com/misc/cargocult.html
I love the toes!!!!
And as important - some may say more so - for the understanding of science I heartily recommend this little piece.
Feynman: "Presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City, and reprinted from The Physics Teacher Vol. 7, issue 6, 1968, pp. 313-320 by permission of the editor and the author. [Words and symbols in brackets added by Ralph Leighton.]
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Simply rattling off a medium-long list of papers is not enough -- even a sceptic (if they think about it) should expect that those papers would exist, given the number of studies that have been done.
I understand your point about simply listing half a dozen studies, Richard, but that's not all Dyan has noted. Doesn't the NIH consensus statement embody a meta-analysis? And the Cochrane reviewers listing acupuncture amongst their group of "moderately effective" treatments for back pain?
If you really want to rebut this criticism, it would be much better to point to a handful of independent studies of the same effect that replicate each other, and make a serious effort to track down and eliminate variables the previous studies did not control for.
But surely this kind of work goes on, and is reviewed, all the time?
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How can you tell if it's a brilliant insight without empirical data?
Just because you can't tell something is brilliant at the time doesn't make it so. That evaluation can come later.
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Placebo use of antibiotics - for viral infections - is almost certainly more damaging to the general public's health than the entirety of adverse effects from alternative medicine (aside from anti-science type campaigns.) It makes me despair for humanity a little.
My emphasis added:
Imagine the Doctor's dilemma.
Parent - "my child has a coach, I think he needs antibiotics"
Doctor's reply options
a) No he/she needs a more sleep.
(gets seen as insensitive arrogant and incompetent)
or.
b) Okay.
(is blamed for the ineffectiveness antiobiotics worldwide - merely seen as incompetent)
Thats why I'm so looking forwards to the direct marketing of drugs.....
<tongue firmly in cheek>
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Parent - "my child has a coach, I think he needs antibiotics"
c) Is the coach contagious?
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Edit thing.....not....working....totally dying over here...got a really bad coach........and my cough is bad too..
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a) No he/she needs a more sleep.
(gets seen as insensitive arrogant and incompetent)
or.
b) Okay.
(is blamed for the ineffectiveness antiobiotics worldwide - merely seen as incompetent)
Is *responsible* for the growing ineffectiveness of many antibiotics. It's a very well-established pathway.
See, this is one of the times where I'd totally understand a GP either a) dishing out sugar pills or b) directing people to a homeopath (as Giovanni reports) Better overall than needless antibiotic use. But then you will inevitably get people using homeopathy to try and cure very serious conditions, and ending up much sicker than they otherwise would have - or dying. DILEMMA.
(E.g. if you do 1000 studies, it is likely 10 of them will look like positive results at the "3-sigma" level, even if no-one has made mistakes, or simply failed to control for hidden parameters that biased their results.)
And that's sort of the crux of the argument. It doesn't matter how old something is or what the Tibetans thought about it or whether it's from the Amazon or baked up in a lab. That's mostly a sidetrack. The question is: if alternative treatments are so great, why is it that despite fairly massive amounts of money being poured into testing by places like the NIH, there has never been clear-cut evidence of a direct, better-than-placebo effect? Why are they only effective sometimes, under some conditions, generally in small studies, for chronic conditions or those with very subjective measurements of benefit?
Because to believe that they're there, obvious and clear, for all the things alternative therapies claim to treat, and we just need to look harder...you need to believe that all doctors and medical researchers, everywhere, are either monumentally incompetent in experimental design or really truly want people to be blocked from access to a beneficial treatment. Which is...pretty harsh, really.
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if alternative treatments are so great, why is it that despite fairly massive amounts of money being poured into testing by places like the NIH, there has never been clear-cut evidence of a direct, better-than-placebo effect?
If you use the word never in a statement, you can guarantee the statement will never be true.
[yes, I'm aware that the statement invalidates itself].
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See, this is one of the times where I'd totally understand a GP either a) dishing out sugar pills or b) directing people to a homeopath (as Giovanni reports) Better overall than needless antibiotic use. But then you will inevitably get people using homeopathy to try and cure very serious conditions, and ending up much sicker than they otherwise would have - or dying. DILEMMA.
No, my GP practiced homepathy himself. And, needless to say, he didn't try to cure serious conditions with homeopathic remedies. Actually, how he diagnosed my mother's brain tumour is a story in and of itself, but he did send her to see a surgeon.
He was a doctor who listened, which is to this day a very rare breed. I think half the problem with conventional medicine as it is practiced these days in countries like NZ is that you see your doctor for 15 minutes and that's just useless. People crave the kind of conversation you get to have with alternative healers, quacks included.
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He was a doctor who listened, which is to this day a very rare breed. I think half the problem with conventional medicine as it is practiced these days in countries like NZ is that you see your doctor for 15 minutes and that's just useless. People crave the kind of conversation you get to have with alternative healers, quacks included.
Very true. It can be an acceptable form of primary health care. OTOH, I couldn't achieve that kind of comfort with someone waving a crystal over me.
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