Posts by Stephen Judd
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
You didn't have to be a medium to guess that -- I suggested the same to my partner days ago. Does that make me psychic?
If I were a copper, I'd be looking for kid-sized holes around the place and I wouldn't need a TV fraud to tell me.
Honestly Hilary, are you just trying to wind us up?
-
sometimes a brilliant insight precedes empirical data.
How can you tell if it's a brilliant insight without empirical data?
-
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.
-
Scientists study the placebo effect precisely to explore how "doing no harm" can turn into "doing good", no?
For sure. To me this is an amazing conundrum -- we can cause other people to do fantastic things but only if we relax our normal rules on what kind of deception is acceptable (and I guess at some level, I would be happy to be deceived too if it cured my cancer, thanks).
For what it's worth, a friend of mine who has been suffering from severe and prolonged insomnia confided in me recently that she had got some stuff from the homeopathist and it was really doing the trick. I decided that was a bad time to share my opinion about the scientific basis for homeopathy, so I nodded and said "that's great, I'm glad you're sleeping better." But if she had said she was getting treatment for diabetes, or glaucoma, or a tumour... I think I would have said something.
-
Actually, I used to be married to a midwife, and heard nothing else from dawn to dusk for the three years of her training :D I am aware that home births are traditional, but lots of traditional things can be valid within modern medical practice..
By "get away with" I mean "give you something that will do you no harm". Although if it comes to that, I expect the vast majority of practitioners of alternative therapies do it in good faith and not as any sort of conscious fraud.
-
*chokes*
In the first case, why are home births "alternative medicine?" To me home birth isn't an alternative form of medical care, it's just a choice of where it's provided. Your midwife or GP at a home birth is quite likely to be deploying modern drugs and using modern tools and practices all the same.
In the second, I have to say, well blimey, I guess a doctor would know when they can get away with prescribing distilled water, sure... and what does "reduced use of drugs we didn't need"
mean? If you didn't need drugs, what were the homeopathic remedies doing? -
conseismal: I can't speak for others, but I apprehend "anecdata" blend of anecdote and data as delightful; thus it has found its way into my verbal bag of tricks -- this case gives it a brief, to this case it is suited, I'm stone glad of its use, delightful portmanteau that it is.
-
because its core theory is, in scientific terms, all kinds of woo.
You know, intellectually, that it can't work. But, oops, it does.
No, that's mis-stating the position. What we "know" (picking my verb carefully here before getting gunned down by Ben on epistemological grounds) is that it is unlikely to work, and if it does, it is probably not working the way that the practitioners claim .
It is no problem to science if it works, and people will investigate whether sticking needles in random places works as well, or whether it has to be needles, and looking at nerves and so on. No big deal.
Herbal remedies were originally often explained by their practitioners through the doctrine of signatures, or humours, or elemental balance, or what have you (and in fact the ones offered by Chinese or Ayurvedic medicine are still explained in those traditions by what I will here rudley label "woo").
Now we know that the ones that work do this by the effects of certain chemicals they contain. This means I still won't trust other remedies based merely on the claim that the doctrine of signatures (or other woo theory) says they ought to work. I'd only trust them if a body of sound trials shows they work, at which point we are leaving woo behind and back in science territory.
-
I find it immensely frustrating when people argue that theory trumps observation
Theory doesn't trump observation, but I'll give much higher weight to an accumulation of methodical observations than to one or even several personal stories.
Also, when people give a personal account, there are two parts to it -- what they observed, and how they explained it. If someone says "I drank the elixir, and now I feel better, and the elixir did it, because it is made from powdered newts and the doctrine of signatures says it should work", I'll believe that they drank it, and I'll believe that they feel better, and I might even suspect that in a sense the elixir did do it, but I won't go on to believe the explanation without a great deal of corroborating evidence.
-
And if that's how you want to blow your discretionary income, I don't quite put it on the same line of suck as snake oil salesmen pushing treatments that don't do shit to desperate parents or the families of stroke victims.
I think part of Peter's argument was that the lovely purveyors of massage in a non-threatening, non-sexual environment are often promoters if not actual sellers of the snake oil as well.