We should be somewhat careful there. It is fairly difficult to get evidence for most medical practices, and many of them – even mainstream ones – are in the category of “it seems to work but it hasn’t been studied very well”. Some proportion of those are probably placebos as well.
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Not just cannabis.
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I’d like to see some money put in my pocket to study homeopathic overdoses.
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I would deeply love $200m to be spent on a research lab to look into weird plants used by natives, fungi used as folk remedies, and a doubling-down on discrediting homeopathy and its ilk. If homeopathy fans end up funding the discovery of a major health breakthrough from mushrooms or jackfruit or something, it would be wonderful.
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The more we dilute the concrete, the stronger it will be!
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Well, I’m far from an expert in period symptoms or midol, but if the symptoms being treated are simply those of discomfort, and chocolate alleviates these symptoms sufficiently, then for those women I would say yes, it is.
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At this point it’s obligatory to quote Tim Minchen: “What do we call natural medicine that’s be scientifically proved to be effective? medicine.”
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“acupuncture . . . has never had a really thorough study done to prove or disprove its efficacy.”
Yes it has. The best-controlled studies find no efficacy. Here is one overview, with references: http://www.ivis.org/proceedings/aaep/2000/220.pdf
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The problem with funding homeopathy specifically is that it needlessly avoids examination of what is worthy of more consideration – the placebo effect itself. Which to my mind, proves somewhat conclusively that consciousness can contribute the the manifestation of “material reality,” which the double slit experiment and its derivations also show.
Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?
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Except for the numerous clinical studies that haven’t been able to measure an effect beyond that of a placebo. That’s about as close to a fact as you can get.
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Right, but 'shrooms and cannabis both have plausible - albeit scientifically unproven - mechanisms by which they produce the results people report.
Homeopathy and acupuncture do not.
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comes with the stipulation that it only be used to study discredited garbage…forever.
This is the basic problem with the “charity”-based (actually: ego-based) approach to funding social services like health, education, and even the arts. That $200M still goes into the column labelled “education” even though it’s worthless expenditure at best, and probably actively harmful. Rich folk get to feel good indulging their whims and peccadilloes - and reaping a tax write off while they’re at it - while actually necessary social services like kindergartens and libraries and sidewalks go unfunded to pay for that tax break.
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This was a better argument 20 years ago, before the establishment of the NCIHH.
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Should give Edzard Ernst the job of running the department. He did a great job in Exeter until the UK’s meddling woo peddling Royal, Prince Charles, managed to get him ousted.
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It’s been studied in depth. There’s at least two Cochrane reviews of its efficacy. Those are meta-analyses and systematic reviews of the literature. There’s no unifying principles in it that have been shown to actually exist by science, and when tested against sham acupuncture “real” acupuncture does no better or worse. Making it a placebo.
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Traditional Chinese Medicine isn’t all that old. China was using regular “western” medicine (IE, medicine developed internationally around the world and in China, just like most anywhere else) until the cultural revolution killed most educated people including doctors. Faced with the hard facts of injury and disease, Mao’s administration basically slapped bullshit together and pressed it into the hands of country farmers, encouraging to make up their own shit on top. That’s how there’s so much sympathetic magic in TCM. All that fuckery selling powdered rhino horn and advising people that snorting a tiger’s dick cheese will make your dick 9 feet long and barbed.
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Are you making a distinction between TCM and acupuncture? Because acupuncture is a couple thousand years old.
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Sure, I guess. But there’s this dumb as rocks mystique among hippy-dippy white people who seem to think that the Chinese were somehow have this secret knowledge of things.
And regardless, just because something’s old doesn’t make it any good. I have a 40 year old analog multimeter. It’s a piece of junk. Being a very old belief has no bearing on whether something’s true.
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But the Chinese are terribly good at spotting the suckers and flogging the stuff to them - that age old adage - never, ever, give a sucker an even break.
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I wouldn’t say they’re especially good at it. Humanity in general is amazingly good at it including the Chinese. I think it might have more to do with white american people’s biases than anything else.
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I guess that the US is no longer going to be allowed to point at Lysenko and laugh.
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