So … do you imagine you’re the first person who ever had that idea?
Here’s another link for you: http://journals.lww.com/anesthesia-analgesia/pages/articleviewer.aspx?year=2013&issue=06000&article=00025&type=Fulltext
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I think scepticism in relation to motivation of Pharmaceutical Corporations is in order, but I usually hear this sort of sarcasm from diluted non- billionaires. From people who feel disenfranchised, whose usual behaviour does includes scoffing about other people eating at McDonald’s, having a latte at Starbucks, and going to a Schulmediziner.
In all earnestness, I’m not saying you are prone to conspiracy theories, mind. I just am a bit allergic to exactly this sort of sarcasm for some personal* (and reasoning) reasons. These days, I always get an itch to RESPOND with irony.
It’s catching, you see.
Maybe I should try some natural remedy for this condition.
To elaborate, and to make sure you really don’t feel offended, hopefully: my niece had a transplant and is relying on heavy immune suppressants. OTH, my nephews are not vaccinated (at least properly) because my in-law are sceptical about vaccinations and would use nearly the excact same sarcastic phrases while defending their position, pointing out that natural remedies against, e.g., measles would help, vaccinations would cause allergies, and acupuncture, homeopathy and natural supplements would be a way forward to a more natural boost of your Abwehrkraft. (They argue in German, but this sarcasm translates well.)
They stop short of the autism claim, but I’m not sure if its because they don’t believe it or they know fully well that I am not very good at controlling my anger and would go spare.
ETA I wasn’t fully awake when I wrote this and didn’t parse your post above stating your allergy to certain words. I should try to avoid them. Re: Chinese studies disproving folk medicine vocabulary, I think there might be some interesting development over time if we with look at the literature. Someone should study that. Hypotheseses: literature closer to the cultural revolution would try to dismiss pseudoscientific beliefs by thrashing them, favouring modern medicine. At least since the late 1990s, studies would get more interested in disproving folk medicine beliefs by offering an alternative explanation. And since late-stage communism 2000somethings, a larger number of studies would actively look at which folk medicine would work and e.g. try to look for useful compounds in traditional medication.
That’s scientific progress for you. The latter isn’t exactly Popper, but then, researchers H0 might be it doesn’t work, and there isn’t any compound, so that’s nearly ok. If, as one might point out sarcastically, no TCM-selling pharma bro/sis is behind the research trying to find a selling point by dishonest research.
Oh, shit, I did it myself. Auto-immune itching, here I come. 
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I wish your niece the very best of luck and health. We’ve got a young friend who just announced her engagement this week, she’s the recipient of a double lung transplant, and the survivor of a lifelong battle with cystic fibrosis. Waiting for her to get old enough for the transplant as her condition slowly worsened over the years, and then the terrible uncertainty of her surgery and year long recovery, was an experience that makes me unwilling to joke around the subject. May your niece be well and live a worthy life.
I’ve had the exasperating experience of anti-vaxxer sentiment in the family, too. I’m generally supportive of people taking stupid and unnecessary risks, since there’s far too many humans and death is the unavoidable end of us all, but I hate to see children suffer for the foolish notions of their elders. I like to think I played a significant part in convincing my friends and family to have their children vaccinated and I hope you too are successful in getting your loved ones vaccinated.
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If we can disdain titles due to their author’s bias, this would be an obvious candidate - but I feel like trying to discredit the author (Chinese or otherwise) instead of pointing out problems with the author’s work isn’t a particularly worthy form of debate.
You’ll note that Novella’s paper repeatedly says that the research indicates acupuncture (and some pseudo-acupuncture) treatments are very slightly more effective than the placebo effect. Since the placebo effect is demonstrably existent and a major force impacting positive outcomes of human healing processes, and we don’t actually understand the placebo effect and have difficulty controlling for it, this indicates to me that an area of research is available. Admittedly it’s not “low hanging fruit” and Novella’s argument is a good one to bring up if we are talking about what research should be publicly funded - there’s far better candidates for taxpayer-funded employment of medical researchers. But this thread is about a person choosing to endow research with private money, so such criticism is not applicable here.
I’m not personally persuaded that acupuncture is pragmatically useful therapy, even though it’s worked wonders for people I know (this could easily be placebo effect) but blanket condemnations of all “alternative medicine” in favor of whatever agenda the corrupt FDA and amoral pharmaceutical companies are bribing people to support this week don’t persuade me either. I do know that I personally have observed inexplicable effects resulting from “alternative” therapies and I would love to have those effects scientifically explained, so I will continue to gently mock people who insist that they know canonically what should and shouldn’t be researched.
By the way, thank you for posting these links to pertinent articles. I do prefer evidence based debate, although it can be hard for the average person to find time to investigate all the relevant evidence.
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What @JonS is pointing out is that even one of the founding editors of the journal that published this thinks the journal has become rubbish due to a compromised peer-review process. Certainly it is now pay-to-play, one of the hallmarks of predatory junk journals.
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Thanks for the additional data point, I didn’t catch that.
I’m still in favor of billionaires funding research grants to universities, though. Even “deluded” billionaires. They’re unlikely to do anything less harmful with their money.
When I worked at the Academy of Natural Sciences we got grants from Crawford Greenwalt to study the physical, mechanical aspects of bird flight. The actual ornithologists hated this, because they were all into DNA phylogeny at the time and found anything bigger than a molecule to be tedious and boring, and they insisted that any such research was a dead end (oops!).
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I think that’s the big benefit here: true, the ‘deluded billionaire’ and his wife (the movie star… the professor and…) are fans of homeopathy, and are earmarking this money for research into alternative therapies (they hope), but it’s not like they’re going to live forever or take their money back for the ‘wrong’ kind of therapy research. In the end, UC Irvine is getting a really nice new building with really nice research labs, will likely do some research into alternative therapies, and will have some great new resources for the future. Sounds like a win for the students, faculty, and medicine.
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That’s a little different; when scientists in field A “dabble” in field B, it is often irritating to the field B people because it often essentially trivializes all the work in B from the field’s beginning. Physicists, for example, are notorious for deciding that all interesting problems in every other science is just a trivial special case of something in physics.
The potential problem here is that the university might well decide to make the donor happy by investing this money as seed money into a unit whose function it is to suck money out of the NCIHH. At that point you need to populate it with scientists whose career involves such suckage, and the research into alternative medicine becomes self-perpetuating. As all externally-funded research actually costs universities resources (a complicated and little-known aspect of budgeting at research universities), you end up having, say, history and sociology undergraduates paying higher tuition to keep the alternative medicine research alive.
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Thank you. I hope that your friend will have a long and enjoyable life. We are far too many people humans, in general. But every single life counts, and is worth saving.
Whenever I hear about successful treatments like this, I am really, really glad about the immense progress science had made. Double lung transplant sounds still like next to impossible.
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These are not mutually exclusive statements.
If there have been 10000 studies, and 9000 are poor studies but 1000 say acupuncture does not work, then most have been poor studies but lots of good ones say it doesn’t work.
And I think you may be fundamentally misunderstanding something about science generally and medical clinical trials specifically. You are looking for a signal in the noise: this treatment produces an effect, and we measured that effect. That’s a conclusive result. No effect means no signal, and that study is therefore inconclusive: there is no evidence that it works. When researchers, and others, say “inconclusive”, it does not mean “I guess we didn’t learn anything and we just wasted half a million dollars, you should give us more money”. It means “there is not enough evidence to conclude that this is effective”.
The next step after 1000 inconclusive results is not “try again it might be conclusive next time”. The next step is “look for something better, this is not working and there is no reason to believe that the 1001st time will suddenly be magic.”
You have also never addressed this fundamental point: not only is there no evidence it works, there is no reason to believe it ever could work, because there is no plausible chemical or biochemical or physiological mechanism by which it could work.
What do you think happens when someone shoved a tiny needle into your skin? How does that achieve the result the practitioners claim it does? What is the physical process? What is the biochemical mechanism? Propose a theory, one that has any possible basis. Can you? If not, why do you believe it can work?
You are deliberately cherry picking what everybody else here is saying. You have twisted and ignored facts to justify the idea that this treatment which has never been proven to be more effectual that placebo at treating pain, and never proven effective at treating any real condition, is still worth spending money to investigate.
Why? Why do think that?
Your only answer has been “we don’t know, we need more studies”. But those studies already exist. Thousands of them. Reviews of those studies, and meta-analyses of those reviews exist. No evidence it works. No mechanism by which it could.
“We don’t know yet, we need more studies to show cigarettes cause cancer” — tobacco companies in 1970.
“We don’t know yet, we need more studies to show that climate disruption is real” — oil companies in 2010.
“We don’t know yet, we need more studies to show that car exhaust is destroying the ozone” — car companies in 1972.
Thousands of studies. No evidence that it works better than placebo for pain management. No evidence that it does anything to treat underlying conditions. No plausible mechanism of action.
How many more millions of dollars need to be wasted before you will concede that it doesn’t work?
No, I understand quite well that there’s been a lot of fundamentally flawed trials showing that it’s useless and and some very good trials showing some promise. Quite frankly, acupuncture is a really hard thing to do a classic double-blind trial of. It’s not like you can poke someone with placebo needles. So, as others have pointed out (including the Cochrane study many have pointed towards), the data is unfortunately still quite fuzzy.
That’s the entire point of doing a study. Lots of people find this weird thing effective but we have no idea why. For some people, having tiny needles poked in specific places seems to really help relieve pain and nausea in a concrete measurable way. It makes no sense. The Chinese say it’s because of energy pathways. Westerners say it’s automatically bullshit because that means magic is real or something. Seems like that’s something worth exploring to me.
That is a lie. I have not twisted or ignored any facts or put words in anybody’s mouth.
Again, I am not an acupuncture proponent or fan; I’ve never used it and am not saying it’s an awesome treatment, because I have no personal experience with it. But the studies people here have pointed to spell out that acupuncture shows promise in pain and nausea management. I think more knowledge is better than less knowledge, which is why I’m totally okay with a billionaire spending money to explore things like acupuncture and herbal medicines more closely.
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Some people are working on that.
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That private money could’ve been used to forward medical research that has already born fruit, instead of pursuing research where the effects have been small if not insignificant. I like moonshots as much as the next guy, but there are far more promising moonshots available.
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Your private money could be used that way as well, but I am sure you’d rather determine your own investments.
Some people have really low standards for ideas on which vast sums of money should be spent, eh? Maybe I can get a multi-million-dollar grant to study whether there’s a teapot orbiting the sun. Most people seem to think no, but I can’t definitively rule it out until I’ve spent at least a few mil on it. For science!
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I think that one’s obligations to society depend on the scale of the investment.
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We’ll have to disagree. I feel that all members of a society have equal obligations in this regard.
I also think a just and equitable society would not result in extreme disparities of investment capital; but I have to admit my logic is pretty circular, since equal market access and economic opportunity are part of my concept of justice and equality.
I guess this is turning into an off tangent and fundamentally different discussion, and while I don’t want to take away from the on-topic discussion, I’ll mention that I think there’s some truth to “from each according to her ability, to each according to her need” as a humane aspiration, at least with regards to how we donate our spare time, money, and effort. As far as just and equitable societies go, I think they’re impossible when people who hold great power (i.e. financial wealth) are unaccountable to society simply because these people “earned” this financial wealth through private means. With great power, or financial wealth, comes great responsibility.
I believe you believe that. I also believe your belief is wrong. I believe that because you did it to me. Several times.
I don’t think it was a deliberate lie though. I just think you’re out of your depth.
