I grouped nonsense alt meds that are based on vitalism/energy fields. “Real” acupuncture works the same as sham acupuncture. It doesn’t matter whether you put the needles in the meridians (the supposed channels of life energy you see on acupuncture models) or even if you skip the needles and just twirl a tooth pick on the skin - really - because acupuncture is placebo BS.
Also, “allopathic” medicine isn’t a thing. That is just the pejorative that homeopaths use to describe scientific medicine.
Naturopathy is an undefined hodge podge of alt med that is unified under the umbrella of the aiding the bodies natural “energy” - and it uses every alt med under the sun, including homeopathy, chiro, and even iridology. There is no science behind the vitalism of naturopathy, so treatments will vary because the practitioners are largely just making shit up as they go along. There is no standard of care for naturopathy, nor can there be, because it isn’t fact-based.
Interesting, I wasn’t aware of this. I’ll have to read more about it. Thanks for the heads up.
I have gotten a lot of improvement for my vascular condition from Chinese herbs from a TCM doctor, as confirmed by my allopathic blood work. Wheras the big pharma prescriptions I got weren’t doing jack. But I know that this is really just medicine, and finding the right medicine, and that many pharmaceutical are derived from compounds in herbs and many TCM formulas are being studied to see if their active components are bunk or legit. So I could have just as easily been helped by pharma prescriptions if they contained the same active components.
Corelation is not causation. And Chinese herbalism isn’t evidence based. Instead it uses sympathetic magic (these leaves are shaped like kidneys, so they must be good for kidneys) and other non-sense (such as "hot or cold “herbs” to ballance your ying and yang). From diagnosis to treatment, Chinese herbalism is nonsense, nonstandardized nonsense, so your herbalist is just making it up as he or she goes, giving you various herbs of unknown potency and efficacy with real potential side effects. (Any drug powerful enough to have an effect is powerful enough to have a side effect.)
As David Colquhoun notes, herbalism is “giving patients an unknown dose of an ill-defined drug, of unknown effectiveness and unknown safety”. Natural doesn’t mean safe, and even if there is an active ingredient beneficial to you in the herbs, natural concentrations can varry radically, and the same weight of herbs can vary from insufficient for a clinical effect all they way to toxic. That’s why we have standardized dosages in scientific medicine, so we can get the dose right, consistently.
I get your skepticism and i understand that correlation is not causation, but when i take the TCM formula i feel a noticeable warmth in all the veins in the affected areas and can actually feel a strong constriction of the affected veins, the affect is quite strong and definitely not placebo.
Not all chinese medicine formulations are based on like cures like (which i agree is crap), and a lot of pharmaceutical medicines have been derived from the herbs in Chinese formulas, so like all herbal medicine I think it isn’t so black and white, but rather depends on what you are taking and what you are taking it for.
Trust me I am skeptical as well.
I only ever take western herbal formulas that are standardized for concentrations of known active components. Components that are recognized by scientific medicine as effective. The TCM formula is standardized as well, but i’m not sure how or for what, so granted i just tried that one out of desperation. D.C.'s statement isn’t accurate because it is too generalized and sweeping and quite outdated. Sure that can be true of herbal medicine, but not necessarily. Depends on what you are taking. Most legitimate modern herbal medicines are standardized for known scientifically verified active components, they are medicine.
The placebo effect’s been well-documented. Patients who receive dummy pills often show clinical improvement. But in all studies to date, the patients believed they were receiving a real drug. Placebos work, doctors believed, because the mind is a powerful thing. Just thinking you’re being treated can make you feel better.
In this study, however, docs told patients they were getting placebos. Eighty patients with irritable bowel syndrome were instructed to take two sugar pills daily. The bottle even had “placebo” printed on it. After three weeks, 60 percent of the placebo group reported relief from symptoms, compared to 35 percent who’d received no treatment at all.
Yeah, people feel like that when they drink, too. Alcohol is a vasodilator, at lower doses, and a vasoconstrictor, at higher doseges. Feeling an effect does not equal effective theraputic treatment of your disease, but “feeling something” is why so many patent medicines had alcohol in them, and why Listerine mouthwash used to only come in crappy “medicinal” flavor, to convince you it is doing something.
I do not claim that the herbs you are taking can’t be beneficial, but what I do say is that TCM (essentially invented by Mao, who brought multiple, disparate traditions together and re-branded them as TCM because it was cheaper than western medicine) has no factual basis, no objective truth testing mechanisms to discard what doesn’t work and adopt what does. It is revered for being traditional and thus not only immune to change, but lauded for it. That’s not what you want in a medical treatment.
You may think the herbs are standardized, but even the herbs that come in nicely labeled bottles at major drug stores that claim to have standard doses often do not. The industry is so poorly regulated as to be essentially unregulated, by it’s own request and lobbying efforts. The pills may not include any of the herb they are supposed to contain, let alone the right dose.
This is false. Placebos are not only associated with symptoms. They are associated with objective measures of disease.
When a placebo does have an objectively measured effect, as in the patient takes the sugar pill and measurably gets better, then the attribution to the placebo of why they are healed is mistaken and we invoke correlation != causation. It’s not the placebo itself ever causing the effect. And it’s not all happening just in patients’ minds. The placebo effect is real and can be objectively measured.
That’s probably what you were trying to say. But to say that placebos can never be measured as having an objective effect, psh… jump on Pubmed and start looking up placebos in clinical trials. An effect is an effect, and when they measure it, it’s considered objective. It’s the post-hoc attribution that is subjective.
this still is wrong in both its general sweeping accusations and its really outdated/misinformed perspective
a good percentage of pharmaceutical medicines are derived from natural substances. these substances are well defined, and of known effectiveness, and have a known safety. also, many herbal medicines have been studied scientifically and have been confirmed or disproven and have had their safety studied. real, legitimate, herbal medicines work because they contain actual medicine, the exact same medicine we use in allopathic pharma prescriptions. as a skeptic i’m sure you realize that such a sweeping generalization is a misunderstanding of both the origins of many modern pharmaceutical medicines and the current state of herbal medicines. again, point taken about poor industry regulation.
I do know the history of TCM and read up on that a while back. I understand about vasodialators and vasoconstrictors. i also know that when the prescription pharma meds that I expected to work did nothing to improve my bloodwork or condition i stopped taking them. when i started the TCM formula that i was highly skeptical of, my condition and bloodwork immediately improved and has continued improving in a way that was directly scientifically measurable by western allopathic medicine tests. when i slacked they dipped some and when i started back they rebounded. the effects are pronounced and noticeable. i’ll take the win regardless of what anyone attributes it to.
Oh yeah, on the whole allopathic thing. @skeptic is correct in the provenance of the term. Regular western medical docs never call themselves allopathic doctors. But when talking about alternative medicine, they are perfectly willing to make the distinction between different “branches of medicine” using the terms allopathic, osteopathic, homeopathic, naturopathic, Chinese, what-have-you. Being immersed in terminology constantly, they have no baggage about it because they suffer no illusions. They’re just practicing medicine. When they’re talking about all the different kinds of medicine, they’re adaptable and there’s never any hard feelings. It’s just a word.
I should have said “no effect on objective measures of organic causes of disease” or some such.
Here’s an example that illustrates the placebo effect, and how it affects subjective symptoms, but not the actual disease. The study of asthma patients gave them Albuterol, sham acupuncture, placebo inhaler, or no treatment.
Woohoo! Placebo and sham acupuncture (which works as well as “real” acupuncture) as that nasty Big Pharma toxic drug! Yea!!! Down with Big Pharma!!! We don’t need Big Pharma, who are just out to steal our hard earned money and poison us!!!
Or, maybe not so fast. When actual lung function was measured:
It turns out that placebo and nothing had the same complete lack of affect on objective measures of organic disease. This shows that placebo effect can actually be dangerous. In this case, asthma thought they were better, but in reality they still had impaired lung function.
So, in essence, placebo effect can make some people feel better some of the time, but it won’t actually cure them of any organic causes of disease; their lungs will still function poorly, their tumors will continue to grow, etc. That is why homeopathy, even as a placebo, is not harmless. It doesn’t cure anything, but it can make you think it is.
oh i didn’t know that, must have missed that comment, rereading the thread now.
i was under the mistaken impression that allopathic was the term that all “regular” western medicine fell under, thanks for the heads up.
There really should be a term though, because when having discussions like this i always cringe a little at using “western” to differentiate, as this sort of medicine is worldwide. skeptic was using the term scientific medicine, which mostly works, but there are grey areas and overlap, like the herbal remedies that are scientifically proven, science can be applied to almost any treatment to determine if it is effective or not, etc. and we don’t scientifically know if or why all western medical treatments work, the British Medical Journal estimates about 50% which seems high but does make a point. Western medicine also still includes a large number of treatments we scientifically know don’t work. So calling it scientific medicine isn’t a perfect fit. guess i’m sicking with “western” for now pilgrims.
Yes, sometimes. And there are also trials where people on placebos do get better, like for real not just in their minds. And trials where placebo and actual treatment show no effect. The placebo effect comes in many flavors. I hope you’re seeing this (?) I think you are, but you’ll let me know I’m sure.
You should read the sham knee surgery paper. Oh man, that one is HORRID. The surgeon opened a note in the OR, telling them to do the surgery for real or do the sham surgery and actually cut and stitch the knee as if they inserted the scope. Talk about a completely weird study. I don’t know how they even got it through IRB.
Let me dig for a link. It’s this study, hope you can get the full text.
Nope, It is more than a word. It is a framing device, just as the term “Death Tax” is a reframing by Republican consultant Frank Lunz of “Estate Tax”. In fact, the Estate Tax is not a tax on death, but only on estates worth more than 5 million dollars, and even then, only on the amount above the 5 million dollars.
Frames can be effective tools, which is why homeopaths and other alt med types try to frame scientific medicine as “allopathy”, using the 200 year old pejorative in spite of the fact that scientific medicine is not based on doing the “opposite”, rather, scientific medicine is based on doing what is proven to work, including doing things that are “the same” such as vaccines. So, there is no good reason for a medical doctor to use the alt med framing of scientific medicine. It makes no more sense for a medical doctor to call his or herself an “allopath” than it would for a surgical oncologist to call his or herself a “cut, burn and poison” doctor. Using other people’s inaccurate framing of scientific medicine is a bad idea. You are just promoting the false equivalency of scientific medicine to homeopathy by using it.
I’ve heard of the sham knee surgery study. IIRC, it proves not that the placebo is effective, but that the actual surgery was not, ie no better than placebo.
Scientific medicine isn’t perfect. But it does advance, if not always as fast as we would like. Unlike alt med, which cannot advance because it isn’t based on facts. You can’t move forward if you don’t have a factual basis to measure your progress. Name one, just one, alt med that has been discarded by the alt med community in recent years for not working. AFIK, there isn’t one.
