I understand all that you said. But I was speaking more to people that have been drug users, like myself. being less likely to accept placebos than the general population.
I don’t have a good placebo story.
But, sort of in that same realm, about how pain can seem different than it really is based on outside influences. One time I had some pain in my abdomen and called my primary care doctor. It was like 4 pm on a Friday and she asked me if I had ever had my appendix out. I didn’t. So, since it was so late on a Friday, she said go right to the ER and tell them about the pain.
She said the last thing we needed was for my appendix to burst.
So I go to the ER, thinking about bursting organs, and then the nurse makes me lift my shirt, and she is really pressing super hard on my belly, and of course more talk about exploding organs, septic shock, and all this shit. She started to tell me about patients she’s had over the years and none of it was pretty. So, the pain increased. It started to hurt much worse. I told her ten. I always say ten, but this was legit. It was going to take another hour at least to get me into the MRI, so she asked me if I had ever done dilaudid.
Ha! I fucking loved dilaudid! We used to crush them up and shoot them all the time.
But, like, you can’t just tell that to the nurse, eyes all big. “Fuck yeah. I love dilaudid!” You have to show some decorum. But, like, how? I wasn’t sure, and she was waiting for an answer. So – and I’m not proud of this, but I’ll tell you guys – I pretended I was scared. I did it because it seemed easier to emote fear than to try for something like nonchalance. I sort of made my eyes go big and said “oooh, what’s going to happen to me.” This nurse was such a sweety. She took my hand in hers and patted it to comfort me.
I felt like such a shit!
But then she whipped out a bottle of dilaudid and gave me a shot. They don’t crush it up or inject it into your vein, and I did feel sort of remorseful about not doing any of that, but it was still pretty cool. Finally I got my turn on the MRI, and they said my appendix was completely normal, and I probably just had some gas.
It’s just one of those things that comes up every now and again if you have a drug history.
@RichVR, I don’t know if I hit the right reply, so I’m tagging you.
So, I have a question for those with more understanding of human biology and Essential Oils (my wife uses Living Social because they are ingestible). I understand the aroma therapy part (good smells can elicit a number of different and real responses). I understand using it in cleaning products (lemon is a natural disinfect and cleaner, and I would not be surprised if several other plants have natural minor disinfecting properties).
I can suspend my disbelief and allow that taking peppermint as a pill might impact my digestive system in positive way. Rolling lavender on a sore or burn, okay I get that.
But what I don’t get at all is why people insist on putting the oils on their feet. I assume that feet are the most protected part of the body when it comes to the thickness of skin and stuff. If the goal is to get something in your body, how does the feet make sense? Any clues, besides the obvious answer that it’s all bullshit. Most of these companies have a kernal of truth to them (a very small one) so they must have some internal logical for this placement.
There’s no real reason for applying oils to your feet with the purpose of absorption into your body. As you say, the skin is thicker, and it’s also further away from everything so there’s not particularly good blood flow anyway.
There are reasons why people might apply oils in order to soften the skin, since it’ll tend to get calloused.
There was some scam product a while back which was some kind of adhesive strip that people would wear on their feet while sleeping, and then they’d take it off in the morning and it’d be all dirty. The claim was that it was leeching impurities out of their bodies.
Turns out, it was just getting dirty because the bottom of your feet tend to be dirtier than other parts of your body.
People love to believe this kind of shit. See also: ear candles.
There’s also a pretty long history of doing stuff to your feet to affect some other part of the body, something about how feet have nerve endings that connect to pretty much everywhere on your body, so, blah blah, applying x on the nerve ending Z affects the kidneys somehow…
Which is like the whole point of the Adidas adilette slides? Without all the marketing hoohow about what ails it cures.
This totally belongs in this thread.
In the article you have people blatantly lying saying the salve cured cancer. This is the same baloney my sister-in-law did. She had lump, normal for the females in her family to get them all the time, used essential oils and herbs to cure the “cyst”, claimed it was cancer when she never saw a doctor, and claims she was cured sending other people with real cancer to her alternative medicine quack.
The thing you’ll never see these people profess? “My fake medicine killed so and so”. Because that could open them up to involuntary manslaughter and equally, many are making a killing selling fake medicine to desperate and vulnerable people.
Read carefully:
Water is wet.
@jpinard Jeff, thanks for posting this. The article itself I found moderately interesting, but what affected me much more was reading the comment section below it, which was filled with mostly very intelligent and sensible responses, rarely degrading users with differing opinions, which I found refreshing on a topic that is normally so polarizing.
One response that caught my eye was one that I think pretty reasonably and accurately summarized how some of these alternative therapy users end up choosing that route:
Flit Ars Tribunus Militum
REPLY
AUG 16, 2017 8:50 AM
Quite a few people in here are blaming people for being anti-science or irrational about medicine. While there are those people out there, most people choosing alternative therapies are rational people who are just afraid of traditional therapies.
You show up at the doctor, you get a cancer diagnosis, and you are told you have a few years left to live. You have the choice of fighting it with years of chemo, feeling sick, with a good chance you’ll come out the other side surviving, but it’s a long, painful, expensive, and slow road. Also, there’s a chance that the last few years of your life were spent ill and weak and you still died because the cancer couldn’t be put into remission.
Or, you can try a therapy that is easy, cheaper, and a couple of people have pushed you into trying, and you find several places on the internet that swear it worked for them.
However, when the cancer progresses again and you haven’t been fighting it with the therapies that work when you find it, you’re almost certainly going to die from it. So many unnecessary cancer deaths come from these sorts of stories, where people think they have more time and more options, try alternative therapies, and then go back to the doctor and it’s too late.
Please don’t let your relatives do this. I’ve heard too many stories of young mothers who have died of completely treatable cancer diagnoses because they went alternative first.
I find it difficult to demonize or insult these folks who are facing the most difficult times of their lives by either not thinking things through fully, or listening to the right people. They are desperate, whether it be because of their fear of excruciating treatments and/or their associated devastating costs because they cannot afford the equally devastating costs of good insurance.
But my total sympathy for their decisions in this regard is limited to their personal illness. When they apply those decisions to their children, however, I tend to be a lot less sympathetic, even though doing the right thing may lead them straight into bankruptcy. When these decisions involve your children, you simply have to do what’s been proven best to the very best of your ability, even if it bankrupts you. However, these are trying times for everyone involved, and I cannot simply condemn those decisions, because I cannot imagine myself put in that position, and thus I cannot say for sure how I would react when placed under that kind of massive stress, as I have no children.
I think that most of these folks, whether they make good decisions or bad, are simply trying to do the best they can with what they’ve got, and I wish the best for all of them. It’s hard for me to work up any derision for people who are going through personal hell, although I would hope that they would at the very least try to educate themselves before pulling the trigger on unproven treatments.
I don’t demonize people who decide to try alternative medicine unless they’re anti-vaxxers. Who I am disgusted, appalled, and have an intense loathing for are those who PUSH vulnerable people into alternative medicine. They should be held for involuntary manslaughter like a real doctor would for selling fake medicine.
As a person who is sick a lot, people don’t understand how vulnerable and malleable your mind is compared to when you’re healthy and strong. It is scary and charlatans, scammers, know that and take advantage of it.
Bargain!
Well hot damn, I was looking for a complete reference guide on crystals for healing!
/s (forgot this is the internet for a second)
So after helping my GF get healthcare, we had a long conversation about who she wants to see as her primary doctor, what speciality if any, etc. She hasn’t had heathcare coverage in over a decade.
And she hit me with, “I’d like one that doesn’t want to look at just traditional medicine but one that also uses holistic practice and supplementation suggestions.”
This will not be fun.
One of my old friendquaintances from Tennessee is blowing most of her very limited savings and discretionary income after a bad breakup left her living on her own on a for-profit holistic medicine course and it is really very extraordinarily difficult to watch her completely ruin her life on the way to ruining the lives of so many others.
Fuck holistic/alternative medicine.
Can’t she save her money and buy the humble bundle instead?
So economical!
That is an interesting mix. The Pain-Free Postures Hand Book and the Sex Positions for Every Body seem interesting. I’m also tempted by the Ice Cream Recipe Book.
So, the Chakra stuff isn’t something I’m into, but as you may recall, my wife uses/sells Young Living Essential Oils and I’m along for the ride. I’m curious about the Essential Oils and what it says. My wife does posts on Facebook, but she has some very strict guidelines she must follow. An example is that we use lavender on rashes cuts and burns, and it seems to have a positive impact, but on Facebook, she can only state that it can be used for skin care, and she removes any comments that mention it’s used with cuts or burns. There just isn’t enough evidence (at least as far as the FDA is concerned).
Despite all that, I’ve had some serious benefits from Deep Relief Roll-On that my wife just got. which goes on and feels just like icy hot. It’s great because I often wake up with back pains and it seems to act fast. I also see my wife much more relaxed because of the use of oils as well. I wish the industry as a whole was much more strictly regulated. There are a lot of fakes and diluted crap out there.
Based on the Working Group discussion of the points presented in the previous sections of this Statement, EASAC makes the following conclusions.
• Any claimed efficacy of homeopathic products in clinical use can be explained by the placebo effect or attributed to poor study design, random variation, regression towards the mean, or publication bias. Among these, the placebo effect can be of value to the patient but there are no known diseases for which there is robust, reproducible evidence that homeopathy is effective beyond the placebo effect.
• Homeopathy raises issues of concern for patient-informed consent if health practitioners recommend products that they know are biologically ineffective.
• There are also potential safety concerns for homeopathic preparations because of poorly monitored production methods, and these require greater attention to quality control and assessment of adverse effects.
• The scientific claims made for homeopathy are implausible and inconsistent with established concepts from chemistry and physics. In particular, the memory effects of water are too short-range and transient (occurring within the nanometre and nanosecond range) to account for any claimed efficacy.
• The promotion and use of homeopathic products risks significant harms. First, by incurring delay in the patient seeking appropriate, evidence-based, medical attention or, even worse, deterring the patient from ever doing so. Secondly, by generally undermining patient and public confidence in the nature and value of scientific evidence for decision making in health care and other societal priorities.
• In the absence of similarly robust evidence for homeopathic products in veterinary medicine, it is an error to require organic farmers to use these products in preference to prevention or treatment for which there is demonstrable efficacy and an established mode of action.