And all these things we’re shitting on are still very effective placebos, which can work well for things that are mostly perception, like pain.
Not that I recommend any of them. :)
Pretty sure I would take chiropractor, acupuncture and someone just walking on my back over getting lifetime too strong opiods to become the next addict.
Also, theres evidence that some drugs that were once more effective than placebo no longer are. Not because the drugs have less effect, but the placebo effect is getting stronger:
There is enough evidence on accupuncture and some manipulation (generally from DOs, not chriropractors) that the last Cochrane review said they both have some effect on chronic pain (back, headaches, etc) and are reasonable to consider for those diagnoses. The effect is not large, but has been measurable and significant. As far as I know, there’s no consensus as to why they work, but we use drugs all the time without completely understanding their mechanisms, and neither accupuncture nor manipulation have much in the way of side effects, also per evidence.
Well, let me put it this way, since I know this will be met with a great deal of derision/skepticism. With the help of a NUCCA chiropractor (this is a different kind of treatment than the “crack your back” stuff), I am having considerable success dealing with my tinnitus, which conventional doctors told me they couldn’t do shit for. Is it gone? No, but we are getting there. My symptoms have improved significantly.
If a misaligned spine can cause health problems (and we know it can), then I don’t see why correcting that alignment couldn’t be beneficial. Now, I don’t think it’s a cure-all that can fix all your problems for 9.95, but labeling everything we don’t completely understand as quackery won’t get you very far either.
This is where I bow out.
The nerd-cencus here is that because anti vax assholes are wrong, everything is wrong if it’s not covered by your HMO.
This is a silly position. The best way to win is to not play.
If your pseudoscientific quackery is working for you, who cares what we think?
In the interest of presenting the controversy, though, I’ll quote from the NUCCA Chiropractic website: “The NUCCA procedure is unique because it frees the nervous system of interference by using a precise, non-invasive, gentle touch technique.”
Glad to hear your nervous system is interference-free!
Yeah and I don’t think chiropractic work, acupuncture, and you know number of other approaches it the same as shoving an egg up your vagina or selling sugar pills at a premium pretending it’s a cure.
Oprah would have some trouble due to some things she’s supported. That’s a fact. The question is, what it would be enough to sink her. I don’t know. I still believe we should be able to do better, but… we could easily do worse too.
I have never used one, and probably never would (I do have tinnitus though and would love to get rid of that) but over the years I have had carpenters who work for me swear by their chiropractor, others not so much.
Yea, one of those things is not like the others. :)
If your tinnitus is somatic (increases when you clench/move your jaw), it might be worth looking into an evaluation. Personally, I believe decades of terrible posture is at the root of mine.
I just kind of woke up one day and there it was. There are times it sort of recedes into the background and then times when it is the background. I wouldn’t be shocked if it was stress induced somehow but doctors and the internet don’t seem to know much about it.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of things western medicine doesn’t know much about, or that the answer to is surgery, even where such a thing is a terrible idea (e.g. carpal tunnel). At least in the US, medicine has become overspecialized.
When I developed de Quervain’s tenosynovitis in my thumb 8-9 years ago neither the orthopedic surgeon nor the physical therapist ever stopped to consider whether the root cause was a nerve issue in my shoulder. It was a massage therapist who recognized that and did more to alleviate the symptoms in one session than all the injections, exercises, immersion therapy, ultrasound, and everything else that had been tried up to that point.
If you’d asked me about some of the stuff that has been mentioned in this thread before that, I would have sounded a lot like Triggercut. I’m not here to convince anyone. I don’t care, frankly. I do hope, though, that anybody that finds themselves in that kind of situation, where they aren’t getting help from their doctors, doesn’t completely dismiss some of these other things as potential options.
No, just that the same strict standards of evidence should be applied to all medicinal techniques.
It must be a bear to separate out whether a treatment ‘actually works’ versus ‘works because of placebo effect,’ incidentally.
If you want to let some quack do weird shit to you, and it makes you feel better, I say go for it.
I draw the line at things like anti-vax stuff. That affects OTHER folks. If you want to live in our society, you need to get vaccinated.
Exactly. I don’t care one whit if someone says a chiropractor or acupuncture treatment works for them. You know why?
The placebo effect is a real, documented, thing. And for that to kick in requires you take some treatment to act as the placebo. Even if those are no more effective than placebo, that is irrelevant. Due to that effect it will work for some percentage of people.
Obviously this really only applies to things like pain mitigation or problems from non discrete sources. You wouldn’t treat cancer with it, because the placebo effect doesn’t work there. But for an individual with the kind of thing receptive to placebo? Knock yourself out, I won’t say boo.
Diseases, however, are a different story. As you note it puts others at risk, and that’s where I draw the i will cut a motherfucker line.
But if you pay for a scam cure that works due to placebo, that feels wrong to me… if all you needed was a placebo, it should be free…
… unless you need to pay for it in order for the placebo to work?
I give up.
I agree, but what do you do happens if something crazy does work for real, but it’s so basic that no one can make money on it? It’s not there ever will be any funding to research why it worked or whether it does actually work.
That’s where I’m at with my wife’s essential oils. It seems to work, relieving some of her stress and anxiety, and giving her more patience with me, but that could all be the placebo effect (and much of it probably is, even if it did have a significant (statistically) impact). The only item that Young Living has done any FDA research with is their deep relief roller, which smells and feels just like Icy-Hot. And given the expanse of the research and the fact that failed hypotheses are rarely published, the information I can ever get is anecdotal in nature.
And of course, there is the fact that 100% purity doesn’t mean 100% purity, according to my wife, so there are a lot of knock off crappy that is heavily diluted.
I want to know, too.
I was wondering about this, particularly in regards to the essential oils thread. It made me start to wonder what it was that really got me about the whole mess; I mean, people do terrible things all the time which have small and large impacts on the world. My conclusion is it’s the pseudo science aspect of it all. I don’t mind snake oil when it’s done with a wink and a nod. I don’t mind someone selling hugs for the “power of love.” It’s the quackery of it all that strikes me as obscene, because it’s taking advantage of others.
I’m imagining this scenario:
X doesn’t provide any perceivable medical benefit
Person A feels better when they have X
Feeling better has modest benefits.
Person B has X, and knows that Person A feels better if they have it.
Person B offers to sell X to Person A, letting them know they may obtain those modest benefits if they get it.
This, I’m okay with.
However, if Person B says X can cure various things and perform medical miracles when offering it to Person A, that’s something I’ve got major issues with.