Hard News: Another entry in the Public Address Medical Journal
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That's a little hard to verify,
But so is your magnetic example, Giovanni, from the point of view of everyone who doesn't know you personally.
Personal anecdotes are a significant way we exchange information, but they are pretty useless in developing an accurate picture of risk. We count the hits and forget the misses (miracle cures), or we focus on the horrible exceptions and forget the subtle improvements (vaccines).
My own anecdote about chiropraxy is that one hurt a family member so badly he thought he was either going to pass out, or hit the chiropractor. Being a kiwi bloke, he didn't complain, he just never went back.
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But so is your magnetic example, Giovanni, from the point of view of everyone who doesn't know you personally.
I don't have any magnetic examples. I have a partner who went to a highly regarded local osteopath after trying several physiotherapists in vain and had a long-standing and debilitating problem solved in the space of a few sessions. It doesn't make jurisprudence, it's what it is, as you rightly point out, an anecdote. But if somebody comes up to me and says that Justine was an idiot for going to a quack, well, that's insulting and reality disproves it, so...
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I don't know much about osteopathy. However, I do know several people who have had screaming newborns, taken them to get some cranial manipulation, and Robert's your father's brother. No more screaming babies. Happy babies. So, there's no hard evidence? It just doesn't matter if it helps people is my VHO.
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Russell,
I apologise for being rude and patronising. Please be assured it was never the intention at all.I did not comment on your research. I thought there may not be enough space for the replies to my comments as I suspect I might get blitzed. I have looked at the links and also at the osteopath wiki link (as opposed to "osteopathy in ameirca") as well. I do note from the discussions on the pages that the americans seem to 'absorb' some osteopathy within the conventional medical system but the comments suggest that as they become more trained in conventional medicine the use of osteopathy becomes a sideline rather than mainstream. I suspect that is the reason there is angst and obviously a split between the two(?) philosophies. I note also that there are a number of surveys in progress that are out to test the efficacy of osteopathy methods in reply to the request of the conventional medical fraternity to "supply the numbers". I await the results with interest and they may offer some reasons to change my mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Osteopathy
Was it Michael Shermer? What say you to his change of mind?
And regarding ACC and magnetic underlays. I make no apologies for ensuring my taxes are not used for sham treatments.Finally, I was the shooting coach for the NZ Paralympic Shooting team in Athens. Amongst the athletes shooting I came across a Canadian - an ex lumberjack but someone who now has difficulty in even wiping his own arse- who is now in a wheelchair after a chiropractor snapped his neck 'cos he was suffering some neck pain and was looking to get it fixed. (And yes, I now expect some comment that conventional medicine has produced as good a result as that. Plenty of them.)
But maybe I have an idea why I remain skeptical.
That is my experience. It is obvious you and others have yours. And there is nothing, nothing on this planet that cannot convince you something works than having a nearest and dearest healed by some process that appears to have no logical reason at all. It is a very powerful (and innate?) force. Keep the defences up and be aware of it.
Question, investigate, use the facts that you know, hypothesise, test and reject or test and accept. If something still does not match the facts (or new facts) then more knowledge is required. I find it difficult to accept that when a reason appears to be unknowable there is an apparent need to invoke what are usually spurious reasons to placate the mind.
I leave you with this:
"The combination of phenomena is beyond the grasp of the human intellect. But the impulse to seek causes is innate in the soul of man. And the human intellect, with no inkling of the immense variety and complexity of circumstances conditioning a phenomenon, any one of which may be separately conceived of as the cause of it, snatches at the first and most easily understood approximation, and says here is the cause."
Count Leo Tolstoy, “War and Peace”
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Uh, I think you just conflated them ...
Not me sir, I've never made any commentary on osteopathy that I'm aware of. I was commenting on other people's comments :)
Can you give me an analogy that would apply to religion. Somebody being cured or something, or winning at Lotto after praying... what are you looking at exactly? How can religion be said to sometimes "work" in the same way as alternative medicine?
There are umpteen people around the world who will stand up and say "I had illness/disease/disability/was dying etc and I went to see a priest/spiritual healer/tv evangalist/monk/witch doctor and afterwards I was fine [possibly then adding "god cured me"]."
Which isn't poles apart from your story of your wife's experience where she had an issue, went to see an osteopath, and since then it's been fine. Different intervention, but same result leading to the belief that the intervention was in some way responsible.
I would say that in the first instance, if the person actually was improved, it wasn't because of some higher being, but some other factor, and in your wife's instance, it might have been partially related to the osteopath and whatever he/she did. As Russell points out, there's obviously some evidence that osteopathy has some effect (I know very little about it).
I was just entertained by the similarities of proof that you and a couple of other people were using which led them to very different conclusions than people presenting relatively similar 'religious' proof.
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There is an article on kidney stones in the on-line version of the guardian here
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I would say that in the first instance, if the person actually was improved, it wasn't because of some higher being, but some other factor, and in your wife's instance, it might have been partially related to the osteopath and whatever he/she did.
You're being obtuse. She went in to see this guy, in whom she had no more trust than in any of the other people she had been seeing up to that point. She was if anything more resigned than she had been before seeing her first physio. She *immediately* received significant relief and after a few more sessions the problem became entirely manageable. To suggest that it may only be tangentially or coincidentally related to her being in the same room as the osteopath at the time is downright ridiculous, and to imply that her benefits are due to some fideistic predisposition is a little insulting. If you cared to apply your rational mind, no to mention Occam's razor, it is simply a case in which an actual physical intervention (and not a "going to Lourdes" sort of affair) by a practicioner of an empirical technique happens to have worked. We have recommended the same guy to other people in Justine's situation, and they found it helpful too. I really don't see how you get off suggesting that it's the same as seeing your priest.
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'extracorporeal shockwave lithotripsy' sounds rather like a prog track to me.... -
No more screaming babies.
Oh god. I'm going to have to tell the story I told in my speech to the Skeptics conference. Later ...
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I apologise for being rude and patronising. Please be assured it was never the intention at all.
Apology accepted.
Finally, I was the shooting coach for the NZ Paralympic Shooting team in Athens.
Yikes. Ghastly story. I've never even thought of going to a chiropractor actually.
But I was osteopathically treated by Kristy Milliken, of the NZ (able-bodied) cycling team. She's very strong ...
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Which isn't poles apart from your story of your wife's experience where she had an issue, went to see an osteopath, and since then it's been fine.
But your underlying assumption is that she got some form of magical faith healing. Gio's wife was treated and given exercises to practice at home, and her previously immutable symptoms eased.
Different intervention, but same result leading to the belief that the intervention was in some way responsible.
By the sound of it, I don't think it's entirely irrational to suppose it wasn't mere coincidence.
I just don't think it's all that irrational to think that a practice that began with a kooky theory evolved over a century of clinical experience into a hands-on physical therapy that seems to do some good, when there's both anecdote and medical research to support the idea.
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I might as well ask.
Karren has been on a heavy diet of assorted pain relief up to and including Tramadol for the past few months. Her problem is Frozen Shoulder. Both of them. She's getting regular physio, doctor and specialist treatment, including two rounds of cortisone injections. She's less than thrilled at the prospect of the recovery taking months at least and perhaps a year or more. Does anyone have any useful advice to offer? -
Found this via Arbroath
Apparently some UK Doctors would like the legal option to pray alongside patients as part of meeting the patient's needs.
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Medical research yes, anecdotes, not so much.
Homeopathy began with a kookyish theory (like cures like) and while it hasn't exactly developed over a century of clinical experience (I think it's gotten kookier), there are many adherents and practitioners today and there are bound to be plentiful anecdotes of its efficacy. Most pregnancy books have at least some of their text dedicated to homeopathy, for example.
The only way you can tell the difference, objectively, between a thoughtful skeptical anecdote and an entirely credulous one, is by collating lots of them and turning them into data. If 55 of a sample of 100 people report feeling better after treatment x, then that's useful. Two out of two is less so.
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I think part of the reason why alternative medicines can work in areas where allopathic medicine doesn't, it's that the latter doesn't seem to have quite learned to look at the body as a complex system of interrelated parts, and insists on treating the local symptoms rather than the causes. But sometimes you've got to look at the whole body, which actually now that I think about it is what Justine's osteopath did. The physio had been working on her forearms, where the pain was. The osteopath claimed it was a postural imbalance in the upper body and neck and worked on that.
Since we're into anecdotes, I once met a hospital dentist (I wasn't his patient) who told me that he didn't believe that it's the bacteria that cause most cavities, but rather bad alignment of the jaw or even incorrect chewing. I'm sure he was probably wrong, but he did make the point that dentists can't see the mouth for the teeth, as it were, that they are not trained to take a step back, and maybe there's something in that. And he wasn't an alternative healer of any kind, just another dentist.
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She's less than thrilled at the prospect of the recovery taking months at least and perhaps a year or more. Does anyone have any useful advice to offer?
Sadly, everything I hear about frozen shoulder is that it's a waiting game.
But ... at the risk of being shouted at again, a clinical trial last year at a British hospital (published in the British Journal of Rheumatology) seemed to indicate symptom relief in 80% of patients from one particular OMT technique.
And BBC Health's review doctor endorsed osteopathy as a treatment.
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at the risk of being shouted at again
Heh. Thanks for that. Hell: at this point, what's to lose?
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To suggest that it may only be tangentially or coincidentally related to her being in the same room as the osteopath at the time is downright ridiculous, and to imply that her benefits are due to some fideistic predisposition is a little insulting.
Perhaps I was unclear or you misunderstood. I was saying that it probably was due, at least in part, to the osteopath (you said that it might also have been helped by something else that she'd already been doing all along). In summary: No I wouldn't believe that a person would be cured by prayer, but I can believe that an osteopath helped.
That wasn't my point at all, my point was about the similarities of the story that you told and which might be told by another person about why you thought the intervention had worked. The difference between the two stories would be the different interventions.
But your underlying assumption is that she got some form of magical faith healing. Gio's wife was treated and given exercises to practice at home, and her previously immutable symptoms eased.
Ugh, no such assumption please. I presume there are some practical things in osteopathy that actually do something real which can help. See above for why I posted.
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it's that the latter doesn't seem to have quite learned to look at the body as a complex system of interrelated parts, and insists on treating the local symptoms rather than the causes
Really? Every medical professional I saw recognised my leg pain and numbness in my feet as being a symptom of an injury to my back, which hardly hurt at all on the site of the injury. I think that example (sorry I got confused with that and magnetic underlays before) sounds like a case a clever osteopath that understands more about physiology than a bad physio, rather than the benefits of osteo over physio as specialties.
There are plenty of examples where a problem at one site manifests as a symptom at another, and to which conventional medicine responds appropriately. Pain radiating down one arm being a sign of heart attack, say.
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Perhaps I was unclear or you misunderstood. I was saying that it probably was due, at least in part, to the osteopath (you said that it might also have been helped by something else that she'd already been doing all along).
She did quit the job that brought about the OOS, but over a year later the symptoms hadn't abated. What I meant by mentioning it is that if she had continued with that job - in the same way that Russell hasn't quit sitting at the computer I imagine - she'd probably have to see her osteopath periodically.
No I wouldn't believe that a person would be cured by prayer, but I can believe that an osteopath helped.
It's really all the we are saying here, which is why your initial equation of the two was a bit puzzling.
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In a VERY quiet voice......
This link is from the UKPubMed that links to a Canadian article.
http://ukpmc.ac.uk/picrender.cgi?artid=1522754&blobtype=pdf
BSD rating? I would give it 7/10. Seems to be a "regarded collection of the conventional medical fraternity" and a good list of apparent (needs checking though) references
Whereas this a wiki article here (whcih has a link to Russells reference BTW:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_shoulder
gives a more positive prognosis...until one reads the discussion and notes the use of TENS - a controversial pain management system. Also in the discussion that the article has " very few references of no relevance whatsoever and totally ignoring national health associations guidelines."
BSD rating: I would reluctantly give 1/10.
Both articles do say that in most cases "time heals". An important piece of information IMHO.
And that concludes my first steps in discovering new facts about "frozen shoulder".
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Giovanni Tiso said: I draw the lesson that astrology was once, in my culture too, woven with astronomy, and myth was an important means of knowledge transmission; which I guess I already knew academically, but experiencing it is a whole nother thing. Also, I have this theory that poetry in the beginning was a tool for remembering essential information, and I find that anthropologically interesting and relevant because scientists and tehcnologists too are storytellers. But mostly, on the non-Maori thing, I never feel left out of Matariki, as if I were on the outside looking into something. It is a truly incluse celebration and it's not as if I can say the same of, for example, Christmas."
to anyone at all conversant with the real roots, origins, and even historiography of modern science, this kind of talk is just horsedog. More storytelling indeed.. How profoundly ungrateful for the mental blood sweated by men who made possible what we humans enter equipped with in the, let's just say here, 20th century?the principal, minimal requirement for anything one can properly call viable science, ie, independent-of-culture and ultimately transmissable across all of them, is the ability to make statements suffiicentlly generalized as to freely obtain out of any *context*
and i
reckon your notion regarding why human beings are motivated in the first to"'tell stories" (as you quaintly put it) is deeply sentimental, as well. Human beings initially "told stories" precisely because of sin, or because there has been, iow, a trangression of their heretofore intact, or thus far ritually-preserved, scene-of-representation..within Maori culture. perhaps it is fair enough to say that all of that which might most loosely be dubbed by someone 'astrology, astonomony, and myth' are truly all mixed up together - but is that any reason to cast unspeakably resentful slights on christian culture - itself always in the business of revealing what manner-of-thing it is that really generates this 'Culture' from the beginning?
tentatively
the Inedible Head -
but is that any reason to cast unspeakably resentful slights on christian culture
Oh heavens no, I really don't any special reason to do that, I can assure you.
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"don't need". Oh well.
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maybe i can just tell a little Obama joke at this juncture..
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