Posts by Peter Ashby
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@Richard
What you say is true, providing it proves safe for Russell on an ongoing basis. As I have said before, if what is being offered is a placebo (and the evidence says Osteo is), then the risk/benefit equation is very different since benefit is in essence 0 then any risk gets magnified even if it is rare. Which is how rare bad reactions to vaccines against nasty diseases are accepted. As we begin to vaccines against less and less nasty diseases and of lifestyle and late onset in particular those rare instances will loom larger and larger in the risk/benefit equation.
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I am not against the scientific method but when the best answer Western medicine has had for over half my life is to try to suppress my immune system, I think it's pretty clear who's taking the piss
Arthritis is a an autoimmune disease. This is a relatively recent appreciation by medical science. You won't get it by cracking your knuckles or by not running on the roads though the use it or lose mantra has some truth as it seems onset is earlier in the sedentary.
Since we are at the present time unable to rid your body of the immune cells that are attacking your joints the best therapy then becomes overall immune suppressant. I assume you must have it bad since this is only offered to the most severe cases for obvious reasons of risk/benefit. You have my sympathy as I have suffered with my joints but continually test negative for any Rheumato-Arthritic conditions (I just have loose joints). I know what deep joint pain feels like.
Be glad that we have found the cause which means a proper cure is now possible even if you have suffer a partial one in the interim. To do it properly would probably require nuking all your bone marrow then keeping you in isolation for weeks while circulating cells die off naturally and are not replace and letting your joint inflammation subside before repopulating. You would still need to take immunosuppressants afterwards though unless the tissue match was absolutely exact (got an identical twin stashed away?).
Be careful what you wish for iow.
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It seems I need to clarify my example of digging the garden to cure my bad back. On the first day I did a little bit, being careful to keep my back straight and not use it like a crane. I stopped when I felt it twinge and took 2 ibuprofen before bed. On day 2 I repeated except I managed some more. On day 3 I felt great (I'm a quick healer) and got myself into a good rhythm with the necessary good posture and finished it. I followed this up in following weeks by taking the point and strapping on my running shoes which includes core body strengthening as part of my warmup routine. I have not looked back, but I still dare not try reading in bed. I cannot feel my back if I keep active, keep good posture and don't read in bed. I live in fear of not being able to keep active enough, I do not consider myself cured of a back bad, I just have it well controlled.
Digging the garden was simply the structured activity that worked for me. I introduced it as an example of activity being effective. Feel free to introduce your own version (raising a glass is insufficient though) but be careful out there and don't try and be a hero.
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@HilaryStace
Look at something like manuka honey and its antiseptic properties - where did that idea come from? Now been proven through randomised control trials. A remedy from one tradition tested and becomes part of another.
As Lucy Stewart says, honey therapy is ancient. Remember that there were no honey bees in NZ prior to European settlement, so it cannot be a traditional Maori therapy. Manuka honey is simply more effective than other honeys. All recipes for making mead stress that you must boil the honey solution for the stated time to kill off the factors that inhibit microbiological growth, or your yeast will not grow. I wouldn't care to try making mead from manuka honey (even if I could afford to do so).
BTW manuka honey has only been demonstrated effective as a topical antibacterial. There is no evidence that the active ingredient (whatever it/they may be) survives the stomach or small intestine. So all those people paying well over the odds for manuka honey here in the UK thinking it must be good for them are wasting their money. Don't worry though, in the interests of supporting NZ's export industries I keep my mouth shut on that one. Slap it on your ulcer, even use it on a (proven) Strep throat (antibiotic resistance being what it is). But don't eat it expecting it to cure anything else.
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@Sacha
Tell it to an engineer. Good sanitation and water supply have saved more lives than doctors ever have.
And who was it who taught the governments that good sanitation was necessary so they employed the engineers? Try John Snow, the man credited with founding epidemiology after he deployed statistics to trace the source of a cholera outbreak in London in 1854 and proved it by removing the handle of the contaminated communal pump thus causing the end of the outbreak.
Or Edward Jenner and his smallpox vaccination that lead to the whole modern field of vaccination?
The discovery of the sodium-glucose co-transporter in the gut and the addition of glucose to Oral Rehydration Therapy has been credited with saving more lives in the 3rd World than antibiotics. You can fight off Cholera if you can avoid dying of dehydration or hyponatria (low sodium). ORT does not need refrigeration, only boiled water.
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@Sacha
I love the faith Peter has that if something is 'scientific and clinical' then it must therefore be okay.
Which is of course not what I am saying. Science is no overarching panacea as the Cochrane Review on back therapies show. It is however the best way of knowing that we possess. It is particularly good at testing effectiveness and when applied to 'Alternative therapies' it shows that they do not work better than placebo, your anecdotes notwithstanding.
That's nothing more than cultural arrogance when it comes to long-established and managed practises like acupuncture that were going for thousands of years before our Euro ancestors moved on from on leeches, trepanning and spells.
This is funny. You do know the origins of 'Traditional Chinese Medicine' (TCM) don't you? It did not exist prior to Chairman Mao except as a random bunch of local witch doctory. When Mao promised to deliver 'barefoot doctors' to every rural village he had a problem: he didn't have anything like enough doctors, equipment, training places, medicines or even bandages. So kitted out every alternative therapist they could lay their hands on with a party uniform (sans footwear) and sent them out with a list of approved 'therapies'.
I also note that in defence of it all the most you can summon is a plea for cultural respect, no mention of effectiveness, safety, cost etc. Did you know for eg that TCM herbal preparations are turning up dosed up with powdered pharmaceuticals? It seems they are feeling the pressure from 'patients' who unreasonably expect their expensive cultural medicine to work, yet in standard Mao formulation it doesn't so it needs 'beefing up'. Still beware the heavy metals and the endangered animal parts won't you?
As for acupuncture, by all means pay your money. It will only hurt if you roll over or you delay a proper therapy for a real condition. Just hope your need for a 'tonic' isn't that undiagnosed tumour weighing you down, eh? Which is why earlier I said that if you must get acupuncture go to one the GPs who offer it.
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@Russell
The point of the Cochrane findings is not that Chiro and Osteo were as effective as standard medical treatments. It was that even standard medical treatments are not significantly better than either placebo or doing nothing. You cannot get from the findings to 'Chiro and Osteo are effective' except by ignoring this point.
I don't want to get into a citation war with you either, it would be nice if you would just stop cherry picking the data to support the point you want so desperately to hold.
You have been wasting your money, suck it up.
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@Ben Wilson
The problem with your situation is that you do not expect reality, you want a miracle. Despite media stories like the one that stimulated the this post originally as 'miracles' they are nothing of the sort.
There is no such thing as a side effect free effective drug, biology and chemistry just don't work that way.
I am sorry that you are in the situation you are in, you have no good choices, only ones where you have to balance risk vs benefit. Welcome to real life. Forget about the possibility of a miracle cure. But be glad that you live in a time where there is a viable therapy
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After a comment about university degrees I just did a google. It seems you can do degrees in Osteo in NZ. At just one institution: Unitec.
Two Medical Schools, neither of them offer Osteopathy. Anyone wonder why that might be?
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I love the faith people have that if something is 'government regulated and licensed' then it must therefore be okay. I have pointed out how governments with public health services see benefits in coralling the alternative 'medicine' crowd into the big tent.
Is the government running large scale, double blind, case controlled trials of these 'techniques'? is it taxing these practicioners to pay for them like medicine gets effectively taxed to pay for the HRC? I wonder why not?
The NIH in the US have burned through USD1 billion in assessing alternative medicine really hard to try and extract useful, working, safe therapies from it. They have found nothing, nada, not a bean. Not even for backs.
1Billion dollars and where is the result? Yes, sure Russell you can cherry pick individual studies, but look overall at the totality of the data like the Cochrane Reviews do and that apparent positivity evaporates. It boils away in the stats as the random noise that it is.
So it makes you feel good, that's nice. I hope lining the pockets of these people eases the pain when the neck manipulation goes horribly wrong or one too many spinal manipulations ends up trapping a nerve instead of freeing up the energy flows.
Would you be happy handing over control of a pharmaceutical production factory to an Alchemist? How about to someone who rejects atomic theory and believes in the elements of Earth, Water, Wind and Fire? No? then why put your body in the hands of a Vitalist?
What is quite astonishing is that they have survived so long. They have done so because it is not about health or medicine or science, it is a faith position. Homeopathy is a cult, Chiropractic is teetering on the edge of becoming one.