>>> Its been tested and retested ***over and over*** thousands of times, 
>>
>> It has *now*. Not sure about back when this study was done...
>>
> lol True enough. Doesn't stop people from *continuing* to test it. There 
> is even a group of *ex-subjects* from the original military test that 
> are still busy babbling about how it *does* work, the military still 
> secretly uses it, and using the same unimpressive BS as "proof" of it. 
> Go figure..

Some people are just delusional. And hey, let's face it, who wouldn't 
want to believe that they actually have secret super-powers and/or make 
craploads of money?

Post a reply to this message

>> (Actually, the history of science and mathematics seems to involve 
>> quite a lot of things being discovered, forgotten and then 
>> rediscovered, often after a seriously large length of time.)
> 
> That happens a lot when fanatics burn down libraries. Hasn't really 
> happened much since the invention of the printing press.

Which, AFAIK, is "fairly recent".

(I still find it amusing that if you plot the names of all the famous 
mathematicians on a graph, there's this big cluster in the middle, about 
400 years ago, and there's Pythagorus at the other end of the graph. And 
seemingly nothing inbetween. Also seemingly nothing since a few hundred 
years ago. I guess mathematicians aren't all that famous any more...)

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:
> Sabrina Kilian wrote:
>> The article doesn't say that sham acupuncture is just as effective.
> 
> Maybe I'm misreading the second sentence, which says
> """
> But the results also suggest that faked procedures, in which needles are
> incorrectly inserted, can be just as effective.
> """
> 

Sorry, I rearranged my post to make it more readable, and ended up with
that line out of context. I was refering to the articles by Linde, which
the LiveScience page seemed to be referencing. In those, they found
that, for tension headaches, actual acupuncture worked marginally but
statistically better than sham acupuncture. For migraines, they both
were more effective than certain drugs.

>> LiveScience isn't a journal, 
> 
> I thought I saw a link there to the actual study, but I see I'm wrong.
> However, google is still your friend.
> 

Yes, it is, that is how I got the other two articles on Cochrane that
found that it was effective for certain things. Google is a nice large
place to look, and with a tonne of studies on acupuncture and the
placebo effect I thought that if there was a single large meta study
proving it was ineffective at just about everything, as Patrick
suggested in the post I first replied to, then I either missed it or was
searching in the wrong terms. All I found were cases where the efficacy
was either proven or disproved for certain symptoms or disorders when
compared to either drugs, placebo drugs, or placebo acupuncture.

I hate linking to Elsevier studies, for reasons that would take a whole
other thread, but:
Acupuncture doesn't work for chronic pain
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0304395999003048
Real needles do work better for rotator cuff tendinitis
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0304395999001074

That is just two that google scholar pulls up. The nearest to an overall
study, that I can find today, is
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1295163/ and the results
there are . . . odd? Placebos are known to have an effect in roughly
1/3rd of people, so if 60% benefit from either acupuncture or sham
acupuncture, then something else is happening.

> http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/114/5/1242
> 

Acupuncture doesn't cure allergies, alright that I can believe. Neither
does aspirin, or cipro, or valium.

I get the feeling that there are some things acupuncture can be used for
in modern medicine, and others that it shouldn't be used for.

Post a reply to this message

Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Wish I knew where to find them. Hmm. Ask Penn and Teller? They where the
> ones that tracked down the guy, whose name I can't even remember. But,
> he was, apparently, for a while, one of the #1 people running around
> advocating its use, and even still has the bus he used to treat people,
> as part of spreading the idea around. He now uses it to show people why
> its bunk.

I will keep digging then. I keep journal search engines bookmarked,
because I keep finding my self needing things to read.

> And for why its not placebo.. I never said it wasn't. But we don't use
> placebos, in most cases, for one key reason, and two lesser ones. The
> main one is ethics. To make a placebo work you have to basically *lie*
> to a patient. The others are 1) lying about the effect of such a
> treatment allows those denying that it "is" placebo to continue to
> suggest that its not, and that a whole host of other BS is real too, 2)
> some of those things *can be* and *are* dangerous, under certain
> circumstance, and 3) people may opt to use the placebo, and refuse
> *real* treatment. The later two happen all the time, and people die from
> it every single year, some of them children.

"We" . . . If you are speaking from medical training, I will defer to
better knowledge of the field. Just let me know. All I know is from
years on the patient side of things.

Beyond that, I got my wording mixed up. Happens, I suck at English some
days. I wasn't openly advocating the use of placebos over all other
drugs. I was trying to say that if acupuncture and sham acupuncture have
similar success rates for Disorder X (what ever that individual symptom
or ailment is), and that success rate is higher than the known placebo
effect of around 30%, then why not use it. Why not study it?

> You can't lie to patients,

Yes you can. Every time a doctor gives out some antibiotics for a viral
infection, that's a placebo. Sugar pills were found to have roughly the
same effective treatment rate for mild depression and anxiety. So
someone gets a mild anti-depressant for times when they are just feeling
blue, another placebo.

"Just feeling blue" may be a local phrase. What I reference is feeling
justifiably depressed and sad; dog or parents died, wife left, house
burned down, things of that nature.

> and you can't support things that result in
> people failing to take treatments for *serious* conditions, by only
> taking the placebo.

Was not suggesting that at all. If another medical treatment has better
results, great. But, benefit analysis needs to be done, between the
doctor and patient, on the side effects too.

> And then... there are the "doctors" who haven't
> managed to get their license pulled, because they are not *technically*
> doing anything they *know* (or at least believe) is wrong, who may hurt
> or kill people by advocating the placebo *instead* of the real
> treatments. And, since no rules exist to prevent it, other than the
> ethics rules, which deny use of such things at all, opening the door to
> them means you have no way to remove such doctors from their practice
> for malpractice.

Those same fake doctors have an arsenal of things they can claim work,
with propped up studies that back them up. Hunt them down, sure, but it
doesn't hurt to look at their data just to see if one in a thousand of
them might have been on to something real.

> Its literally one of those slippery slope issues that it would be *far*
> better to avoid than advocate openly.
>

Post a reply to this message

Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>>> Invisible wrote:
>>>> (There are people who think that accupuncture is nonesense. But now 
>>>> scientists are finding that it causes measurable chemical changes in 
>>>> the body that do, in fact, do something. As crazy as that sounds...)
>>>>
>>>
>>> It is nonsense.
>>
>> Thanks for clearing that up for us. I guess all the actual medical 
>> doctors can stop looking into it now.
>>
> Yep.. 

<long 100% nonsequitur rant deleted>

Wow. OK, I think I'll just give up now.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
>>> (Actually, the history of science and mathematics seems to involve 
>>> quite a lot of things being discovered, forgotten and then 
>>> rediscovered, often after a seriously large length of time.)
>>
>> That happens a lot when fanatics burn down libraries. Hasn't really 
>> happened much since the invention of the printing press.
> 
> Which, AFAIK, is "fairly recent".

Yep. The first "modern" press was the mid-1400's.  There were some in China 
that didn't work out all that well due to the lack of an alphabet.  Plus, 
there were wood-cuts which again for some reason didn't work out all that well.

> seemingly nothing inbetween. 

Quite possibly due to either libraries burning down, or due to math not 
being all that useful without science, once the basics you need for 
architecture census and such are figured out.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

Post a reply to this message

>>>> (Actually, the history of science and mathematics seems to involve 
>>>> quite a lot of things being discovered, forgotten and then 
>>>> rediscovered, often after a seriously large length of time.)
>>>
>>> That happens a lot when fanatics burn down libraries. Hasn't really 
>>> happened much since the invention of the printing press.
>>
>> Which, AFAIK, is "fairly recent".
> 
> Yep. The first "modern" press was the mid-1400's.  There were some in 
> China that didn't work out all that well due to the lack of an 
> alphabet.

Hahaha! Isn't China that country that *has* an alphabet, but it's 22,000 
characters or something absurd?

>> seemingly nothing inbetween. 
> 
> Quite possibly due to either libraries burning down, or due to math not 
> being all that useful without science, once the basics you need for 
> architecture census and such are figured out.

Check out the graph:

http://tinyurl.com/ydncoro

Notice the huge gap in the middle, and the much smaller gap between then 
and now? I'm sure other mathematicians *existed*, they just weren't 
especially famous... ;-)

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> Hahaha! Isn't China that country that *has* an alphabet, but it's 22,000 
> characters or something absurd?

No, it's not an alphabet. It's writing, but there aren't phonetic letters 
you rearrange to make words, which is what "alphabet" means. From the greek 
Alpha Beta.

> Notice the huge gap in the middle, and the much smaller gap between then 
> and now? I'm sure other mathematicians *existed*, they just weren't 
> especially famous... ;-)

Well, anyone whose name we still know 500+ years later would probably fall 
under "especially famous" for me. Of course there might be a big gap when 
you list individual mathematicians. You're not graphing famous mathematicians.

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Indexes/Full_Chron.html


-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:
> Well, anyone whose name we still know 500+ years later would probably 
> fall under "especially famous" for me. 


Yeah, I guess if you don't count Pythagoras as a famous mathematician, we 
might get some gaps in there, yah. ;-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> Darren New wrote:
>>> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>>>> Invisible wrote:
>>>>> (There are people who think that accupuncture is nonesense. But now 
>>>>> scientists are finding that it causes measurable chemical changes 
>>>>> in the body that do, in fact, do something. As crazy as that 
>>>>> sounds...)
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> It is nonsense.
>>>
>>> Thanks for clearing that up for us. I guess all the actual medical 
>>> doctors can stop looking into it now.
>>>
>> Yep.. 
> 
> <long 100% nonsequitur rant deleted>
> 
> Wow. OK, I think I'll just give up now.
> 
Sigh.. Not a rant, but an explanation. As I said, your "medical doctors" 
are almost universally not trained scientists, they are a sort of 
technician. As such, many of them get it into their heads to run "tests" 
of things that are marginal at best, and *do it wrong*, producing false 
results, which then get promoted by advocates of the alternative 
treatment. The ones that are trained as scientists all, at this point, 
pretty much agree that certain things are placebo, and the only question 
is, "What causes the effect", not, "Should I treat someone with this 
sham method, or give them an aspirin?" That clearer for you?

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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