Sabrina Kilian wrote:
> 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.

The problem, as I pointed out to someone else, is that you have a *lot* 
of medical doctors doing these sorts of studies, but not all of them are 
scientifically trained. When ever you run into something like this you 
have about half the studies run by people making critical mistakes, and 
not being immediately caught doing it, often with very small numbers of 
patients in the groups. Other studies, on the same matter, end up 
contradicting them. So far, what I have seen, implies, rather strongly, 
that this is what is going on here. After all, some of these same 
doctors are noted for a) prescribing medications that are not intended 
for use X, for that, because the side effect of treating Y seems to 
produce and effect that could help X, or b) presenting other even more 
"alternative" treatments, along side the stuff they published a study on.

Point being, would you trust someone doing a study, who has no training 
in running proper studies, and also believes in homeopathy? This isn't 
always the case, which makes things even more confused, but all too 
often you find the people behind the studies are either believers in 
other quack, or funded by such. If, and this is a big if, it actually 
does do something in some obscure cases, I am still not sure that the 
unfortunate side effect of finding this out, that of having a huge 
number of people insist that it still does work for allergies, and 
pointing at non-related studies of something that it does work for, is 
worth the relatively small benefit that might be gained from it.

-- 
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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Sabrina Kilian wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
> "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.
> 
Meant "we" in the general sense of society not accepting doctors lying 
to patients about treatments working or not.

> 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.
> 
If a doctor is giving out antibiotics for a viral infection then, yes, 
they would be lying.. You give people anti-virals for viruses, which 
isn't the same thing. As for sugar pills... Yes, in "rare" occasions 
this has been done, but its usually with a) people that don't have 
anything wrong with them in the first place, but think they do, or b) 
... I am not sure, but its not as an alternative to *real* treatment, 
and it is an ethics issue, which, as I understand it, gets argued a lot.

And no, I am not saying that you would advocate replacement of real 
treatment with fake ones. What I am saying is that there are already 
doctors that have fallen for the quack pseudoscience and false claims of 
many "alternative" treatments, and they *do* often advocate for the 
replacement of real medication/treatments with the ones that don't work. 
This needs to be stopped, not accelerated.

> 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.
> 
That is the problem. People do look at their data, and its inevitably 
collected wrong, deals with tiny numbers of people, contains biases, 
like, "I wanted them to feel better, and they trusted me, so they told 
me they felt better, but I don't have actual proof.", and similar 
useless stuff.

That is in fact the biggest problem. You can *test* whether certain 
things have improved, you can't *test* if the patient's perception of 
their minor aches and pains have *actually* improved from some 
treatment, because the mere belief that it should improve can skew their 
own perceptions, even if the actual pain experienced is *mechanically* 
the same. In other words, if you could measure how much pain the nerves 
where generating, it would be the same, but the *perception* of the pain 
differed. This creates a real mess with this stuff, and makes even real, 
but marginal, medications problematic to test, in some cases. They have 
to have an effect that rises "over" a specific threshold of, "This could 
just be perception, not effect."

Studies on such effects, by doctors already advocating stuff that is 
just plain dumb, can't be trusted, because there is already a bias in 
perception on their part, there is almost certainly one on the part of 
their patients, who go there, probably, because he advocates nonsense 
treatments, and that *can* skew the results by 30%, due to both the 
patient exaggerating the result, and the doctor doing the same. Real 
studies, the ones that fail to find anything in such cases, generally 
try to find *direct* ways of measuring what is going on, when possible. 
Why? Because it removes both the 15% added by patient perception, and 
the 15% added by a doctor who badly wants to be helping their patients, 
and *seems* to be getting the result they expected.

You have to take the subjective perceptions of both out of the equation, 
as much as possible, to come up with a valid study. Most of these 
studies, sadly, do neither.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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

An alphabet is where you combine individual symbols, which have no 
meaning themselves, to form words. What they have are glyphs, each with 
a specific meaning, and which only combine when you want to express an 
idea that is a combination of those two meanings. This is rather 
different, and why both China and Japan tend to use English when dealing 
with technologies (well, that and the French didn't invent computers). 
Its literally the only "language" where you can write something like 
dog, and have everyone in the country know what it means, yet where the 
*spoken* form can differ between 10+ versions, some of which are so 
radically different that two people, trying to talk to each other, 
wouldn't understand a single word of each others sentences. And, that 
can come close to being true even with the two "major" dialects.

-- 
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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Neeum Zawan wrote:
> On 11/29/09 11:21, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> Oh, I think there have always been people who truly, honestly believe
>> that every single syllable of the Bible is the Word of God, and cannot
> 
>     Every syllable? In which language?<G>

Hey, *I* know it's crazy! ;-)

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Darren New wrote:

> Even nowadays, it surprises me (in some sense) that religious people 
> object to the teaching of evolution here. You'd think if creationism 
> were *true* and they *really* believed it, they wouldn't be worried 
> about *science*.
> 
> Why would the church lock up Galileo if they thought his observations 
> and deductions were factually incorrect?

Putting it the other way... the scientists *do* know that they are 
correct (or at least, very nearly correct), so why are they worried 
about creationists?

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>> 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. ;-)

Wolfram limits the number of people's names you're allowed to use. The 
list has to be short, so it's kind of arbitrary which people you choose 
to include.

Euclid, Archimedes and Pythagorus are ancient Greek. Then there's a gap 
of about 1,000 years, and then there's a huge chunk of people all alive 
at the same time - Euler, Gauss, Cauchy, Fermat, Pascal, Fibonacci, 
Netwon, Laplace, the whole shooting match. And then there's a gap until 
the present day.

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>> 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.

They're ideograms not phonograms, but I'm not aware that this 
disqualifies them as an "alphabet". It is after all a finite set of 
symbols having well-defined meanings - they just don't mean phonetics.

>> 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

Most of the people in that list, I've never heard of. And I've heard of 
people like Chebyshev that most people wouldn't recognise.

Maybe it's just that all the people who discovered stuff that you'd 
learn about in an extremely basic math course lived a long time ago? For 
example, Andrew Wiles famously proved Fermat's Last Theorum - or rather, 
proved that all modular forms are elliptic. But apparently only a few 
people alive can actually comprehend the proof, so...

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>>   The placebo effect also causes measurable chemical changes in the body.
> 
> Interestingly, I've read that the placebo effect has been getting 
> measurably stronger over the last few decades. How's *that* for a 
> mind-screw?

People are becoming more gullible?

Which would seem weird, given all the conspiracy theories...

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Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Sabrina Kilian wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> The problem, as I pointed out to someone else, is that you have a *lot*
> of medical doctors doing these sorts of studies, but not all of them are
> scientifically trained. 

Okay, this is where we are at odds. I am not talking about a general
practitioner conducting flawed studies. Maybe I have odd doctors, but
they read peer review journals and try to keep up with new techniques
that have been researched and presented at conferences, not just ideas
that have been batted around the office. Living near a teaching hospital
has that advantage.

Yes, I know of GPs who will recommend non-traditional medicine in a
'Give it a try while we do the other major tests to find out what is
wrong.' manner as palliative care, not as a treatment.

> Point being, would you trust someone doing a study, who has no training
> in running proper studies, and also believes in homeopathy? This isn't
> always the case, which makes things even more confused, but all too
> often you find the people behind the studies are either believers in
> other quack, or funded by such.

No, I wouldn't true a flawed study. Quackery is a separate problem from
non-traditional medicine, even if some quacks are pushing
non-traditional cures.

> If, and this is a big if, it actually does do something in some obscure cases, I am
still not sure that the unfortunate side effect of finding this out, that of having a
huge number of people insist that it still does work for allergies, and pointing at
non-related studies of something that it does work for, is worth the relatively small
benefit that might be gained from it. 

That I have to disagree with. People claim and believe that new drugs do
all sorts of things that they just can't, and we let those individuals
promote and sell the drugs to doctors! If a treatment works, knowing
about it is worth the fact that some people out there may try to spin
things their own ways. Unfortunately, that happens, but it will happen
with any treatment, new or old or rediscovered.

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Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Sabrina Kilian wrote:
>> 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.
>>
> If a doctor is giving out antibiotics for a viral infection then, yes,
> they would be lying.. You give people anti-virals for viruses, which
> isn't the same thing.

Never taken a child to the doctor for a cold, or seen a mother who is
convinced that a green runny nose and a 100.1 F fever is grounds for
emergency rooms? Most head colds, sinus infections, ear infections, and
so on, are viral and not bacterial. Yet family doctors still hand out
scripts for simple antibiotics.

>As for sugar pills... Yes, in "rare" occasions
> this has been done, but its usually with a) people that don't have
> anything wrong with them in the first place, but think they do, or b)
> .... I am not sure, but its not as an alternative to *real* treatment,
> and it is an ethics issue, which, as I understand it, gets argued a lot.

There was a study on the effectiveness of anti-depressants on mild
depression. I can dig that up if you like. The sugar pill test was in a
double blind study, not open treatment. However, if the drugs are only
as useful as a sugar pill, why not skip the side effects?

> And no, I am not saying that you would advocate replacement of real
> treatment with fake ones. What I am saying is that there are already
> doctors that have fallen for the quack pseudoscience and false claims of
> many "alternative" treatments, and they *do* often advocate for the
> replacement of real medication/treatments with the ones that don't work.
> This needs to be stopped, not accelerated.

Agreed, but getting rid of "alternative" therapies will not do that. I
can picture it now: "Oh no, my super secret acupuncture tricks are so
useful, that the drug companies lobbied to have my license revoked!" I
mean, if we are talking about quacks, lets pick the very fringe of them.

> That is in fact the biggest problem. You can *test* whether certain
> things have improved, you can't *test* if the patient's perception of
> their minor aches and pains have *actually* improved from some
> treatment, because the mere belief that it should improve can skew their
> own perceptions, even if the actual pain experienced is *mechanically*
> the same. In other words, if you could measure how much pain the nerves
> where generating, it would be the same, but the *perception* of the pain
> differed. This creates a real mess with this stuff, and makes even real,
> but marginal, medications problematic to test, in some cases. They have
> to have an effect that rises "over" a specific threshold of, "This could
> just be perception, not effect."

Morphine works the same way, it doesn't stop the pain from occurring at
the site, it just blocks it on the way to the brain. Modern narcotics
don't even dissolve into the body and are metabolized into pain killing
alkaloids.

And there is a method to measure the amount and types of endorphins in
the blood. So, testing the means by which pain is reduced is not all
that difficult. Testing the amount of pain reduced in the brain versus
the amount reduced at trauma site is difficult but, when comparing it to
the standard analgesics, that isn't an issue.

> You have to take the subjective perceptions of both out of the equation,
> as much as possible, to come up with a valid study. Most of these
> studies, sadly, do neither.

Which studies do neither? Maybe we are reading different studies.

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