Out of curiosity: how many of you guys here consider the traditional Chinese medicine valid? (by valid I mean "possibly having positive healing outcomes beyond the placebo effect")
It may or may not have some validity, but it's practitioners seem to be in no great hurry to apply proper rigour to their practice. For me, that is a clear red flag. If I really believed that I knew how to cure a disease, my first instinct would be to test my beliefs. At the very least I would seek out proof of them. I am deeply suspicious of anyone who shows little or no desire to validate their beliefs, especially when those beliefs are literally a matter of life or death.
I definitely do. It's the reason I'm able to walk again. I was confined to my bed for over 3 months, not able to move my legs. Immediately after my first treatment of acupuncture, feeling came back to my foot, and I was able to move my left leg again. A month after the treatment, I was able to walk again (albeit, dragging my foot like a zombie). At that point, I did Bikram's Yoga for about 6 months with weekly acupuncture, and was back to normal.
It was that, or get a costly spinal surgery which had a high percentage of failure in my particular case.
This still doesn't rule out the placebo effect, which is real and not at all negligible in some case.
I think we shouldn't be so quick to exclude it from "real" medicine. As long as it works on a fair percentage or patients, I say use it and the less drugs the better.
It also doesn't rule out coincidence. People often just get better for no other reason than their body's natural healing process. Maybe the acupuncture had a placebo effect here. Maybe it had a "real" effect. Maybe, coincidentally, his body just happen to heal at the same moment the treatment was administered.
Most definitely not in my case. She was a "very" expensive acupuncturist, her entire life was devoted to the practice, as was her father and mothers. She also gave me a few (horrible tasting) medicines as well.
I literally couldn't move my legs for "3" months. Oh, I wish I could have. Having your excrement taken away from your bed by friends isn't my idea of fun. Anytime I tried to move my legs, I would scream out in pain.
My dad works at the local hospital in radiology, so I got VIP CAT and MRI. It was a very bad injury, and one of the best back surgeons in the state of California told me I wasn't going to walk normally again.
What did I do after I got better? I started practicing Qi Gong / Tai Qi / Gung Fu, 6 days a week. Color me sold on the ways of the east.
I don't know very much about traditional chinese medicine: like western medicine it's probably that they have certain things very wrong.
However, I will say that the analytical side of western medicine is over reliant on tools which render it practically blind to relationships more complicated than linear sensitivity to single variables, whereas the clinic side is driven by the cultural mores and background of doctors who, alarmingly, are not much healthier than the rest of the population.
And then there's the issue of arrogance. My god some doctors are arrogant.
Numerous alternative medicines return the focus to the whole body, whole life, and nutrition, and return the ultimate responsibility for the care of the patient to the patient.
In this, I think that they represent quite a promising volume in healthcare parameter-space.
Maybe the problem is that "relationships more complicated than linear sensitivity to single variables" are hard to study scientifically, and Western medicine is supposed to be founded on science.
That's true in a practical sense today for most scientists, but it need not always be so.
Multivariate linear regression is currently the swiss army knife of the statistical sciences. Even now there isn't much appreciation of its merits, flaws, applicability and power. But now that we have computers powerful enough to interactively process and visualize data, it seems to me to be possible to bring an understanding of non-linear statistical modeling.
I think it's quite possible that certain herbs or treatments may have effects on certain diseases or illnesses, but that is just a starting point to say we need more evidence, not a reason to believe traditional Chinese medicine works.
I am pretty confused about this subject. I've had acupuncture for a headache once by some famous guy in Taiwan, and being a staunch rationalist figured that the slight benefit I got out of it was a combination of placebo and being distracted by the experience of having about 45 needles stuck in me fairly painlessly for about 30 minutes. (It doesn't hurt, but afterward there is some soreness. Very surreal.)
Now I shadow a MDPhd neurologist who got his MD in Taiwan. Apparently the traditional and the Western stuff is integrated in the curriculum. (His specialty and PhD are from the US, I believe UMich for the doctorate)
He does both acupuncture, clinical, and bio research..
Witnessing it, sometimes it really helps and other times it doesn't. Do I know if it's purely placebo? No. His working theory is that acupuncture is related to triggering autonomic response by stimulating nerve clusters, "self-healing", which indicates an upper bound on effectiveness. And sure enough, he'll tell patients that there are some things acupuncture just doesn't work for. (I can't remember; it tends to be purely physical problems like irreversible nerve damage - neuropathy) But he's also told me that he visited some famous spirit healer on vacation in Brazil (just for fun), and about open surgeries with acupuncture and no anesthetics in China.
And this is just acupuncture, which doesn't encompass anything near all of traditional Chinese medicine! He also is knowledgeable in 3 or 4 different systems of acupuncture, which are similar but not isomorphic.
The placebo effect exists, but it exists independently of whatever expensive alt-medicine crap is being pushed at the moment. Therefore, if we're discussing the efficacy of the "medicine," you can't include placebo effects. This is also why medical trials nearly always include a placebo group.
I've long known that in the end, it's the human itself who will heal himself from any illness; not medical doctors, alternative healers, or a particular kind of medicine.
People who don't want to heal simply will not, or at least they'll create a suitable series of different subsequent illnesses. Those who want will heal, possibly through whatever particular enabler they might initially need or simply on their own. There are only few studies of healing miracles, possibly because we really haven't figured out yet why some terminally ill cancer patient with only months left suddenly rids himself of all cancer cells over a mere week.
However, I've now come to the conclusion that it works both ways: the human being can also make himself very sick, up to the level of being dead. This has shifted my focus from healing and curing illnesses -- i.e. fixing the aftermath -- to looking for the answer from the question of why do we get ill in the first place? Why some people almost never get sick? Why some are chronically sick with several illnesses at any given moment? Why these tendencies sometimes change? Why is it that people's lives seem to change in sync with getting chronic illnesses and healing from them?
The validity of the placebo effect kind of fits in logically if we first assume the foremost responsibility of one being healthy or sick to the person himself.
It strikes me as arrogant to dismiss a system as 'not valid' that has apparently worked pretty well for literally billions of people for thousands of years.
I certainly didn't mean it that way. What I'd like to know is whether one is overall better off with the analytical/western medicine or the complex-view approach of the eastern.
A reasonable compromise would be to require providers of alternative medicine to show that it's not harmful. Maybe it doesn't do anything, but that's for others to decide.
Water can poison and kill you at a large enough dosage. Oxygen too. Treating cancer with homeopathy is harmless until the cancer kills you. All medicine (supported by science or not) carries some risk, the poison is in the dosage.
Woo practitioners are more than happy to bankrupt their victims, what's the harm?
A Milwaukee girl died of diabetes recently, her parents were trying to cure her with prayer.
There's a difference between things that are generally harmless in their prescribed doses--water, aspirin, homeopathy BS--and the example given in the article, where the patient took the pills as specified and soon lost her kidneys, got cancer, and had a heart attack.
If the Wu practitioners are giving out lethal doses of their medicine, they should be crushed by the FDA.
yet the FDA manages to regulate drugs for safety, regardless of the fact that dropping 10 tons of even the safest drug on your head results in a really nasty headache.
From what I've seen in the US, a lot of Chinese medicine is actually FDA-approved as "beverages" -- supposedly they are safe to drink, but it's up to the user to believe whether or not there's any medicinal effect.
I think the best solution would be to say that 'alternative medicine' is still medicine and must follow existing regulations. So, treatments must be prescribed by a doctor, they must be approved for use in humans (and so must demonstrate utility and safety), and so on.
But the practitioners will fight this. Many of them are canny enough to know that if you measure them by the same yardstick as real medicine they're going to fall short. That's why they dance around the FDA regulations with their disclaimers so often.
And what for the more established practices, like chiropractic? They already have "doctors". How do you bootstrap this procedure when hundreds of "trained" professional practitioners already flood the market? Do you say, "Okay guys, put your careers on hold while we do 5-year trials!" And we've already done those trials for the most part, and they've come up negative. So do we just say, "Find a new business?"
And you've got to do this all without giving your opponents an opportunity to rile up the public against your actions. Voters can be an irrational lot, but a lot of irrational people can outvote a few rational people. Unless you spin it just so, a narrative of big government crushing small business can be devastating.
I think what you're proposing is what we'd like to have happen, but it's incredibly difficult to have it turn out that way.
I feel quite the opposite. I think it's similar to the problem of separation of church and state. By that I mean you shouldn't be prohibited from trying out unproven treatments and you can believe whatever you want, but it should be kept separate from the medical system that has been shown by scientific inquiry to be effective.
Okay, man. I appreciate this "church and state" argument, but we're talking about medicine here. This isn't people's souls at stake, it's their immediate health and lives.
It's one thing to limit what people put into their body, I'm nod advocating that. It's another entirely to limit what people claim. People can claim anything can cure anything, and then someone who isn't making a fully informed decision then puts their lives at risk, and in the process loses cash to someone who simply made a statement and offered a service.
In many other industries, this is okay. The market tends to detect bullshitters and avoid them. Usually it's only a few over-eager suckers who lose some cash and warn everyone else. But in the case of medicine, transactions are done not only in people's money but also with their health as currency. Asking for the market to correct for this asks for an incredible amount of misery and death to occur before a treatment can be identified. Ethically, this seems like a very bad position to take.
