A friend of mine is undergoing some tests and diet changes to avoid certain allergic reactions.
The test as he describes it, performed by his acupuncturist, is as follows:
Subject touches their thumb and forefinger together (like you’re making the “OK” sign).
Experimenter then tries to pull your fingers apart.
Experimenter then repeats this test while touching your shoulder with a little sample of something that you might be allergic to.
The theory is that if you’re allergic to “X”, it has an immediate effect and your fingers are easier to pry apart.
OK, to me this sounds frankly like 100% B.S., right up there with ear candling, astrology and magic healing crystals. For starters there’s no measurement of the force needed to pull your fingers apart so repeatability is right out the window. Next there’s all the psychological aspects (if you THINK that you’re allergic to celery then you may resist less when they touch a celery stalk to your shoulder, or the acupuncturist may pull harder). Then there’s the problem that not all allergies make you weaker - maybe Windex gives me hives but why would that make my muscle weaker or whatever?
Too much of this just makes zero sense to me but before I poo-poo it to my friend I wanted to see if anyone has heard of this and is there anything to it?
It’s worth noting that:
a. Friend is a big strong guy (however I just tried and pulling somebody’s fingers apart in that position is pretty simple, it’s arm strength versus finger strength).
b. Friend is a former EMT who applied for med school - he’s quite intelligent, has a decent medical background and he’s not by any means gullible.
c. Friend claims that he wasn’t surprised when the test turned up “positives” when he KNEW what he was being touched with but he was surprised when it was repeated with him NOT knowing what substances he was being touched with. Obvious problem is that the EXPERIMENTER knows what he was being touched with.
I do the allergy acupuncture thing every once in a while.
The first time I went I was a complete non-believer. My cousins went. I refused for a few years. I suffered through spring and summer with anti-histamines and such. My mom finally got me to go by offering to pay for it (I was young and poor).
I seem to remember filling out a survey asking what I knew I was allergic to, but maybe not. Maybe I’m thinking of some other doctor visit and blurring them together. I’d had all the standard “western” allergy tests and treatments and used to know exactly what I was allergic to. Did your friend take any such survey?
When I went the doctor (yes, he was a doctor) did the exact same test with the fingers and the allergen. I was amused. I actually snickered. I wasn’t buying any of it. I hold the same skepticism for these things that you do. At this point I felt kinda bad that the $100+ that my mom spent on this was going to go to waste because I wasn’t falling for the the whole psychosomatic aspect of it.
The doctor did correctly “guess” what I was allergic to. I didn’t sense the doctor applying more force or anything when testing for certain allergens. I spotted no trickery. I’d made sure to keep an eye open for such things.
The doctor proceeded with the acupuncture. It wasn’t a traditional acupuncture. It was small injections of some sort into the various acupuncture points. Temples, earlobes, elbows, fingers, etc. That was followed by some kind of shot in the ass (of what I wish I could remember).
As I was leaving the office something started to happen. I could feel my head clearing. By the time I got home I was able to breathe fairly well. After a couple weeks or so of some back and forth, I had no problems with allergies for the rest of the year.
I don’t get it. A large part of me still feels it’s a bunch of voodoo BS used to justify charging $100+ for a shot in the ass. I usually have no use for such mystical things and often treat them with some disdain. I’ve not seen any kind of scientific explanation as to how and why the whole thing works. I went into this the first time thinking it would fail. But then, 3000 years of Asian medicine is probably nothing to sneeze at either (no pun intended). All I know is that it works for me and some others that I know (and failed for another friend). I don’t feel it works any better now that I believe in it. I don’t go every year, as I don’t feel I need to. But, if spring starts out really bad for me I’ll make an appointment. I’ve probably gone 5-6 times in the last 13 years. It’s some of the best money I’ve ever spent.
(I’m in the SF Bay Area also. I wonder if it’s the same doctor or maybe the doctor that took over the practice when the guy I saw retired.)
It’s “voodoo BS”. Actually, that might even be a little insulting to actual Voudoun practices.
Here’s the deal - there are a handful of substances that cause the vast majority of allergic reactions. So if someone says “I’m allergic” and you say “To X, Y, and Z?” 9 time out of 10 (or even 19 out of 20) the answer will be yes.
Just because the quack guesses right doesn’t mean the test is valid.
This is a variation of the BS advocated in this book: Power vs Force by David Hawkins. With his method you hold something in your hand and someone pushes down on your other arm. The harder it is to push your arm down the more truth in the object in your hand. By this method Mr. Hawkins prooves that the bible contains more truth than the koran :eek: My son essentially got kicked out of an University honors program because he refused to believe this nonsense. He was told he didn’t have an open mind.
Pictsie, yes that was the first thing that came into my mind, the old bit about putting sugar in your hand makes you instantaneously weaker.
Spiral - Any chance that you did in fact pay $100 for a standard anti-allergy shot of whatever kind? Are you doing anything different now than you were 13 years ago (for example, vacuuming the house more often, or avoiding certain foods, etc)?
While I certainly won’t tell somebody that their personal experience is “wrong” the whole thing just doesn’t make any sense to me and I can see an awful lot of problems with the theory and application so my skepticism meter is on “redline”.
And what exactly do you mean by that question? That he refused to “acknowledge” the scientific merits of the method? (YES) Refused to “acknowledge” that some nut cases believed in the method? (NO)
I won’t believe it unless and until it’s shown to work through a properly designed test - for example, if we came up with some way to do the test without either the subject or the experimenter knowing what substance was being used, or pried the subject’s fingers apart using some kind of machine with which we could exert a measured amount of force. Then repeat with a few hundred or a few thousand test subjects. If it doesn’t work when you do that, it’s worthless. However, I doubt this will ever be properly tested for several reasons:
The results are VERY easily explained by other means - the subject using less strength to hold fingers together, or the… practitioner… pulling harder.
If it is to work with all allergies and allergens, they need to have an effect solely by being placed on the skin. As far as I know, food allergy does NOT automatically translate to contact allergy.
Severely decreased finger strength is not something that usually comes with food allergies. If allergens don’t cause lots of problems with finger strength when they’re actually EATEN, why should they cause any problems when they’re just placed on the skin? My boyfriend feels pretty nasty if he accidentally eats onions or if someone uses that “Accent” MSG-in-a-shaker on what he eats, but they don’t affect his finger strength to any noticeable degree. (And he’s a guitarist, so I think he’d notice.)
I once went to a chiropractor (I had no choice, my mom made me) and he did something very similar only (iirc, it was a long time ago) I had to hold my arm out and he would touch some vitamin supplements to me or somesuch and if i could not keep my arm out, I needed those ones. It was obvious to me that he was ‘letting me win’ so to speak on most of em, and just pushing my arm down on a few so he could sell them to us. My mom totally bought it and as much as I tried to convince her later it was total BS she diden’t listen :rolleyes:
The practice is called applied kinesiology (AK) and it’s worthless. If you’d like to start researching it on your own, a great place to start is Dr. Stephen Barrett’s article on Quackwatch. There are many references here.
I had this done to me a couple of years ago, when I went to see the alternative practitioner who was ‘treating’ (read: extracting large amounts of cash from) my husband. I suspected this person was a charlatan and went to see for myself.
I have a fairly open mind when it comes to most alternative therapies - I have seen some good results from acupuncture, but have less respect for homeopathy and chiropractics (based on personal experience).
This particular naturopath or whatever he called himself was clearly preying on the gullible.
He also did this thing where he looked at blood samples under a microscope and made diagnoses based on the appearance of the cells. Wish I could remember more about it, at the time it seemed like utter quackery. The main purpose of this centre’s existence was to push you into buying all sorts of pricey vitamins supplements, which they sold in their shop.
I am pleased to say that my husband stopped going there soon after.
Why aren’t these people in jail? Maybe we should set up some seed funding for “alternative medical malpractice”. After we win a few cases it would be self funding.
