Same deal with Tiger Balm, but I’m more inclined to believe the burning of it just distracts you from the other pain… I won’t use ICY-HOT for this reason, it just distracts you from the other pain and makes everything you touch smell like mint. Emu Oil is a joke, it simply doesn’t work/works the same as the aforementioned two.
Yes, and what has that to do with it being a topical anti- inflammatory?
For goodness sake, you can try it for less than ten bucks. They sell it at Walmart for like 7.98.
Nothing CURES Arthritis. It may or may not alleviate some of the pain or irritation from various things.
Frankly, I’ve found that TONS of long sold and sworn wonderful products are crap, at least for me. At least this stuff doesn’t smell like camphor. But I don’t remember getting any special extra relief by using it.
My aunt has bad arthritis. She takes prescription NSAIDS, Tylenol, and very occasionally, narcotics, for it. It keeps it at bay. She is always having people recommend woo to her. She gets really sick of hearing about it, and throws the articles in the trash, but she always thanks people politely to their faces.
Occasionally, people actually give her things. When they do she tries it. Nothing has ever worked. Ever. I don’t know if Blue Emu oil is one of the things, but there have been lots, and I’ll bet at some point someone has given it to her.
Anyway, just to repeat, aside from things an actual doctor has given her, or recommended, NOTHING has helped.
Also because expensive placebos work better than cheap ones. Cite.
Regards,
Shodan
That would fall under “other conditions”. 
I think it was Dr. Weil who said the placebo effect is exactly what you want: the body healing itself.
this isn’t recent but it’s still interesting/relevant The Triumph of New Age Medicine. and you should read it.
all medicine uses the placebo effect - integrative/new age medicine is just better at it
meanwhile, the “non” integrative approach - the “regular” doctor attempts to heal you in an incredibly toxic system.
And afterwards (or beforewards) you should read this.
I did.
The author at least made an attempt to seek out proponents of evidence-based medicine like Dr. Novella, but made some highly dubious assumptions, among them that emphasis on exercise and diet are “alternative” medicine (odd, since my internist stresses these factors like virtually all primary care docs do - the problem is that we patients often don’t listen*), and that mainstream medicine has failed sufferers from chronic diseases because there aren’t cures (drugs and other therapies commonly make these conditions bearable and prolong life, while alt med can’t remotely match evidence-based medicine’s performance).
Money quotes from the article:
“Medical centers are lining up to establish research clinics so that they can take NIH funding for alternative-medicine studies, Salzberg adds. Aggressive marketing of these clinics can also generate substantial patient demand (even a small integrative clinic can take in several million dollars a year).”
note: the article doesn’t mention the increasing tendency of previously well-respected medical centers like the Cleveland Clinic to open treatment facilities specializing in alt med (the Cleveland Clinic suffered major embarrassment when the director of its facility publicly promoted his antivax views). The overwhelming reason is that quite a few patients go for this stuff, bringing in substantial money for the med center, while the facility can preen about its touchy-feeliness and how it’s giving patients what they want.
"Alternative medicine wouldn’t be quite so bad if it were harmless, Salzberg says, but it isn’t. “If the treatment is herbal tea or yoga, fine; it won’t help, but at least it won’t hurt you,” he says. “But acupuncture carries a real risk of infection from needles. And when a chiropractor cracks your neck, there’s a small but nontrivial chance that he can shear an artery in your neck, and you’ll die.” (A British Medical Journal study last year found that only 200 cases of likely acupuncture-related infection have been reported globally, but that many more may have occurred. Evidence for a tiny risk of chiropractic artery-shearing and related stroke is scant, indirect, and contested, but seems plausible.) The biggest danger of all, Salzberg adds, is that patients who see alternative practitioners will stop getting mainstream care altogether. “The more time they spend getting fraudulent treatments, the less time they’ll spend getting treatments that work and that could save their lives.”
The author seems to think that if mainstream medicine has a problem because physicians don’t spend enough time talking to patients and hearing their concerns, a solution is to espouse quacky alternatives like homeopathy, because practitioners of those modalities say they spend more time with patients. It doesn’t make sense.
If you mean "better at deceiving patients by providing worthless therapies while steering them away from vaccination and other useful interventions, then I agree.
My basic attitude towards placebos is this: I prefer a treatment that works whether I believe in it or not.
Would that be the “incredibly toxic system” in which diabetics live long productive lives following diagnoses that would’ve been a death sentence in the days when placebos were all we had to offer them? Or the “incredibly toxic system” where people with impending or early strokes get early intervention that preserves their brain tissue and physical capabilities? Or the one where leukemias, lymphomas and many other cancers are cured through early detection and/or definitive therapies which didn’t exist decades ago?
Do tell.
*yes, listening is a two-way street.
Those two claim to be for pain but their real benefit is as muscle relaxants. I always keep a supply of Tiger Balm around for that.
I think Reductio ad absurdum describes your post, as obvious “incredibly toxic system” does not equal “nothing works ever”.
I prefer a system where my doctor and I decide on my treatment, not a for-profit insurance company whose coverage doesn’t necessarily mean I can stay out of bankruptcy.
I have cousins who are doctors. They are on different sides of the family, so they don’t see each other much, but when they do, and they talk shop, you’ll often hear them complain that they can recommend good diet and exercise, until they are blue in the face, and patients won’t comply, but patients will go to a “Naturopath” with an office next to the co-op, who recommends diet, exercise, plus green tea, shark oil, or baboon repellent, and people comply to the letter, then wax rhapsodious about how the Naturopath cured them where their “real” doctor failed.
Not obvious, given the terminology you used. It’d be mildly interesting to hear what parts of that “incredibly toxic system” you’d concede are useful (dyed-in-the-wool alties grudgingly accept the necessity for acute trauma care and surgery for things like a ruptured viscus where it might be inconvenient to wait around for the 30X homeopathic solution of aconite to work*, but disdain evidence-based care for chronic conditions like asthma, diabetes, heart failure etc.).
I suppose if you’re paying out of pocket for woo treatments there’s a lot more latitude for you and the practitioner, but good luck finding any quality health care system with no external controls on what care is permissible.
Getting back to emu oil and the suggestion to try the cheap stuff at Wal-Mart: price is no guarantee that what’s in the bottle is what’s printed on the label. Prescription drugs are not entirely immune to variations in active ingredients, but the problem is especially pervasive in the supplement industry (along with the perils of unlisted adulterants, plus contamination with heavy metals and other undesirable things).
*Bizarrely, there’s a thing called “battlefield acupuncture” that has defenders in the U.S. military health system, though it’s hard to imagine how someone injured by (for example) an IED would respond to a medic attempting to restore his flow of chi.
They have double-blind tested the chi part and it’s pure hokum. However, yes, acupuncture can really work for pain relief. But the “chi” part is nonsense.
when physical therapists treat pain with needles they call it dry needling
*"Curiously, given that its alleged principles are as bizarre as those on any other sort of pre-scientific medicine, acupuncture seemed to gain somewhat more plausibility than other forms of alternative medicine. The good thing about that is that more research has been done on acupuncture than on just about any other fringe practice.
The outcome of this research, we propose, is that the benefits of acupuncture, if any, are too small and too transient to be of any clinical significance. It seems that acupuncture is little or no more than a theatrical placebo…
There is now unanimity that the benefits, if any, of acupuncture for analgesia, are too small to be helpful to patients."*
Yeah, I got something from my insurance company a couple years back, stating that acupuncture was no longer considered even minimally medically effective based on research, and they’d no longer be covering it. (I assume they sent it to everybody, since I’ve never had an acupuncture treatment).
Dry needling’s justifications aren’t much better than those of acupuncture.
“To date, there is a paucity of high-quality evidence to underpin the use of direct dry needling into (myofascial trigger points) for the purpose of short and long-term pain and disability reduction in patients with musculoskeletal pain syndromes. Furthermore, there is a lack of robust evidence validating the clinical diagnostic criteria for trigger point identification or diagnosis. High-quality studies have also demonstrated that manual examination for the identification and localization of a trigger point is neither valid nor reliable between-examiners.”
As Steve Minchin says, “Do you know what they call alternative medicine that has been proved to work? Medicine.”
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1063458413008005
Conclusions
As a summary of the current available research, the network meta-analysis results indicate that acupuncture can be considered as one of the more effective physical treatments for alleviating osteoarthritis knee pain in the short-term. However, much of the evidence in this area of research is of poor quality, meaning there is uncertainty about the efficacy of many physical treatments.