I think Head-On works under the same principal as boo-boo-kisses. Any child can tell you that if you apply something cool and moist (like mommy’s lips) to something that hurts, it feels better. In fact, my daughter would always ask me to kiss her forehead when she had a headache.
Right. So a dead fish would work as well as mommy’s kisses. Right.
have you ever visited a chiropractor? I hear that a lot from people who never went to one.
My mother mentioned recently that she has used Vicks Vaporub for the same purpose. I told her that that must be the principle that HeadOn works on. She does not have cable, so she had never heard of HeadOn.
Except that that assumes your secret ingredient is infinitely divisible. Once you get down to a single molecule(or very few) of your ingredient, things get wonky. Many homeopathic treatments contain exactly NONE of the specified ingredient for this reason; the pseudo-science babble is that the water “remembers” the ingredient even after diluting it away.
Heh. That part always makes me laugh.
This would work, except that a liter of water only contains about 1x10^26 atoms. A single molecule of your secret ingredient in a liter of water would still be much more than 1 part per 1x10^30.
1 part per 1x10^30 would be a single molecule of water in a 30,000 liter swimming pool.
No. I’m denying that Head-On has any true medical effectiveness, and any conclusions otherwise are driven by ignorance, wishful thinking and/or the placebo effect.
Isn’t that redundant?
Doesn’t the “placebo effect”, by definition (i.e. it necessitates that a person is feeling better), have medical effectiveness?
No. You may feel good for any number of reasons, some of them psychological. Sugar pills have no medical effect, but under the right conditions, you may feel better. Did they cause it? No. Did your brain cause it? Maybe.
If you dislike my definition of medical, substitute “chemical” or “physical”. Surely, if no chemical or physical effect of a substance can be detected under proper observing conditions in the laboratory, any medical effects are strictly in your mind.
Someone mentioned WD-40. One thing that WD-40 DOES do rather well is clean your hands of paint.
We’re dancing around two different things here.
“Effectiveness” in the “this drug is effective” sense isn’t talking about whether it makes you feel better. It’s specifically defined as a measurable and statistically significant difference between compounds containing the drug and those that do not (the control, usually a placebo.)
The “placebo effect” is nothing more than an acknowledgement that “how are you feeling?” is a subjective sort of thing, biased in part by the knowledge or belief that one is taking some action or that improvement is happening. There’s no absolute scale for pain and suffering, despite the “rate your pain on a 1 to 10” thing the doctors do. People can often feel they’re improving when they’re not, and as others have pointed out, most conditions change from day to day on their own. Attributing change to an entity that did not, in fact, cause it is the “placebo effect.”
The answer to the OP’s literal question is “no.” The “drug” is meant to have a clinical effect by its creators, and there’s theory and practice (homeopathy) behind how that effect is supposed to be produced. Because the theory is (charitably) unsound, the drug is “ineffective” in the sense listed above, but it’s not a “placebo” because it’s not given in place of an effective compound – it just is one.
Others point out that despite being ineffective compared to a control (and several controls have been listed), it makes you feel better (as do the controls). Assuming that that’s true statistically rather than just as anecdotally (which is a lot harder than just “collect enough anecdotes”), it’s a good reason to believe that you should use the stuff when you feel pain – just not a good reason to believe that you should use it instead of a wide variety of similar and equally pain-relieving compounds not containing the supposed effective ingredients.
Timewinder, no matter how you dance around it, it doesn’t do anything. If it did, it wouldn’t have to be marketed under the weasel law that allows useless, homeopathic-labeled preparations to be sold to the gullible public.
Is it a placebo (Latin for “I shall please”)? Maybe, but that’s the kindest thing I can say for a blatently fraudulent product.
I’ve used HeadOn (two different HeadOn formulations actually, Extra Strength and Sinus, I believe) and in my opinion, it’s as much of a placebo as BenGay would be, as it provides basically the same effects, just to a different area of the body. I suppose if you consider BenGay and products of that type to be placebos, you would also consider HeadOn to be one, but I don’t.
Frankly, I was surprised it helped. I was skeptical of it and only tried it because someone else bought some for me.
I agree completely. What in my post made you think I didn’t?
Have you read anything in this thread?
I could call myself a chiropractor and as long as people believed I was, I would get the same results.
I really and truly don’t understand your point. Are you saying chiropractic healing can be performed by anyone, or that any sense of healing attributed to chiropractic healing is a placebo effect? Or something different altogether? Your initial comment was a bit of a drive-by, and you either missed or ignored my previous question asking you to clarify.
The basic idea of classical chiropractic is that “subluxations” are the cause of most medical problems. According to chiropractic, a “subluxation” is a misalignment of the spine that allegedly interferes with nerve signals from the brain. However, there is no scientific evidence for spinal subluxations and none have ever been observed by medical practitioners such as orthopedic surgeons, neurosurgeons, or radiologists. Chiropractors think that by adjusting the misalignments they can thereby restore the nerve signals and cure health problems.
One is likely to seek a chiropractor (or buy magnetic braces or some other bit of quackery) when one’s pain is most severe. Natural regression will usually lead to the pain lessening after the treatment, even if there is no causal connection between the two. This is not to say that chiropractors don’t help people with aching backs, including people with chronic back problems. Maybe some do. But there is no scientific evidence that subluxation has anything to do with back pain or that correcting these so-called misalignments by manipulation has anything to do with relief from pain.
Some references to help (a Google search will reveal links to items below)
* Debating a chiropractor - Steven Novella, M.D.
* ChiroBase A Skeptical Guide to Chiropractic History, Theories, and Current Practices (Operated by Stephen Barrett, M.D. William T. Jarvis, Ph.D. and Charles E. DuVall Jr., D.C.)
* ChiroWatch
* National Council for Reliable Health Information Position Paper on Chiropractic
* NCAHF Fact Sheet on Chiropractic (1998) William T. Jarvis, Ph.D.
* Don't Let Chiropractors Fool You by Stephen Barrett, M.D.
* A Comparison of Active and Simulated Chiropractic Manipulation as Adjunctive Treatment for Childhood Asthma - New England Journal of Medicine October 8, 1998 v. 339 issue 15 (found no benefit from chiropractic)
* A Comparison of Physical Therapy, Chiropractic Manipulation, and Provision of an Educational Booklet for the Treatment of Patients with Low Back Pain - New England Journal of Medicine October 8, 1998 v. 339 issue 15 (found no difference between physical therapy and chiropractic and found any benefit from either to be minimal)
* Statement by the American College of Surgeons on Interprofessional Relations with Doctors of Chiropractic
* Mass Media Funk
Consumer Reports (September 1995), article on lower back pain.
Benedetti, Paul and Wayne Macphail. (2003). Spin Doctors: The Chiropractic Industry Under Examination. Dundurn Press.
Homola, Samuel. (2007). “Chiropractic - A Profession Seeking Identity.” Skeptical Inquirer. Jan/Feb.
Jarvis, William. “Chiropractic: A Skeptical View,” in The Hundredth Monkey, ed. Kendrick Frazier (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1991), pp. 262-270.
Magner, George. Chiropractic : the victim’s perspective; edited by Stephen Barrett ; with a foreword by William T. Jarvis. (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1995).
Smith, Ralph. At Your Own Risk: The Case Against Chiropractors, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984).
Thyer, Bruce and Gary Whittenberger. (2007). “A Skeptical Consumer’s Look at chiropractic Claims: Flimflam in Florida?” Skeptical Inquirer. Jan/Feb.
[QUOTE=Musicat]
Let’s suppose you have a headache. You apply Head On as directed. There are only three possible outcomes:[ol][li]You get better[]You get worse[]You stay the same[/ol][/li][/QUOTE]
4. You feel different, neither better nor worse, just different.