[[Where does this leave us? We recognize that scientific medicine cannot solve every affliction. We have to recognize that many patients need more time dealing with the human side of the doctor.]]
Not just that… we’re talking about more than just touchy-feely “holistic” care. When dealing with patients, medical providers should take into account the psychological, sociological, political and environmental context of disease, and the complicated nature of health behavior change. Diagnosing, prescribing medication, and giving instructions and brochures is not enough. If an elderly man is diagnosed with diabetes, the medical provider should find out who does the cooking for him and talk to that person, too. The whole family needs to be involved. There are barriers to wellness that many doctors and other health care providers do not address, and they should.
Reasonably fair restatement. The key factors in being able to treat a patient’s problem effectively (once you leave the realm of penicillin for a Streptococcal throat infection, appendectomy for appendicitis, etc.) are to get the patient to believe that you are taking their problem seriously, that you understand the nature and the cause of the problem, and that you believe that the treatment you are recommending will cure/control the problem. This is independent of any scientifically proven benefit - if you get the patient to believe in the treatment, it has a reasonable probability of working.
Ah, the old $$$ criticism.
I am going to use a condition called fibromyalgia as an example. Fibromyalgia is characterized by muscle/joint pain & fatigue. It can be so devastating that people must stop working & collect disability pay because of it (at huge monetary cost to society both in direct costs & in lost productivity). Yet allopathic medicine has no understanding of the cause, or any effective treatment for it. We attempt to treat it with frequent visits, & different combinations of anti-inflammatory drugs (like Motrin, Naprosyn, etc.) and anti-depressants. This is not free. This costs real money too. And because allopathic medicine has become so ensnarled with a huge bureaucratic layer of overseers, accountants, and insurers, this care typically costs a whole lot more money than than does care from our alternative counterparts.
That’s untrue. It’s more of a disaffectation with the way traditional medicine approaches certain kinds of problems. Of all of the people I know who use alternative treatments, I know of none who wouldn’t go to a physician if they noticed a suspicious mole or felt a breast lump, or suddenly developed chest pain, or thought they had pneumonia.
Yup. But it has very little to do with seeing a homeopath for their fibromyalgia. One does not invariably lead to the other.
No argument here. It would seem, however, to argue that allopaths give out ineffective (relatively) non-harmful treatments just like alternative providers. Pardon me if I don’t act surprised at this…
But too many cannot see that their endless attempts to find just the right combination of anti-inflammatory drugs and anti-depressants are not on any better scientific basis than an acupuncturist’s treatment, or herbalist’s remedy. This IS a delusion.
Why do you assume homeopaths get no clinical psychology training? If the only reason their treatments work at all is because they can convince patients that they will work, they are much better at applied psychology than most allopathic providers are.
If belief in a treatment is the fundamental reason why so many alternative treatments do work, why do so many alternative medicine opponents suggest that people with diseases like fibromyalgia (which MUST be psychosomatic because there is no scientific explanation for it or no cure - no logic problems there :rolleyes: ) go see a psychiatrist or other mental health professional when patients absolutely believe there are no psychologic issues underlying their condition? This is a recipe for failure. While many people with fibromyalgia score highly on depession on psychological surveys, much of this is secondary to constant pain & fatigue. Multiple studies have shown that they do better with a provider focusing on their physical symptoms combined with a lot of emotional support than with a mental health provider who can offer nothing for their physical complaints.
Don’t go to them, then. But I fail to see why your particular beiefs and values should dictate the choices available to everyone else.
I was partially joking, about the pitchfork-weilding townfolk, Claw. This board has a lot of very intelligent people posting to to it regularly. There is a very strong bias on this board towards acceptance of things “scientific”, and non-acceptance of matters which do not fit into the scientifically explainable realm of things.
I just found it ironic that Saltire posted that he wanted to hear more from homeopathy proponents, and yet found it necessary to disassociate himself from homeopathy lest he be subjected to the same kind of ridicule as the 2 original posts.
Like a hippie walking into a biker bar, or a SDMBer posting on the Left Behind board, most people simply leave places where they are made to feel unwelcome. Simultaneously bemoaning the fact that an opportunity for good discussion was lost while damning homeopathy with faint praise seemed to show a real lack of understanding of human nature.
Cecil was probably pretty dead on when he said that homeopathy has similar results to over the counter medication for minor undiagnosed ailments. The reason for this is not only a placebo effect, but also something referred to in social psychology as “the normalcy effect.” Normalcy effect states that, on average, things want to return to their normal level. Thus, if you are feeling out of sorts, you are more likely to improve (move toward the norm) than get worse (move away from the norm), particularly since the body has a pretty good immune system. In other words, in many cases, it’s not the medication, it’s a natural function of the body.
I had said, in my unpublished opinion piece: “Alternative medicine practitioners, however, may spend a great deal of time with the patients, providing a caring feeling that may not be present otherwise.” Jill responded:
You’re certainly not going to get any argument from me!
Same with your second post in response to something I said there.
It would appear on the surface living in a polluted world that if the homeopathic model were correct, we should all be dead due to a massive overdose of all the other more harmful particulate matter in our environment. It should also follow that if it truly worked someone would have come up with a homeopathic beer that you could buy in really tiny bottles and get just as blotto without so many trips to the lu.
Even so if I hadn’t had a personal brush with homeopathy that worked I’d be just as cynical about it as Cecil. I had an allergic reaction which closed my windpipe. I was in the hotbed of alternative medicine, downtowm Manhattan, and voila while waiting for the EMS to save my life, this girl gave me a homeopathic remedy. She said my reaction would become more severe, which it did, but then go away, which it did. So, while I still don’t buy the entire concept, I know in this one circumstance it did work.
I have discovered though, still, if I’m upset and someone starts coming at me brandishing a bottle of Rescue Remedy, or tries to cleanse me with a smoldering shrub, I’m outta there. It’s the cultural trappings that can discredit a thing that might actually work, even if we don’t have the scientific explanation behind it.
Brett
Except that the homeopathic model says that potency decreases with dose, so we should be polluting more in order to save the world.
You know that you took something that someone told you was a homeopathic remedy, and you know you got better. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is the name of the applicable logical fallacy.
Hey everybody, this is my first post to this board, so I’ll keep it short.
I totally agree that homeopathy is a load of excrement, and it really frustrates me when normal, intelligent people wholeheartedly believe in it. Most testimonials that I’ve seen for homeopathy seem to point out that it’s not your extremely whacked-out nut-case who believe - it is “ordinary people” who buy this shit.
This may be the problem.
In this brave new world everbody seems to think that they’re “equal to everyone else and better than most.” Thus, you get 30-something middle-class, well-educated, employed people who think that just because they know how to surf the Internet and watch tv that they’re qualified to render a medical opinion. Excuse me, but just because you got a degree in Communications from Joe-Small-Town College doesn’t necessarily mean that your critical thinking skills are fully-functional (if you know what I mean ).
Some people watch a 30-second soundbite on tv and then fervently believe that some “ancient/oriental/tropical/rainforest/homeopathic/herbal” miracle substance will cure all their ills (based on one study that gathered opinions from ten people, except that four of them dropped out during the two-week study).
Now, I’m not saying that everyone is like this, but there are a great many out there that are at least somewhat similar.
Five or ten years ago everybody was touting the Internet as a great way for people to become informed about virtually any topic in the world. Unfortunately (?) this is true; people can learn about any old pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo that is presented as a fact on web-pages that are completely unregulated. Obviously, the Internet itself is not at fault - there are plenty of excellent search engines, web-pages, and other resources out there. But a lot of people either don’t want to spend the time or the effort or the mental energy to look.
How often do you see idiots say things to the effect of “Well gee, my sister’s hairdresser’s cousin takes X supplement and her problem with Y disappeared overnight… has anyone out there heard of this before?” Wherein you search for approximately 20 seconds and find pages and pages of double-blinded randomized controlled trials showing that said supplement is even less effective than water at curing any illness whatsoever. Well now, isn’t that a shocker!!
I’m not sure what can be done about this… obviously the world isn’t faring too badly (judging by many of the great messages already posted on this topic).
Anyways, I’d better shut up now as this message is already much too long.
Comments? Please?
The key is to have an open mind, without it being so open that your brain falls out.
Well, Jill, why is selling a little vial of tap water for $75 any different than charging a buck fifty for a quart of “bottled” tap water. Same thing, but different marketing and price scale.
Mike, my guess about the expiration date on the bottled water you got is because of jab1’s phenomenon of the water remembering the container. I once had an old bottle of water that I started that was past its expiration date. The bit of it I drank tasted like plastic, the chemicals in the plastic bottle having leached out into the water.
On the other hand, the water may not have been forgetting, but just remembering something else.
Majormd–there is NOTHING that is not amenable to the scientific method. Nothing that effects the material world, anyway.
I’d say that you have abandoned medicine, & have embraced the nonsense of the astrologer, the witch-doctor, & the charlatan.
Rationality is the only key to understanding the Universe & Man’s place in it. Mystical mumbo-jumbo is amusing, but not to be taken seriously. Homopathy cannot stand up under the glare of the light of day.
Bad manners? How should I know? I was raised by wolves.
Nice example of a tenet that is neither provable or unprovable. That is as much a matter of faith as is a belief in a God that is not answerable to the laws of science in a world He created.
No, I just choose not to tell the many people for whom evidence-based/scientific medicine can currently offer little or no hope of improvement that I do not believe in them or their ailments. I do know the science. It may be that our current inability to help many of these people is a symptom of our limited understanding of science. Or it may be a limitation of molecular phenomena to explain everything we experience - because we may be more than a sum of our parts.
I am not saying, and have never said, that the homeopaths have it right, and that allopaths & the basic scientists supporting them have it wrong. While I can appreciate that the Law of Similars can have some basis in reality based on what I know of feedback mechanisms, and the fact that much illness is brought on by the body’s overzealous response to some disequilibrium, I think there is too big a leap of faith that substance X at dilution ZX precisely targets the appropriate receptors to allow just the right amount of response to occur to promote optimal healing. But allopathic medicine has its leaps of faith, too, and has often been proven spectactularly wrong.
Sue, the difference is that, usually true science is self-correcting through constant testing and peer review. Homeopathetic doctors are masters of manipulation, rationalization, and cover-up. There is no way in hell all of these supposed “sciences” can co-exist, yet when they get together at “health” fairs and the like, the only enemy is the real medical profession.
The doofus in the booth next to you at the convention could be telling people something that is 180 degrees away from what you believe, but as long as he or she uses the label “alternative medicine” he or she is an enlightened one, with full membership in the quack brotherhood. Most, if not all magazines that publish the studies done with various cures are owned by the very companies that sell the cures. Testemonials from carefully selected true-believers are used instead of actual testing of the product, and the term “clinical tests” is thrown in for good measure, without telling the reader what the test showed.
And I can show you plenty of situations for which journals of/for internists are 180 degrees away from how best to manage problem X than journals of/for surgeons. Take optimal treatment of blocked carotid arteries in asymptomatic persons, for example. This is not exactly a minor issue, either, in terms of numbers of people involved, or in severity of consequences (strokes, death) if you made the wrong decision.
Hundreds of articles over 10 or 12 years in Neurology journals almost all showed no benefit to surgical intervention. An equivalent number of articles published in Vascular Surgery journals almost all showed benefit. All were peer-reviewed & with validated statistical methods, though blinding is a bit of a problem with surgical treatment options… So let’s not pretend that homeopathy or other alternative medicine is the only arena where well-meaning people can be diametrically opposed to each other’s beliefs.
Allopathic medicine has a degree of scientific underpinning that does not exist for alternative modalities. But there are gaps between what science has proven, and what allopathic medicine does on an everyday basis. If one is to be a skeptic, one must be equally skeptical of everything, or become a hypocrite.
Sue from El Paso
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
One more time, sue.
The difference is that real medicine is peer reviewed, tested, and corrected constantly. This is allopathic medicine vs. naturopathic medicine. This is REAL medicine that is testable and tested vs. FAKE medicine that is at best an unknown quantity, and at worst a danger to people.
When REAL medicine is presented, there might be opposition to it, at which point it is subjected to double-blind tests, the results of which are then published in independant journals to be seen by everyone and thus judged. Thus theories that don’t work can be exposed, corrected, or supported based on the actual evidence presented.
so-called “naturopathic”, “homeopathic”, and other so-called medicines cannot and do not go through these procedures, and you KNOW why. They do not work. According to science(not allopathic, not naturopathic, but REAL science), as presented they cannot work.
Until authentic double-blind studies are presented for review, they are fraudulent.
If I may offer my opinion; there’s no difference if both are being sold as water. If one is being sold as water and the other is being sold as medicine (and it’s a medicine which there is good reason to believe is ineffective except as a placebo), then I see a big difference. I would call one ordinary marketing and the other fraud. Others might not, of course, go so far as fraud, but I hope that they would see a difference between selling water and selling medicine.
<BLOCKQUOTE>
Hundreds of articles over 10 or 12 years in Neurology journals almost all
showed no benefit to surgical intervention. An equivalent number of articles
published in Vascular Surgery journals almost all showed benefit. All were
peer-reviewed & with validated statistical methods, though blinding is a bit of a
problem with surgical treatment options… So let’s not pretend that homeopathy
or other alternative medicine is the only arena where well-meaning people can
be diametrically opposed to each other’s beliefs.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
And slythe replied:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
One more time, sue.
The difference is that real medicine is peer reviewed, tested, and corrected
constantly.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
I think Sue’s point was precisely that when it comes to medicine, it can be quite difficult to devise “tests” and “corrections” that are adequate. The human mind/body is an extraordinarily complex phenomenon, and as Sue’s example showed, respectable researchers can come up with different tests to find out the answer to a particular question and come out with very different results. I don’t get the impression that Sue is suggesting that scientific method validates homeopathic medicine; rather, she is making some important and subtle points about the ways modern allopathic medicine also often fails the tests of scientific method. Sometimes we find ways to improve the tests and put treatment on a more scientifically sound basis; sometimes—much of the time—practitioners are forced to experiment with treatment in a quite unscientific, uncontrolled way, just in the hope of hitting on something that “works”. It’s no wonder that many people view the boundaries between homeopathy and allopathy as a little blurry in spots.
>Alternative supporters are quick to laud >traditional Chinese methods. Guess what, if >you go to a hospital in China, they aren’t >going to realign your qi - they’re going to >use Western medicine on you.
Try again--what you'll find there is a mix of Western and traditional oriental (the same basic stuff is used in more than just China) techniques. In most aspects of acute problems, western medicine has surpassed the traditional techniques, therefore you'll find mostly western stuff in the hospital these days. You'll still find plenty of the traditional stuff in the treatment of the lesser problems of life, though.
I fully agree that the traditional approach makes no sense by our standards. Some of it no doubt is junk. However, in 12 years of marriage to someone trained in it, I've seen enough to convince me that not all of it is junk. Many things are obviously subjective and hard to study (although the number of chronic pain patients that have tried many other things that failed, and then she helped, are pretty strongly indicative of something beneficial), there are also some that I've been aware of that are unambigious.
).