I want to throw up [homeopathy]

The BBQ Pit
141

[QUOTE= Fessie’s CBC link]

So Rennard put his theory to the test. He added his wife’s home made soup to white blood cells called neutrophils. They’re the cells which rush to attack an invading virus. That can cause the buildup of fluids in the chest.

Taking chicken soup samples for laboratory testing requires the skilled hand of a professional.

Rennard suspected the soup would slow the cells’ movement and reduce congestion. So he tested the homemade chicken soup and thirteen store-bought soups.

The results

Rennard found that his wife’s homemade soup did slow the neutrophils. But a third of the store bought soups slowed the cells even more. Knorr’s chicken noodle was most effective followed by two kinds of Campbell’s, a Lipton and a Progresso chicken soup. (Click for details.) Rennard can’t explain why.

[/quote]

This isn’t really pertinent to the discussion, but isn’t this kind of a bad thing? Slowing down your neutrophils, that is. I would think the neutrophils are an important part of your immune system, or else you wouldn’t have them. It seems kind of short sighted to disable an important part of your immune system just so you feel better for awhile.

142

[QUOTE=Bridget Burke]
Some alternative therapies are clinically useful. And others are being investigated.
Check out this list. Lots of data under the links.
[/quote]

So interesting, thank you for sharing, I look forward to reading those. I’m really a neophyte about all this

Not a chance. And I don’t think that my daughter’s pediatrician is the least bit evil. Just human.

143

[QUOTE=fessie]
How would you test the effectiveness of prayer when it was carried out by people who don’t believe in it? I can’t even begin to google that one, everyone has an axe to grind.

Yet I know people who’ve incorporated prayer (and “healing touch”) in their treatment regimens (along with chemo and radiation for my friend with lung cancer, and insulin for the diabetic) and it worked. The lung cancer was pretty amazing, her odds were terrible and ::knock wood:: she’s doing great (probably helps that she’s a Minister) (the staff about fell over when she blessed her chemo drip, no one had ever done that before).

But perhaps you would say that prayer is no longer viewed as “alternative”? That’s the main tool I think of.
[/QUOTE]
You may be interested to know that clinical studies have been done to look at the effectiveness of having third parties pray for patient well-being (“intercessory prayer”). Initially some positive results were reported (study methodology was criticized as inadequate); more recent findings have not demonstrated effectiveness of prayer:

“There was no evidence that prayer affected the numbers of people dying from leukaemia or heart disease…Intercessory prayer did not clearly decrease the odds of people with heart problems experiencing a bad or intermediate outcome…Prayer increased the odds of readmission to the Coronary Care Unit… but these results are made significantly negative by the inclusion of an assumption of poor outcome for those not accounted for in the final analyses.”

“Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG (cardiac bypass graft surgery), but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.”

Hmmm. Maybe God gets pissed off when people bother him with these everyday prayer requests… :dubious:

144

[QUOTE=fessie]
Same with “an apple a day” - that one turned out to have legs, too.
[/QUOTE]
“An apple a day keeps the doctor away” was coined in 1904 by the director of a Missouri state agency that provided research services to the Missouri fruit industry. It became widely known during Prohibition when apple farmers were looking for a way to rebrand their product as a healthy food instead of a source of sinful hard cider.

Traditionally apples didn’t have a very good image. They were associated with debauchery and chaos, partially because of their use in cider-making and partially because of their failure to breed true from seed. (Think of Eris’s apple of chaos, or the apple as the Biblical forbidden fruit.) The modern healthy image of apples is largely the result of 19th century breeding experiments and 20th century ad campaigns.

145

[QUOTE=fessie]
Hrrrmph – You (collectively) seem to have me coming and going on this — how is it that (some) “folk remedies” are total B.S., until researchers demonstrate that they really DO work…and then all of a sudden it’s Science who “owns” the knowledge.
[/quote]
I think people in this thread have been far too hasty to shout at you, since you’ve seemed willing to take points on board which is all I ever ask in a discussion, but I have to say this really is quite annoying. No-one is talking about ownership of, or monopoly over knowledge or truth or anything. All we are saying is that the scientific METHOD (which is available to anyone) is how specific CLAIMS should be assessed. If “alternative medicine” makes a claim, it can be tested scientifically. You don’t need to be part of a club to do this; indeed by testing it you yourself become a scientist. But this sheer sophistry of claiming persecution of ones ideas is utterly bankrupt; the very idea that respectability is conferred upon ones claims precisely because you refuse to submit them to actual scrutiny is anathema - not to Scientists with a capital “S”, but to anyone who bothers to think about things at all. Moreover, the fact that one “alternative” remedy is proven to have genuine effects affords no extra credence to any other such remedy, unless that remedy is also properly tested.

No-one is saying that alternative therapies need to be handed over to Scientists, who will then own them and make them magically acceptable; all we are saying is this:

If you claim it; prove it.

That’s really all. What can you possibly object to about that?

146

[QUOTE=fessie]

Yet I know people who’ve incorporated prayer (and “healing touch”) in their treatment regimens (along with chemo and radiation for my friend with lung cancer, and insulin for the diabetic) and it worked. The lung cancer was pretty amazing, her odds were terrible and ::knock wood:: she’s doing great (probably helps that she’s a Minister) (the staff about fell over when she blessed her chemo drip, no one had ever done that before).
[/QUOTE]

Why did these people bother with chemo and insulin? :rolleyes:

As for ‘healing touch’, is it the same as this?

‘Therapeutic Touch, or TT, that was big news a few years back when a grade school kid, Emily Rosa, effectively debunked it and got the results published in a peer-reviewed journal. TT was a bizarre pseudoscientific practice that was getting peddled in nursing schools, in which people would touch or stroke and claim to be able to diagnose disease and even heal people. Rosa showed that they were full of crap, and after a few squalls of fury from some New Agers, I hadn’t heard of it since.’

147

[QUOTE=fessie]
Yet I know people who’ve incorporated prayer (and “healing touch”) in their treatment regimens (along with chemo and radiation for my friend with lung cancer, and insulin for the diabetic) and it worked.
[/QUOTE]
Sorry to be brutal, but no; you know absolutely nothing of the sort. You know someone who received chemo and prayer, and got better. By what preposterous stretch of logic do you confidently ascribe credit for the outcome to the prayer? Chemo treatments have been proven by study after study to make people better; don’t you find it faintly ludicrous to now be saying that it was the prayer that made the difference? How can you possibly support this claim?

You might suspect prayer helps, but until you conduct a well-designed trial (which has its own problems in this instance), you can’t possibly know. Can’t you see how utterly frustrating this is; to have a proven remedy placed in parallel with an utterly unproven one, and yet to have you ascribe a positive outcome to the latter? By what mental contortions do you arrive at this point? Don’t you think there are a million other people being prayed for, experiencing all the different outcomes on God’s earth? How on earth do you think one example shows anything, when it wasn’t even exclusively prayer that was being applied? How can you expect anyone else to share your conclusions?

148

[QUOTE=Dead Badger]
Can’t you see how utterly frustrating this is; to have a proven remedy placed in parallel with an utterly unproven one, and yet to have you ascribe a positive outcome to the latter? By what mental contortions do you arrive at this point?
[/QUOTE]
Don’t be too hard on fessie - this sort of thing is common among alt med enthusiasts. I’ve seen numerous claims for herbs/supplements/prayer having cancer-curing abilities in people who, um, coincidentally also had surgery and/or radiation/chemotherapy, which of course doesn’t get any credit. One ghastly online example features a woman who developed a breast lump and refused surgery or radiation for it over a period of years, until it had turned into a huge, fungating tumor invading her chest wall. At that point she “allowed” doctors to give her Herceptin (a chemotherapeutic agent with specific action against certain kinds of breast cancer) while also getting alternative drugs from a fringe practitioner. Her cancer appeared to stabilize at this point, so did the Herceptin get any credit? Of course not - it must have been the alternative therapy.

This practice of patients taking both alternative and conventional drugs is also what helps make testimonials worthless. You never know if the person claiming success for colloidal silver, urine drinking or whatever has also been taking conventional pharmaceuticals which are known to improve a given medical condition.

149

[QUOTE=Jackmannii]
Don’t be too hard on fessie - this sort of thing is common among alt med enthusiasts.
[/quote]
Well, as I said I think people were far too eager to jump on her (?) earlier in this thread, but I really don’t understand how one can view proven and unproven remedies in parallel, and come to the conclusion that the latter are the efficacious bits. I realise it’s not an uncommon fallacy, but at this point it seems like there’s a fundamental disconnect in the very nature of how we reason and prove things. So no, I’m not really trying to have a go at fessie, but I am trying to illustrate the sheer outlandishness of the sort of “reasoning” being applied here.

If I came across as specifically insulting you, fessie, then I apologise, but it is rather frustrating to be presented with such fundamentally flawed reasoning and to be implicitly challenged to accept it with an appeal to false “open-mindedness”. Having an open mind should not mean taking outlandish claims on faith. I don’t accept that any individual pill I am given will have any effect unless I know that it has been proven to do so; it’s the proof that’s important, not the tag saying, “as recommended by Scientists.” I am willing to believe any remedy works, given proof, and that to me is having an open mind. I am not willing to accept self-selecting anecdotal evidence as that proof. This is not close-mindedness; it’s just rational, defensive inquiry.

Edit: Oh, about those vitamins and antioxidants…

150

fessie, since I asked for the citations in support of your assertions, I have to say that I don’t think those studies answer the questions adequately. It should be very simple to come up with a few measures of the severity of different aspects of colds, and give people chicken soup, other kinds of soup, other kinds of warm and cold liquids, and see if chicken soup demonstrates signficantly greater changes on the measures one has identified.

Its effect on neutrophils is interesting (although its not my field, so I can’t really say it has much meaning for me), but I know I was left wondering how the changes would have compared to something that wasn’t chicken soup. Was there no not-soup control substance to have as a contrast?

But, it is nevertheless good to see some empirical testing of these kind of processes. As was pointed out above by flight for example, it would be very useful to know whether there is some element of soup that is effective for treating colds.

The only problem is that, if we found it, what would we fill in to express our disbeliefs about the progress of science? “They can replace our pancreas, but they cannot [del]cure the common cold[/del]!”

151

Those are perfectly valid questions – by what methodology WOULD one “test” the theory that prayer and healing touch helped my friend with lung cancer (along WITH chemo - we’re not talking stupid here, but we ARE talking about a particularly lethal cancer).

It’s not like it can be tested, we can’t rewind her life - are you going to pay people of faith to STOP praying, and ask skeptics to ignore their own logic and reasoning? Pshaw!

That’s why that 3rd party prayer experiment was a good idea, I remember that one; I was surprised that the initial results were so good (I have skeptical moments, too), and a little disappointed that the follow-up blew it out of the water.

So it occurred to me to ask if being a person of faith made any difference, and I found this article:

Can Churchgoing Increase Lifespan? - study suggests that church attendance may help contribute to a longer life - Brief Article
USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), August, 1999

[Copyrighted information removed.]
(sorry I can’t reply to all of the points raised, they are interesting and valid, but my husband has been chilling a bottle of wine is growing impatient)

152

fessie, including entire copyrighted articles is not permitted. A short quotation (clearly marked as such) is permitted. I’ve edited your post to comply with this rule; this is a warning, please do not do this again.

153

Wait. The guy found out that chicken soup worked against neutrophils? One of the front line cells that fights against viruses? How is that an argument for chicken soup? At best, it’s a treatment for the symptoms, and probably inhibits the best hope for actually destroying the virus…well, apart from restriction endonucleases.

I hate to be a dick, but has the mommy network covered restriction endonucleases yet?

154

[QUOTE=fessie]
Those are perfectly valid questions – by what methodology WOULD one “test” the theory that prayer and healing touch helped my friend with lung cancer (along WITH chemo - we’re not talking stupid here, but we ARE talking about a particularly lethal cancer).

[/quote]

It’s pretty simple.
Take people with cancer and do the following:

25% get chemo
25% get prayer
25% get chemo + prayer
25% get nothing

Of course the problem is that people will die needlessly, but I am confident the results will be similar to:

25% get chemo … 90% recover
25% get prayer … 5% recover
25% get chemo + prayer … 90% recover
25% get nothing … 5% recover

Which would prove again what science has repeatedly done: tested medicine works, there is a placebo effect, alternarive medicine doesn’t work.

[QUOTE=fessie]

So it occurred to me to ask if being a person of faith made any difference, and I found this article:

Can Churchgoing Increase Lifespan? - study suggests that church attendance may help contribute to a longer life - Brief Article
USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), August, 1999
)
[/QUOTE]

You need to eliminate all other factors before making such claims.
I think wealthier people in a developed society live longer.

155

Usually the response of people that believe in prayer to the results of such testing is:

  1. If the results show anything above average in their favor, no matter how sloppy the research,“This proves that prayer works!”
  2. If the research doesn’t give positive results to prayer,“This test means nothing! People could have secretly been praying!”
156

[QUOTE=Czarcasm]
Usually the response of people that believe in prayer to the results of such testing is:

  1. If the results show anything above average in their favor, no matter how sloppy the research,“This proves that prayer works!”
  2. If the research doesn’t give positive results to prayer,“This test means nothing! People could have secretly been praying!”
    [/QUOTE]
    Well, quite, although to be fair, the latter is a valid point. It’s extremely difficult to circumscribe interactions with some hypothesised omnipotent, omnibenevolent deity. Moreover (if examining prayer in a Christian context) one can fall back further on biblical admonitions against testing God; after all, one can hardly argue that God doesn’t know what’s going on, so any pretence at blinding goes right out the window in a puff of theology. So yeah, it’s pretty much impossible to conduct a well-founded study on intercessory prayer.

Whether one takes these intrinsic difficulties to be a sign of an oppressive Empiricist Establishment failing to exhibit a sufficiently open collective mind, and thus confirmation that prayer works, is an entirely different matter, however. :slight_smile:

157

[QUOTE=glee]
It’s pretty simple.
Take people with cancer and do the following:

25% get chemo
25% get prayer
25% get chemo + prayer
25% get nothing

Of course the problem is that people will die needlessly, but I am confident the results will be similar to:

25% get chemo … 90% recover
25% get prayer … 5% recover
25% get chemo + prayer … 90% recover
25% get nothing … 5% recover

Which would prove again what science has repeatedly done: tested medicine works, there is a placebo effect, alternarive medicine doesn’t work.

You need to eliminate all other factors before making such claims.
I think wealthier people in a developed society live longer.
[/QUOTE]

That’s the problem with having to delete most of the story (sorry about that, fluiddruid, I really dropped the ball). If you’d read the whole article glee, you’d know that they DID adjust for other factors. Duh.

Re: the chicken soup, I quoted 2 studies, and no I don’t know squat about blood cell chemistry. Given the snide remarks I’ve received in reply, I’m not inclined to waste more time doing research.

Re: prayer — being “a person of faith” is not as simple as saying X prayers X times a day. I’m talking about what’s in a person’s heart, a matter of TRULY believing. Not simply the motions of saying a prayer, those are just words, how silly.

And that’s not to say “oh, you died, you didn’t believe enough” because it’s not a magic bullet, either. Of course it DOESN’T work perfectly. What does? But the study showing that people who practiced faith (assuming that church attendance really is an indication of it) lived longer DOES provide an argument (though not definitive proof) that their faith helped.

As to that girl’s healing touch experiment, which was well-designed, I remember that one too — she tested a specific aspect of “telepathy”, I believe it was whether it was her right or her left hand they were touching? Something about hands behind a little curtain, she was on television but I didn’t see it on your link. And she debunked it, she did. She proved that claimants were wrong.

That’s not what “healing touch” is actually about, at least not among people of my acquaintance. It’s about being able to read and respond someone’s energy, and some people’s ability to offer a bit of healing. Really it’s not THAT wacky, it’s not like “oh, I touch you, BING, now you better”. All kinds of studies HAVE shown that people need hugs, really truly need them – “healing touch” operates along that principle.

Energy is where prayer works, where healing touch works, where faith works.

You can’t tell me you’re completely immune to this - surely you’ve walked into a room and known instantly that something was wrong (or right).

How do you know when to kiss the girl, if you can’t feel an electricity between you?

And since everything else happens along a bell curve, why wouldn’t the capacity to detect and respond to energy be the same, with some people on the far right? People on here are clearly on the far left. Which is a good thing, keeps the charlatans and hucksters at bay - but you’ve put all your faith in one specific methodology. And you don’t know everything. Keep in mind that plenty of other things existed long before we figured out how to “prove” it

Dead Badger I respect what you’re saying. My minister friend blessed her chemo, I don’t think she (or anyone) would say prayer alone “cured” her. And no, it’s not for everyone.

I’m really curious to see if you empiricists will go through your whole lives without ever experiencing a significant spiritual moment.

This has been interesting. Thank you.

158

[QUOTE=fessie]
That’s not what “healing touch” is actually about, at least not among people of my acquaintance. It’s about being able to read and respond someone’s energy, and some people’s ability to offer a bit of healing. Really it’s not THAT wacky, it’s not like “oh, I touch you, BING, now you better”. All kinds of studies HAVE shown that people need hugs, really truly need them – “healing touch” operates along that principle.

Energy is where prayer works, where healing touch works, where faith works.

You can’t tell me you’re completely immune to this - surely you’ve walked into a room and known instantly that something was wrong (or right).

How do you know when to kiss the girl, if you can’t feel an electricity between you?
[/QUOTE]

What is this “energy” you are talking about? All the things you are mentioning here are readily explainable without reliance on some mystical energy field. Seriously, it sounds like you are talking about “The Force”. Also, as far as no instant bing, you are better, no medicine works like that. All medicine has a percent success rate. If alternative treatments could be shown to do better than doing nothing I am sure scientists would be very interested. So far they haven’t, or they wouldn’t be alternative.

This reminds me of the quote from Roadtrip:

It’s supposed to be wacky, it’s Alternative Medicine! If it were proven it would just be Medicine.

159

Fessie, God Bless You, but you seem to be getting in deeper and deeper. We know that placebos work pretty well, so there is obviously some mechanism that causes your body to heal faster if you are hopeful. You see the reverse all the time where an elderly person dies soon after their spouse dies.

The experiment the girl did was testing the claim that healing touch practitioners could detect “energy” coming from a persons body by placing their hand near the body but not touching it. All the practitioners she tested were confident they could tell if there was a hand beneath a piece of thin fabric. It turned out they couldn’t.

I have a personal stake in this. My sister has fallen for a series of alternative treatments and poured a ton of money and time into them. She has had all her fillings removed, paid for Reiki treatment, bought a bizzare LED gizmo that she waved over her food and then over her head to “align her molecules” with the food, and many other fads of the day.

This sort of credulous belief in alternative therapy is just rife for abuse. People send their life saving to TV evangelists or discontinue treatment to pursue faith healing.

I don’t know of many people in the fact-based world who would argue that hugs, supporting friends, or optimism don’t help people recover faster. Hospitals have “therapy dogs” for this very reason.

But when you talk about things like “energy” it just come across like bunk. Does it follow the inverse square rule, can it propagate through vacuum, what speed does it travel, what sort of energy is it, are some of the questions that you have to be prepared to answer if you are going to use a scientific term for your belief.

160

[QUOTE=fessie]
I’m really curious to see if you empiricists will go through your whole lives without ever experiencing a significant spiritual moment.
[/quote]
Huh? What’s this got to do with evidence-based medicine?

You will find many religious physicians and researchers. The competent ones know how to separate their spiritual beliefs from their work as far as employing fact-based treatment goes (otherwise they’d be laying hands on paralyzed patients and directing them to walk, or raising people from the dead.)*

The incompetent ones let their faith color their judgment, i.e. the “scientists” who support “intelligent design” as opposed to scientists who are religious but recognize evolution.
*We’d see more of this but Medicare reimbursement for resurrection has fallen way off.