All of this and p hacking/data dredging. Look at results of a study from enough different angles, and patterns can emerge.
I had a weird thing happen with lower back pain. I had lower back pain after my son was born, that responded to PT, and I was pain free for about three years, then the pain started to come back. It was partly a lifestyle thing-- due to a move to a different neighborhood and a different schedule at work, I wasn’t able to follow the same exercise schedule I’d been following. But my doctor had me scheduled to go back to the PT for help in re-establishing a helpful exercise schedule.
Anyway, in the interim, before my first PT appointment in the second round, I started taking just a wisp of amphetamine in the morning as part of my insomnia regimen. The idea was to keep my from getting sleepy and taking “micronaps” during the early part of the day, on days following a bad night’s sleep.
After just a couple of days on the amphetamine, the back pain resolved. Apparently, this is not unheard of, that amphetamines have pain-reducing properties, although they are not prescribed for this, because they are even more addictive than opioids. I’m still going to the PT, because the pain is being masked, not dealt with, and I need to exercise, but I can’t tell you what a blessed relief it is.
My point is, that people with problems who are desperate enough to try acupuncture are quite frequently seeing a doctor as well, and may be taking medications for various conditions. They may not be taking specifically a pain medication, but they could be taking something that happens to reduce pain as a side effect.
Actually, people know a lot about the placebo response due to a large study about five years ago. Enough to start calling it the placebo “response,” and not the placebo “effect.”
For example, memory plays a major role in the placebo response, to the point that it is very difficult to impossible to produce in memory-impaired patients. On the other hand, higher-order non-human animals do exhibit the placebo response. It can be used in veterinary medicine.
One thing that has proved necessary in double-blinded studies is do duplicate the non-placebo medication exactly. If it’s a pill, the active medication and placebo have to look EXACTLY alike, and have to be administered EXACTLY the same way. It patients on the active drug can’t eat grapefruit, then neither can patients on the placebo. If the active medication is given through an IV administered by RNs in green scrubs, then the placebo has to be also.
One interesting way the placebo effect plays out in ordinary medication, and not drug trials, is that people expect a pill with a higher dose of a medication to be bigger. Often, ir does not have to be, because the composition of a pill is maybe only 5% active drug, and the rest is binders, coatings that get it to the right part of your digestive system, and things that stimulate absorption. The amount of those things is usually the same for a 5mg dose or a 10mg dose, and 5mg or 10mg or the medicine is a very tiny difference. But the drug company will add more fillers to the 10mg pill, because consumers need to see a bigger pill-- and it isn’t just that people think they are not getting their money’s worth if they don’t see a big pill-- even if the reason for the size of a pill is explained to them, they still respond to the size of the pill, so it’s happening on a psychological level below logical reasoning. This has been tested on people taking things like high blood pressure medications. Their blood pressure gets lower if the pill is bigger, to put it simply.
People in hospitals respond better if medication is given my people in white coats, of scrubs. When hospitals switched over from having nurses dress in the traditional uniform to scrubs, many older patients did not respond well to treatments, and now that more in known about the placebo response, it’s believed that the patients were responding to the whole scenario of administration, not just the medication itself.
Many, many people respond better to medications given through injection, even when it can be demonstrated that the medication enters your system faster taken orally. People just think that a little discomfort from the shot out to be balanced out by a better response to the medication. So they respond faster.
I read an article about this in The Skeptic several years ago, and I was so intrigued, that I sought out many of the original sources, and read articles in JAMA and a few other journals.
There is no real way to measure the placebo effect, or response, or whatever you want to call it. We see that it exists, there’s no unit of measurement for it, no established mechanism to explain how it works.
It’s common for alternative therapies to be given the credit for improvement, even when the patient has also gotten “conventional” treatment.
This happens frequently in cancer care testimonials. A patient will report a cure due to herbs, supplements, intravenous vitamin C or other alt modalities. after turning down adjuvant drug therapy. Then you find out that the patient had their cancer surgically removed, which carries a substantial chance of long-lasting remission/cure all by itself (the recommended chemo or other drug therapy had been recommended to add maybe an additional 20% or so chance of long-term success). So in one respect they “beat the odds”, but not because of the herbs or coffee enemas.
Yeah. I’m aware of that. Most people who go to Lourdes for their cancer are receiving chemo, but still credit a remission to the trip to the magic waters.
I have cousins who are doctors, and they bitch about this a lot. My cousin once did a complicated surgery for bone cancer that was caught while it was still localized. Patient didn’t need chemo, because they got everything. He still took shark cartilage from the GNC (or somewhere), and thinks that is the reason he didn’t need chemo. She probably shouldn’t have been talking about it in front of other people, but she didn’t use names or much detail. Man was she pissed, though.
Nonsense. No doctor I ever saw gave me a blowjob, or even a complimentary copy of Final Fantasy VI.
That doesn’t negate what Qadgop said. You might as well try to attack someone who says “Houses are built mostly from wood” by retorting “Nonsense. No carpenter I ever hired used balsa, or even mahogany.” And the mere fact that you can name distractions which aren’t used in healing says nothing about whether healing uses distractions. The obvious answer in the former is that there are other types of wood which have been historically proven to be more useful than balsa and mahogany is too expensive for home construction. The obvious answer to the latter is that medical distractions work best when the distraction isn’t obvious, which is why silly things like blowjobs and video games generally are replaced by other things.
Notice Qadgop didn’t say that medicine is only distraction, just that “much” of it is distraction. The placebo effect tends to run at around 30%. Show me a medical treatment that works 60% of the time and half of its success is due to the placebo effect.
When a child falls down and bangs their knee, a parent can make them stop crying by “kissing it to make it better”. This partly works by distraction. For a few seconds, the child stops thinking about the pain and instead thinks about the fact that their parents love them. During that few seconds, the pain has already started subsiding on its own. And the child stops crying. Of course, it also helps that physical touch triggers a release of oxytocin in the child’s brain, but it’s still fair to say that “much” of the healing there is due to distraction. Surely you don’t think this works only on children, do you?
That’s quite interesting. It reminds me of something I read which said the natural endorphins released during childbirth don’t only dull the pain but they repress the memory of the pain. One of the worst things about a toothache is thinking about how long the pain has been with you and worrying that the pain won’t go away. If you could simply forget that you had the pain in the past, it might make it a lot easier to take the pain in the present, feeling hopeful that it will soon go away in the future.
Speaking as a life long Buddhist, real Acupuncture is completely non-rational. An improvement in a physical condition is a side effect from the Doctor opening up a blockage to the flow of ‘energy’ through the body’s psychic system. Real Acupuncture only comes from a Doctor who is overwhelmed with compassion. If your Acupuncturist is not among the most compassionate people you have ever met they are practicing, often unintentionally, quackupuncture. Explanations about endorphins, etc… are idiotic. Also, real Acupuncture hurts. My Doc says treatment was originally done with bamboo splinters. She will also treat herself, but she knows what she is doing. Only an idiot would sit around and stick needles in their body because they read about it in a book. And that James Reston story was a hoax, what Fearless Leader would call Fake News.
That’s your opinion…unless you’ve got some good cites to back it up with.
It is all my opinion, what part of it do I need to back up with cites? Me no understand…
What “energy”? What “psychic system”?
So if it something doesn’t work, after the fact you can accuse the acupuncturist of not being overwhelmed with compassion-an accusation that cannot be confirmed or denied objectively?
If you have better(or any) studies that show this, I’d like to see them.
Studies that show that acupuncture is more effective if they cause pain would help here, as would any verification about its origins.
I’d say explaining this with good science would be a damn good start, otherwise your opinions are worthless:
Not all treatments involved all three. I’ve been treated different times for different things.
I did get a more complex level of care from the Chinese-trained acupuncturists. They had different modalities and applied in each case what they believed would be efficacious. The treatments tend to be different for everyone.
With the MD acupuncture, it was merely the insertion of needles and some manipulation. No moxibustion, (that’s when they burn herbs on top of the needles), no TENS with the needles (had that several times with the Chinese-trained).
I went into all of this hoping to be healed and willing to try something new. I saw the MDs after I saw the Chinese practitioners. I was willing initially to be treated by an MD because I thought, hey, best of both worlds, eastern and western, no? It was not until after I was treated by the MDs and nothing was accomplished that I began to question … and investigate.
Of course if you are convinced there is nothing for you in that treatment, then you will be absolutely correct. I admit, the human mind is a powerful instrument. This does not mean that I wholeheartedly believe in every treatment offered by everybody; I’m just reporting on my situation. You should check out anything you’re considering and be an educated patient. Just the same, * “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”*
It’s a short jump from this to “you skeptics are ruining it for everyone else”.
Not from me! 
Speaking of moxibustion, I found a wingding of a published study on the subject in a sCAM journal.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a “systematic review of case reports” before, but apparently if you systematically present very low-quality evidence, its value is markedly enhanced.
The objective way in which the authors present the study is indicated by the following passage:
"The effectiveness of moxibustion has been tested in the traditional and contemporary moxibustion clinic for more than 2500 years. A bibliometric analysis reported that up to 364 kinds of diseases can be treated with moxibustion. The most common indications of moxibustion therapy are malposition**, diarrhea, and colitis. The next common indications are urinary incontinence and dysmenorrhea. The third common indications are knee osteoarthritis, temporomandibular joint disturbance syndrome, soft tissue injury, heel pain, asthma, urinary retention, and herpes zoster [2]. Moxibustion can also be used to treat weakness, fatigue, and problems related to aging."*
Yes, moxibustion definitely looks good for what ails you, step right up (the guy who died can safely be ignored, as it’s pointed out that he may have been stressed by not expecting what happens when stuff gets set fire to on you).
the classic Appeal To What’s Been Used For A Really Long Time fallacy.
apparently you can reposition kiddies in the womb with this technique, no fooling.*
***no further smart-ass remarks about the quality of articles on alt med coming out of China, please.
****“According to TCM theory, moxa has a tonifying and warming effect which promotes movement and activity. The nature of heat is also rising. This warming and raising effect is utilised to encourage the baby to become more active and lift its bottom up in order to gain adequate momentum to summersault into the head down position.” -
http://www.pregnancy.com.au/birth-choices/breech-birth/moxibustion-for-breech-presentation.shtml