While I almost agree in general, when it comes to the specifics, a few things need to be mentioned.
First, homeopathy has had a fucking shitload of study. Type “Homeopathy” into PubMed and you get a whopping 4960 results. We don’t need more studies. We need a casual glance at the existing literature and a tiny bit of critical thinking.
Second, similarly, reiki doesn’t need a clinical trial to debunk. It needs a 9-year-old’s science fair project.
Thirdly, what the hell are we doing? I take it back. I don’t agree. At all.
There is real medical research to be done. Real promising leads on ways to make our lives better, and a very limited amount of funding for it. Shouldn’t we be giving this money to treatments with a hint of prior plausibility? Shouldn’t we be able to separate “this drug has some promise because of analytical science X Y and Z” from “this treatment involves a pinch of fairy dust and a whole lot of believing in yourself!” and throw money at the former but not the latter? Yes, by all means, investigate St. John’s Wort. Investigate that anti-malarial drug from china. Investigate old herbal folk medicine if there hasn’t already been investigation and there’s good reason to believe there’s more to it than chewing random shit found in the forest. But Homeopathy? Even if we had a clinical trial showing that it worked, we’d be left with a clinical trial essentially showing one of the following two results: “this clinical trial had a flawed methodology”; or “magic exists”. :mad:
And even if the fairy dust treatment is being used, we’re almost always better off spending our money on other leads to try to make the world better, rather than continuing to slam our heads against the fucking brick wall that is people who earnestly believe this shit works. Do you think quacks give a damn what the science says? I don’t. These people disbelieve the entire concept of science-based medicine, and often the entire concept of peer-review. You’d be surprised how often I hear pathetic excuses like “Oh, maybe you just can’t test our modality like that” or “The medical establishment is keeping our results down”, as if either made any fucking sense. These people don’t care about the science. They know how to sell their shit with or without it.
Homeopathic “medicines” actually start with something that has the opposite effect you want. For example, if you want to treat sneezing, you add a drop of something that causes you to sneeze to the initial gallon of water, and start diluting from there.
So to make a homeopathic money bin you would toss something into the water that costs you money, like say a child or a house. Or homeopathic medicine.
The NIH spent $371,026 in a study that was supposed be devoted to addiction research, which might even be a legitimate use of limited government resources.
What were the findings? “Mothers have the same reaction when looking at photos of their dogs as they do to those of their own kids.”
The next step in the research?
“including more people and look at how men and women without children reacted to photos of babies and pets as well.”
I know you’re new here, but this isn’t Facebook. You have to include some context before anyone will care. Maybe the researchers just wanted to show doggy pictures to people, and maybe studying the physiological responses to stimuli is relevant to the mechanism of addiction.
I’d like to see this study. At a guess, it’s a study of how the brain responds to various stimuli, and they may have tested hundreds of different stimuli, and perhaps Coburn picked the response that sounded the weirdest.
Which in no way invalidates the idea of studying how the human brain responds to exterior stimuli.
I wonder how I knew which conservative columnist it was that this imbecile copied from without clicking the link. Given that he didn’t even know the guy was a conservative, it seems like he wasn’t even familiar with his own link.
Given that he struggles with differentiating between columnist and newspaper, do you really expect him to be able to find the studies themselves? This guy is a brainless troll, either by purpose or by function.
Here is Coburn’s Wastebook 2014 publication (big PDF), and here is the mother/dog-picture study.
The study does seem to focus on reward/motivation brain function, but the authors don’t seem to have been too concerned with explaining how this relates to addiction. I’m not a neurobiologist or anything, but ISTM you should probably at least explain how your research relates to your grant.
So I can’t really blame Coburn (or rather, the poor flunky who had to read all this shit) for calling them out.
I can. Do you really think that every publication from a data set lists all the hypotheses of the grant funding? A good project will generate more than one paper from a grant. In this case, I would guess that there was scientific value in publishing on this particular fMRI paradigm independent of other publications from the grant.
Further, researchers have to use validated paradigms for fMRI research. Now others who would like to study brain function related to reward processing can point to this study to support their own study designs.
In any event, to those involved in this area of work, there would be pretty clear implications for how it would link to addictions work.
Nobody is buying this dodge, you imbecile. I said nothing suggesting I could not distinguish the two, whereas you clearly fucked up the difference between a newspaper and a columnist.
The question is becoming “Why do you get off on others pointing and laughing at you?”
It probably wouldn’t. Viable reward methods of the brain would need to be developed and it would probably take grant money to get the feasibility check underway.
I looked for direct cites to the studies, could not find them in the big conservative sources like the Wall Street Journal, or National Review. They just copied and pasted what Coburn made, as soon as it is clear that there is no links to the studies made I have to look at history, and in the past many conservative posters also make the same mistake of ignoring that usually the lack of links is made because the actual research points to mundane but very related part of the experiments. Usually when seemingly silly things like this pop up they were part of the control group.
I still remember when a list like that appeared recently in the right wing media sphere pointed by the former rep Erick Cantor that looked at waste in science. Virtually all what the Republicans pointed out was misleading regarding the actual scientific research.
Nope. I said that we could talk about cable tv, but first we needed to get you squared away on what newspapers are. (It was only one page back - easy enough to check back to see.)
See, your fundamental stupidity makes you fail to even grasp how others are mocking you, you dumb bitch.
