The crucial difference being that “fibromyalgia,” unlike “age,” sounds like something treatable.
I don’t agree with that. I’m not trying to play devils advocate, while pharma does have a lot of placebos, ineffective drugs and me toos on the market it does bring a lot of valuable products to market too.
And alternative medicine is not woo just because it goes against the current cultural paradigm. I have seen my mental health improve with selenium, b vitamins, low dose lithium and magnesium. Granted I’m still a mental fuckup, but less so than in the past.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/05/lithium-in-drinking-water-has.html
Personally, I don’t have a problem with people taking whatever “alternative” therapy they like. It’s their bodies, they have the right to treat them in whatever way they please. I do, however, draw the line at alternative food zealots attacking conventional medicine as ineffective while recommending herbs and spices with no proven benefit. It’s misleading and dangerous. The article in my OP is a prime example. To the author of that travesty, it doesn’t matter how many studies come out supporting the use of chemo in cancer treatment, and it doesn’t matter how many people are cured by it. Chemo isn’t “Natural” and is therefore evil and dangerous. Try this bloody spice instead :rolleyes:
Nevermind that cancer itself, along with HIV, tuberculosis, and e-coli, are as natural as sunshine itself. Nature is always good and synthetic medicine is always evil. There aren’t enough rolleyes in the world for that shit.
How much selenium? How much selenium would be toxic? Given that the body can’t store B vitamins, and just excretes what it doesn’t need, did you take too much vitamin B? Again, how much lithium or magnesium? Who told you how much to take for your particular condition? Why did you trust them?
Alternative medicine isn’t woo cuz it goes against cultural paradigms. It’s woo cuz it goes against established and tested medical and scientific paradigms. It relies on anecdotal evidence, has little to no regulation or accountability, and everyone you go to will tell you something different about whatever it is you’re asking them.
- Tim Minchin, Storm
My cousin died in her mid-50s because she believed that chemotherapy wouldn’t cure her cancer, goji berries would. And yeah, it was her life to lose. But you know what? At the end, she was begging for surgery, for them to cut the cancer out of her. And it was too late - her heart was too weak to handle it. So she died, and left her husband of 2 years a widower.
So yes, I hate alternative medicine and its practitioners. Give me double-blind, peer-reviewed studies, motherfuckers, or go to hell. :mad:
Not only is there big money in it, but the customers mobilize in its defense in a way that you don’t see when typical corporate malfeasance is involved.
I remember when in 2008, Congress was considering how to properly regulate nutritional supplements, and seemingly every health food store had signs up asking people to call their Congressman and oppose regulation. YOu just don’t see that much, corporations enlisting their customers to lobby for them.
Things like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia and fake Lyme Disease(as opposed to the real, detectable version that you get from deer ticks) sound like efforts by doctors to give the patient a diagnosis when what they really should be saying is “I have no idea”. I guess the problem with that is that if real doctors tell their patients they don’t know what’s wrong with them, they’ll go to a quack who will tell them they have heavy metal poisoning or something and sell them big bags of magnesium.
I was diagnosed with it at 20. I’d had over a year of blood tests and x-rays, and had seen several doctors in that time. The last one cautiously diagnosed some form of arthritis and referred me to a rheumatologist. The rheumatologist concluded it was fibromyalgia after reviewing my test results and performing the fibromyalgia pressure points test (if you have pain in at least 11 of the 18 points, that points to a fibromyalgia diagnosis). My doctor became very dismissive after my diagnosis. She told me to take antidepressants, get a job, and exercise, she wrote the name down for me so I could remember it, but refused to give me any further information and sent me on my way.
A lot of people say it’s the trendy disease of the moment and that people just think they have it because it’s in the news all the time, but 17 years ago when I was diagnosed that wasn’t the case - I’d never heard of it. It was a revelation to me years later when I stumbled across other people online going through the same experience.
So yeah, I believe it’s a real thing. Maybe there are people out there who don’t have it but say they do, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
It’s real, in the sense that you have a very real problem and fibormyalgia is the best they can come up with. My wife was diagnosed with it, until they found her real diagnosis, which was Ehlers-Danlos. Many fibromyalgia patients later get diagnosed with a different condition.
But all fibromyalgia is is unexplained chronic pain. They’d call it Unexplainable Chronic Pain Syndrome, except then it wouldn’t sound like they knew what they were talking about.
But that’s the great thing about real medicine - it’s not based on faith.
This is something I see a lot, related but not quite the same, where if the child behaves differently when awake than asleep the parents will blame it on sugar, or gluten, or preservatives, or something, instead of, well, kids are like that. I can only assume that when they envisioned themselves parenting, it was always with docile, obedient children, rather than childlike ones.
that’s nice but obviously I was referring to my faith in it, not medicine itself.
The point is, you can look at the data to see how effective certain drugs are.
There isn’t a large “faith” component like there is in alternative medicine where they tell you “take this. It’ll work, believe me, my mom did it and it worked out great.”
There are some people who facts cannot penetrate their worldview. I have a lovely ex-coworker who I keep in touch with on facebook, but she posts every big pharma and big aggro conspiracy EVER on her facebook wall, usually 1-3 per day. Some of them are legit but many are not, such as how marijuana cures cancer (really, then why does ANYONE get cancer?) I have really stopped pointing out the logical fallacies in almost all of those things she shares, because she doesn’t really respond to them, just moves onto the next one, and I value her friendship.
I also have a 71 year old co-worker, I’m not sure exactly WHAT email lists he is subscribed to but I’m almost sure one of them is Rush Limbaugh and he probably is on the Alex Jones one too. He repeated the “Chemo is disproven!!!” thing at our desks a couple days ago. He also believes apple seeds cure cancer and that it was proven in Germany. In his case I believe it is fear of dying alone, which is also why he doesn’t want to retire at 71. I’m sure the mystic woo makes him feel more in control of his health. To be honest I will be VERY lucky if I make it to 71, much less be as slim and in shape as this guy, but still he does not know how to analyze sources of information at all. He also believes pretty much EVERY right wing talking point about Obama… he is definitely racist, but he LITERALLY believed that Obama took a vacation on an aircraft carrier battle group to India where the American tax payer paid tens of billions of dollars to drill and underground tunnel from the airport to the Taj Mahal so he wouldn’t have to be unsecured. And then he didn’t even use the tunnel anyway, wasting all the tax payer’s money. I don’t bother contradicting him anymore because a) He’s old and won’t change, and b) it’d involve talking to an annoying old racist when I don’t have to.
In some cases, it’s probably that they don’t want to do what a conventional treatment would require. AIUI, chemo sucks. There are a lot of side effects. Who wouldn’t rather eat some berries than go through that? Promoters of alternative medicine tend to be less open about possible side effects, or there are fewer side effects because their remedies don’t actually do anything.
“No Side Effects” is usually a big selling point. Of course, “No Effects Whatsoever” would be more accurate.
While most of the posts in the thread have been people just making fun of pseudomedicinal woo, it’s an interesting topic.
I think it’s been hit upon; people like alternative medicine woo because it is comforting. They like it for the same reason people like religion, or conspiracy theories; because medicinal woo offers certainty and comfort, while science and truth offers the best it can but with uncertainty, because the real world is random and uncertain.
I have a friend, whom I will name Kim, who is currently undergoing some health difficulties. Pinning down precisely what is wrong with her has certainly not been easy because she is suffering from a number of competing symptoms and complications, ranging from thyroid issues to autoimmune problems, which have resulted in some scary things like weight loss and jaw problems.
Talking with Kim about her problems - and that’s all she wants to talk about - is difficult, because frankly it’s a changing story every week, but predictably she has decided the solution lies, at least partially, in silliness like naturopathy. The reason is obvious, when you cut through the nonsense; her REAL doctors are honest with her. They tell her “it may be X, but it might also be Y. The solution is not clear.” The woo sellers tell her “it is definitely Z, and if you pay me money I’ll fix it.”
Human health is really complex, and the fact is that doctors can only offer possibilities and probabilities when things really go to shit. That’s very, very hard for some people to handle. Existential terror is not something a person deals with well.
I would like to think that, every time Lil’ Neville behaves in a way I don’t like, there is some easily identified and avoidable cause. Then I could just never give her foods with artificial colors (or whatever), and she would behave perfectly all the time. I would also like it if every week had two weekends, there were a billion dollars in my bank account, and I could travel faster than the speed of light.
Except that all data in the world doesn’t necessarily mean that a fairly reliable treatment is necessarily going to work for YOU. And I use the term ‘fairly reliable’ because nothing works 100% of the time. I’m not sure that there’s anything in current medicine (because it’s always evolving) that works even 90% of the time. Which means that even mostly successful, accepted treatments are still going to fail some of the people all of the time. So to some extent, yes, it is an act of faith to assume that modern medicine can cure what ails ya.
There too will always be cases where modern medicine told people to go home and put their affairs in order because ‘nothing else can be done’. Said patient then goes home and tries a homeopathic cure, ground unicorn horn, a change in diet or whatever, and suddenly their regular doc can’t find any sign of the cancer or other illness that was that was killing them. So, was the modern doc just wrong in the first place? Did Mother Nature effect a spontaneous cure? Did the nontraditional stuff work? No one knows, and anyone who claims to is full of dooky.
That said, I’m still going to choose modern medicine over alternative every time, unless and until I’m told that they’ve done everything they can, at which point, unless I’m ready to give up, I’ll try other things. Although, there are somethings I would never try. :eek: 
This is a little unfair, to dismiss chronic conditions as psychosomatic. Yes, that does come up occasionally but I think more frequently it’s a matter of a chronic problem for which there is no definitive cure, only management and sometimes not terribly effective management.
Particularly anything that involves long-term chronic pain, you’ll get woo. You see it with severe arthritis, back pain of various sorts, and so on. Modern medicine has limited help for that sort of problem, yet people in our society have this notion that bodies are like cars, you should be able to definitively fix them. That ain’t reality, and they don’t want to hear that they may have to limit their activities or learn to accommodate a certain level of pain long term or ask for help or find new ways to do things. They want a cure. So when a woo-seller waves “cure” in front of them they’re easy marks.
One theory I heard about fibromyalgia is that the pain receptors become hyper-sensitive, or just don’t turn off. This would indeed result in a complaint of “it hurts” without there being anything visible wrong. Of course, there are a multitude of other theories.
It is a real collection of symptoms that really exist in some people. It’s also probably over-diagnosed, especially when *self-*diagnosed. I’ve known a couple of women under 30 diagnosed with it, and a couple of men, but you’re right it’s much more common in women than men. That doesn’t make it unreal, though - autoimmune disorders are more common in women, chronic pelvic inflammatory disease is more common in women, and breast cancer is more common in women but those are all real diseases.
The people I know who were diagnosed by a real doctor (usually by eliminating everything else) and who actually cooperated with treatment and rehab did, eventually, recover. It takes a long time, though, to get back to normal and rehab is often an unpleasant thing to do as it can involve forcing yourself to do uncomfortable or even frankly painful things. People would rather have woo that makes them feel special and doesn’t hurt.
And yes, there is a mental component - well, if YOU were in pain, felt like shit, and everyone told you there was nothing wrong for months or even years you’re just a nut you would also get depressed. Chronic pain causes depression. It becomes chicken-and-egg, which came first, the firbromyalgia or the depression?
My spouse has chronic pain due to a birth defect and the after effects of many surgeries, not all of which were helpful. An important component of his care is an anti-depressant because being in constant pain is depressing. He’s not crazy, he hurts, every single day without exception. No one can cure the pain, so the only choice is to treat the symptoms.
So yeah, there are some flaky fakes out there, but there are some legitimate sufferers as well.