Even if you'd heard several people say that a specific chiropractor had helped them with a particular issue that you were also suffering from?
Yes.
Keep in mind that people have even had medical procedures that they thought had actually helped them, but once double-blind placebo controlled studies were done, it was found that they were no better than a placebo.
For example, doctors used to do a kind of arthroscopic knee surgery called arthroscopic lavage or debridement, where loose cartilage is removed from inside the knee. This was supposed to help alleviate knee pain. However, when compared to surgery where no actual debridement occurred, there was no significant difference in results. As such this practice has almost entirely fallen out of use. See: "
Study Finds Common Knee Surgery No Better Than Placebo" (Science Daily - 7/12/2002).
With some things, especially with things like pain and fatigue, placebo effects are quite prone to occur, so special care has to be taken to not be fooled by that.
Also, even more common, is what is called "regression to the mean." People tend to go for treatment when they're at their worst, and the body tends to heal over time or get used to problems, so these two facts combined can make
any treatment seem effective. People assume because they got the treatment and then they got better, that this means that the treatment helped them, but that's not necessarily the case. You can't tell if you're getting better because of the treatment or if you would have gotten better anyways without the treatment unless you do scientific testing.
This is why I don't blindly take people at their word; anecdotes are not data. I look at the objective scientific evidence instead.
I find it interesting because I go to the NHS GP like a good little girl and tell them "I have this problem" or "the problem is a lot worse now" and they say "here are stronger painkillers, go home". At least an alternative medicine practitioner might make a bit more effort to work out what is wrong with me than that.
That doesn't actually mean that they're any better at diagnosing or treating the problem.
That said, some portions of chiropractic are OK while others are superstitious nonsense. Look up "
innate intelligence" in relation to chiropractic some time. The quality of a chiropractor greatly depends on how much he subscribes to objective science versus pseudo-scientific nonsense.
Homeopathic medicines are very useful. They provoke a placebo response without any danger of adverse side effects. I know a doctor who recommends them for that reason. Of course he doesn't tell that to the patients because then it wouldn't work.
Personally, I think it's unethical to have patients spend money on treatments that don't really do anything and dangerous to promote the idea that they actually do something. If you think homeopathy is harmless,
you're wrong.
There are products companies label homeopathic that do contain active ingredients, as was with the case of a nasal spray which contained Zinc and caused permanent loss of smell in some cases. I seem to recall, but I'm not actually sure, that due to them being labeled homeopathic and not actual medication, they were subject to less strict regulation than medication. So don't count on anything labeled homeopathic to be harmless.
Correct. You're talking about
Zicam, and the manufacturer, Matrixx Initiatives, paid $12 million to settle 340 lawsuits from the people who lost their sense of smell (and thus some sense of taste as well) due to using this self-proclaimed "homeopathic" product. Some products calling themselves homeopathic actually
do have active ingredients when they're not sufficiently diluted, though most are just water, sugar, lactose, alcohol, or some other dilutant.
Unfortunately bills have been passed by senators who are fans of homeopathy which make it so that that these products don't have to be tested for safety or efficacy before being sold the way real medicines do, so the public can easily get screwed over like this. And where the FDA
can investigate, they've found manufacturers who have allowed glass shards to contaminate the product, who've failed to put anything homeopathic in the product, and who've put greatly varying doses in products, and they've found
all of these violations in just one manufacturing plant.
In case you hadn't guessed, I'm not a fan of companies selling products which aren't likely to do what they claim they do and at
best they do nothing. It's all fraud as far as I'm concerned, and
dangerous fraud preying on those who often really need medical help to boot.
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Topic: WCDT: 2495-2499 (22-26 July, 2013) Weekly Comic Discussion Thread (Read 132622 times)