"My beef with the natural medicine crowd is that they fall into a trap of faulty logic and bogus claims. They can't explain how their "cures" work, just that they do, and when they make the attempt to explain how, it's always based on faulty assumptions and assertions about the human body that are just...plain...wrong."
I totally agree. I tend to lean towards a natural lifestyle in terms of whole foods and avoiding synthetics when practical,cloth over disposable and so forth- so it tends to be an unpopular opinion among many of my peers. But many of the logic they give you only sounds good on the surface and isn't back by *existing* technology that should be able to back it. I can go off on this subject, so I'll just leave it by saying that I totally agree.
Jehovah's Witnesses more likely to be swindled by quack medicine and conmen
by B_Deserter 22 Replies latest jw experiences
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AlyMC
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Gregor
My sweet little Granny (the one who wouldn't use aluminum) got turned on to a high colonic 'cleansing' by a sister at the KH. The bogus ailment claimed was that ones colon gets clogged up like an old sewer pipe with impacted crap like concrete and the body is slowly poisoned. So imagine an enema with a hose about 3 feet long! This a complete fairytale but people believe it and suffer malnutrition consequences from constantly purging the lower colon.
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B_Deserter
I thought if the patient gets better the medicine is verified?
Nope, not at all. In an uncontrolled setting, it's impossible to determine just what caused the patient to get better. That's why a much larger sampling is required. How accurate is a poll that only asks 10 people? Clinical trials are where hundreds, even thousands of patients are given a certain treatment in controlled settings. In any valid scientific study there is also a "control group" to determine that the recovery is truly the result of the medicine, not something else. A control group is not given the treatment and represents the general population. Let's say a new type of cancer develops that quite often goes into spontaneous remission, which many cancers have been known to do. Now, let's say you have some naturopath (aka Witch doctor) give this cancer patient an herb and poof the cancer goes away. Now, does the herb cure cancer? It could, but there's no way of knowing. This was one case, and there was no control. If there were a control, the person who did not get the herb would likely have also gone into remission and proven that the herb really had nothing to do with it. Even if the herb-taking patient recovered and the control person died, it's still too small of a group to determine that the treatment really works. You literally need hundreds or thousands of people in each group.
but I also think that they should be investigated, and if found to have merit further looked into.
What makes you think these anecdotes haven't been looked into? There is literally an army of scientists and researchers that look into this kind of stuff. Most notably, James Randi is a very famous skeptic and debunker of all sorts of myths, the original "mythbuster" if you will. He exposed the tactics of Uri Gellar and Peter Popoff to millions of people. I boggles my mind when people say that extraordinary claims and the like haven't been investigated when they read no medical journals and none of the many articles written on the subject.
Does science completly understand that? Forget about understanding it, how about just harnessing it. And it can't solve all problems: If you're in a wreck and get a rebar stuck through your skull and you're still alive, the placebo effect is not what your paramedics are going to need to beef up on.
I'd say science understands the placebo effect to a pretty thorough degree. No, it can't solve all problems, but I don't see many herbal cures for rebar being stuck through your skull, do you? This is a non sequitir.
And that is why the peer-review is not infallable. The past hundred years has many examples of scientists who were poopooed by their peers, only to be vindicated later. There is no medal for that, no apology, no amends for having their careers ruined.
No, peer-review is not infallible, but that doesn't mean we should just chuck it out the window altogether in favor of the old system: nothing. Do you REALLY think we need to return to the era where the only medicine available was snake oil? Can you cite specific examples of scientists that were poopooed by their peers and proven to be right? I can't think of any. Sure, there were some theories that were met with skepticism, but eventually they were proven right. You're attempting to cast practitioners of homeopathy in the same light as these vague, "victim" scientists that you mentioned. But the reality of the case is that most of these people don't even TRY to get their ideas accepted by the scientific community. They don't even TRY to do responsible clinical studies. If they did, all they'd have to do is show the data, and after much discussion and debate, it would likely be accepted.