He does a good enough job of that on his own.

This.

“#42 POSTED BY KEEPER OF THE LANTERN, JULY 18, 2009 3:01 AM
#31 said…
“Acupuncture is mostly likely a placebo effect that, as a placebo, reduces the subjective impression of some kinds of pain, just as do sugar pills.”
You’re clearly not a trained scientist. You’ve made a number of sweeping statements that betray an ignorance of both specific scientific facts as well as a general ignorance of how science works.”

I just love how you make sweeping assumptions. Clearly if you are a trained scientist you aren’t very objective on this issue :rolleyes:

The placebo effect is far more than a simple “reduced subjective impression of pain”. The placebo effect (ie, a perception on the part of a patient that their treatment is working) kicks off numerous processes in the body (including endorphin production) that have physical, measureable effects on the body, some of which can indeed produce healing. At the very least, Accupuncture leverages some of these processes, and the meideval Chinese were aware of it and even quantified it. (Go look through some of Joseph Needham’s works for detailed discussions.)

Yes, KOTL, Placebo Effect is a complex phenomena. That doesn’t mean that Acupuncture is anything other than Placebo Effect. Does that mean Acupuncture has no use? No. But it does mean that the supposed magic mechanisms of Acupuncture–the influencing of invisible, undetectable energy flows of “Qi” along imaginary “Meridian Lines” are superstitious nonsense and can be discarded–you know, through that process known as **science**, the process you get all indignant and condescending over but don’t seem to actually follow.

But let’s take one single application, shall we? Go obtain Science in Traditional China, but Joesph Needham. In Figure 19, page 89 (1st edition, Harvard U Press), look at the photograph of accunpuncture used as an anesthetic for open heart surgery. I’m (slightly) interested in hearing how mere “placebo effect” (even given the more general definition of mine above) alone could be responsible.
(Needham, by the way, was a Cambridge Biochemist and wrote the seminal work in Neurophysiology earlier in the 20th century.)

Hey, remember how open heart surgery means you have no ability to make a vacuum in your chest and can’t breathe on your own? The “open heart surgery” he described was no such thing. The use of Acupuncture for surgical anesthesia in China has a horrifying history. It was promoted by Chairman Mao and was a political imperative–and it even worked on a few people with extremely high pain tolerances, but you need to learn the real story about acupuncture anesthesia before passing along nonsense and revisionist Maoist Propaganda as fact.

See Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945-63: a Medicine of Revolution by Kim Taylor, and also, http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?cat=8 , especially the 4 part series ““Acupuncture Anesthesia”: A Proclamation from Chairman Mao ”

To get at the crux of the issue, let’s see what some of the Chinese, themselves, have writen on the subject. Keng Hsi-chen and T’ao Nai-huang, two mainland chinese doctors, wrote a 1980 essay, cited in Medicine in China by Paul Ulrich Unschuld:

“The pushing of acupuncture anesthesia into large areas of clinical application cannot be separated from the peculiar historical conditions in our country of that time. During the period of the ‘Cultural Revolution,’ acupuncture anesthesia served politically as a standard to judge progress or backwardness, revolution or nonrevolution. Physicians and patients were under the pressure of the political requirements of that time. They had no choice but to have exceptional courage in order to carry out or undergo surgery, especially as the patients who felt pain could not cry out. Some resorted to shouting political slogans during surgery in a loud voice. At one place, the chairman of ophthalmology was enthusiastic about acupuncture anesthesia, and he tried the knife at his own eyelid. Finally he reached the conclusion: the effects are not good, it should not be extended. He wrote a report to higher authorities and as a result he was labeled one with three hats [i.e., an intellectual not interested in practice] and met the criticism of the masses. Under this type of political pressure, not a few people made statements against their will and acted against their conscience. Thus, in some hospitals the rate of acupuncture anesthesia utilization reached 20 percent, but among these, 80 percent were ligation operations. In other hospitals before clinical application of acupuncture anesthesia, the patients were given already sufficient amounts of anesthetic drugs through injection and then, in addition, needles were pierced into their ears pretending acupuncture anesthesia. Only joy was reported but no sorrow; one did not dare to tell the facts. This of course had decisive influence on how the concerned leadership department passed correct decisions regarding the real situation of acupuncture anesthesia….
…
Our opinions expressed here are not taken out of thin air. We, the authors, have in the past, from 1969 through 1977, as part of our work in the hospital, conducted more than thirty thousand surgical operations under acupuncture anesthesia as an exploratory practice in order to warmheartedly promote acupuncture anesthesia. This represents about 1.5% of all cases of surgery under acupuncture anesthesia in our country. This tremendous amount of practice has led us to publish the opinions offered above. Also, these opinions are not really our own original ideas, they are extensively discussed and acknowledged among medical personnel of anesthetics and surgery. It is just that due to the political pressure of the past period, nobody dared to state them openly.”

And, yes, ANTINOUS, sometimes placebo out performs “real” medicine, or at least performs the same but with fewer side effects. Sometimes “real” medicine doesn’t perform as expected. That’s why we **do** placebo controlled, double blind clinical trials, to find out. The trick is what do you do with the data? In science you try to confirm the findings and then act on them once they are confirmed, by, for instance, discontinuing the treatment that has been disproved. That isn’t what happens with “alternative” medicine. In spite of overwhelming negative results the politically charged NIH CAM program has not declared any “alternative” medicine to be useless. That’s not science being objective, that’s politics trumping science. Same goes for acupuncture, where you have people like KOTH reacting virulently to the fact that acupuncture is not proven medicine, but is instead an ancient superstitious modality that performs no better than sham acupuncture.

“Acupuncture is mostly likely a placebo effect that, as a placebo, reduces the subjective impression of some kinds of pain, just as do sugar pills.”

You’re clearly not a trained scientist. You’ve made a number of sweeping statements that betray an ignorance of both specific scientific facts as well as a general ignorance of how science works.

Let’s start with your statement above. The placebo effect is far more than a simple “reduced subjective impression of pain”. The placebo effect (ie, a perception on the part of a patient that their treatment is working) kicks off numerous processes in the body (including endorphin production) that have physical, measureable effects on the body, some of which can indeed produce healing. At the very least, Accupuncture leverages some of these processes, and the meideval Chinese were aware of it and even quantified it. (Go look through some of Joseph Needham’s works for detailed discussions.)

At the high level, it is also almost completely meangingless to say that “accupuncture isn’t scientifically proved to work”. Work for what? No peer-reviewed real journal in the world would publish any study or paper that would attempt to determine accunpuncture’s usefulness in every possible application (there are thousands).

But let’s take one single application, shall we? Go obtain Science in Traditional China, but Joesph Needham. In Figure 19, page 89 (1st edition, Harvard U Press), look at the photograph of accunpuncture used as an anesthetic for open heart surgery. I’m (slightly) interested in hearing how mere “placebo effect” (even given the more general definition of mine above) alone could be responsible.

(Needham, by the way, was a Cambridge Biochemist and wrote the seminal work in Neurophysiology earlier in the 20th century.)

Maybe not, but this does:

http://www.csicop.org/si/2008-02/hall.html

I like to see phonies exposed for what they are, but to think that there isn’t anything out there that we don’t understand… I don’t have that much hubris.

And before I get jumped on here, I’m not saying that there are ghosts, because we haven’t proven that there aren’t. I’m just suggesting the possibility that one can abide by what science has proven (and even what it suggests) and also have interest in the “other.”

“I’m reminded of when Penn & Teller did this on there show: Bullshit.”

I believe you mean THEIR show.

sorry. the their, there, they’re thing drives me nuts.

“#24 POSTED BY XOPHER, JULY 17, 2009 1:56 PM
Also, remember that acupuncture was considered hokey “yeah right” crap 30 years ago. Now it’s generally regarded as effective (with ample real science done to show that it is), even though no one knows how it really works or why.

Actually, it isn’t supported by science. The most recent, and one of the best studies, just showed that “real” acupuncture is no better than sham acupuncture. Acupuncture is mostly likely a placebo effect that, as a placebo, reduces the subjective impression of some kinds of pain, just as do sugar pills.

Check the acupuncture section of Science based medicine:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?cat=8

And the most recent podcast of Quackcast:
http://www.quackcast.com/spodcasts/files/531077e7df3f72608dba5105d99c51b9-32.html

…acupuncture is not a proven form of medicine.

If some people believe in paranormal stuff and it enhances the joy of their life- leave them to it. If others feel better being on the more left-brain logic end of things- leave them to it. All spokes lead to one hub.

One thing we can all learn from ‘new age’ folks is that there is always more to life than we perceive at any given moment- and choosing to open up to that can be a profound source of wisdom, joy, experience and growth.

Don’t tell me you drank the “Jonestown members drank Kool-Aid” Kool-Aid. (It was actually “Flavor Aid,” a competing product.)

Whether you believe you can faith-heal someone’s liver cancer, or you believe you can fool someone into thinking that you’ve just faith-healed their liver cancer, the end result is the same: “you haven’t healed their liver cancer, you arsehole.”

Hmm, “arsehole” might be a good term to include both purposeful charlatans and the critically delusional.

;)

I’ve lost a few friends to the madness.

Actually I don’t believe any of that, but if I were a busted psychic, that’s what I would say.

Golly, I don’t know, maybe by inventing and or discovering virtually every major medical advance of the past century, and thereby doubling the effing average life expectancy over said same time period for a start? But you’re right, all of this “knowing” and reliance on “objective evidence” and “facts” is just as good as any other woo method of understanding the world right? Let’s just treat that bowel cancer with some aquamarine quartz and laying on of hands, rather than 200 mg of iv cyclophosphamide daily. After all, what’s the difference. Carl Sagan must be spinning in his grave.

According to the author of the article, if I claim to play the piano, and then fail to play the piano in a test, then that proves that no one can play the piano.

That’s what she means, right?

Sure, unless a clever person convinces them otherwise. Personally I like the side that tries to convince people through critical thinking.

Great (or is it grate?) job of grammar policing.

You are two, to good at that!

Wait a second. Are you taking a body count on the benefits of science, because if you are, you forgot all of the people killed by modern weapons, industrial pollution, automobiles, environmental cancer, and all of those other things your good buddies in the scientific community have brought us.

Come back when you have a REAL total.