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Who likes an OP full of quotes from another thread? I don't like either acupuncture or herbal medicine, which is why it annoys me that there's evidence that they're medicinally beneficial that stands up to modern scientific rigor. This was brought up as a derail in another thread, so here we are. My argument is that the Acupuncture and herbal medicine have medicinal benefits that are backed by double blind clinical trials, the gold standard of what's 'real'. Where we left off: Kiwi Ghost Chips posted:
You're citing an article that lists eastern countries' publication bias, and reviews papers from the 60's up until 96. For starters, there's a strong agreement between western and eastern medicine that there are medical benefits to acupuncture, the article is primarily arguing about a matter of degrees: quote:Of trials published in England, 75% gave the test treatment as superior to control. The results for China, Japan, Russia/USSR, and Taiwan were 99%, 89%, 97%, and 95%, respectively. Also, this timeperiod mostly predates the widespread acceptance of evidence based medicine, and while double blind trials are ancient and evidence based medicine was a common topic for research and discussion in the 1980's, it really caught fire in the early 90's when it became standard teaching practice. The meta analysis I posted here also pulls much more recent articles: quote:We updated the searches from 1996 to February 2003 in CENTRAL, MEDLINE, and EMBASE. We also searched the Chinese Cochrane Centre database of clinical trials and Japanese databases to February 2003. Kiwi Ghost Chips posted:
evilweasel posted:To explain why the "alternative medicine" can find statistically significant results - statistically significant simply means that, assuming the null hypothesis (that the thing is worthless compared to a placebo) you'd get the result you got by chance only one out of 20-100 times (depending on the confidence interval used). But when you've got something with as much quacks believing in it as this, you're going to have 20-100 studies, and therefore one, by chance, will appear statistically significant. You pick that one, ignore the rest, and it seems proven. You notice the other failed tests, and you can figure out what happened.
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Oct 23, 2014 20:08
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Dancer, you haven't established 'sciencebasedmedicine.org' as a credible source, and as it doesn't cite research in its conclusions, it doesn't seem to establish itself as a credible source either. Here's a meta analysis of multiple double blind clinical trials where acupuncture was tested against control groups to see if it had any medicinal effect: http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001351/BACK_acupuncture-and-dry-needling-for-low-back-pain The conclusion that the Cochrane Collaboration came to was that acupuncture outperformed the control groups by a statistically significant margin across the many studies they examined. edit: If you don't mind adding '.org' to your quote I'd appreciate it, as quoting 'science based medicine' is an appeal to a school of medicine that exists beyond that one website you're quoting, and looks intellectually dishonest. Pythagoras a trois fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Oct 24, 2014 |
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Oct 24, 2014 22:26
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Dancer posted:About the herbal stuff: I'm not sure what statement you're trying to make. If the statement is "plants can be effective therapy", then yes, that is undoubtedly true, and something that doctors and reasonable people cannot disagree with. I agree with this, and I think the problem with the discussion about Herbal Medicine is I don't know any way to accurately pin down the terminology to be clearly right or wrong. Echenecea apparently isn't more effective than placebos, but willow bark certainly is. Chernobyl Prize posted:I'm hoping for great things from this thread. I want to hear about acupuncture/pressure, crystals, homeopathy, and chiropractic medicine. I've never heard of marijuana being called alternative medicine, when discussed for health reasons it's always medicinal marijuana as if everyone knows it's not bullshit. The majority of homeopathic medicines I've encountered are just herbal medicines with a label that says Homeopathy. That said, I've never seen anything suggesting Homeopathy had any medicinal benefit, so if anyone wants to refute homeopathy or crystals then I'd be all ears. Pythagoras a trois fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Oct 24, 2014 |
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Oct 24, 2014 22:32
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SedanChair posted:It sounds more like he's talking about naturopathy. Homeopathy is specifically the theory of dilution and nothing else. And naturopathy is lousy with belief in it, but covers other things as well. I meant to say if anyone wants to support homeopathy they're welcome to, because I assumed no one here would defend homeopathy. I certainly won't, so there's probably not a lot of good debate to be had on the subject here. I was just looking up more evidence for acidophilus and its effects on the brain, re: The Radiolab epidsode "Guts", and couldn't find anything. Which is sort of disappointing, because I also struck out on convincing evidence that Omega 3 has any effect on brain function, which is something I thought was well accepted.
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Oct 26, 2014 17:49
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