And? What point do you think you're making? That the Chinese had similar ideas that they came to independently? That's neither surprising, nor does it support your point in any way. From a sample size of two you don't know. If you have a group of 200 patients and you give 100 of them acupuncture and you prod the other 100 with needles incorrectly (so called 'sham acupuncture) and you find the acupuncture group had significantly better outcomes, then you can say acupuncture is likely effective. Studies like that have been published and the last one I read found no difference between real and sham acupuncture. ...you're going to need to rephrase that because I don't know what point you are trying to make. Again, what point are you trying to make? Actually no, TCM have far fewer advantages than modern western medicine because the bits of TCM that do work have been refined and incorporated into modern western medicine - the bits that don't work haven't. That's how it works. Acupuncture has some efficacy (although for not nearly as many conditions as TCM practitioners claim), so western physicians will sometimes prescribe it for things like lower back pain. Tiger penis does not work as a treatment for erectile dysfunction, so it is not prescribed by western physicians. I'm not going to watch a propaganda film. How about you go read some science. It's good for you - unlike tiger penis.
The point most definitely does stand! Oil is plant matter. Mostly plankton, as I understand, but trees too
It says that the scientific method could do a much better job of eliciting placebo, given money and desire for research, than the random findings of ancient quacks. Placebo and trance states could be hugely beneficial to medicine, but I'm sure we could come up with much better ways to implement them than current complementary/alternative medicines.
Like I said before, it is difficult to talk about TCM and Western medicine without bringing in the politics that surrounds them both. Nevertheless, it is a much needed conversation. Western doctors and insurance companies are only now admitting the benefits of holistic medicine, and laws are being made to incorporate holistic and TCM state to state. TCM has its own peer reviewed journals. They have their own methods and studies about their medicine, whether you consider it scientific or not. That is essentially the politics behind the conversation. Personally, I know doctors who have recommended acupuncture to their patients. I know acupuncturists who have recommended surgery and antibiotics to their patients. I've heard chiropractors direct people to nutritionists. Dare I say, I've even known people get cured by cancer with natural medicine after years of struggling with chemotherapy and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses. I've also known people get better with over-the-counter medicine when natural remedies failed. All these professionals are experts in their field, and they know when their expertise becomes limited in their patient's care. The point is the scientific method cannot explain everything. When doctors run out of answers, do they just give up on their patients, or do they open them up to other possibilities outside their scope of knowledge?
Why do they need their own peer-reviewed journals? Could it possibly be that they don't use robust methodology or analysis, both of which usually have holes so big you could drive a truck through? I guess there will always be good and bad doctors and the odd acupuncturist or chiropractor with a shred of integrity. Well, human cancers are a complex set of diseases. Spontaneous regression is reported in all kinds - some cancers are more likely to regress than others and several possible mechanisms have been suggested. Although coincidental timing might suggest otherwise to an indivdual patient, I would suggest that spontaneous regression is a far more likely explanation than 'X gives miracle cure.' Do you know what the scientific method is? Very basically, it involves recognising and formulating a problem, using observations and experimentation to collect data, formulating and testing hypotheses and drawing conclusions. Why do you think this is not good enough? Opening patients up to other possibilities outside a doctor's scope of knowledge is at best unethical and at worse downright dangerous.
What Politics? You're the only person who keeps bringing up politics. The rest of us are talking about evidence. No, TCM has propaganda magazines dressed up to look like scientific journals. The studies presented in those magazines are not credible. If TCM works, they should be able to show it works using the scientific method and they should be able to publish the results of that research in scientific journals. Yes. We've covered that. Move on. Point being? Yeah. No. When Doctors run out of answers they don't start prescribing things they know wont work. Stop trying to make this a political issue. It isn't one. If a medical treatment works, regardless of where it originated, a double blind trial will show it working. End of story. Science is blind to politics.
That is so demonstrably false as to be laughable. Western medicine didn't just cure smallpox. It eradicated it. If the only thing western medicine ever did (and it's obviously done MUCH more than that) was eradicate smallpox then it has already done more for human health than all of the complementary medicines put together will ever do. Western medicine has done so much to advance human health that modern humans have lost sight of how unhealthy we can really be (or used to be). As far as I'm concerned the current popularity of TCM is because Mao wanted something to keep people quiet while they died and westerners are enamoured with exotic foreign stuff that sounds all mystical and funky.
I take it you're all medical professionals, or people who would never consider "alternative", quack medicine even if your life depended on it. Like I said I'm not out to push my beliefs on anyone. I'm just presenting another point of view. Good luck to you all, and I wish you only the best health for you.
It's all placebo man In countries that offer free health care, limited funds means that treatments rely on evidence based medicine so that the patients get the best treatment for the lowest cost. acupuncture performs like many traditional medicines perform well as placebos. see the video in this link where a medical professional explains things much better than me. http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Acupuncture/Pages/Evidence.aspx
this should be the standard response anytime "traditional" or "herbal" or whatever remedies are suggested.
Science should be blind to politics, but it isn't always. If you think politics doesn't affect aspects of science, you are really naive. Just what studies funded or not is often affected by things that are more political than scientific.
funding and political ideology are different issues altogether. if evidence does not exist for a hypothesis, then no politics can help it. just because a creationist doesn't believe that evolution is happening, doesn't mean that evolution is not happening--we not only have observations, but we have tons of evidence for it. or an anti-vaccer claims that vaccines cause autism, no amount of science is going to save that assertion. i think what you're talking about is the void left by lack of scientific method. then yes i agree, politics and ideology have lots to do there.
yes and a quick search of the cochrane review library reveals a number of chinese universities publishing about traditional chinese practices all being unsubstantial all the practices that have worked have been included into modern medicine. the use of acupuncture in a number of psychosomatic pain treatments is proof of that.
You should give some examples of aspects of science you think are being unfairly treated as a result of politics. In the UK at the moment, there is a very clear bias towards only funding things with clear economic impacts, but that is more a reflection of the current economic environment than any prejudice against particular areas of science.
Climate change gets a massive amount of funding from all sides. Where's the political interference in that?
Because the denial is almost exclusively funded by interest groups to the point where it is basically pseudoscience - if something is paid for to state something it is no longer science. The level of the funding is not the issue
Yes, but it's more than countered by the actual science. Corruption is a problem in all areas of life, science isn't immune.
the really interesting thing about climate denial funding is that it's not science, it's just denial with technical terms. i don't know of any funded studies that purport to show that agw is not happening. because they can't possibly show that it's not happening; there's a locus of multiple disciplines and consensus that this is indeed happening. we have so much confirmation, it's scary. we've known about the greenhouse effect, for what, 150 years. anyone with some air, some extra carbon, a test tube and thermometer can actually replicate the conditions at the heart of the science: cap a test tube, put it in sunlight, take the temperature, introduce some carbon, take the temperature again. all i ever see is: michael mann made an assertion in a science paper; but he discounted solar activity; ergo, all of climate science is a crock. never mind that michael mann actually did consider all the variables. but now mann is on the defensive and has to respond--at least in some peoples' eyes. climate change denialism really is right out of the cigarettes/cancer denialism portfolio. all the deniers aim to do is confuse just enough to cause inaction. i'm simplifying the greenhouse effect experiment. but look here... http://www.starhop.com/library/pdf/studyguide/elementary/GloJar-7.pdf any one of us could actually do this.
