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lol at the last one going completely off the rails and diving into meaningless gibberish because acupuncture does not work and your bottle of st john's wort is an expensive placebo. That white woman DOES know everything about inner energies, because they're made up and there's nothing to know
I think takes like this are 100% the result of people knowing what you said is true, but being uncomfortable calling out pseudoscience when it originates with indigenous or colonized people in a way they wouldn't be when it comes to, say, traditional Germanic folklore.
For a truly wild example, there's an entire sub-controversy around whether Native Americans had continuously domesticated horses before European contact; the craziest thing is that this is the result of two overlapping pseudoscientific movements, one centered around (allegedly) indigenous oral history, and the other around the Book of Mormon.
i think it's that a lot of people lean REALLY HARD into the Noble Savage when trying to be antiracist and whoops, it's always racist. It's racist to pretend that rhino horn or an egg that has been pissed on by virgin boys cures gout or whatever, it's racist to believe that American Indians have a special relationship with dogs and horses unlike any other human people over the last 40,000 years (except the mongols, sometimes), and it's racist to believe that anyone, anywhere, has 'different ways of knowing' whose empirical results are worse but which are morally better, and that their empirical results are therefore better.
Oh god, that horse thing drives me nuts because it’s so easily disprovable. Horses evolved in the americas. They crossed over to eurasia through beringia. They then went extinct in the americas. Sometime between 1492 and 1500 they were reintroduced to the americas by european colonists and explorers. They also may have been spread along indigenous trade routes before europeans got as far int the continent. This is easily provable solely by the archaeological record; we don’t find horse remains in the americas between about 10,000 years ago and 500 years ago because there weren’t any fucking horses
That's all extremely difficult to prove to be honest. Like, proving that was multiple people's life's work. DO you have any idea how many bones they had to dig up? Let alone inventing, funding, and building carbon dating machines, training people in their use, and applying them to those bones.
Yeah, it was difficult for the researchers to prove—but it is very easy for us to go look at their work now. And yet, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary being very easy to access, people still think horses were here the whole damn time. It’s just so dumb
Did the lack of any north American domestic horse sub species caused by ten thousand years of domestication in a separate population not tip anyone off?
We've created unrecognisable divergence in domestic animals in a fraction of the time.
Right??? Like, if there were North American horses the whole time they would not be identical to eurasian horses!
Which is dumb, people should call out Raiki AND Anthroposophy both. (fill in with whatever bullshit that matches).
Sure, but there’s a lot of institutional power that can come down on you in the former case that isn’t really an issue in the latter. Here’s a semi-famous example: https://newsroom.co.nz/2021/11/17/royal-society-investigation-into-matauranga-maori-letter-sparks-academic-debate/
I don’t mean to sound conspiratorial, it’s just a feature of academia.
I work adjacent to science in New Zealand and matauranga maori is such a peculiar elephant in the room.
Many of the people who loudly oppose it ARE racists, and there has been a definite trend towards anti maori sentiment in government recently, so the organizations who aren't or dont want to be seen as racist say "yes yes we need to integrate with matauranga maori, we need a braided river approach, we need to pull knowledge from many kete".
Then they hire a consultant, and everyone continues work in exactly the same way as always, but now the company has a waiata that they make you sing.
I’m one step more removed than you are, but AFACIT the more egregious stuff isn’t the banal corporate diversity efforts, but (for example) attempts to insert religious claims into high school chemistry textbooks, cf.
There’s a weird parallel to the evangelical Christian attempts to pervert science education in the US, though of course the rest of the context is very different.
Yeah, a similar dynamic has definitely had similar effects in the US. There’s a fair bit of corporate-flavored DEI initiatives that almost everyone involved secretly rolls their eyes at, but the loudest detractors are in fact white supremacists, so nobody wants to actually speak up and immediately be on Team Aryan Brotherhood.
Should it not just be its own subject in high school? Shoehorning it into chemistry seems a bit much.
I wouldn't have a problem if it was more integrated in my workplace because we dont actively do research and maori engagement with science is pretty low. But you ask people ok, how do we do that and you just get blank looks because no one has any idea what matauranga maori is or how it applies to anything we do. Like cool, I said a karakia over the cheese scones in my meeting of exclusively white people. Are we going to go and talk to some iwi representatives about what we do? Aaaahhh oops theres no budget for that sorry.
Rant over sorry.
I mean yeah, I have no problem with religious studies classes or whatever; I object to requiring lies to be printed in science textbooks, whether that’s “the universe is 6,000 years old” or “all particles are imbued with mystical spirit energy that contains consciousness and morality.”
I agree with you, but it's not a lie; it's non falsifiable, and the people saying it believe it
The controversy is something I gotta know more about
Superstitious cures don't work better just because it's a Chinese elder doing it instead of a white mom who found herself on a trip to India. I guarantee if there's reason to believe a traditional medicinal practice works there's already researchers on it.
Actually, WEIRDLY and to be clear this is REALLY COOL, a Chinese elder doing stuff that doesn't materially work or have any benefit works measurably better than some white woman, because the placebo effect is more effective when someone you see as authoritative administers it. So it works if you're racist and are like 'wow that magic chinaman and his qi powers really did the trick.' But if you're not a racist moron it doesn't work as well.
The magic chinaman and his qi powers sounds like a character in an old play from the early 20th century about how we need to throw the yellow devil out.
Yes, that's why I said it. I wanted something that sounded ludicrously racist in an amusingly old-timey way rather than a way that would get people mad at me. Letting you see behind the curtain here
Eh, sometimes it does work, or at least support other efforts. My dad gets acupuncture on his back every couple weeks and its worked wonders. Instead of being in constant pain and not being able to bend forwards or reach up most of the time, he can actually do everything again. It's not just sticking people with needles randomly. They're placed in specific spots and they run a current through them which helps relax the muscles
It is, in fact, sticking needles in people randomly. Sticking needles in people randomly works. I know this because studies were done where they stuck people with needles randomly, and it worked. Taking sugar pills from a doctor also works, about as well if you really believe in the doctor. It even works if he literally tells you 'this is a sugar pill, it has no pharmacological effect, I want you to take one first thing in the morning every day to help you not feel pain.'
The placebo effect only applies if you believe it should work. My dad never believed in this stuff, but it still works. Don't really care what you think about it, his pain is mostly gone which is what matters
That's incorrect, actually. You can literally say "I am giving you a placebo" and it will have an impact compared to doing nothing.
most likely your dad is taking anti inflammatory medication as well. That is what is most likely treating the pain.
He doesn't take anything
Gonna push back on that last bit. Christianity is also made up, yet would not know everything about theological theory after a five hour seminar. Yes, it's made up, but theres method to the madness and (probably) much to learn. Is it effective treatment? No, maybe as placebo or for mental health issues if the person genuinely belives it helps them. But it's still spiritual belief that deserves an ounce of respect at least and spans much more than healthcare
Yes, but you would know everything about the laying on of hands and treating diseases vis a vis being able to do it as effectively as anyone on the planet. Obviously if we're talking religion then there's legitimate scholarship but when you strip the religion out to get at mechanisms coated in mumbo-jumbo your failure to accomplish anything is measurable.
You've never had a cup of chamomile tea to help you sleep? Or taken something with ginger to help your stomachache? Or used a ricola cough drop?
I've punched myself in the arm to make a beesting stop hurting, dude. What's your point? I don't understand how people can respond like this. Oh you've NEVER sacrificed a goat to Baal to ensure a good harvest and bathed in the blood to make sure your next child is a son? Of course I've done that. We all do that. Just because it obviously has no impact and Baal isn't real doesn't mean I'm not irrational. It's just that it obviously has no impact. Baal isn't real.
Wow, what a strawman lmao. You claimed that botanical substances are just a placebo and the other user replied with a reasonable comment stating that some botanical substances do, in fact, have some effects on the human body, and now you're going off about demonic sacrifice?...
You really don't understand the word 'strawman' at all
Ok but there's an actual reason punching yourself in the arm helps a bee sting stop hurting, just like how there's an actual reason why herbs help. Herbs have constituents that are isolated and synthesized for medications if it's profitable for pharmaceutical companies. Like foxglove, one of its constituents is used as a heart medication, it just has a low therapeutic margin in the raw herb. Or, st. John's wort. TONS of medications interact with it. How can you believe that it can harm you without believing it can help you? Ashwagandha can cause serotonin syndrome. That's something it objectively can do. How can it do that, and have side effects, but it's impossible to believe it has helpful effects?
Many herbs have evidence that they do work. There is science explaining how they work.
And also, if you're really convinced that it's a placebo, I don't see how that's a problem either. The placebo effect still has an effect. Physical illnesses can still improve under placebo. Most commonly used herbs like chamomile, mint, ginger, etc have minimal noticeable side effects (excepting allergies or contraindicated conditions), so what's the harm?
The same is true for yew trees except as a pain reliever. Oh also it causes severe stomach ulcers if you use the yew instead of the pain reliever.
Because I know what arsenic does.
Or getting shot.
Or being burned.
Or drinking mercury.
Or touching poison ivy.
The harm in saying "well it doesn't do anything but the placebo effect helps so let it go" is that you could be getting even better results from something that actually does something.
I didn't say it doesn't do anything. I said it definitely does stuff, and explained that it doing negative stuff means it does something and if you can believe it can do negative stuff means it's not a huge leap to believe it can be beneficial.
And assuming you don't believe they have any "real" effects and that it's all placebo, for the herbs the average layperson can get their hands on, the worst that can happen is nothing, and the best that can happen is the placebo effect.
Some medications do nothing as well. Zofran does nothing for my nausea but ginger helps. None of the psychiatric medications i have taken have done anything for me, but valerian helps (it has been proven to have an effect on gamma-aminobutyric acid/GABA, the same neurotransmitter affected by benzodiazapines). But it depends on the person. Not all herbs are for everyone just like how not every med is for everyone. One reason someone may choose to use it as opposed to a pharmaceutical option: Valerian is not addictive while benzodiazapines are. So even if the effect is less pronounced, the balance of positive to negative effects may be preferable.
I was referring to specifically:
"And also, if you're really convinced that it's a placebo, I don't see how that's a problem either."
Which specifically requires the assumption it does nothing to address. Otherwise it isn't a placebo effect.
And I explained that bullets exist. I don't see a bullet wound providing any positives. Nor being burned, ingesting mercury, or lead.
They decide to avoid actually affective medicines and have drastically worse outcomes because the tumeric made them feel mildly less sick as opposed to the chemotherapy or poison themselves because the lead made them feel better when they drank it.
That is still a worse outcome than actual medicine.
Yea, the neat thing about actual medicine is it has an efficacy rate at dosage depending on genetics, epigenetics, and body chemistry and can be adjusted or changed to get results as opposed to placebo effects that just rely on vibes.
You're ignoring the parts of what I say that actually involve the herbs having an effect on the body. I'm sorry that I'm not the best at rebutting the whole "it's all placebo" thing but I don't believe it's all placebo because it's literally not. I was just attempting to make that argument for your benefit and to try to see it from your perspective.
The thing about the yew is funny, because it's literally the exact opposite with willow bark and the synthesized equivalent, aspirin. Aspirin causes ulcers while the willow doesn't, because of the synergistic effects of the many constituents in the willow bark. So that can go either way.
Also, I'm definitely not advocating for the use of herbs in place of cancer treatment or whatever. That's why "alternative medicine" is shifting to "complementary and alternative medicine" or "integrative medicine". Herbs and other safe CAM belong in our Healthcare repertoire just as much as allopathic treatments, but as a complement, not replacements. The "alternative" is like with my example of the valerian vs benzodiazapines. Valerian has an (albeit weaker) effect as well, through a similar mechanism of action, but has less negative effects. It's a trade off that someone should have the ability to make when given proper informed consent. So I would rather take valerian as an alternative to benzodiazapines. Either way, it should be guided by someone well educated on the medicines and their effects, doctors and CAM alike. I think some herbs are equivalent to an OTC drug and some are equivalent to prescriptions, both in terms of effectiveness and in terms of needing guidance from a professional before use.
The problem of people using herbs as replacements for allopathic medicine is an issue that will exist similarly with people misusing otc or prescription drugs, generally being attributed to desperation, lack of education, or general Darwin award shenanigans that would be present regardless of what form of medicine they were using.
No ethical herbalist is going to advocate for you abandoning your chemo and switching to herbs unless it was ineffective at treating you or your likelihood of survival was low and you told them that you wanted to manage your symptoms while getting the most you can out of what time you have left. An ethical herbalist might work to find herbs to help you manage side effects from chemo, and encourage you to communicate with your doctor about their suggestions.
My last thought is about the bullet thing. A bullet can help you, by attacking something that is an actual threat. Bullets save lives all the time. Being burned can be used to cauterize wounds. There is a time and a place for herbs. There are more and less effective/safe ways to use them. But these statements apply to allopathic medicines too. If you don't have cancer, chemo isn't gonna help. If you don't have ADHD, meth isn't gonna help. And if you do have either of those conditions, and those treatments are used incorrectly, they're going to cause harm. We wouldn't trust them either if we were given free will to use them willy-nilly with no professional guidance.
Yes I am because it wasn't the parts I wanted to talk about. I very specifically didn't mention them because I was commenting on the placebo effect or the false logic that having any effect means there is a positive one.
I can't prove they have no net beneficial effects. It would take literally forever, I'm not going to convince you anyway, and you can't prove a lack of something so I decided to bother trying.
Further, I'm aware some do have positive benefits, even if small or potentially outweighed by the negative ones.
Yea, about that:
"salicin can be toxic, damaging kidneys, causing stomach ulcers, diarrhea, bleeding or digestive discomfort"
Not when fired at your own body which would be the equivalent here.
Alright, you got me there, though I was thinking more of third degree burns but I didn't specify.
Most people that turn to alternative and complementary medicine use it in conjunction with biomedical intervention, or after those options have neen exhausted, rather than as a full replacement.
"Most"
The other harm is that people use magical nonsense to establish credibility and social power, then mislead people for a wide range of reasons. When you do things you know don't work, OR when you do things that you don't know whether they work or not, and you present yourself as an expert of any kind, you make others less able to effectively make choices in their lives.
I’m so happy you used acupuncture as an example! It’s a great one for this thread because acupuncture does work for chronic pain30780-0/fulltext) and and we are starting to understand why. In licensed ND states it is covered by manny major insurance plans including Medicare, something even Big Pharma treatments used off label and supported by by lots of medical evidence often aren’t.
Naturopathy is a state licensed healthcare profession (like MDs/NP/psychologist etc)in many states, is covered by insurance in many states, and allows providers to prescribe western meds as well as some traditional treatments. Licensed Naturopathic doctors earn a 4 year accredited graduate degrees, do 1200hrs of supervised experience. It’s not the same as being an MD but it’s a clinical license, not like a Dr of philosophy or history or something. They are typically integrative practitioners with both western and traditional medical training.
I get other people’s points about virtue signaling but to me that part of the post is about comments like yours; that people (including healthcare providers) are prejucdiced against what they see as the entire category of “alternative medicine” because it originated in indigenous or non-Western societies. So they lump the safe and effective in with the bullshit and throw it all away, to the disservice of the public; particularly chronically ill people with conditions that don’t easily resolve with more established western methods, such as chronic pain.
Those are the people who suffer most when effective treatments are dismissed. There are a LOT of things western med cannot treat effectively yet on its own.
If you don’t have disability justice on your framework here or significant chronic illness experience in your history, if you don’t actually understand non western medical research and practice in the US or other 1st world countries, if you haven’t actually read the research on some of the modalities you’re trashing…you really need to sit this one out.
I too am happy that I used acupuncture for this, and also that you have decided to make this about identity politics. It's a very good example of how you can fall for bullshit if it supports other aspects of your life that you value.
acupuncture has been well studied and it's clear that it is approximately as effective for pain management as chiropracty (which is quackery) and invasive western back surgery (which is quackery) and also that the extremely rigid structure of where to stab people with needles in one tradition is often directly contradicted by an equally well supported tradition where you must NEVER put a needle in a given spot. And they did random needle placement studies and guess what! they work great.
The thing is that heroic interventions (like stabbing people with needles) have an outsized placebo effect compared to less heroic interventions. If you feel like something drastic was done, it works better. If you can also say 'wow, I did something drastic that confirms my underlying biases as a person who is extremely concerned with disability justice' it's gonna look like fucking sorcery. Sorry about your incredibly powerful mind and its impact on pain, friend. Don't worry, though! Even though I told you and I'm right, it'll still work for you, because a) you will choose not to believe it, and b) even if you were convinced, it would still have some impact. Placebo is the coolest thing ever discovered.
I was going to write up a whole comment and then you did it better, grazie.
Using ‘it’s covered by insurance’ as a proof point makes no sense whatsoever. Chiropractic is also covered by insurance in many places, and that’s as pseudoscientific as it gets. In many cases, the things covered by insurance are driven by lobbying, not research.
Insurance companies are not medical authorities, unfortunately.
complementary and Alternative medicines have a lot of value in society, and efficacy in healthcare is absolutely not as cut and dry as we would like to think it is. There in fact is evidence that acupuncture is beneficial for some people. and its not as if we don't have entire classes of drugs that are barely better than placebo anti-depressant efficacy is famously pretty questionable by biomedical standards.
You have even likely used some form of alternative or complementary medicine before. medicine is squishy, and its complicated, and efficacy is complex. Many many people are left behind by biomedical systems and turn to alternatives for a huge number of reasons. And many of those alternatives are helpful to them. Don't quit your cancer treatments or whatever, but this black and white way of viewing medicine and complementary or alternative medicines isn't helpful, and it isn't going to convince anyone to change the way they think, because there are reasons that these things are ubiquitous and there are different ways to measure efficacy.
Cool this has nothing at all to do with efficacy. I agree, the placebo effect is materially beneficial, and feeling empowered to do things when in fact there's nothing you can do is also arguably beneficial. It's still extremely black and white, though.
Clinical analysis has found acupuncture to be effective. Thats efficacy. It isn't black and white.
Accepted pharmaceutical treatments like anti-depressants and some cough medicines are questionably efffective, but we don't treat them the same way as questionably effective complementary and alternative medicines. So much of how we judge efficacy in medicine is cultural, it isn't as objective as you think it is.
Clinical analysis has found drying out a lizard and shaking it over a kid suffering with a fever to be effective, though. The placebo effect is real and the results for acupuncture specifically can be explained by the fact that more heroic interventions activate it more strongly in a larger cohort of people.
I provided a bunch of sources for why alternative medicines shouldn't be dismissed out of hand and why efficacy isn't actually that cut and dry. Placebo effects or not, some alternative medicines work at least as well as accepted medicines. Bodies are squishy, medicine is hard to pin down, dismissing alternatives as bogus garbage that doesn't work or have any value and acting like efficacy is black and white doesn't help anyone.
Yes, I am aware that a lot of people say that alternative medicines shouldn't be dismissed, and a lot of money has been spent muddying the waters when it is extremely cut and dried, things either work in double blind studies where you control for placebo or they don't. Lots of people being very gullible doesn't really cut any ice, though.
You can say it's extremely cut and dried as many times as you would like to, but that doesn't actually make it true. Randomized controlled trials are not the only way to measure efficacy in healthcare.
Bro I'm sorry but you've posted two articles you didn't read, both jstor abstracts. This is very clearly because you're gesturing towards academic rigor without actually understanding or valuing it for its own sake, only for its seeming. I am expecting the latinate gibberish to come out any second now, because this is how quacks operate, and that's what you have thrown in with intellectually. I know I'm not gonna get through so I'm posting this to the gallery now: check out this guy! he's a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
And here's another article on the shortcomings of double blind randomized control trials.
Have you actually read the studies you’re linking? None of them seem to actually say what you’re claiming they do.
listen I don't want to respond by just saying 'lol, lmao, lol' to you but you're making it really fucking hard. Like, did you read this article, or did you just link it? Because this is not a criticism of double blind studies, it's an article about how they're hard to do and some things are tricky to study with them. I assure you that witchcraft and humbuggery are not hard to study in this way.
The shortcomings of double blind randomized control trials are, ultimately, that they're not impacted by what you want to believe, or what your core values are, or what is politically expedient to believe, and therefore they won't always tell you things that you want to hear. It's regrettable, I agree. If only the signifier was the signified! Alas,