Posted by Tabitha on August 2, 2016, at 11:33:34
In reply to Re: mercola, posted by Christ_empowered on August 2, 2016, at 7:50:30
> I kinda like Mercola. He interviews people from the alt health field, and that's cool. I don't buy his products, but I do think bringing in different ideas about healthcare to the masses is probably a good thing.
It sounds good, if you think that effective treatments are sort of evenly distributed between conventional medicine and alternative medicine. Or even if you think there might be a few good treatments in alternative medicine that haven't yet been embraced by conventional medicine. However, controlled testing on alternative methods consistently shows their effectiveness is not better than placebo. The NCCIH has spent $1.3 billion on alternative medicine research since 2000, and has not produced a single successful intervention that is better than placebo or conventional care. Examples of their research results:
- Tai Chi works as well as physical therapy
- CBT and mindfulness are better for back pain than no intervention (as is any placebo)
- acupuncture provides benefits, whether or not you stick needles into acupuncture points, stick needles into arbitrary points, or just pretend to be sticking needles into the skin. (The reasonable conclusion is that all three methods "work" through placebo effect.)
- many reports describing the prevalence of use of alternative medicine, without speaking to its effectiveness at all.Wouldn't you expect some more impressive results after $1.3 billion?
Worse, when there are numerous studies showing that treatments don't work (e.g. homeopathy, acupuncture), alternative medicine practitioners don't abandon the techniques. Contrast to medicine, which, despite all its flaws, does pick up new treatments and drop ineffective ones in response to new research.
I think if people understood the following, alternative medicine would lose most of its appeal:
- it's actually very difficult to come up with effective treatments. most ideas that seem initially plausible never translate into successful treatments
- things often seem to work due to common cognitive biases. controlled testing is necessary, and results often will contradict human instincts
poster:Tabitha
thread:1090994
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20160713/msgs/1091087.html