Since I seem to be on a roll the last few days discussing cancer quackery, I thought I’d just go with it at least one more day. Frequently, when I get on these rolls laying down the Insolence, both Respectful and not-so-Respectful, over antivaccine quackery I start whining about how I need to change topics, but not this time around, not this topic. It takes a lot more than what I’ve posted lately to make me feel as though I need a change of pace. Besides, for whatever reason, the blog fodder is flying at me fast and furious, whether it be the dubious testimonial I discussed yesterday, yet another deconstruction of the moral bankruptcy that is Stanislaw Burzynski, or my take on the sheer quackery that is “naturopathic oncology.” The first rule of blogging is that you don’t talk about blogging. Oh, wait. That’s not it. I talk about blogging all the time. The first rule of blogging is: When the world is throwing easy blogging material at you, for cryin’ out loud, go for it. Yeah, that’s it.
So I’m going for it.
The blog fodder this time around comes in the form of three articles that appeared in ONCOLOGY: Perspectives on Best Practices, an open-access journal about…well, oncology. All three of them are about cancer quackery. Shockingly, in the first article, by Barrie Cassileth, director of all woo integrative oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and IIan R. Yarett, actually uses the word “quackery” in its title: Cancer Quackery: The Persistent Popularity of Useless, Irrational ‘Alternative’ Treatments. In it, Cassileth provides a rather standard discussion of bogus cancer treatments that almost could have been written by Orac, were it not for the complete and utter lack of snark, even the subtle snark that academics sneak into papers. She does, however, complain that quacks have appropriated the term “complementary” in order to “use it incorrectly.” This complaint derives from how many of these cancer quacks don’t actually advocate using their nostrums in addition to conventional therapy but rather in lieu of science-based medicine. Personally, I find this amusing, given that quackademics have no one to blame but themselves for this, given the specific modalities they have tried to “integrate” with science-based medicine. It rather reminds me of the “intelligent design” creationists, craving respectability and crowing to high heaven that they aren’t pseudoscientists but real “scientists,” taking umbrage at being lumped together with fundamentalist creationists who believe that the earth was created 6,000 years ago with all animals in their current forms. No, Cassileth seems to be saying, we don’t associate with that riff-raff. They’re fundamentalist loons. We’re scientists!
I’ll give her some credit for this article, though, and why not? Cassileth lists a fairly standard bunch of quack treatments, the majority of which have been covered on this blog at one time or another, and rips into them. The litany should be familiar: laetrile, shark cartilage, Entelev/Cantron (which I recently discussed, with the comment thread afterward having swollen as of this writing to nearly 1,100 entries), various oxygen therapies (such as hyperbaric oxygen or various means of administering hydrogen peroxide, “energy therapies,” which Cassileth admits have no evidence to support them. Given that admission, one wonders why reiki, which is a form of “energy therapy,” is offered at MSKCC. Come to think of it, acupuncture is also a form of “energy healing” as well, given its claim to be able to manipulate the flow of qi through the body to healing intent, and MSKCC offers acupuncture as well. That doesn’t stop Cassileth from making the dubious claim that acupuncture and other woo have “been shown to be safe and effective as adjunctive treatments for managing pain, nausea, stress, and many other symptoms, and for supporting patient well-being in general,” whatever “supporting patient well-being in general” means.
There are other weaknesses. For instance, no mention is made of Gerson therapy, and it is that particular form of quackery, as well as its many variants (such as the Gonzalez protocol and other treatments that loosely fall under the rubric of “metabolic therapies” and often include such lovely interventions as coffee enemas), that is arguably the cancer quackery most heavily promoted right now; that is, unless high dose vitamin C, which never seems to stay dead no matter how many scientific stakes are driven into its heart, isn’t the most common quackery. One could only wish that, like the vampires on True Blood, such quackeries would explode into a disgusting blob of blood and tissue when the stake of science is driven through their hearts, but sadly this never seems to happen. Her omissions aside, I can’t be too hard on Cassileth. Her article is actually pretty good, by and large, if you can ignore that she is in charge of bringing quackademic medicine into one of the greatest cancer centers in the world. She also makes this statement:
Many alternative approaches to healing are premised on the concept of the mind/body connection, and specifically on the theory that patients can harness the power of their mind to heal their physical ills.[4] Many mind/body techniques, such as meditation and biofeedback, have been shown to reduce stress and promote relaxation, and are effectively and appropriately used as complementary therapies today. However, some proponents of these techniques overpromise, suggesting that emotional stress or other emotional issues can cause diseases like cancer and that correction of these deficiencies through mind-body therapies can effectively treat major illnesses. Such claims are unsupported.
Many of these ideas were promoted by a former Yale surgeon, a popular author who advocated special cancer patient support groups in his books. The importance of a positive attitude was stressed, as was the idea that disease could spring from unmet emotional needs. This belief anguished many cancer patients, who assumed responsibility for getting cancer because of an imperfect emotional status. Among alternative modalities, the mind/body approach has been especially persistent over time, possibly in part because it resonates with the American notion of rugged individualism.[4]
Of course, none of this stops MSKCC from offering “mind-body” services. I guess it’s OK to Cassileth because she doesn’t promise that such woo will cure the cancer. OK, I’ll stop with the snark (at least the snark directed at Cassileth). She’s basically correct that there is no evidence that these therapies can impact the natural history of cancer and produce a survival benefit, and I give her props for carpet-bombing the quackery that is the German New Medicine.
Cassileth’s article was accompanied by not one, but two, additional commentaries, both of which didn’t take issue with the criticism of specific cancer quackeries, such as Entelev, but rather with her statement above about mind-body “healing.” Neither of the commentators were happy that Cassileth had questioned the central dogma of alternative medicine, which is what I’ve been discussing the last couple of days. That central dogma is that if you wish for it hard enough your mind can heal you of anything. The corollary of this central dogma is that if you are ill it is your fault for not having the right “intent,” attitude, and thoughts and therefore not doing the right things and/or not believing hard enough. It’s not for nothing that I have likened alternative medicine to religion or the New Age woo that is The Secret, and these authors simply reinforce that view. First up is radiation oncologist and practitioner of “integrative oncology” Brian D. Lawenda, MD, who pens Quackery, Placebos, and Other Thoughts: An Integrative Oncologist’s Perspective.
In the first part of his article, Lawenda protests loudly, arguing that “not all therapies categorized as ‘alternative,’ ‘nonconventional,’ or ‘unconventional’ are completely ineffective.” I suppose it depends on what you mean by “completely ineffective.” Personally, when I say “completely ineffective,” I mean “indistinguishable from placebo.” That’s the usual definition of “ineffective” in medical circles, and it is a description that applies to the vast majority of “integrative oncology,” including acupuncture, therapeutic touch, reiki, and the like. In the case of acupuncture, for instance, it doesn’t matter where you stick the needles or even if you stick the needles in at all (a toothpick twirled against the skin will do as well or better). In other words, in the case of acupuncture, the effects are entirely nonspecific. Indeed, Lawenda’s claim that these therapies are being used in an “evidence-based” manner is almost as overblown as the claims that quacks make; real “evidence-based” use of the vast majority of these modalities would be not to use them at all. They don’t work. That doesn’t stop Lawenda from advocating placebo medicine. But first he has to remonstrate with Cassileth over her characterization of “mind-body” medicine:
One area of controversy that comes up often in integrative oncology circles is whether or not there is an association between chronic stress and cancer-specific outcomes. Dr. Cassileth asserts that the association between chronic stress and cancer development, progression, and recurrence has not been definitively established. Those who support this view might categorize as quackery the claim that stress reduction (eg, through lifestyle changes, mind-body therapies, etc) can improve cancer-specific outcomes.
Those who believe that chronic stress and cancer are linked cite data that support this claim. In particular, there are clinical studies[7] that report improvements in cancer-specific outcomes in patients who are taught stress management techniques. Furthermore, researchers continue to identify chronic stress as a causative factor in numerous pathophysiologic processes that are known to be associated with the development, progression, and recurrence of various cancers (eg, stimulation of systemic inflammation and oxidation, impairment of immune function, increases in insulin resistance and weight gain, etc).[8]
Lawenda overstates his case massively. The evidence that improving “attitude” improves cancer-specific survival is of shockingly low quality. There’s just no “there” there. As I’ve said before, that’s not to say that psychotherapy and other modalities designed to improve a patient’s mood and mental state might not be useful. Certainly, they can improve quality of life, used in the proper situation. However, there just isn’t any evidence that is even mildly convincing that such modalities can improve a patient’s chances of surviving his cancer.
I also know that Lawenda is laying down pure, grade-A woo when I see him retreating into the favorite alt-med trope, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” and claiming that “many alternative therapies, once believed by conventional medical practitioners to be merely placebos, have now been shown to have proven therapeutic value (eg, acupuncture, numerous botanical extracts, meditation).” Well, no. Acupuncture has not been convincingly shown to have therapeutic value for any condition, and it’s no surprise that botanical extracts might be effective for some things; they are, after all, drugs. Adulterated drugs with lots of impurities whose potency can vary widely from lot to lot, but drugs nonetheless. He even attacks antidepressants based on more recent evidence suggesting that they might not be as effective as previously thought and in some cases might not be better than placebo, an idea ably countered by James Coyne.
Lawenda’s rebuke, however, is nothing compared to what comes next. Remember Cassileth’s dismissal of the findings of a “Yale surgeon” who claimed that support groups improved cancer survival? Here comes that Yale surgeon! Yes, indeed. It’s Bernie Siegel, and he’s pissed, proclaiming that The Key to Reducing Quackery Lies in Healing Patients and Treating Their Experience. Of course, his carefully cultivated image of being the ultimate nice guy and caring physician can’t be endangered; I only infer his annoyance from the tone of his response. I also infer a lot from the fact that, unlike Lawenda and Cassileth, who at least include some references taken from the peer-reviewed scientific literature to support their points, Siegel cites exactly one reference, and one reference only, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward. Lawenda cites mostly poor quality studies, but at least he tries by citing studies. Siegel, on the other hand, seems to think he is the Great and Powerful Oz (Dr. Oz or the Wizard of Oz, take your pick) and that you should just take his pronouncements on faith because he is so awesome. I will admit that Siegel probably has a point when he says that better communication could potentially reduce the incidence of cancer patients turning to quackery, but even making this reasonable point he overstates his case when he says that quackery would “diminish greatly” if doctors would just learn to communicate better. There’s a lot more to the appeal of quackery than having a doctor who can’t communicate, much of which wouldn’t even come close to disappearing, even if every doctor turned into a Bernie Siegel clone with respect to showing incredible empathy to patients.
Siegel then dives right in, relying on the sheer force of that awesome empathy of his to rip Cassileth a new one for daring to criticize his work:
Our emotions govern our internal chemistry, and hope is therapeutic. We know that laughter enhances survival time in cancer patients, while loneliness has a negative effect. When a Yale graduate student did a study on our support group members and it showed increased survival time for the group’s members, his professor told him that couldn’t be true and made him change the control group so that everything came out equal. Doctors don’t study survival and the power of the mind.
Which is, of course, utter nonsense, leavened with more than a little conspiracy mongering. Doctors have been studying the “power of the mind” and survival for a very long time. What Siegel doesn’t like is that they haven’t found that the mind is nearly as powerful as Siegel would like to believe. It’s a topic I’ve been writing about since the very beginning. There’s a reason for the central dogma of alternative medicine; it’s very appealing to believe that sheer force of will or thinking happy thoughts can heal us of serious diseases. Talk about the ultimate form of “empowerment”!
Siegel then goes completely off the deep end:
The mind and energy will be therapies of the future. I know of patients who were not irradiated because the therapy machine was being repaired and no radioactive material was reinserted. The radiation therapist told me about it because he was feeling terrible. I told him he didn’t know what he was saying to me. “You’d have to be an idiot to not know you weren’t treating people for a month—so obviously they had side effects and shrinking tumors, which was why you assumed they were being treated.” He said, “Oh my God, you’re right.” I couldn’t get him to write an article about it. I also have patients who have no side effects because they get out of the way and let the radiation go to their tumor.
Yes, an unsubstantiated anecdote about an apparently incompetent radiation oncology tech who didn’t notice that his radiation machine wasn’t actually delivering radiation trumps evidence, apparently. (One wonders how the machine still functioned if its source wasn’t re-inserted. Most such machines have a warning light or won’t turn on if the source isn’t properly in place.) Siegel’s article is so full of alt-med tropes and a heaping’ helpin’ of what can best be described as pure woo. Besides recommending his own books (one of which I actually have on my shelf but have not gotten around to reading), Siegel recommends The Energy Cure: Unraveling the Mystery of Hands-On Healing by William Bengston, The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles by Bruce Lipton, and The Psychobiology of Gene Expression by Ernest Rossi. Lipton, as you recall, is a cell biologist who abandoned “conventional” biology after having some sort of mystical revelation about cells that led him to conclude that God must exist and that “holistic” therapies work. I hadn’t heard of the other two, but Siegel describes Bengston thusly:
Bengston cured mice of cancer in a controlled study with the energy conducted through his hands. I was healed of an injury in the same way by healer Olga Worral many years ago. We definitely need to test potential therapies to verify whether or not they are useful, but we also have to keep an open mind to what might be possible, and we must understand that we are treating a patient’s experience and not just a disease.
It turns out that Bengston preaches exactly the sort of quackery that Cassileth quite correctly castigated, namely that energy healing can cure cancer! From his own website:
Can energy healing really cure cancer? Is it possible for you to heal someone’s terminal illness with your bare hands? Is the Western medical community ready for a fundamental change in its approach to treatment?…Dr. William Bengston invites you to decide by taking a journey with him into the mystery and power of hands-on healing. Drawing on his 30 years of rigorous research, unbelievable results, and mind-bending questions, Bengston challenges us to totally rethink what we believe about our ability to heal.
As there so frequently is after a book advertisement, there are blurbs with people saying how great Bengston’s book is. Guess who gave Bengston a plug. Yes, Bernie Siegel. I must say, I had no idea that Siegel was so deep into woo. Elsewhere in his article he says he had chronic Lyme disease and was helped by homeopathic remedies. He even says that he “knows they work” because of his “experience of having the symptoms of the disease alleviated.” It doesn’t get much quackier than energy healing and homeopathy. They are the two most ridiculous quackeries out there, and Bernie Siegel is promoting them both.
Siegel concludes:
I was a pediatric surgeon and a general surgeon, and I know how powerful my words were to the children—and adults—who believed in me. I had no problem deceiving children into health by labeling vitamin pills as medications to prevent nausea and hair loss, or telling them the alcohol (Drug information on alcohol) sponge would numb their skin (and of course, sharing this with their parents, who helped empower their child’s belief). The mind and attitude are powerful healing forces. The mind and body do communicate, so I work with patients’ dreams and drawings and have diagnosed illnesses from them. I have yet to meet a physician who was told in medical school that Carl Jung correctly diagnosed a brain tumor by interpreting a patient’s dream.
This may not seem related to the subject of quackery, but it is—because it is about how to train doctors so that they know how to provide hope and potential to patients and how to use the mind and placebo effects. Doctors’ “wordswordswords” can become “swordswordswords” and kill or cure patients. I know a man who had cancer and needed cataract surgery so he could enjoy the life that remained to him with restored vision. His health plan denied the surgery because they expected him to die within 6 months and didn’t want to spend the money. He died in a week. The Lockerbie Bomber was released by the Scottish authorities because he was dying of cancer. He went back home to the Middle East and survived for over 3 years— and that is no coincidence.
Note the mind-body dualism (“the mind and body do communicate”). Of course they do, because the mind is the brain, and the brain is in constant communication with the body! That doesn’t mean you can think yourself healthy. Remember how I discussed some time ago the way that this increasing emphasis on placebo medicine among promoters of “integrative medicine.” As I’ve said so many times before, the reason IM fans have taken this position is because they’re finally being forced to accept that high quality evidence shows that most alt-med nostrums rebranded as “CAM” or “integrative medicine” produce nonspecific effects no better than placebo. So these nonspecific effects get relabeled as the “powerful placebo,” as proponents of “integrating” quackery into real medicine pivot on the proverbial dime and say that’s how their favored therapies worked all along, by firing up placebo effects! It’s pure paternalism, as well, as I have discussed multiple times.
Siegel claims he’s “unleashing the healing power” in each of us, but what he is really doing is advocating a return to the paternalistic, unquestioned, shaman-healer so common in so many societies in pre-scientific times. In ancient Egypt, physicians were also priests; both functions were one, which made sense given how little effective medicine there was. Praying to the gods for patients to get better was in most cases as good as anything those ancient physicians could do. Also notice how, to Siegel, apparently the end justifies the means. Siegel can deceive patients about vitamins and alcohol sponges because he thinks it’s all for a greater good, really believing that he is so all-powerful a shaman-healer that his words alone can have a huge effect in curing or killing patients. That’s how he appears to be justifying the deception. He needs to get a clue (and some humility) and realize that, although placebo effects are important confounders in clinical trials, it’s a huge stretch to ascribe such awesome power to their effects. What Siegel is describing is magic, not science; religion, not medicine. Thinking does not make it so.
Unfortunately, Cassileth doesn’t seem to realize that, at their core, the “unconventional” aspects of the “integrative medicine” that she is promoting are little or no different than what Siegel promotes. In essence, “integrative medicine” is all about “integrating” magical thinking into scientific medicine. Acupuncture, “mind-body” interventions, reiki, and all the various quackademic medicine that has infiltrated medical academia relies on the same ideas, the same magical thinking, that we see on display from Bernie Siegel. Cassileth might think herself so much more rational and “evidence-based” by attacking the most egregrious cancer quackery, but she’s only fooling herself.
1,996 replies on “Quackademic medicine versus cancer quackery: The central dogma of alternative medicine is questioned by an advocate of “integrative medicine””
I had a thought when you were talking about the issue of “communication” and alternative practice, and you got to it later.
Remember, the one aspect of communicatin commonly used by quacks that is not used by actual doctors is that they LIE to their patients.
So when I hear Seigel claiming that traditional doctors need to improve their communication to get rid of quackery, what I hear him saying is that doctors need to lie to their patients.
Like he does.
This is absolutely fabulous woo, Orac, thanks much.
So, Bengston healed mice of cancer with energy transmitted through his hands? I myself once cured a mouse problem with the power of my hands, though the energies were transmitted via a heavy book that squashed a mouse that was lurking on my living room bookshelf.
Bernie Siegel, you’re too much! The healing power of laughter in cancer patients can easily be trialed – just let them read Siegel’s articles.
Side note: now that Ebay has banned sale of reiki services, I wondered if bereft patients could still turn to other forms of woo, such as oxygen therapy for their diseases. Might Ebay have banned “food grade” hydrogen peroxide, too?
Nope.
ht_p://www.ebay.com/sch/sis.html?_kw=1+gallon+3+H2O2+Hydrogen+Peroxide+w+John+Ellis+Water
Is Chronic Lyme even a recognised diagnosis, or is it one that could be real but potentially overapplied, such as CFS and some depression/anxiety types.
Before I comment on the post, I’d like to mention that a few weeks ago, in the wee hours, I chanced upon a documentary on television about Bob Marley- by pure happenstance, I tuned into the last days: seems he had consulted with a Dr Issels in Germany after receiving a poor prognosis from oncologists. It was terribly pathetic to see poor, emaciated Bob, weakly making his way through the snow, wearing a woolen hat, probably freezing. He stayed for months and felt he was improving but died upon his return to IIRC Miami.
Wouldn’t he have better spent his last days surrounded by family, friends, music and his drug of choice at home?
Bengston cured mice of cancer in a controlled study with the energy conducted through his hands. [Siegel] was healed of an injury in the same way by healer Olga Worral many years ago. We definitely need to test potential therapies to verify whether or not they are useful, but we also have to keep an open mind to what might be possible
Laying on hands may be an effective treatment in fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, but here in the real world that treatment method was debunked by a fourth-grade science fair project. So this particular treatment method actually has been tested, and found not to work. It’s all well and good to have an open mind, but not so open that it falls out.
Bengston and his amazing healing abilities (so powerful that they even healed the control group of mice) were discussed at some length in a recent comment thread. Anyone interested in reading more might find his article in Issue 2 of Edge Science of interest. BTW there is plenty of woo in those Edge Science magazines, varying from the intriguing to the ridiculous; a goldmine for those with a taste for such material.
Unfortunately, I am dreadfully familiar with most of this, courtesy of the Progressive Radio Network, where Bengtson, Siegal, energy healing and stress-as-causation are frequent topics; Lipton has appeared on various shows at the aforementioned festering sinkhole of un-reason. That ‘words/swords’ meme sounds awfully like the AIDS denialism belief that stress and fear following the diagnosis *kills* people, not HIV.
Recently, PRN’s head honcho has been lovingly recounting his storied history as a researcher and intuitive healer: seems that he did both anti-aging ( nutrition) and *psi* research at the Institute for Applied Biology with the blessing of Pauling himself.
He had a group of healers pray for cancer-ridden mice and *Voila!*- they were cured. Of course, there is much more drivel along these lines that I won’t trouble you with: it all boils down to the remarkable powers of the mind and spirit.
Gag.
Woo-meisters spread these ridiculous ideas in order to trump the scientific community- which they are not a part of and barely comprehend- at least in their audience’s minds. I believe that often both the proselytiser and the proselytised harbour a barely concealed hatred and envy of the more educated because they are not part of that *elitist* group, as they label them reproachfully. Read Natural News article by MIke and you’ll see what I mean. This animosity accounts for much of the venom we encounter: they reject the standard and conjure up a new aristocracy of pseudo-intellectual poppycock purveyors who enthrall their un-suspecting followers whose adulation fills in the missing ego- enhancement that rightly should have been supplied by the entire world’s respect. Fame, fame, fame** continually evades them so they seek out followers instead.
Yes, their research is rejected because it is truly *independent* and free of entrenched interests- and INDEPENDENT of sense, ethics and utility as well.
** my apologies to DB
There was a lot of discussion about Bengston and his followers right here on RI recently. Check the thread on using reiki on dogs–several reiki “masters” wrote in to defend and extoll Bengston, and of course the RI regulars ripped them to shreds.
By the way, Bengston holds seminars across the US and can teach anyone to cure cancer using energy healing in a weekend for a few thousand dollars. He also teaches “distance energy healing.” On the reiki thread someone in Toronto claimed she can do the same thing.
Partway through the article, going through that central dogma, I remembered a post of mine on Bruce Lipton, then I saw you mention his last name. He’s definitely into the positive thinking, and has some weird leaps in how he tries to justify it.
To wit.
Given that Bengston’s somehow able to cure subjects he isn’t even treating, aren’t we all under his care right now?
“many alternative therapies, once believed by conventional medical practitioners to be merely placebos, have now been shown to have proven therapeutic value (eg, acupuncture, numerous botanical extracts, meditation).”
It seems to me that the various plant-inspired chemo drugs (taxol, vincristine) were discovered without any help at all from alt-med. Unless there are *specific* botanical extracts from the alt-med pharmacopeia that later entered mainstream cancer treatment, this is like arguing that
(1) Ayurvedic concoctions contain heavy metals like lead
(2) the cis-platin drugs are platinum compounds
(3) Therefore conventional medicine recognises the basical validity of Ayurveda.
Given that Bengston’s somehow able to cure subjects he isn’t even treating, aren’t we all under his care right now?
If you’ve *read his papers*, you’ve probably undergone the requisite quantum entanglement to come under his healing umbrella.
The Lockerbie Bomber was released by the Scottish authorities because he was dying of cancer. He went back home to the Middle East and survived for over 3 years— and that is no coincidence.
It is certainly no coincidence that the Lockerbie bomber claimed to have only weeks to live when he was applying for compassionate release.
Libya is not the ‘Middle East’.
AND that they did so because CAM practitioners demonstrated their effectiveness.
Also worth noting that the bit you quoted is straight-up false. Nobody actually says that herbs are “merely placebos.” It’s a pure straw man.
“So, Dirac called me the other day with the usual sales pitch. I had to tell him, ‘Paul, my wavefunction is so collapsed that the bras are all imaginary anyway.'” [/phyllisdiller]
I, for one, am perfectly willing to believe that chronic stress leads to some diseases, and that techniques like meditation can help remove stress and reduce the risk or impact of those diseases. Hypertension might be one such disease.
Naturally, this would need to be verified on a disease-by-disease basis. While I suspect that chronic stress could cause, say, back pain, TMJ, and various sleep disorders, I’ve yet to hear adequate evidence that it leads to influenza, type 1 diabetes, or cancer just to name a few.
“Can energy healing really cure cancer?” sure its even got a name. Radiationtherapy. Conventional medicine 1, quackery 0
Dokter bimler, to be fair, some people consider Libya part of the Middle East and some don’t.
I literally LOL’d at this. 🙂 Ah Orac, always enjoyable to read even when I get so angry at some of the antics you blog about.
Supporting positive thinking and calmness. But then, why not just meditate or read a book?
Seriously she’s for biofeedback… sigh.. that was debunked in my high school psych class.
This sounds like an intro to some sort of psychic reading TV show… or a magic show. Either way.
Regarding the alleged effects on patients of doctors giving them a poor prognosis, here’s a counter-anecdote.
My mother had been ill for years, and in 1981 her sister finally talked her into going to a doctor. The doctor was surprised she could walk into the office because her congestive heart failure was quite severe. He warned her that she had no more than 6 months to live. There was little they could do but prescribe diuretics (or at least that’s what I recall as a teen going off to college a long time ago).
Every time she went to the doctor, she was in worse shape than the last, and they estimated she’d die within 6 months. This went on for nearly two decades, and after the first few years she stopped paying attention to their prediction. The last few years, she was looking forward to an end to her suffering from peripheral neuropathy, arthritis, kidney disease, post-polio syndrome, etc. She was not fighting to live, though I think she mainly just took things day by day.
I know anecdotes aren’t data, but this is a pretty good counter to people who say that doctors kill people by saying have only so much time to live, and that people die because they don’t think positive thoughts. (Yes, I’m sure people will say she was in pain because of negative thoughts. But she kept as active as she could, despite the pain, and was a voracious reader who sewed most of her own clothing.)
some people consider Libya part of the Middle East and some don’t.
Some people are WRONG. Harrumph.
@Orac
I believe it means making it easier for the patient to move about by lightening their wallet.
Added to Kathryn – a wonderful man at my church was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive prostate cancer at stage IV (he had had a clean PSA only two months early, suddenly got very sick and a scan found prostate cancer with bone mets and I think the others were liver and lung). There were several times he himself swore he was going to die and would be sick for several weeks until new treatment would restabilize him.
He actually lived just over two years after diagnosis. He was always on the edge with chemo doing its best to just give him more time. Though it wasn’t the same life he had before, it gave him peace to get as much time as possible with his wife, manage and plan his own funeral, spend time with my husband and I after our marriage, etc.
@ Militant Agnostic:
I venture that it might also include helping them to get in touch with their own ‘spirituality’, to become less materialistic..
so they won’t be too upset by the wallet -lightenong process.
Pardonnez-moi, LIGHTENING.
Here we go again.
The biggest group perpetrating quackery against cancer patients is oncologists promoting chemotherapy, which has now been shown to promote the spread of cancer.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22863786
Marg, what part of that paper indicates that chemotherapy promotes the spread of cancer? I’d wager you haven’t even read it.
@marg
Have you even read the paper? Do you know what the results mean?
Judging by your ignorant comments, probably not.
This is being bandied about here and on other sites to prove that chemo is evil. I would suggest that anyone that thinks that is what is says should read the whole study and not just press releases.
What part of “promoting tumor cell survival and disease progression” is unclear? Chemo interacted with the existing microenvironment in a way that was harmful.
“The expression of WNT16B in the prostate tumor microenvironment attenuated the effects of cytotoxic chemotherapy in vivo, promoting tumor cell survival and disease progression. These results delineate a mechanism by which genotoxic therapies given in a cyclical manner can enhance subsequent treatment resistance through cell nonautonomous effects that are contributed by the tumor microenvironment.”
If one were to read the entire quoted bit of abstract, let alone the full paper, it would become clear that it’s describing the chemotherapy being less effective than otherwise.
Apologies; hit Submit accidentally before I was done.
One would also notice that the thing which was “promoting tumor cell survival and disease progression” was “the expression of WNT16B,” not the chemotherapy.
But I guess basic reading comprehension isn’t some peoples’ strong suit.
Marg, you do understand that there is a difference between “promoting tumor cell survival and disease progression” and “promoting the spread of cancer,” right?
@AdamG
If anything else, it highlights a process that certain tumor cells can use to become resistant to chemotherapy,k a process that, since it is more fully understood, can now be better researched and used to develop more effective therapies to stop this process.
But of course, ignorant individuals like marg cannot understand this. Of course,, reading comprehension was never a strong suit for him/her.
Yes, absolutely. The authors of the study are actually affiliated with my department, and I’m friendly with several of them. I can’t wait to show them how the woo-peddlers are twisting their research, I’m sure they’ll get a kick out of that.
Attenuated–I don’t think that word means what you think it means, Marg.
Could someone please enlighten me on the criteria for successful chemotherapy. My understanding is that a drug is deemed successful if it shrinks a tumor by a certain percentage for a certain period of time. I would like to know by what percentage and for what period of time. I would also like to know the correlation between shrinking tumors and long-term survival.
@AdamG
I would say that “promoting disease progression” would mean promoting the growth of cancer.
I knew a man who grew a large inoperable tumor WHILE receiving aggressive chemotherapy for bladder cancer. After this tumor was discovered he was given an aggressive last ditch combination of chemotherapy and radiation which essentially killed him. I also know two women with supposedly aggressive cancers, one of them breast cancer, who said no to conventional treatment and are still alive 15 years later with the cancer still in their bodies. While you call me an ignoramus there are things about cancer that you do not know that would fill several encyclopedias. And trust me, the day is coming when pharmaceutical companies will be looking at multi-billion dollar class-action suits for promoting cancer drugs which they knew to be deadly and ineffective, and oncologists will be lucky if they don’t get dragged into it.
@Rose
Answer my questions about what the criteria for a successful chemotherapy drug are and then we can talk.
@Marg
Your anecdotes are heartwarming. Where are the studies to back them up?
@ Rose
Furthermore, I don’t think the anecdote of the man who grew a large tumor while undergoing chemotherapy and died while receiving further treatment is the least bit heartwarming.
Alrighty then, the majority of your anecdotes are heartwarming and still not backed up by studies. i am sad when anyone dies of cancer but what do you have to offer that is proven to work better than chemo?.
Tell it to Burzynski.
@beamup
What is meaningless about a question asking what the criteria for a successful cancer drug are? I would think that is a crucial question for cancer research. If there are different criteria for different cancers, I would like to know that too. There are people on this discussion board who have the answers to this question.
Don’t bother to respond if all you have to offer is innuendo and ignorance.
Goalpost shift much? Or could it be that you simply have no response to the fact that you’ve conclusively been shown to simply be making up lies with no basis in reality?
I’m pretty sure that your questions are quite meaningless, too, though this isn’t my field. I don’t believe that any hard-and-fast rule such as you demand exists. It’s all relative to what kind of cancer, how advanced, what other options are available, etc. And tumor shrinkage isn’t necessarily the endpoint being used – survival times are more often the metric.
Pop quiz – what was promoting it, and relative to what baseline? The answers do not support your claims.
@marg
Since when is “promoting tumor cell survival and disease progression” and “promoting the spread of cancer”, which you seem to keep dodging, marg.
Change goalposts much?
And my anecdote. I had a friend of mine whose father had colon adneocarcinoma. An aggressive treatment of radiation and chemotherapy was able to get his cancer into remission, and he was able to see his son graduate high school.
So my anecdote trumps your anecdote.
Either way, you maliciously assume that since chemo didn’t work on your so-called “friend”, it must be totally ineffective, which is a logical fallacy.
And of course, the old “pharma shill” gambit, which is a classic sign of a troll quack.
No one has yet answered my question about what the criteria for a successful chemotherapy drug are.
“Disease progression” in cancer usually leads to metastases. To suggest otherwise is to split hairs.
Insults don’t answer questions and don’t constitute meaningful discussion.
Marg, do you by any chance know one Jonathan Chamberlain?
You got an answer. And you have signally refused to even acknowledge any of the questions you have been asked, or detailed explanations of why you are completely wrong.
At this point you’re approaching the level of a three-year-old sticking his fingers in his ears and screaming, “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”
Yet you stand up for Gonzalez, whose idiocy demonstrably worsens outcomes.
The point you’re missing, Marg, is that this article’s findings don’t argue against the use of chemotherapy. They argue for better chemotherapy. The authors themselves acknowledge this when they state
No treatment is 100% effective. That there are researchers working to improve the treatment’s efficacy is not an indictment of the entire treatment.
@beamup
You are still resorting to insults without providing a single meaningful criterion.
@Narad
I am not acquainted with Jonathan Chamberlain. I also don’t know what bringing up Gonzalez has to do with the statement that disease progression in cancer usually leads to metastases. Agree with the statement or disagree. Don’t sidetrack.
@AdamG
Kudos to the authors for looking for better chemotherapy.
Quoth Marg:
Quoth Beamup:
Yes or no – do you admit that you were completely wrong about that paper claiming that chemo promoted the spread of cancer?
So Marg, do you see now why your statement
is a baseless swipe based on a complete misinterpretation of a high-profile study?
It isn’t sidetracking: supporting Gonzalez is advocating disease progression.
@AdamG
I stand by the first half of the statement and amend the second to “which has now been shown as potentially ineffective or detrimental depending on the surrounding microenvironment”. I don’t see how any chemotherapy can now be administered without further studies on how each and every drug affects/is affected by this microenvironment.
@Beamup
There may be no hard and fast rule, but there have to be guidelines for particular cancers. I would like to hear from someone who is familiar with these guidelines and can give examples.
I think we should all keep in mind that we are arguing with someone who, on the last thread they participated in, said:
Marg does not have the ability to critically analyze scientific evidence because he/she does not understand basic concepts about the scientific method and study design.
Marg, which drug(s) were used in this study?
Can you summarize the authors findings regarding how these drugs “affect/are affected by this microenvironment?”
Your grounds for which are?
Still false; a correct statement would be “the effectiveness of which varies depending on the surrounding microenvironment.” Chemotherapy works. This enhances our understanding of the factors contributing to how well it works, nothing more.
When we already know that they are effective, it’s perfectly reasonable to continue to administer them while further research progresses on how to make them even more effective.
As a pure diversion from the complete and utter failure of your claims, I gather.
What do you recommend instead?
@Beamup
“When we already know that they are effective”. These would be criteria for which I am asking. By what criteria do we deem them effective?
@Narad
A groundbreaking 14 year study was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in December 2004 called “The Contribution of Cytotoxic Chemotherapy to 5-year Survival in Adult Malignancies”.
Researchers at the Department of Radiation Oncology at the Northern Sydney Cancer Centre studied the 5-year survival rates of chemotherapy on 22 types of cancers in the US and Australia.
They studied 154,971 Americans and Australians with cancer, age 20 and older, that were treated with conventional treatments, including chemotherapy.
Only 3,306 had survival that could be credited to chemotherapy.
Study Results: “The overall contribution of curative and adjuvant cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adults was estimated to be 2.3% in Australia and 2.1 % in The USA”
Study Conclusion: “As the 5-year survival rate in Australia is now over 60%, it is clear that cytotoxic chemotherapy only makes a minor contribution to cancer survival. To justify the continued funding and availability of drugs used in cytotoxic chemotherapy, a rigorous evaluation of the cost-effectiveness and impact on quality of life is urgently required.”
Hey, who am I?
What do you recommend instead? A cost-effectiveness study?
Marg, please read this.
@AdamG
Read it. To change the percentage of effectiveness from 2% to 8 or 10% does not make chemotherapy much more impressive. In no other avenue of life would we consider that kind of success rate acceptable.
I am still waiting for someone who knows to give me examples of what some of the criteria for effectiveness are.
@AdamG
If the pharmaceutical industry were not barking up the wrong tree, we would have had better results by now, considering that they’ve been barking up this particular tree for at least half a century.
What’s the alternative, Marg? 10% doesn’t seem so bad when the alternative is 0%.
Still waiting on these:
Which drug(s) were used in this study?
Can you summarize the authors findings regarding how these drugs “affect/are affected by this microenvironment?”
Hi Narad,
Someone has swiped your nym…
Try jumping off a cliff and flying. If you don’t fly, then clearly you weren’t trying hard enough.
Marg,
After only 70 years we have effective treatments for some types of leukemia, improved 5 year survival of breast cancer patients to over 90% and cure more than 85% of testicular cancer, to name but a few successes. By comparison, herbalism and other traditional approaches have been trying to find a cure for cancer for thousands of years with absolutely dismal results.
A groundbreaking 14 year study was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in December 2004 called “The Contribution of Cytotoxic Chemotherapy to 5-year Survival in Adult Malignancies”.
As pointed out by AdamG above, a systematic rebuttal of that study is available to anyone who bothers to search the R.I. archives.
One crucial point being that the ‘ground-breaking’ study somehow left off *all the varieties of cancer* for which chemotherapy is most effective. Another point being that ‘5-year survival’ is simply not appropriate for breast cancer (among others) where delayed relapse is the rule rather than the exception, and adjuvant chemotherapy produces a greater survival-rate improvement *after five years*.
Marg, let’s pretend for a moment that you are a grade school teacher. Teaching, say, math. Got that?
Okay, let’s move on with this thought experiment. Suppose you have a particular analogy that you teach all your students which is meant to help them understand fractions. And for most of your students, the analogy does indeed work, and most of those students “get it.”
Okay. Now suppose you find out that for some students, maybe 1 in every 1000, the analogy doesn’t work. Those rare students just don’t understand the analogy and as a result, they are actually worse at fractions after you’ve presented them with this analogy.
Okay. Now, with those as the facts in place, how fair is it for someone to ignore the 999 out of 1000 students that are helped by your analogy, focus on the 1 out of 1000 that your analogy confuses, and characterize you on that basis as “promoting the spread of ignorance”?
Now you might protest, “wait a minute! We have discussed no data on how these recently-discovered side effects of chemotherapy compare in strength to the cancer-killing effects of the chemotherapy – how can you compare it to the specific figure of ‘helps 999, harms 1’?” That’s a very good point! Except that you, by bringing it up, show yourself to be a big hypocrite. Because you showed NO interest in “how do the side-effects compare to the cancer-killing effects in strength?”; you talked about these side-effects as if they were the ONLY effects. Whether that was deliberate deception on your part or merely ignorance, it fatally undermines your credibility.
Really?
So where did you pull that number from? It’s not in the link.
Say we have a treatment that results in 80% of patients surviving a disease with high mortality. Say we have a second treatment that, in conjunction with the first, results in 90% of patients surviving. According to you, we would reject the second treatment because the success rate is an “unacceptable” 10%.
I can’t see what Marg is on about… whether the available chemotherapy options are actually counterproductive (as she first claimed) or simply not good enough (as she’s claiming now), the answer is the same. No-one is forcing her to take them. If she develops cancer, she is free to die with as little therapy as she likes.
If the problem is that medical researchers are wasting their money by barking up the wrong tree, all she has to do is prove them wrong by producing the better chemotherapy herself.
@Krebiozen
Say you have a type of breast cancer that kills women in 8 years. It takes four years for it to become palpable, so through breast examination it is discovered in the fifth year, but with a mammogram it is discovered in the first or the second. Prior to mammograms, the women with this cancer die three years after the discovery of their cancer; after large scale mammography is introduced the women live 7 years. Nothing about the cancer has changed, but there has been a huge increase in 5-year survival, giving the illusion that something has improved when in fact nothing has. The same can be said about early detection of prostate cancer. You have no way of knowing how much the percentages you cite are due to people living longer simply because their cancer was detected earlier and not because of any treatment they might be receiving.
@Antaeus Feldspar
Your numbers are way off.
BTW note the title of the study, which is “Treatment-induced damage to the tumor microenvironment promotes prostate cancer therapy resistance through WNT16B.” In particular note the words “Treatment-induced damage”.
Duly noted, thanks (I mean, I don’t claim ownership or anything, but the distinction is there).
And in case anyone is interested, here is the answer to my question about criteria for cancer drug approval:
http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Drugs/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/Guidances/ucm071590.pdf
@ Marg:
Now you may not believe this, but cancer researchers have actually considered the phenomenon you describe, given it a name and measured it.
@ Narad:
I had a peek at MarkH’s blog and there is no comparison to the original. But I wonder if the ‘nym lifter might be someone who holds a grudge against you…. you-know-who .
However, the spelling and grammar aren’t totally atrocious, so maybe not.
Please explain, in detail, what lead-time bias has to do with any position that you have advanced previously.
Oh, right the Swampjack. I’ll never forget Ol’ Whatshisname. I dunno, at 7:20 his time, he might not have been fully in his cups. Or maybe he’s been fervently working the chapbook or something. Beats me.
@Narad
What’s with this habit of assigning essay questions? I began with the statement that the biggest purveyors of quackery in cancer treatment were oncologists promoting chemotherapy drugs. Pointing out that increased survival rates could be due to earlier detection and not to any drug intervention is entirely consistent with that position.
@Marg: Your non-answer straightforwardly indicates that you have attempted to change the subject. You have floridly demanded answers to your own questions as a control attempt, so perhaps you could unclench long enough to answer a simple one.
@Narad
I have responded. That is my answer; it is internally consistent, and it is consistent with my position in this discussion. End of story.
Let me rephrase Narad’s question for you. What evidence do you have that early detection was solely responsible for the cancer survival rate? The difference between you and a scientist is that you ask questions, while scientists look for answers.
The Anderson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania has no problem with Reiki as an adjunctive treatment:
http://www.oncolink.org/treatment/article.cfm?c=4&s=19&id=466
@Gray Falcon
I did not say that early detection was solely responsible for the cancer survival rate but merely posited a scenario in which it could have been.
@Denice Walter
It would be interesting to know how they figured out a ratio.
Marg, what, specifically, is the treatment?
I’ve asked 3 times now. You continue to cite that study, but you do not understand its methods or conclusions. You want us to be shocked by these results but you can’t even identify what drug or drugs they used.
Marg, hypothesis is the second step of scientific inquiry, after observation, not the last. Humans are not infallible; after a hypothesis is formed, one must test it to be sure. If it fails, there’s nothing to be upset over, just move on to the next one.
Uh, you do realize, don’t you, that that’s why RCTs are so complex and are designed to try to control for lead time bias? That’s why clinical trial subjects are stratified by stage, for example. Differentiating lead time bias from a real effect on cancer outcomes is difficult for screening tests, but not as much for treatment. The patients have all been diagnosed with cancer and grouped according to clinical-pathological stages for which the expected survival is known, all before undergoing treatment.
And neither do I if reiki is correctly described as a spiritual/religious modality and its practitioners are treated the same way as chaplains, allowed to see patients, but no claims made for them being able to actually treat anything.
@Orac
Glad to know that.
@Gray Falcon
I see that answer as a non sequitur
@Orac
My comment about lead time was not for current experiments or for experiments going forward. My comment relates to claims of improvements in survival as compared to a time when early detection through the use of mammography was not widespread.
And as I pointed out even before you made that objection, Marg, you did not even acknowledge THE EXISTENCE of cancer-killing effects of chemotherapy, MUCH LESS try to assign any kind of number or any form of quantification to them, MUCH LESS try to provide any reasonable assessment of how those cancer-killing effects compare in strength to the effects recently discovered that promote tumor cell survival. That makes you A BIG FLAMING HYPOCRITE when you try to say “Antaeus, the true figure isn’t 99.9% : 0.1% !” Whatever the true figure is, it’s even farther from the false ‘figure’ of 0% : 100% that an unwary observer would have taken away from YOUR wholly biased misrepresentation of the paper’s conclusions.
I am not TRYING to provide figures, I am trying to explain the PRINCIPLE. I am trying to explain to a WILLFULLY IGNORANT PERSON (this would be you, Marg) that “One of the effects of chemotherapy is that some tumor cells are actually helped to survive because their cell-repair mechanisms get triggered, and disease progression in these cells is heightened” and “The effect of chemotherapy is to trigger the cell-repair mechanisms of tumor cells, thus resulting in disease progression in the patient” are NOT SYNONYMOUS STATEMENTS; anyone who takes a paper that concludes the former and announces its conclusions as the latter is at best completely misunderstanding and at worst deliberately deceiving. To say “chemotherapy promotes the spread of cancer,” which I will remind you again is EXACTLY WHAT YOU SAID VERBATIM, is a big fat freaking lie unless you prove that whatever the chemotherapy does to promote the spread and survival of tumor cells WHOLLY OUTWEIGHS what chemotherapy does to limit and destroy tumor cells. Did the paper you quote come to any such conclusion? NO. Did you provide independent evidence of any kind to justify such a conclusion? NO. Did you even acknowledge that there was any need to consider the cancer-killing effects of chemotherapy, i.e. THE WHOLE FREAKING PURPOSE FOR WHICH WE ADMINISTER CHEMO IN THE FIRST PLACE AND THE ONLY REASON WE USE IT, in assessing whether the overall effect of chemotherapy is “the spread of cancer”? NO, you did not.
If I sound a bit snippish, my apologies. That was not my intent. My intent is TO SHAME YOU for being either A BIG FAT LIAR or AN IDIOT. I already TRIED being patient with you, Marg, and what was the result? You took EXACTLY the argument that I explained to you that you could not use in good faith, and you used it anyways. Where the hell do you get your nerve?? You big mewling hypocrite. “You failed to accurately represent the comparative strength of this effect in relation to the other, Antaeus.” Yes, and YOU failed completely to ACKNOWLEDGE ITS EXISTENCE so kindly take all your criticism of figures that are “way off” and SHOVE IT.
@Antaeus Feldspar
I am not easily shamed or bullied, the latter of which is what you are trying to do. From my perspective for the purposes of the patient it is entirely sufficient that “One of the effects of chemotherapy is that some tumor cells are actually helped to survive because their cell-repair mechanisms get triggered, and disease progression in these cells is heightened” to lead to the worsening of their condition and ultimately death. These chemo-resistant cells will then be the ones that go on to divide, creating one heck of a chemo resistant tumor. And where the hell do YOU get the nerve to try to bully me because I disagree with you?
Marg, your perspective is irrelevant. It is not what the authors conclude, so any personal interpretation you use is faulty.
No, bullying would be if I was saying “You should quit posting here, because I don’t like your point of view.” That’s far different from shaming you for your pathetic use of a double standard, where it’s a big problem if I don’t provide figures for the relative comparison of two factors that are accurate enough for your liking (in a thought experiment, no less) but it’s okay for you to completely ignore the existence of one of those two factors for your relative comparison.
It really is a pity you aren’t more easily shamed. It might have led to you actually being a decent person, if you had had conscience and shame to guide you.
Except that is not the conclusion of the paper and it is not a reasonable extrapolation from the conclusions of the paper, it is ENTIRELY PULLED OUT OF YOUR AR5E. It would be like me saying “I just discovered that there’s a service fee for setting up a Certificate of Deposit at my bank; that proves that setting up a CD at that bank leads to losing money!” If the service fee is one dollar and the interest I can expect to gain from the minimum deposit amount over the term of the CD is more than one dollar, then no, it does not lead to “losing money” as any sane honest person would understand the phrase. You as someone outside that description will doubtless have trouble comprehending that.
Not because you disagree with me, Marg, but because you withhold information and argue dishonestly and maintain a double standard. THAT is why I shame you.
You do seem pretty shameless, Marg. Antaeus was angry because he shouldn’t have to explain to you why lying is bad.
@Darwy
The authors may not be saying it, but given that the reason cancer is so deadly is the proliferation of multiple-drug-resistant cancer cells, they should certainly be asking the question whether the mechanism they discovered is implicated in this. Not to ask the question is dishonest.
@Antaeus Feldspar
If chemotherapy helped 999 and harmed 1, I would have zero problem with it. The odds are rather worse.
@ Marg:
Unfortunately I have to leave and can’t go into detail BUT
risk/ benefit analysis is considered with ALL medical procedures and treatments. It is. Furthermore, it is studied mathematically not by personal factors.
If you decide whether to buy something or not, you weigh the pros and cons casually: SBM has to do a whole lot more to justify using ANY procdure and doctors have to also weigh this information when they prescribe and discuss it with patients who have CHOICE.
Pehaps someone can follow my lead.
@Narad
I am not sure why you pointed me to Jonathan Chamberlain, but it’s interesting stuff. I wonder how the statistics would change if everyone took charge of their own healing.
http://www.fightingcancer.com/docs/cancersurvivors.pdf
This statement is false.
@ Marg,
I don’t know what you mean, but if everyone would try to cure cancer without the help of a doctor, specialised in cancer, I think less people would survive.
Cancer isn’t a battle one can win if one has enough fighting spirit. One needs luck and good doctors. Especially the latter.
The “why” is in the acknowledgments. Just a lark. As for Chamberlain himself, I think his endorsement of detoxifying foot baths really says it all.
@Narad
In what way?
Perhaps you could be more specific.
Marg,
We know the answer to that question since oncologists are now seeing cases of untreated cancers that they had previously only seen in old textbooks, thanks to people believing the sort of nonsense Chamberlain writes. For example, the following comment from a cancer surgeon on a UK medical professional site.
Here’s a an interesting look at one of the cases Chamberlain cites as a success story for alternative cancer treatment.
Did Marg just say that the authors’ conclusions are wrong, and that they should change their results because *it’s just so obvious that chemo is bad*?
Narad,
I think Marg was asking you why you think Chamberlain’s endorsement of detoxifying foot bath says it all.
Marg – it’s because detoxifying foot baths don’t actually do anything to remove heavy metals or other toxins from your body. Someone less charitable than myself would call them a scam (and many have). You might check out the article titled “Do you really need to detox?” in Consumer Reports.
@Flip
Not change their conclusions but follow up on their study.
@Mephistopheles
What are you on about? There is far more to what Chamberlain says than foot baths. I didn’t even see a reference to foot baths. This is your MO, ladies and gentlemen, pick out on small item to stick your claws into and then rip it to shreds.
@Narad
Again, the link you provided about the patients cited by Chamberlain refers to one patient among twenty-something.
I have seen what chemo does when it doesn’t work. You destroy the person and then shrug and say, “sorry, it didn’t work, there is nothing more we can do. You can go home and die now.”
I wonder how the statistics would change if everyone took charge of their own healing.
They’d change, all right, but not in the way you seem to assume.
The fact that the man can’t think is not a “small item.”
the reason cancer is so deadly is the proliferation of multiple-drug-resistant cancer cells
I hate to have to point this out, but cancer is deadly even without chemotherapy.
If the authors aren’t saying it , it is probably because they did draw that conclusion from the evidence. This study does not support your point. Do you have one that does? If the answer is no then you really don’t have a leg to stand on.
Marg,
I’m puzzled by this notion that people with cancer who die despite the best treatment available die of the treatment, not of the cancer. It seems to me a very dangerous idea that is becoming more and more widespread, that cancer patients do better with no treatment at all. Why do you think the cancer destroyed the person, not the cancer? For just one example, take a look at the Gonzalez pancreatic cancer clinical trial; those on conventional treatment lived three times as long as those on Gonzalez’ ‘treatment’ (essentially no treatment at all). When you consider that pancreatic cancer has probably the worst prognosis of all cancers, I think this speaks volumes.
I meant “Why do you think the treatment destroyed the person, not the cancer?” Funny how typos leap out at you after you submit the comment…
And in the meantime, you are citing the paper as your source for what you admit the authors didn’t say. How do you justify that, Marg? Are you really so egotistical that you say, “Well, I’ve never published a paper in my life, but I know what these researchers should have concluded, so I’ll just announce my own personal views as being the conclusions they came to” and think that’s legitimate? Oh, that’s right, you’re hard of thinking, so I’ll give you the answer: No, that’s dishonest.
And again, Marg, I don’t give a damn what you have “zero problem” with or don’t, because your judgment reeks like month-old tuna salad. In case I haven’t already explained this to you five or six times, my point is that your assessment methods fail. Given a chemotherapy method that killed 99.9% of the cells in a tumor and left 0.1% stronger, your assessment of that method would be “oh! Look at these 0.1% of cells, and ignore all the others! Obviously this method promotes the spread of cancer!” That is all we need to know to know that your assessment methods blow chunks.
And the fact that you present the flawed conclusions that your flawed assessment methods led to as if they were the conclusions of the paper means one of two things: you couldn’t understand what the paper actually said OR you deliberately chose to lie about what the paper said. It’s one or the other, Marg, but whichever one it is, you’re a fool if you think you have any credibility left.
I think “the authors may not say it ” tells us all we need to know about Marg. She will jump, no parachute to a conclusion that meets her beliefs regardless of the evidence.
I regret to report the result of an inadvertent recent experiment: month-old tuna salad is pretty neutral-smelling, at least with jarred mayo. Never, ever, buy a seven-pound ham if you live alone, though.
@Marg
I’m sure the authors will do what they think is necessary to follow up on the conclusions of their study. And so will others.
However… You said this:
Darwy said this:
You said this:
To which you seem to be implying (and being wonderful in objecting every time someone tries to understand what you’re saying by accusing us of not understanding you) that their *own* conclusions are wrong because you think something else. If they haven’t said something in the conclusions, it’s not because they’re pretending the data didn’t say something and they don’t want to be going against the grain. They’re not saying it because it’s *not what the data showed*.
You’re the one starting off with a conclusion (chemo = bad) and working back from there.
The authors are saying that chemo is effective *but that it can be made to be more effective*. As others have pointed out, you can’t use the study based on *what you think they should have said instead*.
If you want to go on about chemo=bad, find a different source/publication/experiments that show it.
I’m going to call you Pegamily Rebooted. You sound alike.
I think in science, detail counts.
[citation needed]
@Narad
Hundreds of thousands of cancer patients have experienced variations on the theme of “there is nothing more we can do” and “put your affairs in order”. If you want a citation, check out Jeff’s story in chapter 5 of Leigh Fortson’s “Embrace, Release, Heal”. Obviously your lot are not going to bother with scientific studies on the people who have been destroyed by chemo and sent home or to hospices to die.
It is unclear to me why you aimed this in my direction, but given that you have already confused me with Krebiozen above, I don’t suppose it matters. You don’t have anything better.
shrug and say, “sorry, it didn’t work, there is nothing more we can do. You can go home and die now.”
I’m not sure quite what alternative Marg has in mind. Possibly the hospital should lock the uncured cases away in basements and not let them go home to die.
Hundreds of thousands of cancer patients have experienced variations on the theme of “there is nothing more we can do” and “put your affairs in order”.
Evidently not enough oncologists are lying to their patients — they should be telling them ‘Yes! You’re getting better and better!’
@Narad was meant to be @Flip. Reach chapter 5 of Leigh Fortson’s “Embrace, Release, Heal” anyway. Or better yet, read the whole book.
@Antaeus Feldspar
If you have chemo that kills 99.9% of cancer cells and leaves 0.01% super cells, guess what that 0.01% is going to do. Yippee, hurray, multiply!!! And don’t give me that I don’t know what I’m talking about because patients with AML are given exactly that as a reason for needing the most stringent chemotherapy protocol possible.
@Herr Doktor Bimmler
I know two women diagnosed with supposedly aggressive cancers, one of them breast cancer, who are still alive 15 years after their initial diagnoses, with no chemotherapy or radiation, with the tumor still in their bodies, both of whom used diet and other alternative therapies to maintain their health. I know of people with the same cancers, diagnosed more recently, who obediently went through the standard protocols, and are now quite dead.
@Narad
Sorry, that would “read chapter 5” …
@Narad
Sorry, that would be “read chapter 5” …
If you cannot make the case yourself, and you certainly have not, I assure you that I have both more pressing and more interesting things to deal with than sales pitches.
Marg,
Perhaps there is some point to your anecdotes. Then again, maybe there is not.
@Narad
I can certainly summarize. Chapter 5 of Leigh Fortson’s book is about “Jeff”, who had multiple myeloma, and came to the end of his extensive and ineffective treatment when he refused to have experimental chemotherapy that would have been injected directly into his spine and would have left him wheelchair bound if he survived. After he refused the treatment he was told to go home and put his affairs in order. Someone suggested he should go to see a man called Ben who lived in the desert. Ben treated him an hour a day and taught him a style of meditation in which he visualized cleaning up his spine. About six weeks after he began treatment with Ben, he was cancer free. This happened in 1991 and “Jeff” was still alive and free of cancer when Fortson’s book was published last year. According to some information on the internet, this “Ben” was Bill Bengston’s teacher.
Scoff all you want. Fortson’s book is not only about Jeff but also about a dozen others who healed from cancer against all odds using alternative treatments, many of them _after_ they came to the end of the road with conventional therapies, after their doctors told them “there is nothing more we can do”.
But of course you have better things to do than waste your time on things that challenge your conventional way of thinking. So go ahead and do them.
Hundreds of thousands of chemo patients have experienced variations on the theme;”Congratulations, you have reached five years.” or ten or fifteen.
Someone suggested he should go to see a man called Ben who lived in the desert.
It’s hard to be a hermit these days. There you are, living in the desert, trying to enjoy some piece and quiet, but there’s a whole stream of visitors knocking at the door of your shack in the hope of one of the hermits will be called Ben.
Fortson’s book is not only about Jeff but also about a dozen others who healed from cancer against all odds using alternative treatments
Do they *all* have made-up names like “Jeff”?
If you have chemo that kills 99.9% of cancer cells and leaves 0.01% super cells
99.9% + 0.01% =/= 100%. Just saying.
And once again, Marg, you are completely avoiding the real issue.
You claimed that the paper was a source for the claim that “chemotherapy promotes the spread of cancer.”
The way that a reasonable person would interpret that phrase is that cancer spreads faster and becomes worse when chemotherapy is administered, as compared to what it does when chemotherapy is not administered.
Those are NOT the conclusions of the paper.
I’ll repeat that again.
Those are NOT the conclusions of the paper.
For you to claim that “chemotherapy promotes the spread of cancer” and cite the paper as the source of your claim is dishonest.
You may in fact yourself hold the opinion that chemo does no harm than good. That’s fine, if you want to believe it.
What’s not fine is telling the lie that “the researchers who wrote this peer-reviewed paper concluded that chemo does more harm than good!” when their paper concluded no such thing.
And as long as you continue telling that lie, and keep on dragging red herrings across the trail to try and distract people from the fact that you lied, people will continue to be angry with you.
I did not ask you to summarize the book that you are now for some reason pitching, I suggested that you actually make the case that you have been advancing, which is that, in general, chemo is worse than no chemo, modulo shooting coffee up your ass (Chamberlain, oddly, suggests that flaxseed oil and coffee are interchangable for this purpose, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how this conclusion is arrived at).
Allow me to get this out of the way as well:
Marg, I strongly suspect that you would lose your ever-lovin’ sh*t if you really understood what’s “inside” my head. “Conventional way of thinking”? I’m willing to assert that the perceived world is isomorphic to the unconscious mind. One can leave the reservation and nonetheless arrive at very nearly the exact same conclusions, which do not involve the globular-blobular pudding-mind that seem to be so proud of.
^ “that you seem”
Oh boy! I come back 10 hours later after an exceedingly pleasant day alongside the river, looking at outsider art, trendy shops, crumbling 19th century buildings, renovated 19th century buildings and sampling fabulous halal curry (after drinks) now it’s late and WHAT DO I FIND?
Oh Marg! I have been told countless stories about all of the people who conquered cancer without SBM, courtesy of alt med proselytisers: I’ve read articles, seen films, heard interviews and *exposes* BUT I have YET to see any one of them produce ONE study that illustrates the differences of which they speak.
On one hand, SBM has thousands of meticulous, complex studies that can be investigated and criticiqued and the alt med bastion has *stories*.
Let me know if you want a copy of Bern Porter’s Found Poems and I’ve Left; I have one each remaining from the stockpile.
@Pegamily Rebooted… er, Marg
It’s up to you to provide citations. Not book references: peer-reviewed journal citations.
Anecdotal data: many of my family received many bouts of chemo (one even for different cancers throughout their life), all enjoyed years if not decades of extra life, with limited side effects. These were all elderly people, but all died due to natural causes or other illnesses, not chemo/cancer. See, my anecdotes equal your anecdotes. And that’s just my immediate family! (Oh, if only I could tell the show-stopper anecdote: but that gives away my ID)
I really don’t need to read a book to discover that cancer is a bad thing and that medicine is improving all the time. Or that some people die and some don’t, or that life is way more mysterious than we think. What I would like is some actual scientific statistics.
Show me the statistics that chemo is not helping the majority of people, that the risk/benefit comes down on the side of “better not try it”, or that you have any kind of proof at all outside of anecdotes. Give me something I can look up in Pubmed. (I can’t afford books at the moment, particularly just for a one-off read… Pubmed’s cheaper)
By the way, I see what you did there. Nice sidestep away from the point, which is that you lied, or attempted to put words into the authors’ mouths. Either the study supports your point or it doesn’t; either you think the authors are wrong or you don’t.
So I repeat:
I’ll give you another attempt:
Is this study truly proving your point? Or are you calling the authors liars?
Antaeus is right. You’re just trying to distract from the fact that you’ve been caught out.
Oh for… can you at least be original? Post some data, we’ll look. But we’re picky. We don’t want anecdotes or books, try some CDC (or other country) stats or Pubmed or something…
(To the regulars… Note the similarity between Pegamily and Marg. Both refuse to offer peer-reviewed citations. Both argue over semantics whilst refusing to admit that what they said is what they meant (or being vague so they don’t have to be pinned down). Both like distracting you away from the proven lies. Both like books as references. Both like the nirvana fallacy. Is this a sock puppet? Or should I dig out my post to Pegamily about how books are not science? … Incidentally, this is why I’m annoyed about ghost writers and alt-med. There are any number of people who want to “tell” their scare/survival story – that’s not science, that’s literature)
Obviously your lot are not going to bother with scientific studies on the people who have been destroyed by chemo and sent home or to hospices to die.
Obviously not… but wait, here is a scientific study of terminal cancer patients at a hospice! Apparently “our lot” are going to bother after all!
Carter, Helen, McLeod, Rod, Brander, Penny and McPherson, Kath (2004) Living with a terminal illness: patients’ priorities. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 45, (6), 611 – 620. (doi:10.1046/j.1365-2648.2003.02953.x).
— It’s the first study that came to mind, on account of living with one of the authors. There are many many many others.
I knew I had heard of the hermit Ben who lived in the desert.
You tell me.
@ Narad:
I thank you for your kind offer but I was refering to more visually-oriented outsider art: a long time ago ( in a galaxy far away?), I knew a fellow who used to set fires and another who produced bizarre *tableaux vivants* – in which I was often cast- more recently, I look at textural essays involving unlikely materials- like making trees out of steel nails and building room-like sculptures that move ( but only when no one is observing), torturing fabrics et al.
-btw- one of the idiots I survey calls himself the “New Mr Natural”.
@ Antaeus:
re moisture farm.
You got it, Mister!
I’m considering “The New Pooperoo” myself.
@ flip:
One thing I’ve noticed is the naivete of alt med advocates who trash a study unaware that most of their objections have already been considered, studied and dismissed DECADES ago by real scientists. This is especially true about SMI.
They continue beating the same old dead horse that has long since vaporised and now exists only as a memory. I venture that the reason that the memory of the aforesaid deceased equine hasn’t been eradicated is because woo-meisters continuously resurrect it frequently, intensively and emotionally every chance they get. Some of them even produce documentaries on the subject.
@ Narad:
Especially apropo because of the coffee enemas.
Let me be more clear: apropo for a woo-meister.
Forgive me: haven’t read the comments just yet, but I just saw this in my twitter feed…
An Immune Disorder at the Root of Autism
nytimes.com/2012/08/26/opinion/sunday/immune-disorders-and-autism.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=general&src=me
@Denice
I suspect it’s partly an ignorance of where to find that info. Then one day they happen across, say, RI, and then post a comment. Time is also an issue: who has the time to search blogs for previous content – especially when they think they are privileged to some inner knowledge that “it doesn’t work” (in the case of SBM).
I agree that it doesn’t die because proponents don’t let it: but it also doesn’t die because the people looking for info are possibly looking in the wrong places or just not bothering to look at all.
An Immune Disorder at the Root of Autism
I have no great confidence in an author who follows the principle of “include the most dramatic claims available, even if you backtrack and admit that the claim is wrong within the same sentence“:
Diagnoses have increased tenfold, although a careful assessment suggests that the true increase in incidences is less than half that.
“firstborns seem to be at greater risk”
Seemingly not.
“the whipworm, which is native to pigs, has anecdotally shown benefit in autistic children.”
— This is just the form of inspiration they need at AoA!
“the whipworm, which is native to pigs, has anecdotally shown benefit in autistic children.”
– This is just the form of inspiration they need at AoA!
But then, Herr Doktor, they would have to admit to Doing It Wrong with those parasite ‘cleanses’! (Although I suppose we should be grateful, if it would put an end to bleach enemas.)
@ herr doktor bimler:
All of us10th generation, candy-@ssed, elitist city-dwellers need to get back to Nature! And get infested with good old-fashioned natural parasites! THEN we’d be healthy.
But wait. I am healthy!
It’s Nature that makes me sneeze and itch.
@hdb
I only skimmed the article, but it seemed to me to be an opinion piece which wanted to vaguely point to immune disorders without actually coming out and saying it. Ie. wanting to appear reasoned and balanced but adding the subtext of “why so much chronic illness?” that anti-vaxxers are so fond of.
There has been an attempt at beachhead.
Going back to this study, as you all attack the ultimate conclusion of a 2.1% contribution of chemotherapy to overall 5-year cancer survival, are you also raising questions about the numbers given for individual cancers?
Are we to be reassured by the 0% contribution in the case of pancreatic, kidney, bladder, and prostate cancer? The 1% contribution to survival from colon cancer? 1.4% for breast cancer? 0.7% for stomach cancer? 2% for lung cancer?
No wonder the authors are questioning the validity of chemo.
Advance a demonstrably superior option or bugger off.
We are not looking for demonstrably superior options because we are putting all our resources into _this_ option, because apparently many of us have our heads stuck up our buttholes looking for light where it doesn’t shine. If biochemical approaches worked, you would think that after 70-odd years we’d something better to show for all the money and effort sunk into this.
Although I have spent most of weekend in idle diversion, I vaguely recalled a certain post, so prior to mixing myself a drink, I typed “chemotherapy effective” into the searchbox *et voila*! What do you know? A wealth of results came up, including the one I wanted: “So chemotherapy does work after all” ( Dec. 2011) in which our esteemed host explains how woo-meisters spread mis-information about chemoherapy including the infamous “2% gambit” and why that is not based in reality.. oh he can say it so much better than I can because he’s an expert and like it or not, they do exist.
At any rate, Cheers!
Marg: something better to show for all the money and effort sunk into this.
Seems to me that there’s actually been an awful lot of money (from patients) & effort (persuading patients to part with money) gone into ‘alternative’ treatments for cancer, over the last 70+ years. You’d think by now that there would be some actual published peer-reviewed data demonstrating how superior those alternative treatments actually are.
Also, what Denice said above.
The numbers are cited are for individual cancers, not for cancers overall. @Denice, show me the studies that disprove those individual numbers. Show me where the authors of this study recanted.
Orac’s (and others’) objection to this study was that it excluded cancers such as leukemias where the results were more positive and therefore came up with an overall low percentage. Mind you the 5-year survival rate for AML is not so hot either, is it?
Marg, there is a truism that was often invoked at NANAE, and I suggest that you ponder upon it: There Is No We. Moreover, if there were, you sure as shit wouldn’t be the spokesperson, so I further suggest that you quit dancing around.
Once upon a time, there was a doctor who wanted to prove that energy healing was real.
He performed experiments where, if the experiments were done correctly and the hypothesis was true, the control group of mice should have all died and the experimental group should have had a statistically significant number of survivors.
The results he actually got, instead, were that his control group all survived with the exception of one, which was not statistically different from the experimental group, which also survived with the exception of one.
This meant that the doctor had screwed up his experiment.
But the doctor was unwilling to admit defeat. Whether he was simply pathetically insistent upon fooling himself, or whether he just wanted badly to fool others, we do not know.
We do know what he did next, though, and that was to spin one hell of a whopper about what the experiment results meant. Instead of admitting that it was a failed experiment, the doctor pretended that it was actually a SUPER-SUCCESS where the control group got QUANTUM ENTANGLED with the experimental group and therefore the experimental results meant the doctor had proved energy healing to work on BOTH groups.
There were actually people gullible enough to swallow that load of bullcrap.
And one of them is Marg.
So, Marg, when you say that biochemical approaches to cancer haven’t given sufficient results and don’t show enough promise of further results to be where we should be concentrating our research, I say your opinions on the matter amount to birdcrap, because that’s what your ability to distinguish between real science and wishful thinking amounts to.
I’m just curious. Is the Marg posting on this thread the same Marg who wasted lots of bandwdith tossing out silly insults, misunderstanding jokes, and avoiding addressing questions back in late June on the https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2012/06/05/reiki-versus-dogs-just-being-dogs/ post (along the Reiki Master Judith)?
I am intrigued by language, and the unusual spelling caught my eye (again).
None of that changes the dismal numbers for chemotherapy.
Marg, you turkey, you’re still pulling the same craphead manuevers! No one is saying the authors of the study have “recanted.” No one is saying that chemotherapy is a magic bullet that can alleviate every form of cancer.
What we are saying is that, contrary to your idiotic claim that “chemotherapy promotes the spread of cancer,” chemotherapy is one of the most successful anti-cancer methods we actually have, and while not every cancer can be successfully treated with it, many can. Oh, yes, we know that you think energy healing is a much better alternative, but that is because on the subject of energy healing you are a gullible chump who swallows nonsense that an intelligent seventh-grader would spot as a load of fetid dingo’s kidneys.
So no one is really interested in hearing you whine ungratefully (and lie) about how awful chemotherapy is. It’s the best we’ve got so far, and while we’d gladly drop it in a heartbeat for an alternative that gave better results and caused less hardship to those taking it, that alternative has to be REAL. Not your cockamamie energy healing crapola where you look at an experiment that clearly failed and claim it actually proved both energy healing AND non-locality.
Which, none too surprisingly, are vastly better than yours from a Billy Beane sort of approach to player evaluation.
If as much time, money and effort were spent on researching energy healing as has been wasted on the biochemical alternative, it would be doing a heck of a better job by now than chemotherapy does.
C’mon, let it all out, honey.
Marg
I’ll take that as an affirmative answer to my question.
I’m pretty sure I suggested this to Judith, not you, back in June, so I’ll toss it out to you, now, too:
Go write some grants. Get back to us after you’ve done the studies.
if as much time, money and effort were spent on researching energy healing
Also, see my previous comment. Many ‘alternative therapies’ are big business in their own right – look at the supplements industry as an example – so how come they aren’t funding research to demonstrate their effectiveness? CAM proponents claim what they offer is effective, so over to them to support that claim with published, peer-reviewed data (none of those anonymised heart-warming stories, thank you).
If as much time, money and effort were spent on researching energy healing as has been wasted on the biochemical alternative, it would be doing a heck of a better job by now than chemotherapy does.
I missed the part where mainstream science intervened to stop Marg from investing her own time, money and effort on researching energy healing.
Obviously your lot are not going to bother with scientific studies on the people who have been destroyed by chemo and sent home or to hospices to die.
I am still intrigued by this earlier claim that the medical establishment is simply not interested in patients for whom chemotherapy is ineffective. The Frau Doktorin does a lot of volunteer work at the local hospice, so I occasionally meet the non-existent researchers there (not to mention the dedicated medical & nursing staff). They are all generous-souled individuals who would probably not approve of me inviting Marg to die in a fire.
I see Marg is avoiding my questions. And not posting citations as requested instead of books…
Are they though? Can you cite their actual words where they do that?
If rockets worked, you would think that after 70-odd years we’d have something better to show for all the money and effort sunk into space flight. And look: we’ve only been to the moon a couple of times!
(Erm, Alison said it better: homeopathy, energy healing, bloodletting, cupping, acupuncture… so many things have had plenty of time to show evidence. Heck, evolution has had the same amount of time as many of these and look how well it’s been supported by evidence!)
You’re the one with the hypothesis. But of course, all you can do is point to *one* study that doesn’t say what you think it does, and where you insist that the authors mis-wrote their conclusions.
And why you won’t find anything about *recanting* is because the others don’t say what you think they do.
Which you don’t seem to want to cite. Funny, I asked you to post some stats. Where are they?
Ah yes, the “there’s no money to research alt-med” gambit. Yawn…
Where’s the stats Marg? How can I possibly change my mind if you refuse to post any real references?
And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride them.
(OT, English is my second language, and I never really understood this saying – still, I found it quite evocative)
Isn’t there a branch of the NIH, the NCCAM, with a annual budget of 125-million dollars, whose role is to investigate alternative medicine?
(sigh – that budget could be enough to finance annually about sixty 20-people, cancer-searching academic teams like my former lab)
I believe the only “alternate” protocol NCCAM managed to confirm after 20 years of inquiries is massage as pain relief.
Which, considering, is not that alternative. Nor that news.
I guess the searchers there (and the politicians behind the foundation of the institute) were not interested enough in challenging their conventional way of thinking.
@heliantus – in the legal world, if you want to be a litigator, you work for a a law firm, if you’re interested in reviewing contracts & having a 9 – 5 job, you go work for a corporate legal office…..I guess in Medicine, if you don’t want to stretch yourself, or are just looking for a paycheck, you go work for NCCAM – I mean, how hard can that research be, really? It isn’t like you have to worry about finding actual, “evidence” right?
*one* study that doesn’t say what you think it does
The goal of trolling is to put less time & effort into provoking people you provoke than they spend responding to your provocations. Or so I hear from a friend.
So you can’t expect Marg to *read* the papers she waves at you; that would take time and effort, and miss the whole point of the game.
@Flip
Gladly. Here it is:
“As the 5-year relative survival rate for cancer in Australia is now over 60%, it is clear that cytotoxic chemotherapy only makes a minor contribution to cancer survival. To justify the continued funding and availability of drugs used in cytotoxic chemotherapy, a rigorous evaluation of the cost-effectiveness and impact on quality of life is urgently required. Morgan, G. et al. (2004). Clinical Oncology 16, 549e560”
For the percentages, see the tables on pp 3 and 4.
http://chrisbeatcancer.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/contribution-of-chemotherapy-to-5-year-survival.pdf
Marg,
So 1690 patients in the studies looked at owed their 5 year survival to chemotherapy? How many owed 1 year additional survival to chemotherapy I wonder? Even one of the examples they give of chemotherapy being oversold, in breast cancer, seems a lot better than nothing to me:
A ‘number needed to treat’ of 29 for 5 year survival doesn’t seem so bad, does it? Do you think it would have been better if these patients had died? If not, what exactly is your argument, because it isn’t at all clear to me. Also worth noting is that survival isn’t the only important factor in cancer. Quality of life is also important – again if you look at the Gonzalez trial, not only did the patients receiving chemotherapy live 3 times longer (though apparently according to Marg increasing survival by less than 5 years is pointless), they also had a much better quality of life than those treated using the Gonzalez protocol.
@Krebiozen
Yep, 1690 out of 72,903. What happened to the other 71,213?
@Krebiozen
“Quality of life”? I’ve seen the quality of life chemo can give. Puking guts out, no energy, joint pain, kidney failure; in comparison having no hair is just a minor, cosmetic detail. In another thread a commenter said “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy”. And yes, I recognize that this is not everyone’s experience, but it should not be _anyone’s_.
Re: one additional year. How do you know that the people who lived one year lived that additional year because of chemo? They could have lived that year without chemo too.
How wise you are to know the outcome of things that never happened…
More Oracian analysis : Does chemotherapy work or not? The “2%” gambit ( Sept 2011).
It appears to me that the ‘2%’ gambit is part of a programmed campaign by alt med to accomplish many goals, including:
frightening people about SBM treatments,
illustrating how ‘useless’ SBM treatments are,
painting the medical establish as cruel, greedy and disingenuous,
portraying themselves as those who will ‘enlighten’ and ‘save’ the general public heroically.
Orac discusses how the oft-quoted study doesn’t disentangle curative/ adjuvant chemotherapy and doesn’t include cancers that use chemotherapy successfully as a primary treatment; it doesn’t include other measures of outcome, I note. Orac notes another alt med PR gem: that doctors themselves ‘refuse’ chemotherapy- based on an old study. They neglect to tell you that a new study doesn’t show the same results.
However, if you take the word of woo-meisters, it would seem as if Gonzalez and Burzynski** offer a superior advantage to chemotherapy ( note: Dr B, despite his press, does use chemotherapy and *exclusively* so);
to those who carp about SBM’s so-called 2%:
what are alternative therapies’ effect? 30%? 70%?
Oddly, I don’t seem to recall seeing *their* numbers.
If you scan a so-called documentary about alt med cancer ‘cures’, read a book by Suzanne Somers, see articles or listen to rants by web woo-meisters, you will hear amorphous stories about ‘cures’ without any numbers or percentages included: one of the idiots I survey says “all” while simultaneously hinting that SBM produces NO cures.
This is similar to anti-vaccine propaganda wherein negatives are exaggerated and positive effects are omitted.
Sounds like a black-and-white paint job with a broad brush.
2%? Why not just say zero?
** or Burton, Issels, Gerson, Revici
Let me guess: they were destroyed by chemo and sent home to die.
@JGC
See my response to @Flip, above (9:38)
Here is a sampling of headlines in early August. Clearly your lot have a lot of people to educate out there:
Headline – Time magazine:
How Chemotherapy May Trigger Tumors’ Resistance
Headline – The Week:
How Chemotherapy May Trigger Tumors’ Resistance
Headline – Fox News:
Chemotherapy can inadvertently trigger cancer resistance
Headline – BBC News:
Chemo ‘undermines itself’ through rogue response
Headline – Digital Journal:
Study: Chemotherapy can make cancer worse
Headline – Medical News Today:
Chemotherapy Can Inadvertently Encourage Cancer Growth
@Narad
Probably.
I’ve seen the quality of life chemo can give. Puking guts out, no energy, joint pain, kidney failure; in comparison having no hair is just a minor, cosmetic detail.
Not only are you stupid, but you’re a liar and behind the times. My mother just had chemo for breast cancer, and didn’t throw up once. She lost some — not all — of her hair, and only had one major incident at all, which was because she contracted a bladder infection. Another friend of mine who was also undergoing chemo at the same time didn’t throw up, didn’t lose much of her hair at all, and had no issues aside from some fatigue. I have fatigue and I’ve never had cancer or chemo.
Also, the study you just threw out claiming that it proves chemo doesn’t work is looking at adjuvant chemotherapy only, which is to say supplemental chemo that is secondary to the major treatment. It does have a higher treatment-to-benefit ratio than primary chemotherapy, but since you never know if you’re going to be that one person in 29, it’s still probably a good idea.
Also, to actually rebut your argument on the lack of merits, even assuming arguendo that there really was such a thing as vitalistic energy, you just said that energy healing doesn’t work as well as chemotherapy, so why in hell should we discard something that works in favour of a clunky prototype anyway?
Jesus you’re stupid, and you don’t even know it. You’re a walking Dunning-Krueger Effect.
We can all play teh anecdote game–I’ve also seen the quality of life chemotherapy did. Gave a friend an additional four years with his young children, one more wilderness trip with the college friends he’d been kayaking with every summer for 29 years, the time to wrap up his personal career to his own satisfaction, etc. Gave my mom nearly 6 more years with me and my family. Cured a cousin (testicular cancer).
Is chemotherapy a guaranteed cure for every type of cancer? Of course not. One can cherry pick specific cancers where it proves less likely to result in long time survival as the authors of the study you keep shoving in our faces did but it would be dishonest (either wilffully or through ignorance) to argue that therefore chemoptherapy is only effective in 2% of all cancer patients who receive it and therefore should be abandoned in favor of natural ‘therapies’ that have never been shown to be effective at all.
@Narad
On April 16, 1996, Amalie Bigony died at Palmetto General Hospital, in Hialeah, Florida. As this story … told by Mrs. Bigony’s daughter, Vicky, makes clear, the cause of this South Florida woman’s death was chemotherapy, although physicians originally attempted to lay the blame on ovarian cancer. ..
‘In April 15th of 1996, my mother passed away-exactly 10 days after undergoing chemo-therapy. She had been told by her surgeon that she only needed six treatments. My mother died after just one.
Her doctor finally conceded that the chemotherapy killed her and the amended death certificate is so annotated. It was a shock to us all. Who would have thought one treatment of chemo could be fatal? That’s why I feel what happened to my mom should be made public.
Undergoing chemotherapy is not to be taken lightly. Even though many people are aware of the terrible side effects, such as nausea, weakness and loss of hair, how many really understand that the drugs used for chemotherapy are toxins, deadly poisons that kill all your cells, not just cancer? According to one doctor regarding my mother’s case, it is not uncommon for patients to die from chemotherapy. I wonder why people are not aware of this fact? We certainly were not, and even after the doctor conceded to us that the chemotherapy had killed my mother, he still tried to downplay what happened by saying, “The cancer was so advanced, your mother would not have lived long anyway.”
In late December 1995, my mother had a severe pain attack in her abdomen. A sonogram determined she had a mass on her right ovary. Follow-up tests confirmed it was cancerous. Her CA-125 count was at 400 [editor’s note: normal CA-125 levels are less than 35]. Due to some delay, surgery was not scheduled until March 6, 1996. A full hysterectomy was performed and the mass removed.
However, since the tumor was touching on four different areas, the surgeon insisted that my mother undergo chemotherapy. My mother was hesitant and asked about alternative treatment, but the surgeon said that was not anoption. He added that she needed to have only six treatments of chemotherapy.
On April 4 and 5, my mother underwent the chemotherapy. The drugs used were Taxol and Platinol. Three days later, on Monday, April 8, my mother fainted and was rushed to the emergency room. She was released, but on April 10 was again in the emergency room because of severe pain. No blood was drawn and after being given a shot of morphine, my mother was released and again sent home.
On Friday, April 12, my father and I took my mother in to see her physician. After a brief examination, she was, to my surprise, not hospitalized. I thought the doctor might hospitalize her or at least run more tests. In my mind, my mother was more than just weak; she could not walk and could hardly stand. We even had to borrow a wheelchair from the doctor’s office for her to use. However, our not being doctors and never having been around anyone who had to undergo chemotherapy, my father and I had to trust the doctor’s decision. We took my mother home.
Two days later, on Sunday, April 14, my Mother was again rushed to the emergency room-one final time. She was barely conscious. At first the doctor thought she was having a reaction to the drug Darvon, which my mother was taking for pain.
However, when the blood work came back, the doctor explained to me that my mother had no more white blood cells [editor’s note: a common and sometimes lethal side effect of chemotherapy is white blood-cell depletion], and her prognosis was poor.
The next 24 hours were a nightmare, with one crisis after another. First, my mother had to be intubated [the insertion of a tracheal tube] because she was having problems breathing. When she was finally stable enough to be transferred to the critical care unit, her heart rate had shot up to 180. It took four hours for a cardiologist to finally come. Later, my mother ran a high fever.
Her own doctor and oncologist never came until the following Monday morning, but my dad and I stayed and never left my mother’s side, holding her hand and talking to her. During this entire time, my dad and I had no idea how critical my mother’s condition was or what was causing her heart rate and temperature to soar. Unbeknownst to us, my mother’s kidneys had also begun to fail. Even though the cardiologist had mentioned the term “septicshock” [shock associated with overwhelming infection], I was unable at the time to fully comprehend what it meant.
At 8 a.m. Monday morning, my Mother’s doctor and oncologist finally came. But by then, there was not much they could do and so had to call in a heart specialist as well as an expert on infectious diseases. A procedure was attempted whereby a tube was inserted into the lungs with the hope of draining fluid which had accumulated. However, not long thereafter my mother’s heart stopped beating altogether.
Quite simply, my mother died from septic shock brought on by chemotherapy. The chemotherapy had wiped out her white blood cell count, leaving her at risk for infection. This led to the release of endotoxins [fever-producing agents of bacterial origin causing her blood pressure to drop]. Without receiving the necessary oxygen to survive, her organs then began to fail. Yet all along, her heart was desperately trying to pump harder until it, too, failed.
I know if my mother had known how lethal chemotherapy is, she never would have consented to treatment. I hope what happened to my mother is enough to stop others from choosing chemotherapy.
I will never forget my mother’s words as she got weaker and weaker: “No more chemo.” My dad and I did not know at the time how true her words would be.’
@Marg
I saw your post at 9:38. See Denice Walter’s at 10:56.
Then perhaps read Orac’s full blog entry from Sept 2011.
Yes, we’ve finally gotten down to cut-and-pastes from Life Extension magazine.
Re: Amalie Bigony
Is chemotherapy, like all other medical interventions, known to sometimes have side effects? Yes.
Are some of the known side effects of chemotherapy, like all other medical interventions, sometimes serious? Yes
Does that mean chemotherapy only contributes to the survival of 2% of all patients who receive it? No.
@ Denice
That’s a rather succinct and accurate description of Alt-med grievances, yes.
Cue Marg’s last painting job, quoting four headlines which look like the same press article just copy/pasted from one news organism to the next. News tend to be propagated this way, you know.
The last headlines are more on topic, but that we wanted was peer-review articles. Press releases are not the same thing, the data is missing or incomplete.
But your argument from popularity is noted.
Actually, as a matter of fact, you are right. Part of the scientists’ job should be to educate the public on their findings, and we could do a better job.
As the saying goes, knowing is half the battle.
@JGC
You are really not looking at the numbers, are you? Orac disputes the overall 2% finding. I am conceding to him on the charge that authors left out blood cancers where chemo is the primary method of treatment, but that still leaves the numbers for the individual cancers, which with the exception of one or two are dismal.
The study was not done by so-called “woo-meisters” but by medical professionals. It was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Here are comments from some other scientists/medical professionals:
…as a chemist trained to interpret data, it is incomprehensible to me that physicians can ignore the clear evidence that chemotherapy does much, much more harm than good.
Alan C Nixon, PhD, former president of the American Chemical Society
Cancer researchers, medical journals, and the popular media all have contributed to a situation in which many people with common malignancies are being treated with drugs not known to be effective.
Dr. Martin Shapiro UCLA
Many medical oncologists recommend chemotherapy for virtually any tumor, with a hopefulness undiscouraged by almost invariable failure.
Albert Braverman MD 1991 Lancet 1991 337 p 901, “Medical Oncology in the 90s”
Most cancer patients in this country die of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy does not eliminate breast, colon, or lung cancers. This fact has been documented for over a decade, yet doctors still use chemotherapy for these tumors.
Allen Levin, MD, UCSF, The Healing of Cancer
…chemo drugs are some of the most toxic substances ever designed to go into a human body, their effects are very serious, and are often the direct cause of death. Like the case of Jackie Onassis, who underwent chemo for one of the rare diseases in which it generally has some beneficial results: non-Hodgkins lymphoma. She went into the hospital on Friday and was dead by Tuesday.
Dr Tim O’Shea in TO THE CANCER PATIENT
Seems there are doctors out there who don’t buy into chemo. Convince them first, then try to convince me.
@Narad
Regardless of where it comes from, the woman died, and her doctors conceded that it was from her chemotherapy.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19111700
The BBC’s report was clearly not cut-and-paste., and you can see how it would lead people to believe that chemotherapy leads to a worsening of cancer:
“Around 90% of patients with solid cancers, such as breast, prostate, lung and colon, that spread – metastatic disease – develop resistance to chemotherapy.
Treatment is usually given at intervals, so that the body is not overwhelmed by its toxicity.
But that allows time for tumour cells to recover and develop resistance.
In this study, by researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle looked at fibroblast cells, which normally play a critical role in wound healing and the production of collagen, the main component of connective tissue such as tendons.
But chemotherapy causes DNA damage that causes the fibroblasts to produce up to 30 times more of a protein called WNT16B than they should.
The protein fuels cancer cells to grow and invade surrounding tissue – and to resist chemotherapy. “
@ Marg
Ah.
My sincere condolences for your loss. I am sorry that chemotherapy didn’t helped your mother.
Sometimes, medicine (and science) fails.
One problem with cancer, you see, is that cancer cells are your cells, too.
So yeah, targeting the rogue cells and leaving the normal cells alone is sort of tricky.
And this will likely be the case with any alternative treatment you may think of (alternative as “other than mainstream chemo”).
Unless you have something specific of cancer cells to target. We are getting here, slowly, for some cancers, with more or less success.
Um, no, this has not been demonstrated in the slightest. The underlying assertion is that a single administration of paclitaxel destroyed, in toto, Ms. Bigony’s leukocytes, which were just dandy otherwise. This is the part where you provide some actual documentation.
Ah, comprehension fail on my part, Marg was quoting someone’s else testimony. I retract my condolences.
Cold comfort, but that’s likely true.
A number of cancers are benign and trying to treat them is doing more harm than good. There are constant re-evaluations of the consensus for treatment for prostate tumors, by example. Colon tumors are another example.
On the other hand, a number of cancers are known to be quickly fatal. Pancreatic cancer (see Steve Jobs) is one of them. Ovarian cancer isn’t far down on the list, IIRC.
I concur with Narad, “This is the part where you provide some actual documentation.” I don’t reject the idea that this woman had her life shortened because of the chemo.
But.
For a proper risk/benefit assessment, one need to know the chance of the risk, and the chance of the benefit.
[Citation needed], please.
@ Marg
My cut-and-paste sentence was referring to the way News media are propagating information, by picking up that has been published by the concurrent and re-publishing it.
Or more simply: next time you point us to a news article, just pick one, no need to give four or five versions of the same.
Yes, this is a problem, a serious one, and not a new one. We have something similar going on with antibiotics, and to some extend with herbicides.
A few scientific teams are trying to find solutions, be it new molecules, or different protocols. Not enough teams, in my opinion, but I could be biased.
I agree that having a cancer resistant to chemo is worse than having a cancer which is not, but I’m not sure I agree with the implication that chemo should be dropped altogether.
When a soldier run out of ammo to shot at the enemy, the situation is worsening for him, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he shouldn’t have fired in the first place.
Believe me, if there was something better than chemo, all of us here would love to hear about it.
Or just that a treatment is ineffective? Again, do tell.
But as pointed elsewhere, we are picky: we need data to convince us that we are not running after shadows.
@Narad @Heliantus
Is it common for ovarian cancer to destroy lymphocites? Answer: NO.
Is chemotherapy known to destroy lymphocites?
@Narad @Heliantus
That should have been leukocytes.
No, toots, it doesn’t work that way. You have a single, inadequately documented, facially implausible, 16-year-old, fatal adverse event, and you think it’s golden.
Adverse events are all around if you just care to open your eyes and look.
So are good outcomes.
Your continuing retreats into the stupidest pouting imaginable are not advancing your argument.
@ Marg
Sigh. Everything you do has potential adverse events. Even breathing air or drinking water
(to start with, there are all the dust micro-particles you draw in, which do some damage to your lungs or guts; let’s add allergens and the occasional pathogen micro-organism for more serious adverse events)
If something has biological effects, then part of the effects are likely to be undesired, or even undesirable. Salicylic acid (a natural molecule which lead to aspirin) is an egregious example of this – it’s a painkiller, an antipyretic, an anticoagulant, and it has a tendency to trigger stomach ulcers. Not everybody need all of these effects, especially the ulcer part.
The question, again, is risk/benefit. How often does that adverse event happen? How often, by comparison, the patient is getting better for taking the medicine?
We agree that as Orac has indicated the authors failed to include outcomes for the cancers where chemotherapy has been found most efficacious during their analysis. Do you also agree that Orac’s other points (the author’s failure to distinguish between adjuvant and curative chemotherapeutic regimens or to consider other measures of outcome other than survival time (e.g., quality of life) are correct as well, and as a result a blanket statement that chemotherapy is only successful 2.1% of the time isn’t supported by this study?
…but that still leaves the numbers for the individual cancers, which with the exception of one or two are dismal.
Yes, for the particular set of ‘individual’ (I.e. cherry-picked )cancers presented chemotherapy does not perform as well as we’d all wish it would.:clearly, however, it still performs better than no chemotherapy at all.
What evidence is Dr. Nixon suggesting we’re ignoring, exactly? Be specific.
Which common malignancies, what drugs, and what evidence demonstrating they are ineffective is Dr. Shapiro referring to here? Again: be specific.
Are you seeing the trend here? Yes, there are “doctors out there who don’t buy into chemo”, but unless they can provide credible evidence that they’re correct not to buy into chemo all these cut and pastes represent is an argument from authority at best, and an argument vox populi at worst.
Show us evidence, rather than cut and paste random quotes, if you want anyone to take your position seriously.
Marg,
Perhaps their lives were extended by 4 years? If you include cancers that have a very short average survival and use 5 year survival to assess treatment efficacy, you will get a very distorted picture. For some cancers conventional treatment is not very effective, it’s true. My reaction is to hope that current and future research will find better treatments for the many thousands of different types of cancer that have proved to be more complex and difficult to treat than anyone expected 40 years ago, and to make a donation to a cancer charity. You appear to assume that this (relative) failure is because scientists are too stupid and have been trying all the wrong approaches, when in many cases those approaches have been tried and are utterly useless. Your attitude seems to me to be hopelessly naive and more than a little offensive to the thousands of doctors and scientists who have devoted their working lives to solving this conundrum.
Oops. Working link to Vickers 2009.
Did anyone notice, in Marg’s lovely story about her friends with breast cancer, that she carefully worded that they refused chemotherapy and radiation therapy and then went on about they did dietary changes, etc. Wonder if they happened to have the curative SURGERY which is the primary treatment for breast cancer? (Gee, Marg, given what our host does for a living, you think we don’t know a fair amount about how breast cancer is treated from his many posts?) After all, I’m sure Marg is well aware that surgery (lumpectomy preferably, greater surgery if the mass is too large or there is lymph node involvement) is the treatment of choice, and chemo/radiation are additional therapies used to improve long term outcomes?
After all, WAY back in the day, many, many, many women lived long lives after radical mastectomies with no radiation or chemotherapy. Nowadays, we’ve improved things so women don’t necessarily have to lose their entire breast, but they improve their changes to some extent with chemo/radiation.
So, Marg – want to tell us the rest of the story of your friends? Surgery or not?
Another facet of black-and-white thinking.. scratch that! there AREN’T any facets in black-and-white thinking!
Another *characteristic* of B&W thinking is that you don’t weigh benefits and risks- it’s all one way or the other – not gradations.
We know that young children think this way and GRADUALLY start to incorporate a more subtle recognition of shades of difference rather than just 2 categories- a dichotomy ( yes/no). By adolescence, most kids start to think this way, e.g. they can rate things on a scale and using percentiles gets easier for them. Also their verbal characterisations get more complex as they use qualifiers and exceptions more. Kids learn to consider more than one variable simultaneously and their interactions as well AND this is not purely in the cognitive realm ( school work, naive physics et al) but includes social cognition. They are less swayed by emotional arguments and learn to understand hidden motives of persauders.
For some unearthy reason that I cannot fathom**, alt med seems to habitually use less complex explanations when discussing science with its audience.
** although I have my guesses, I add innocently.
hidden motives of PERSUADERS.
@MI Dawn
I believe I said in my post that both were still alive with the tumor still in their bodies.
Only one of them is a breast cancer. In 2007 it was the size of a grapefruit. It waxes and wanes.
The other is a soft tissue sarcoma. It was removed by surgery when it was first discovered and grew back larger than it had been.
So, no, the woman with breast cancer did not have surgery. The other woman did, but the tumor grew back.
@MI Dawn
And why the sneering tone?
@Denice Walter
And you and others in these posts don’t adopt B&W thinking in your blanket condemnation of CAM? Especially Orac, who would not even allow it as an adjunct to conventional treatment?
@ Marg:
No, we firmly differentiate CAM/ woo/ alt med that does NO harm from that which DOES harm as well as the degree/ amount of harm that is done. Additionally, we discriminate ‘harm’ that merely wastes time, money or both from that which causes physical harm. Or psychological harm. We also discern that alt med providers might be motivated by monetary rewards or may honestly and TRULY believe in their woo.
I could go on but won’t.
And of course pharmaceutical companies have motives that are as pure as the driven snow.
With the use of chemotherapy we must then differentiate between the temporary harm that causes the patient to feel ill while under treatment and the lasting harm which causes the cancer to come back stronger than ever, or results in “adverse treatment effects” leading to death.
Using people as guinea pigs?
No kidding! Who ever said corporations have pure motives? Why do you think there is regulation? Should be more.
Or that SBM isn’t concerned with multiple side-effects along a spectrum of harm or that there isn’t a trade-off between gain and loss with any treatment? What do you think testing and trials are about?
@Denice
Okay, that bit about guinea pigs was facetious on my part. I take it back. I understand that everyone means well, maybe even the pharmaceutical companies, whose main interest is the bottom line and for whom a long protracted illness needing lots of treatment is a financial bonanza. No one really wants to see cancer patients suffer, not you, not me, not Orac, or anyone on this discussion board. And I have as much contempt as you do for alternative practitioners who are out to fleece cancer patients. In the best of all possible worlds orthodox medicine and CAM should work together for the best outcome and least suffering for the patient. I hope we can agree on that.
The problem here is that you are unable to recognize when patients are being fleeced. Remember that time you wrote this?
CAM practitioners fleece people, including cancer patients, every day. The only way ‘orthodox medicine’ and CAM can truly “work together” is if CAM disappears.
Yep, 1690 out of 72,903. What happened to the other 71,213?
Marg would not ask such stupid questions if only she would read the sources she cites. Nothing happened to them, because these are extrapolations from applying results from RCTs and historic cancer incidences to the Australian population at a particular moment — not empirical counts.
Some would have lived, some would have died. The 1690 is the hypothetical number of people who would have died before 5 years if they had been treated without chemotherapy, and would have passed the 5-year point *with* chemotherapy. The numbers who would have died before 5 years despite receiving chemotherapy or who would have lived at least 5 years without chemo are *not calculated* in the paper (not being the authors’ concern).
Even one of the examples they give of chemotherapy being oversold, in breast cancer, seems a lot better than nothing to me:
As has been noted, a lot of women who undergo surgery for breast cancer without adjuvant chemo or radiotherapy relapse after more than 5 years. The 5-year criterion was chosen to minimise the benefit of adjuvant treatment.
Marg, the conclusion that you want us to accept is “energy healing is better than chemotherapy.” And the premise you keep spewing at us is “Chemotherapy is awful.” Let’s diagram that syllogism, shall we?
1. Chemotherapy is awful.
2.
3. Ergo, energy healing is better than chemotherapy.
Do you see what I see? I see a missing premise! I see a big empty space where there needs to be some sort of evidence for energy healing being better than chemotherapy!
By “evidence,” BTW, we mean something better than unsupported assertion of counterfactuals, like:
I see by this that we have something in common: I, too, enjoyed a few episodes of Sliders back in the day, at least in the early seasons. But you have to realize, Marg, all those things they showed of “Here’s what would have resulted in some alternate world where things happened differently than they did in ours!” were just make-believe. They were made up by TV writers, Marg. Trying to use them as evidence to win real-world arguments is just embarrassingly silly.
It’s ok, all of this talk of measuring effectiveness is totally pointless according to Marg. On the last thread she said
It’s really quite simple. When you treat a person, there are two possibilities: there is either an effect or there isn’t one. In my empirical experience there is an effect most of the time. I don’t need studies to prove to me that what I do is effective; people tell me whether it’s effective or not.
Marg, why does chemotherapy require studies of effectiveness but reiki doesn’t?
Could oncologists just say, “In my empirical experience there is an effect most of the time” like you did with reiki?
Why the double standard?
sigh, html fail. the section from “It’s really…or not” is all quoting Marg from the reiki thread.
@Antaeus Feldspar
That argument is the best one anyone has produced so far. I agree. There is a big blank. We will have to work on filling that big blank.
@AdamG
If I were a cancer patient I would be far more reassured by an oncologist saying “in my empirical experience there is a [positive] effect most of the time” than I would be by “studies show”, but that’s just me.
Marg, you’ve dodged the question entirely. Why is observational data sufficient to prove reiki’s effectiveness but not chemotherapy’s?
I have not stated that experimental data is de rigueur to prove the effectiveness of chemotherapy.
The problem with experimental data from the perspective of the consumer is that because something works on X per cent of the participants in a study is no guarantee that it will work on you. In fact, it is not even a guarantee that it will work on the same per cent of the population, when it’s taken out of the lab into the general population or that there will not be unexpected side effects or “adverse events” (see Vioxx). It’s a game of chance that is dressed up in scientific garb and therefore people naively buy into it.
So, a number of practitioners speaking to its efficacy is all it takes for a treatment to be effective? How, then, do you propose we identify alternative practitioners who are ‘fleecing cancer patients’ as you suggest above? Surely those who are fleecing patients also claim that their treatments are effective. What system can we use to determine whether or not their claims are truthful?
@AdamG
It’s a problem, isn’t it? When the world was a much smaller place, you could rely upon patient testimonials. If a healer consistently failed, everyone in the community would know. With healthcare delivered in a mass market, this no longer works. Whether you go to a healer or an oncologist, you have no clue what kind of track record they have. And, BTW, even with the best studies on hand, you as a patient have no idea what kind of results your oncologist or the cancer centre you are going to have had with your kind of cancer. None. It’s all accepted on faith. Unless I am missing some kind of database that keeps these records. Is there one? Also, does anyone keep tabs on oncologists? If there were one out there that consistently and catastrophically underperformed, or just had the signal bad luck of losing a lot of patients, would other oncologists ring the alarm bell? Would anyone warn patients? Are there checks and balances? I am just asking the question because I don’t know the answer. The same is true of healers.
@ Marg:
With any therapy, we have no way of knowing how effective it will be *without* research and yes, research is not infallible. A patient only can be assured that on *average* a person will be helped- not any one individual. But that’s science. It’s about probabilities and liklihoods. And SBM strives to acquire more information that guides doctors better in matching patient and therapy.
And research can be tainted and experimenters can CHEAT( and get found out, I should add). And competing researchers can often improve methods. SBM thus is a self-correcting system, altho’ it may take a long time..
Alt med does NOT usually present scrupulous methodologies and serious peer review. Statistical analyses are often an afterthought. Testimonies may be relied upon to convince potential patients sans data. Theoretical considerations may be articles of faith rather than testable hypotheses.’ they just KNOW it will work.
Here is my greatest concern about alt med: many of those who proselytise also have vested interests because they sell products like supplements, treatments or information ( books, lectures, videos) AND they do not have the blind justice of methodology, statistics, review and regulation to ferret this out.They don’t rely upon the scientific method even though they present themselves as scientists. It’s harder to spot a cheat if they don’t submit themselves to the public scrunity and criticism of submitting articles to journals.
And -btw- two of the biggest frauds in medicine/ psychology were found out by the press, although their work caused suspicion by people in their own fields first.
No, Marg. You have to work on filling that big blank. Because you’re the only one who is insistent on the particular goal that blank is en route to. The rest of us are all “we want whatever works best against cancer to be used against cancer” and you’re the only one who’s all “Energy healing, ooh, ooh, it’s the new paradigm, let’s ditch that nasty chemotherapy which only has real-world results in its favor.”
You used to be able to rely on investor testimonials as well. Carlo Ponzi’s customers were quite happy and gave glowing testimonials. So did Bernie Madoff’s.
Guess testimonials aren’t as sure a sign of quality and effectiveness as they used to be.
@Antaeus
By “we” I meant my lot, not your lot. Because we are not scientists, our opportunities for creating scientific studies are limited. Most studies on energy healing tend to be of the “adjunctive pain and anxiety relief” variety. We don’t often get mice to play with. Apparently IRCs believe that subjecting mice to energy healing is causing them unnecessary suffering. So it’s hard even to get a foot in the door.
BTW wouldn’t you love to ditch that nasty chemotherapy and have something better?
@Denice
Curious to know, who were the two frauds unmasked by the media?
I know about an incompetent pathologist who often acted as expert witness in child death cases and sent many innocent parents to jail. I also know about an ob/gyn who crippled women through shockingly incompetent surgeries for decades before his license to practice medicine was finally revoked. He just kept moving jurisdictions every time questions were raised.
BTW I am mistrustful of alternative practitioners too.
Marg, I suggest you do a little research on Benjamin Rush, Founding Father of the USA, a great man, a medical pioneer, yet he was convinced that bloodletting was a cure-all. He even sued, successfully, a journalist who suggested he was leaving a trail of corpses in his wake, which we now know was almost certainly true. If a man like Rush could deceive himself so thoroughly, what chance do the rest of us mere mortals stand, without the scientific method and randomized clinical trials?
@Krebiozen @Mephistopheles
How true. I guess Rush didn’t leave enough people alive to complain?
@ Marg:
One has been a topic often @ RI: Andrew Wakefield fixed data and was exposed by Brian Deer of the Sunday TImes.
Another was Sir Cyril Burt whose research into intelligence and heredity was widely accepted. It was suspected that he created data – perhaps subjects and assistants as well. Also made public by the Sunday TImes. Psychologists were suspicious because of other data that contradicted his and because his coefficients of correlation were remarkably stable across studies- to 3 places, IIRC. This is not very likely to occur by chance.
On a personal note: my prof used to speak at length about how Burt’s dishonesty affected school/ social policy for decades: if science shows IQ is firmly based in heredity why spend money trying to educate kids?
I’ve always speculated if perhaps Wakefield, who is around my age, heard similar tales from a prof and instead of being upset by it, used it as a jumping off point for his own fraud. He didn’t have things line up quite so neatly as did Burt…he did Sir Cyril one better..or so he thought.
I always thought that Wakefield’s work didn’t fit other research I knew about.
Is it common for ovarian cancer to destroy lymphocites? Answer: NO.
I can only conclude that in Marg’s world, leukocytes survive after the death of the patient.
Then we have this:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57376073/deception-at-duke-fraud-in-cancer-care/?tag=contentMain;contentBody
and this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4617372.stm
‘Dr Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, said he would be speaking to the co-authors of the study to seek their permission to retract the paper.
He described the fabrication of data as a “terrible personal tragedy” for Dr Sudbo.
However, he denied that there was anything fundamentally wrong with the process of peer-reviewing contributions to scientific journals.
“The peer-review process is good at picking up poorly designed studies, but it is not designed to pick up fabricated research,” he said.
“Just as in society you cannot always prevent crime, in science you cannot always prevent fabrication.” ‘
If i subscribe to what Marg writes, as an active breast cancer patient, the chemo, radiation, surgery, and hormonal drugs I take are all bunk because I will be dead in a few years anyway. Thanks Marg!
Give sarcasm a rest, @Herr Doktor Bimmler. We were just reaching a consensus here.
@Jergen
In the long run, we are all dead. In the meantime I wish you all the best with your treatment, sincerely. I think the one conclusion we all agreed with is that results are individual. May you live a long life.
Marg @ 6:17 pm
Where’s the rest of it go? Here’s the whole thing, I hope:
Marg @ 6:17 pm
“Studies show” is shorthand for “the empirical experience of a large number of practitioners and patients, adjusted for various sources of misleading experiences, such as the personalities and dreams of the practitioners, shows.”
Marg 7:09 pm
“And … even with the best [reputation] on hand, you as a patient have no idea what kind of results your ]woo-peddler is] going to have had with your kind of cancer.” FTFY.
———————————————————————————————
A few weeks ago, Daughter-in-law was diagnosed with GBM (Glioblastoma Multiforme). We immediately hit the various (medical) resources, on the web and in real life. Her hospital team in Seattle recommended radiation + adjuvant chemo, following the little bit of surgery that had been possible: web medical sources report this as the treatment most likely to be effective.
She has a family option of going to Scripps Hospital in San Diego (her sister works there). Sister checked with the Scripps center, who reported that Seattle had a good reputation. at least as good as their own, for GBM. The current plan is for her (and Granddaughter and Greatgrandkids) to return to San Diego after the Seattle treatment completes, next week or so.
———————————————————————————————
Info not relevant to Marg’s misguided blather:
Son was too far down the kidney list when dialysis proved insufficient, ten years ago, so DIL has been going it more-or-less alone.
The bad news: DIL’s platelet count took a nose dive over the weekend, so the Seattle team has DCed the chemo. They may treat her to a platelet infusion this week, depending on her condition. She may be going home to San Diego to recover, or to die. That’s the way life works. At least she will have given it her best shot, without falling prey to Marg-style fraud.
@Bill Price
I wish your daughter-in-law well and I am very sorry to hear about your son. Most alternative practitioners, like orthodox practitioners wish to help and your daughter-in-law (and you yourself), would probably benefit from something like reiki. I understand that you are angry, but it helps no one for you to vent on me.
No.
In the best of all possible worlds, there is medicine which has been proved to work and is proposed to patient with appropriate explanation of risks and benefits, and there is medicine which hasn’t been proved efficient, and which is not proposed to the patient.
Again and again and again, it’s not about black and white orthodox vs CAM. It’s about data.
We don’t accept CAM because the data shows us it’s not working.
Forgive me: haven’t read the comments just yet, but I just saw this in my twitter feed…
An Immune Disorder at the Root of Autism
nytimes.com/2012/08/26/opinion/sunday/immune-disorders-and-autism.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=general&src=me
Emily WIllingham has systematically examined the editorial’s claims, discovering that the author was wrong about practically everything it was possible to be wrong about.
Marg,
I share your desire for better options. My wife’s ovarian cancer was too far advanced for surgery at diagnosis so chemo was her only option. Unfortunately first and second line chemo failed and her tumours just laughed at the clinical trial agents she tried at the end. If there were another option with a better chance of working then I’d have urged her to try it. I’d have screamed for it. We moved 4000km for a clinical trial that looked promising and would have done whatever we could to find the right treatment..
Unfortunately there isn’t a better option.
Lots of interesting ideas: cell therapies, novel agents, combination therapies and better methods of detection (get it early enough and the stuff we have now works) but the data isn’t in yet to demonstrate efficacy… or side effects.
There are also lots of ideas for treatments that don’t work. That have been tried and failed. That’s where a lot of the CAM options fall. My wife’s oncologists were willing to let her stop treatment and try something alternative while they continued to monitor her blood work and the scheduled scans, but when we asked them for hard numbers, for outcomes, they were only able to say that there were no published data showing that the vitamin, energy and related treatments worked; that there was some data showing they didn’t work; and that they had never seen a single patient improved by the CAM in any measurable way.
Life doesn’t always work out how we’d like. The magic options isn’t there just because we think it should be. That doesn’t mean we stop looking, but we don’t have the luxury of fooling ourselves.
Clearly my grasp of grammar fails when I write too quickly. My apologies.
@Niche Geek
You are right about life not always working out the way we`d want it to. And also about keeping on looking while not fooling oneself. That`s a difficult balance to keep. I also wish medical practitioners were more abreast of what`s available out there.
I am sorry about your loss.
Marg,
“I also wish medical practitioners were more abreast of what’s available out there”
Like what? What is out there that works better than the conventional treatment? I haven’t seen any convincing evidence and a lot of dis-confirming evidence.
@Niche Geek
There are new energy therapies out there that are more effective than reiki, for instance. The studies on energy therapies have mostly concentrated on reiki and therapeutic touch, and mostly with regard to pain and anxiety relief. They are usually initiated by nurses, many of whom have some background in reiki or TT. The only person I know of who studied the effectiveness of an energy therapy on cancer was Bill Bengston, who Orac & everyone else here love to scoff at because all the mice in his experiments survived to full life span cures, including most of the controls. The catch is that he has done about a dozen experiments in at least five institutions (including medical schools), with at least two different cancers, and the pesky mice persist in surviving no matter what is done to them, even after growing massive tumors. He has not done trials with people yet.
Also, Leigh Fortson`s book “Embrace, Release, Heal“, which came out last year, is quite a resource. She has collected the stories of a dozen cancer survivors, including herself, who beat the odds with alternative medicine after conventional treatment failed. But at this point reading it may just serve to add to the pain of your loss, so you may not want to. The evidence all tends to be anecdotal rather than experimental anyway.
Marg,
Forgive me if you’ve heard this before, but you are applying an appalling double standard. Every single chemotherapy worked brilliantly in mice. Every single chemotherapy looked great anectdotally. Nobody would have tried a further trial if it hadn’t. Why should I believe your anecdotes over theirs?
As for Reiki, she actually tried it as an adjuvant. It was definitely restful and calming but clearly had no effect on any objective tests. Based upon that experience, I have no problem with Reiki as a meditative tool. In that way it is comparable to a lot of religious practices… but that doesn’t make it medicine.
Marg August 27, 11:27 pm
Thank you for your good wishes and sorrow. The issue I have with “alternative practitioners” and their putative “wish to help” is the simple truth that what they practice destroys life, while pretending to ‘help’. Life is all we’ve got, and death is part of it. The best we can do is to make the best of what we get – both in quantity and quality. The game of the “alternative practitioner” is to promise both, but to deliver, at most, a brief improvement in perceived quality, often at the expense of quantity.
Well, I’ve found that relaxation and massage can give me a brief improvement in my mental state, and DIL has likely had that experience also. No reiki practitioner is needed for that.
Like theists insists that atheists are angry at the theists’ gods, CAM believers seem to believe that real-med users are angry at CAM. The believer must adopt the attitude that, since the believer has THE TRUTH™, any dissent must be from anger. The believer also tends to project: the believer is angry because THE TRUTH™ is not immediately, unquestioningly accepted, so the ‘angry’ dissenter-from-TRUTH™ must likewise be angry.
No, Marg, I’m not angry; I’m sometimes sad however. I’m sad about the likelihood that DIL will not survive much longer, and that we, her kids and her grandkids will not have her in their lives. I’m happy, though, that none of the family has suggested substituting woo-fraud for actual medicine. I’m sad, a bit, that the chemo hasn’t been as effective an adjuvant as it often is; but I’m happy for what effect it has had.
When I speak of reiki and the other forms of woo-fraud as woo-fraud, I’m not venting any anger. To the extent that you identify your woo-fraud as part of yourself, I can see how you might think I’m venting on you. I’m just honestly and accurately characterising them. No, Marg, it’s not about you — it’s about reality.
The catch is that he has done about a dozen experiments in at least five institutions (including medical schools), with at least two different cancers
List them, please.
If Bengston has done about a dozen different experiments in five institutions with two different cancers and each time the result has been that the control group survives at a rate indistinguishable from that of the experimental group, the conclusion it points to is that he needs to learn how to stop f***ing up his experiments.
It would take a truly committed idiot to look at Bengston providing these results and say “Wow, there was no difference between the control group and the experimental group; that proves that energy healing makes a big difference.” Unfortunately, Marg has affirmed over and over that she fits that bill.
If Bengston has done about a dozen different experiments in five institutions
Antaeus Feldspar, you may be exaggerating Bengston’s incompetence — I only know of 5 experiments. Bengston & Krinsley report 4 experiments. Bengston and Moga summarise those four and report one more.
@Bill Price
No one suggests using reiki as a stand-alone therapy for cancer. I don`t know where you would get the idea that it would improve quailty of life _at the expense of quantity_, but I am pretty sure that if it did that, hospitals would not be offering it as an option. I am also pretty sure that the reiki practitioners who volunteer their time in hospitals are not fleecing patients. Why would you want to take pride in your DIL not availing herself of an option that might make her feel better while she undergoes orthodox medical treatment? It is very different from massage.
@Niche Geek
As above, I don`t advocate reiki as a stand-alone medical therapy. I advocate it precisely for the reasons you suggest: it makes people feel better. Calm and peaceful are valuable states to be able to have in the midst cancer treatment.
Reiki or other energy “healing” most certainly can have a calming effect and help with pain and stress. So can the prayer that any church will teach you for free. So can watching sitcoms on television.. So can watching a baby sleep.
My problem is when energy”healers” claim to be able to cure cancer. Then they are just stealing peoples’ money and giving them ephemeral useless twinkles of hope. True hope that a real treatment will work is beyond price but the false hope these people sell is pitiable.
I have lasting side effects from chemo but compared to the agony of a fungating breast tumor they are so small as to not be mentioned.
@ Marg
You and I cross posted. If you do not advocate energy “healing” as a substitute for chemo was substitute would you suggest?
I’ll bite: what are these new energy therapies, and how exactly have then been shown to be effective at all, let more effective than other reiki or other previous energy therapies?
Be as specific as possible.
Re: Bengston, quite simply when your control group fails and treatment outcomes are indistinguishable from untreatment outcomes (i.e., in B’s case, when both the treated and the untreated mice survive with equivalent frequencey) your entire experiment has failed and you cannot derive any meaningful conclusions regarding the efficacy of the treatment you’ve given the experiental groups, it doesn’t matter if the treatment we’re talking about is science based or CAM.
If I ciyed a study which found cancer patients treated with surgery followed by adjuvant chemo did no better than a control group of cancer patients who were left completely untreated, and said “See? This shows surgery and chemo works!” wouldn’t you jump all over me?
Why then are you giving Bengston a pass?
Because she neither knows nor cares what the facts are; only what validates her religion matters.
I can only remark that we have had centuries to show the efficacy of various alt med treatments: herbs, healing, meditation, prayer and decades for the more modern forms like vitamins and special diets. There should be a mountain of data. There isn’t. I read about the same herbs, supplements and methods in 1950s alt med articles or a 1990s healing digest ( I have a collection).
And whilst SBM *may* only provide what’s been shown to have effectiveness probablistically: it’s all we have. There is no certainty – but I’ll take the latter over no data at all. You can’t just rely upon word of mouth.
Someone in my family had a serious heart problem after the age of 80: he was managed by a simple pill 3 times a day and a simple 24 hour patch for almost 10 years. Needless to say, I was admonished by a few people to try herbs or supplements, even prayer over “dangerous pharmaceuticals”. Brew up the daily hawthorn/ foxglove! And pray? Not at all. He certainly wouldn’t buy into that. Nor would I. And I said so in no uncertain terms.
Alt med that works ( and is shown to work) becomes ‘medicine’. What works gets replicated. There are additional modalities that may make a person *feel* better without treating them, like massage and meditation. I view these as an extension of spa services. The problem comes in when alt med providers try to impute medicinal properties to them.
Have a nice day all! I am off.
@ Marg
Reiki is only one energy therapy. Energy therapy and reiki are not interchangeable terms and more than color and red are. You cannot speak about the peace and calm reiki can create and compare it to other things, such as watching TV, unless you have experienced it. If you dismissing it without experience, all you are doing is expressing a prejudice.
My reason for giving Bengston the benefit of the doubt is that his only involvement with the mice was putting his hand around the cages. He didn`t inject them with cancer; he did not feed them; he did not touch them. Lab technicians did all of that. The experiments took place in multiple labs over several years. I just can`t wrap my head around the astronomical improbability that qualified lab technicians at several universities are all so incompetent that they can`t properly inject mice with cancer. Also, the cancer took. The mice grew the expected tumors. Histological analysis, not done by Bengston but by biologists, showed they were cancerous.Then the tumors ulcerated and healed. Something did that. Bengston relates that he did two experiments at most institutions; the second one because the people who ran the lab refused to believe the results of the first. Is it easier to believe that all these people screwed up, even when they were trying to prove him wrong, than it is to believe that there was some kind of effect?
I would like to see Bengston duplicate his results with people. That would be more meaningful.
How does reki compare to meditation?
Sorry-reiki Why are typos easier to see after you hit submit?
Marg,
If Reiki doesn’t work better than conventional medicine then your comment at 1:32 didn’t answer my question at 1:04… So why did you bring it up?
I missed the comment that said all energy “healing” was reiki. Could someone point it out to me?
Yes, something did that, but there’s no rational reason to conclude that Bengston had anything to do with the mice’s survivals.
Bengston, after all, only “put his hand around the cages” of the mice in the treatment group, yet that something did whatever it does to both the treatment group and the control group.
That pretty conclusively demonstrates that whatever that undetermined something was, it wasn’t Bengston’s putting his hand around cages.
Well Marg, buying CD’s makes me feel better, but I’m not going to sell it as an aditional therapy for people suffering from cancer.
only what validates her religion matters.
I haven’t seen any evidence that Marg takes Bengston’s claims seriously except as a way to wind up RI readers. She hasn’t read his papers (or she wouldn’t be claiming that he’s done “about a dozen experiments”).
Oh, I believe she truly does. Here’s some of her words from the Reiki thread:
Marg has a deep failure to understand not only how scientific inquiry is conducted, but also why scientific inquiry is the only effective method for evaluating medical claims. We’re not going to get anywhere with Marg.
Marg: ”Leigh Fortson`s book “Embrace, Release, Heal“, which came out last year, is quite a resource. She has collected the stories of a dozen cancer survivors, including herself, who beat the odds with alternative medicine after conventional treatment failed”
And there we have it, really. ALL those cancer survivors had had conventional cancer treatment. Suzanne Somers-style, they have chosen to credit whatever ‘alternative medicine’ they also took.
I’ve read scores – perhaps hundreds – of ‘I healed my own cancer’ stories. I’ve never seen one that stood up to the mildest scrutiny. Without exception the person has either had conventional treatment too, OR was never actually diagnosed with cancer in the first place (many of the latter had self-diagnosed, some were flat out lying).
And believe me, I wanted to see reliable testimonials. I’ve ‘fessed up on RI before to being a reformed altie. It took my own cancer to shake me out of that. Books, websites, email exchanges… all the ‘healed myself’ testimonials I read led me to one conclusion – no alternative treatment had ever been effective against a single case of cancer. Anywhere. Ever.
The person who argued most persuasively had refused chemo and radiotherapy for her breast cancer, and was adamant that Gerson therapy had saved her life. But… before undertaking that gruelling regime, she had had surgery.
Me? Stage 3 breast cancer; surgery, chemo, radiotherapy. Fit and well almost 9 years after diagnosis.
Oh, that reminds me.
‘Most cancer patients in this country [which country, btw?] die of chemotherapy.’
Evidence, please.
Due to computer issues I haven’t been able to check in to the updates to this thread – I am here and I will be catching up, but it will take me a while.
I do see Marg has posted some citations – or at least one, and remember I haven’t read anything but the couple of posts after my most recent one – but I don’t see anything as yet that shows a study or list of statistics of the percentage of people who have cancer but the majority are dying/getting worse/not getting better when using chemo.
Does that kind of thing exist?
In the meantime, please be patient with me while I catch up.
Rose,
I’m not sure why you asked “I missed the comment that said all energy “healing” was reiki. Could someone point it out to me?” but I don’t believe I’ve seen it. I commented on Reiki because my wife tried it.
So not all energy healing is reiki. Yay. We have successfully adjusted the position of at least one Titanic deck chair. What an achievement.
Now that we’ve wasted more time on that than it deserves… Marg, when the hell are you going to show us some evidence – not speculation, not baseless assertion, but evidence – that energy healing OR reiki, whichever you choose, has a greater effect on cancer survival rates than chemotherapy? Oh, the answer is “never”? Then who the hell cares what the failed woo is called?
@Niche Geek
I asked because Marg said that not all energy healing was reiki. I did not think that anyone had said that it was and was wondering why she was refuting a point that had not been made.
@Herr Doktor Bimmler
My information about there having been a dozen experiments comes from various talks/interviews Dr. Bengston gave. They are available on the web, along with some, but not all, of his papers. I also attended a talk in person.
BTW in one of the experiments geomagnetic probes were placed near the cages of the mice, both the experimental ones and the controls, which were in another lab. At the times when Dr. Bengston did energy healing on the mice the geomagnetic probes, which normally register a random pattern, began to show an organized wave, the same organized wave in both places, regardless of the distance. Other geomagnetic probes set up as controls in other places did not show the same patterns. Bengston published an article about this: “Anomalous DC Magnetic Field Activity during a Bioenergy Healing Experiment.” Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 397-410, 2010. (with Margaret Moga)
Another experiment not involving mice showed that Bengston’s brainwaves and the brainwaves of the people he treated became synchronized. This has been shown with other modalities too, such as Reiki. The results of the experiments involving Bengston were published in:
“The Healing Connection: EEG Harmonics, Entrainment, and Schumann’s Resonances.”Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 24, no. 4,Winter 2010, pp. 655-666. (with Luke Hendricks and Jay Gunkelman)
From past experience I know that you will now all get your panties into a twist about the Journal of Scientific Exploration. Be my guest. But the experiment with the geomagnetic micropulsations seems to suggest a mechanism for the healng of the control mice. The organized pattern recorded by the probes has been referred to as “negative entropy”, and the hypothesis has been advanced elsewhere, not by Bengston, that one of the ways energy healing works is through creating “negative entropy”. There are actually scientists out there interested in the phenomenon.
Good night, everyone. Sleep well in the knowledge that there is still stuff out there left to discover.
BTW, WTF is a “geomagnetic probe”? You mean a “compass”?
@Narad
Your ignorance is not my problem.
@Narad
That last was my reaction to your “WTF”. Here is a link that explains geomagnetic micropulsations:
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/ElizabethWong.shtml
Micropulsations or geomagnetic pulsations are responses to changes in the magnetosphere. The magnetosphere is a cavity in the solar wind, which is the result of the geomagnetic field (earth’s magnetic field) impeding the direct entry of the ionized gas (plasma) of the solar wind into the cavity. Micropulsations were first observed and published by Balfour Steward (also spelled Stewart) in 1861. He described pulsations with frequencies ranging from 3 mHz to 30 mHz. Today, geomagnetic pulsations cover the frequency range from 1 mHz to 1 Hz. Pulsations are divided into two classes, continuous and irregular, each of which are further divided according to the period of the pulsations.
Some research has found that the variations in the geomagnetic field strength (which micropulsations are a response to) can affect one’s health, especially cardiovascular health. Dr. Eliyahu Stoupel published his results in the Bio-Electro-Magnetics Institute (vol. 1, no. 1) in the spring of 1989. Research into micropulsations and their resonances may also be applied to space meteorology, field-line resonances (FLRs) in the magnetospheres of other planets, and other geomagnetic activity (GMA), including geomagnetic storms and flares.
Are we seriously continuing a debate on the cancer healing abilities of Reiki? Energy healing? Really? What a load of crap!
JGC:
Yes, something did that, but there’s no rational reason to conclude that Bengston had anything to do with the mice’s survivals.
One way of looking at it, is that the natural course of events when you inject mice with a dose of unrelated, tissue-cultured cancer cells, is for the cells to proliferate madly for a while and create a tumour, until the immune systems of those mice kick into gear and wipe the tumours out again.
What happened in Bengston’s 10 experiments — the ‘test’ and ‘control’ arms of the five reported studies — is that the natural course of events did indeed happen, 10 times.
If people prefer to interpret this in terms of “energy healing” (with a form of otherwise-unknown energy) and “quantum entanglement” (with a form of quantum theory unknown to quantum theorists), then there is little one can do except remember Schiller’s aphorism — the one about a human attribute against which the gods themselves contend in vain.
Perhaps you didn’t understand the question. Describe the instrumentation that is Bengston’s “geomagnetic probe.”
Oh, mercy, this Stoupel stuff is side-splitting. Heart attack? In Lithuania, it’s the neutrons.
Oh. My. G-d. “Clinical cosmology”?
Clinical cosmobiology, Narad!
I’m guessing that someone read Lucius Shepard’s first novel “Green Eyes” (with the subplot about magnetosensitive bacteria) and mistook it for a documentary.
AH CANNA MAHK A BABBY, DE SUNSPOTZ IS GONNA TURN DE PRIVATES IN DE WRONG DIRECTION!
Shirley you mean Sunpot, Narad.
OK, the actual paroxyms have backed off and my eyes are nearly dry. In the piece linked above, which is really just dorking around for correlations in the solar-geophysical data, Stoupel also makes the bold assertion (citing himself) that “solar, cosmic ray and geomagnetic activity, at the begin-
ning of pregnancy may also play a role [1-9,17-19], per-
haps via their effects on chromosome function (clearly shown in the case of Down syndrome).”
Oh, no, not again.
F*cking protons.
Narad, you may wish to peruse his paper on “Death — Optimal Physical Conditions”, in which the good cardiologist explores the physical conditions most conducive to the cessation of life.
I’m not paying for that, De Gruyter seems to have crappy manuscript editing if any at all, I’d probably get thrown out of the library, and I’ll bet it’s just the same damn thing.
Anyway, what’s an “imp” of neutrons? Impacts?
[Looks around]
Uh-oh, it looks like it’s a movement. Traffic accidents are caused by solar weather.
I’d also be curious if anyone could track down the history of “The Terrestrial Echoes of Solar Storms” by one A.L. Tcizevsky, which is kind of looking like the locus classicus for this whole trip, which totes polishes Bengston to a blinding shine.
Fuckin’ geomagnetic probes/
How do they work?
So Bengston’s ‘geomangnetic probes’ detected activity at the location of both the treatment and control group cages, but not at other locations? Why then didn’t bBEngston relocate the control group to one of those other locations he had found to be unaffected by his ‘healing energy’, rather than go ahead with an experiment lacking a valid and necessary control?
RE: negative entropy, words have meanings. Entropy is defined as the quantitative measure of the amount of thermal energy not available to do work in a closed system, it can be calculated and is expressed as joules per Kelvin.
How exactly is ‘negative entropy’ defined, how is it calculated, and in what units is it expressed?
I still find it strange that a professor of sociology got to experiment with cancerous mice.
Oh no! Suddenly I understand everything: illness is caused by disruptions in the cosmic plane. Sounds like astrology.
Perhaps this explains the ex’s depression: the old Kozmic blues got him again,
or the other guy’s asthma – breathing in those protons,
or my Irish friend’s diverticulosis, caused by
ingesting them: ” So you’re telling me that it was the fricking PROTONS when all the time I thought it was the bloody sesame seeds!”, she’ll say.
A few web woo-meisters believe that this year’s solar flares will cause disruptions of the electrical grid AND now we can add the CNSs of living animals as well. Not sure about plants though.
Oddly, I seem to be rather healthy: could that mean that I am in tune with the esoteric harmonies of the spheres and swirling nebulae? Adrift non-randomly in supposed random-ness?
And immune to random protonic toxicity.
Mercy me. I feel as though I won the sweepstakes.
For intelligent people you really are a bunch of morons, sorry to say. Over and out; I’m not wasting any more time on you.
Marg, do you have any specific reason you think we are morons, or do you just have no idea what “negative entropy” means. I work in refrigeration and air conditioning, and in our industry, entropy isn’t an impressive metaphysical concept, it’s a word that gets used as often as “torque” among automotive engineers.
Marg,
You did invite us to scoff all we wanted.
Obviously, she doesn’t get that RI is like the right ventromedial prefrontal cortex:
it’s where sarcasm happens.
My work here is done.
In case anyone’s wondering, negative entropy is created by any functioning climate control system. An air conditioner is not a closed system, because it receives outside power, so one should actually expect entropy to decrease, rather than increase.
Marg, any chance you can answer a few questions before you leave the discussion?
What is the definition of “negative entropy”, as you’ve used it in your post? How is it calculated? What units is it expressed in?
If I cited a study which found patients receiving no treatment did just as well as patient’s receiving chemo, and claimed this proves chemotherapy works, wouldn’t you rip me a new one? Why then do you expect us to accept Bengston’s study as proof energy healing works?
When you decribed Bengston taking measurements with ‘geomagnetic probes, what actual device or devices were you referring to?
Can you explain why, once Bengston had evidence that his control group was compromised (the geomagnetic probes near the control group cages also generated an organized waveform whenever he attempted to heal the treatment group mice) he didn’t halt the experiment and devise a valid negative control? It could have easily been done, since he’d identified locations where the organized waveform wasn’t detected, or perhaps enclosing the control group mice in a Faraday cage.
Not knowing what a “geomagnetic probe” is, I searched for a copy of the paper in question to see what they were, as my thought was also that it was a fancy name for a compass.
I couldn’t find the paper anywhere other than behind a pay wall, so if anybody out there can help a brother out…
If they are indeed anything real, compass or otherwise, it seems that we’d have the makings of a JREF challenge. We wouldn’t even need a cage of sick rats, just the quack making a single probe ‘dance around’ would probably count as a win.
Of course, the quacks will say they don’t need a million dollars, but it would be fun to watch them fail.
A guy can dream, can’t he?
Oh, c’mon, honey. I really, really want to know how protons manage to talk neutrons into not being all Switzerland-like and start hurling tiny sabots at the “cell nuclei in enzymes.”
From the title, I can only guess that it was some sort of DC magnetometer. This presents a couple of issues in terms of detecting “micropulsations,” to say the least.
A previous flounce from the “Reikie versus dogs” thread:
Marg
June 22, 3:32 pm
Ciao, ciao, gentlemen.
In a few years we will know who was right.
Not knowing what a “geomagnetic probe” is, I searched for a copy of the paper in question to see what they were, as my thought was also that it was a fancy name for a compass.
Everything Marg has said about Bengston’s papers comes from interviews he’s given. To provde details about the “geomagnetic probe” she would have had to read his papers.
At the times when Dr. Bengston did energy healing on the mice the geomagnetic probes, which normally register a random pattern, began to show an organized wave, the same organized wave in both places, regardless of the distance.
Marg’s source appears to beJudith’s blog*:
(this is the Judith who was also commenting on the Reiki thread, in alternation with Marg).
OK, so he coughs this up in the January–March 2010 issue of Edge Science:
While there is no direct description of the instruments, the reported values and what I imagine their budget to have been like seem consistent with something like this (if not even this. I’m really wondering, given that they’re claiming “DC” up to 30 Hz, how noise rejection was achieved. And how stably they were mounted. And the power supply.
^ There’s an error in the quote: “And, in act” should be “And, in fact.” Any other missing f’s are probably my fault–they were for some reason all ligatures in the original and didn’t carry over.
Isn’t “intelligent morons an oxymoron?
Hmmm. Like Marg upthread, Judith on her blog is enthusiastic about “Embrace, Release, Heal”.
Judith, however, has become skeptical about Bengston therapy, which is why I suspect Marg of plagiarising from Judith’s blog rather than being a sockpuppet.
The bit just before the negative entropy stuff about concentrating Schumann resonances in one’s pineal gland before shooting the energy out your hands seriously risks sending me into another laughing fit.
Does negative entropy mean that someone’s getting colder?
concentrating Schumann resonances in one’s pineal gland
It makes perfect sense that the 7.88-Hz Schumann fundamental, with its wavelength equal to the Earth’s circumference, should be coupled so strongly to an organ the size of a rice grain.
[Cue music]
Why yes, yes it does.
I have half a, err, mind to just do up a Powerpoint presentation of all this. Something like Koyaanisqatsi in reverse. With mice and stuff.
@ Narad:
I think that that would be very enlightening but please don’t tell Mr Glass – I met him once. Dead serious. I am. He was.
I have read that it’s all the melanin in the pineal gland that gives it those special third-eye properties. So far the alt-reallity thinkers haven’t caught onto the bafflegab possibilities of Pinopsin.
hdb – & there was me thinking the pineal’s melanin was involved in photosynthesis, as per that in the eye… (http://sci.waikato.ac.nz/bioblog/2011/12/while-lurking-over-at-riddled.shtml)
The probes were never directly affected. There had to be a cage of sick mice nearby for the effect to occur. Therefore, wherever Dr. Bengston moved the mice, the effect would have followed also.
Here is something else for you to chew on. This one should keep you busy for a while:
http://www.tonibunnell.co.uk/healing.html
@JGC re: Faraday cage
The Faraday Cage and Psi
…
The cage also has a role to play in trying to determine the mechanism by which psi effects – if they exist – are generated. If an experiment that works normally then fails when the cage is employed, this strongly suggests that some form of electromagnetic radiation is involved. The electromagnetic hypothesis would seem to be a logical idea, especially given the level to which electrical signals are essential to the brain and hence – presumably – are connected with consciousness.
Despite the attraction of the theory, most research suggests that psi is not blocked either by the presence or absence of a Faraday cage. This suggests strongly that the mechanism for psi phenomena is not electromagnetic in nature.
That said, as with most areas of parapsychology the results are not clear cut. There has been some research (1) that suggests the use of a grounded Faraday cage might actually increase General ESP (GESP)!
Which is especially bad news for those who trust in tin foil hats to protect them from external mind control.
There are not “millions of crystals in the cells of the brain.”
That didn’t take long at all.
There are not “millions of crystals in the cells of the brain.”
Only if it’s frozen. Negative entropy will do that.
Is this assemblage of words supposed to be self-consistent?
Flounce duration: 10 hours, 43 minutes.
Seems to me someone has a failure of understanding where Schumann resonances come from. Amongst other things.
the window frequency known as the Schuman Resonance, which is the vibrational frequency of the earth’s electromagnetic field (emf). This means that the brain waves of a person in the alpha state will resonate in sympathy with the earth’s emf producing constructive interference which amplifies the vibration.
I am not brave enough to ask where HAARP fits into the picture, but there is little doubt that it fits in somewhere.
Note: I originally prepared this response yesterday, but shelved it when Marg announced her flounce. Since she failed to stick the flounce in record time, why, I dusted it off and brought it here for your enjoyment…
Marg doesn’t seem to realize a very key fact of the universe itself: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. She keeps arrogantly shoving in our faces chains of evidence and shrieking “See! See! See how strong this one link is! Since the rest of the chain is as strong as its strongest link, this is nigh irrefutable logic I’m giving you!”
Just the most obvious example from her latest fewmet: she gives us factoids from the Journal of Scientific Exploration and then sneers “From past experience I know that you will now all get your panties into a twist about the Journal of Scientific Exploration. Be my guest.” Basically, Marg’s syllogism is:
1. It was published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
2.
3. Therefore, it’s almost certainly a meaningful result.
Except that if we have no reason to think the Journal of Scientific Exploration is anything but a crank journal like Medical Hypotheses or Medical Veritas, we have no reason to think the conclusion holds true. Marg might as well be saying “my cousin Bernie who I think is pretty smart thinks it’s true, therefore it’s true!” Why on earth would cousin Bernie’s opinion mean a damn thing?
Same thing with the supposedly “organized” results from the “geomagnetic probes” (did Bengston have a reason to think these would show results, or did he just make sure his experiment had lots of endpoints?) Scientists are interested in the phenomenon and are calling it “negative entropy.” Wheeee. Are these “scientists” any better than those who drew elaborate phrenological maps a century ago? They were very good at making authoritative declarations and giving things exciting names that made it sound like they knew what they were talking about, but they didn’t.
Yawn. You are all way too predictable. Tell you what, take it up with Bengston in person. He gives free talks a few times a year (usually the day before his workshops, which don’t cost thousands of dollars as somebody earlier claimed). You can find the talks announced on his website, http://www.bengstonresearch.com well before the event.
BTW the statement that he should have moved his control mice to where there was no geomagnetic effect illustrates exactly how moronic some of you are being about all this.
Still completely unable to actually refute any of the many arguments demonstrating you to be Not Even Wrong, eh?
FTFY
So Bengston can’t directly cause a ‘geomagnetic probe’ to fluctuate, but a cage of sick mice will ‘rebroadcast’ his magic healing energies as a magnetic field? Is that what I’m expected to believe?
I note in Narad’s post that Bengston claims to have noted
However, in the description of the milligauss meter that Narad provides, we read “the Earth’s field is typically about 500 milligauss”. I’ve never had a chance to play with a gauss meter, but I’d bet that just walking by the meter would cause a 1 to 8 milligauss fluctuation. It sure sounds like a noise to me.
Belief in *psi* was fashionable in educated, sophisticated
London, Paris, Vienna, NY and Boston more than 100 years ago AND psychologists, James and Jung amongst them, wrote about how it could be studied *scientifically*. I enjoyed how Freud himself regarded common beliefs ( pre-cognition, prophetic dreams) and showed how they might be explained in a more mundane, parsimonious fashion by a person who studied human abilities and emotions.
In the past 100 years, we’ve learned a great deal more about psychological processes and physics plus new instruments and means of measurement have been developed YET has any SERIOUS research revealed even an inkling of evidence for *psi*?
One of the woo-meisters I survey has spoken about his own research ‘healing’ mice by prayers performed by acknowledged ‘healers’ ( 1970s? 1980s?) which yielded spectacular results- yet has this ever been published?
Larry Dossey was widely publicised 20 years ago: has his research goe anywhere since then?
Beliefs of this sort provide comfort for people and thus persist: it would be wonderful if we could speak to the dead because they somehow persist somewhere and that their personalities didn’t dissolve into nothingness. It would be great if healers could vaporise cancers without resorting to surgical instruments and cutting through flesh. It would be fabulous if we could predict the future and avoid terrible accidents and make fortunes in the market.
All of those *psi* abilities are idealisations of human abilities that we DO have: we recall the dead and incorporate their qualities into ourselves, we look at photographs that trigger memories; scientists use technology to find therapies that harm the patient less as they cure; through analysis of data we can predict natural disasters and economic events better than our ancestors could.
In the past several decades, we’ve learned a shocking amount about the brain : there are MRIs and other scans that illustrate differing abilities and conditions in living people ( e.g. LONI), that can show the progression of devastating illness that destroy parts of the brain and result in psychosis or dementia. Yet we haven’t found any solid evidence for powers beyond natural ones like memory, perception, reasoning, attention and even social skills.
So, if we can’t find its locus or measure its power by instruments that measure minute quantities of energy, what is it? If it is insubstantial and non-local? My guess is ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ which is but another metaphor for human abilities perfected and non-existent.
And Marg, I would truly like to believe in this, but I can’t . I actually think that people have a tendency to believe that helps them live better in our un-predictable, sometimes disastrous, frightening world.
If our responses are predictable, Marg. it’s because we’re responding to the same predictable expressions of ignorance.
Like it or not (and I know you don’t) scientific experiments do not default to “earth-shattering and paradigm-changing.” You keep acting on the false premise that they do, that if anything unexpected happened in Bengston’s experiments, it supports the idea that something magical and mystical and wonderful was just proven to be there around the corner. This is not science. You don’t get to tell people you were the winner of the race just because you didn’t come in dead last. You don’t get to tell people you won the baseball game just because there was at least one inning where you didn’t strike out. You don’t get to trumpet how we’re on the verge of a revolutionary change in medicine because one experiment which FAILED to show any difference between the tested intervention and placebo had instruments which were at best tangentially related to the actual subject of the study give anomalous readings.
And the more you predictably keep repeating your false claims that Bengston’s screwed-up experiments are meaningful, the more we’ll give our predictable response that Bengston’s experiments are no more “science” than counterfeit bills are “currency.”
I was taking another look at the Society for Scientific Exploration and came across two target-rich areas for skeptics: firstly a page of video links to talks on a variety of subjects (one by Bengston about a third of the way down the page), the second a page of links to articles again on a variety of topics (there’s link to an article by Bengston about half way down the page). I’m not sure what to make of some of this material, as some seems fairly sensible, while some seems like utter BS. There seems to be a sort of consensus there that does not resemble the scientific consensus I am familiar with. In their world precognition, remote viewing and telepathy are proven fact, as are energy healing, acupuncture and homeopathy. It’s a bit like a weird parallel universe, but inhabited by (apparently) well-credentialed scientists.
For example I just watched with some amusement a talk on how you can use remote viewing to predict changes in the the stock market (I thought of you Denice). I couldn’t stomach one on how a woman was cured of Asperger’s through two methods, firstly, “to provide coaching of behavior in this very bright and mature 18 year old woman who was suffering from problems in learning mathematics, inattention, difficulties in interpersonal relationships, lack of feeling in the left hemisphere of her brain and a symptom she called “galloping,” a practically all-day pacing back and forth due to an inner sense of urgency”, which seems reasonable, but also, “to heal using the Levashov Method of mental intention to scan and enter the etheric and astral bodies of Gwen’s (fictitious name) subtle body structure and make corrections where needed”.
If any of you have a few minutes to kill, I would be interested in what those with specialist knowledge make of some of the topics you are familiar with that are discussed there. Those areas where I do have some specialist knowledge do seem like nonsense to me, but my physics and astrophysics are rusty, as is my understanding of neuroscience and consciousness studies and several other areas. So little time, so much interesting information. Anyway, is there any wheat amongst the chaff, or is it all chaff?
Actually, we all–each and every one of us–lack feeling in both hemispheres of our brains.
I’m reminded that Vallée was the very first ApJ author that I handled. Kinda surprised to see Yervant Terzian on the list. Anyway, I just glanced at “Is There a Mars Effect?” Gauquelin would seem to be shooting himself in the foot by noting, “Actually, the more recent obstetric procedures tend to modify the natural (circadian) cycle of labor and birth. Fortunately, the athletes were not born that recently, and their births still reflect a spontaneous pattern.” (Citations omitted.) I mean, what, it doesn’t “work” if labor is induced? Mars is actually on a mission?
JGC,
I didn’t spot that. Anyway, I seem to recall that the whole hemispheric specialty thing has been largely debunked. Most of us have a functioning corpus callosum so experiments with split brain patients are of limited relevance.
Narad,
If there is a signal in the noise it seems vanishingly unlikely that it is caused by the position of Mars in the sky, but more likely something that correlates with both that and some other factor that affects behavior. It seems reasonable that a child conceived in the winter might be different to a child conceived in the summer, for example, and I think there is some evidence for that. Of course even more likely is that the correlation itself is an artefact. It’s interesting that in so many of these studies they seem to detect a signal that vanishes when examined more closely, and they then spend years chasing shadows. It reminds me of the phenomenon of clinical trials that initially seem positive, but further studies are disappointing.
You are all way too predictable.
It is because our pineal glands are coupled to the 7.83-Hz Schumann Resonance of the Earth’s emf. That leaves little room for unpredictability.
Tell you what, take it up with Bengston in person.
If Bengston takes the trouble to writes comments in a Respectful Insolence thread, I imagine that someone will respond to him. At the moment, it’s Marg writing comments in a RI thread and receiving critiques of her ideas.
Why should we go to the organ-grinder in person?
Aside from being able to release the energy at unexpected moments to make funny hand noises, of course.
Oh, Krebiozen, I tried!
I looked over the list of articles, hoping to find something about consciousness, memory or personality that I might delve into seriously BUT
then after looking over the AUTHORS and running across ‘H.Bauer/ H.H. Bauer’ several times in a relatively short list… well, he is highly ranked amongst chief HIV/AIDS denialists, I mean DISSENTERS. And an expert on the Loch Ness monster- so I suppose I became judgmental .. you know that old saw about the company people keep giving us valuable hints about their quality etc.
I might go back after my headache dissipates.
-btw- I myself do remote viewing all of the time but I call it either visual memory or imagination. I’m odd that way.
Is that like armpit farts?
I’ve said it before, life would be so much simpler without ethics. As a marginally accomplished scientist, I think how famouser I could be by selling out to the sCAM side. I could do it and throw my position behind it and they’d love me.
As I said I have an ethical streak. Not so much a moral streak, as I could easily see myself ruling in hell (I figure, if the christians are right, then satan would certainly appreciate all of his “work” I’ve done on earth so I’d have that going for me), so it’s not like I don’t have a satanic side, but when it comes to colluding with scam artists, I draw the line. Thesew folks are bloody evil.
Denice,
It sounds like you had a similar experience to mine when I saw familiar names like Maccabee, Radin, Vallee, Stevenson, Puthoff, Targ, Gauquelin, Sheldrake, Hoyle, Wickramasinghe… I suppose that shows where my interests used to lie, until I got tired of all that. I still find it fascinating that so many scientists spend their time chasing, but never catching, rainbows.
By the way, I don’t think my diversion is as OT as it seems at first. I think the phenomenon of people seeing and pursuing patterns in noise has a lot to do with the kind of quackery often discussed here. I’m not convinced, as Marry Me, Mindy appears to be, that these sCAMsters all know they are selling false hope. I’m pretty sure most of them genuinely believe in it. It’s just that these kinds of belief have a much greater potential to do serious damage in the area of health, than believing parrots are telepathic, that you can remote view climate change or whatever.
two target-rich areas for skeptics: firstly a page of video links to talks on a variety of subjects …, the second a page of links to articles again on a variety of topics…
Lots of blogging material there to be sure, but one can’t just write about “crazy stuff that intelligent people take seriously” without soon reaching satiation, because there’s SO MUCH crazy stuff that people believe. Eventually you starting for “crazy stuff that stands out in some way”.
It’s a bit like a weird parallel universe, but inhabited by (apparently) well-credentialed scientists.
Reminds me of the Fortean Times but without the sense of humour.
I see Persinger’s on the list.
@ Krebiozen:
I wonder if we can smell woo?
I find myself in the uncomfortable (RL) position wherein I know a lovely, bright man, who is entirely well-meaning and expert at what he does, whose daughter is directing a documentary of what-might-be-woo ( concerning athletic training/ performance linked to a factor that may have some physiological merit) I don’t want to entirely lower the boom and I haven’t as yet read the whole thing but I fear I might have very bad news for the father. Who I don’t want to hurt.
So far, I have warned him that her project may have merit but she should be very wary of marketting engines- like alt med websites with high rankings who might use her and who often are associated with dodgy business and science. I guess at somepoint I should write something up for her. I’d also hate to see her hurt or, as an innocent trying to break into a field, get used as someone else’s vehicle. And I don’t want to lie to these people. But I also wouldn’t want to see a young person’s career start out badly.
Pablo (MMM) is right: ethics are a b!tch.
HDB,
The sheer volume of nuttiness is a bit overwhelming, but it’s the scientists who should really know better but have bought into the crazy that fascinate me. I did notice browsing through some Edge Science volumes that quite a number have strayed some distance out of their area of expertise, like Bengston, a sociologist, wandering into energy medicine and cancer, and Sheldrake, whose PhD is in biochemistry, postulating morphogenetic fields and psittacine telepathy. BTW I know the chap who founded Fortean Times, who lives not far from me, and I used to attend the Fortean Unconventions which were quite fun, though I enjoyed the pub afterwards even more.
Denice,
That’s a bit of an unenviable quandary you have there. Remember that disillusionment may hurt but it’s a good pain.
I’ve never been in the UK at the right time of year for an Unconvention, alas — when I was living in London in the late 80s the FT’s social activities were restricted to a stall at the Alternative Press festivals in Conway Hall. Had a few beers with Paul Sieveking though.
I finally have time to get caught up and see there’s no point in discussing the original cancer quackery anymore… apparently we’re now in the land of weird energy fields?
I agree with Antaeus: Marg holds onto one single example of ‘proof’ and ignores the consensus of data that disproves her point.
Antaeus was too generous:
You keep acting on the false premise that […] if anything unexpected happened in Bengston’s experiments, it supports the idea that something magical and mystical and wonderful was just proven to be there around the corner. This is not science.
I emphasise that nothing unexpected happened in Bengston’s experiments. Bengston reckoned that it was a surprise for one particular strain of inbred mice to have sufficiently strong immune systems to destroy one particular strain of cultured tumour cells — but he had nothing to support that assumption. The only relevant publications are decades out of date, when mouse strains and tumour cell lines are both continuing to evolve with each generation.
@ flip:
” we’re now in the land of weird energy fields”
Yes and I sense a disturbance in the Force.
Seriously, woo seems obsessed with the idea of energies and waves, having apparently given up on bio and physio.
I have heard a tale about Rife’s assistant ( or wife) having saved a ledger filled with the curing frequencies he had discovered : each one specific to a particular illness. Of course, no one knows where this treasure now is located.
Similarly, energy medicine ( or psychology) may be described as an attunement of a person’s unwieldy energy patterns being brought into line by a healer who serves as a human tuning fork, coaxing the bad vibes into allignment.
Chakras- wheels of energy, may be similarly balanced through meditating or repeating an assigned syllable ( by sound vbrations).TCM balances Qi by various methods.
I think that energy/ waves is a step on the immaterial/ material scale that leaves the purely material behind: it may be halfway to ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’- which is where they’re really headed.
If you scratch woo deeply enough, you’ll find religion.
Boy, a person throws you a bone and you have hours of fun chewing on it. I should be charging for all this entertainment.
Have you checked out Joie Jones’s experiments yet on pranic healing and cell lines damaged by gamma radiation? That’s on the SSE website too. And Youtube.
One of these days someone is going to twig that the experimenter’s consciousness affects the outcome of experiments. Oh wait, I think physicists already have ….
Oh, wait, you think wrong. Are you just bouncing on the flouncepoline at this point?
@Narad
Nope, I think I’m quite right on this point.
@ DW
Yes we can smell woo. Mercaptans, maybe. I respect your expertise! Do you intend to write a review, monograph, or book?
And yeah, Marg, nothing like seeing some very smart & educated people take the bait and try to explain some elements of real-world science to the deluded provocateurs who drop in now & then. Some of the threads amaze me.
@DW
This is where smart, educated people who have been completely brainwashed into thinking that nothing completely new could ever be discovered again try to impose that point of view on someone else who thinks otherwise.
Sorry, that last is for @THS
@DW
Similarly, energy medicine ( or psychology) may be described as an attunement of a person’s unwieldy energy patterns being brought into line by a healer who serves as a human tuning fork, coaxing the bad vibes into alignment.
Yes, that appears to be the general belief. Seems kind of consistent with the results of Bengston’s studies with geomagnetic probes.
One of these days someone is going to twig that the experimenter’s consciousness affects the outcome of experiments. Oh wait, I think physicists already have ….
Quantum physicist here. Also, I was once a farmboy. One thing about growing up on a dairy farm is that you know cowshit when you see it.
You are all way too predictable.
You know what would be really unpredictable? Flouncing out from a web community promising never to come back, and then not coming back.
It appears that the word ‘c0wsh1t’ puts one in moderation. Ah well.
Wait… umm. Let me get this straight – his healing energies are so amazing that they bounce off what they are healing and effect the geomagnetic field…
I have to wonder why everyone with cancer for miles wasn’t miraculously healed at the same time as the mice?
Marg’s whole argument is ridiculous. Even if Bengston could do what she says, which is so far beyond rational that it is invisible in the real world, so what? Can anyone else do it? No? So what good is it? Let’s compare him to Uri Geller who claimed to be able to bend spoons. Again, so what? What possible use is there in the world of such a useless skill? Who benefits?
I know that if these charlatans could actually do what they say they can do, which they can’t, it would mean that all the known laws of physics would have to be changed but I am just pointing out how useless it is for one person to display a skill that no one else has. I can wiggle my ears, one at a time. Seems to me that is at least as impressive.
August 25, 9:05 pm:
Scoff all you want.
12:50 am:
This is where smart, educated people … try to impose that point of view on someone else who thinks otherwise.
I guess scoffing is not allowed after all.
Remembering the time someone dropped a flask-full of mercaptans in the cold-room – more phew than woo…
Marg,
Of course completely new things can and will be discovered, but when someone claims they have made such a discovery, the quality of evidence they provide has to be high, which includes replicability. I would love to see Jones’ and Ho’s work replicated by someone else – their claims that stimulating acupoints associated with vision in the foot cause the visual cortex to light up on fMRI should be easy enough to test, using a more robust double-blinded methodology (IIRC visualizing something also causes the visual cortex to light up on fMRI so expectation could be a serious confounder). Until then I remain skeptical, particularly as it seems certain that acupuncture as practised today was invented in the 1930s, not developed through thousands of years of trial and error as Jones suggests.
Some of Jones’ paper on pranic healing made me chuckle I must admit, such as, “These experiments represent, to the best of our knowledge, the first experimental observation and measurement of karmic intervention” and, “A Newtonian physics world view, which serves as the basis for contemporary biology and Western medicine, is incapable of explaining these experimental results; however, the data are quite consistent with a quantum mechanical world view”. I’m afraid I find it hard to take that sort of thing very seriously.
visualizing something also causes the visual cortex to light up on fMRI
IIRC the evidence for that is pretty shaky. Perhaps some activity in extra-striate cortex.
Did Marg just call psychology energy medicine?
No Marg psychologists do real experiments with real controls and results that can be duplicated. That is like calling quack medicine for the body real medicine. Oh wait, you do that too
Darn! If you had just used the CAM buzzword “quantum” I’d have filled my bingo card!
Oh well, maybe next game…
Perhaps the stupidest comment I have ever read here.
Marg, apparently you are not aware that there are plenty of folks here even whose entire careers depewnd on the fact that there are new things to be learned! It is what folks like me do for a living – discover new things that people did not know before.
The idea that these smart people can’t accept something new is about as clueless ad hominem that can be. Created
One of the problems seems to be that Marg does not understand intelligent people.
The problem isn’t the unwillingness to believe that anything completely new can ever be discovered: it’s that you’ve offered no actual evidence something new has actually been discovered.
I keep asking this question, and you keep persistently failing to answer it: if we offered a study which found cancer patients receiving chemotherapy did just as well as cancer patients receiving no treatment at all, would you consider that evidence science had been “discovered” chemotherapy cures cancer?
@ THS:
Well, I didn’t think it’d smell like oakmoss- which I like.
I thank you for your interest :I actually don’t want to write a book ( although I have thought about a story updating Thomas Hardy where the characters live in highrises and use electronic communications but that might be entirely too close to home for me).
We are engaged in a collective endeavor and I work very hard to share what I know and what I find.
@ Kr (7:59)
The section of Jones paper you quote has me suspecting a Sokal-style parody – but it’s a bit of a task, actually, to spoof material that is intrinsically a self-parody. But it’s not easy for someone trained in critical thinking and reasoned argument to spout gibberish at length. Sokal has discussed this in his commentary on how & why he wrote & published that spoof – “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”.
“Newtonian physics world view..” Phew! Reminds of an exchange I had ~ 20 yrs. ago with a friend, newly minted Ph.D. with a post-modern bent. I’d expressed interest in the molecular biology of neurology or some such thing & she responded something like, “Oh, so you have a Newtonian approach…” And i was like, “I’m not sure what you mean but my interest in is how things work…”.
“Newtonian world-view” rhetoric is generally followed by quantum-mechanical and/or relativistic nonsense.
About SB people being brainwashed:
I’d argue quite the opposite- many people here have had experience with alt med, new age thought, religion and esotericism of various sorts. Some people are converts to SBM *from* woo. And just possibly- a few of us might understand how brainwashing and propaganda work.
No one tells me how to think. I’m over 50 and can easily recall movements that expounded new age ideas in the 1970s and 1990s.. I was fortunate to begin my university education at a very young age and didn’t start out in social science- I studied art and literature and life sciences as well. I did entertain possibilities beyond the accepted norms but always came back to what seemed most feasible.
It comes down to whether results and evidence can be shown OR if there is a possible mechanism that explains the action postulated. If you have one, it might eventually lead to the other. But when you look over data that can be explained other ways more easily, is haphazardly acquired or supports a product OR there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism, you often become jaded.
About mechanisms:
how would this work? We can detect extremely small amounts of energy and minute biological changes. If someone is transmitting something or receiving something, we should be able to detect something. And where would this occur? What part of the brain? Or body?
One woo-meister I survey talks about ‘energy exchanges’ being his method of healing: he lays hands on people. OK, this shows a location – hands. If there is something, why hasn’t it been measured? People report these healings since the early days of humankind. Now we have sensitive instruments.
I sometimes think that people who are entranced with alt med might have a better time of it if they studied art, literature or music where emotions and creativity can rule unhindered and speculation has no negative consequences.
THS,
She’s obviously not a pool player… Newtonian physics still seems to work pretty well in the macro world I mostly inhabit.
@Mrs Woo
See, this is what I mean by intelligent people being surprisingly dense. What the results suggest is a correlation between healing and local changes in geomagnetic micropulsations. The nature of the correlation needs to be investigated.
@Krebiozen
But a lot of the gadgets that you use rely on quantum physics.
@DW
It has been measured.
http://www.spiritualone.com/Download/OschmanReprint2.pdf
Sure thing. In that case, you should see a latitude-dependent effect.
@Marg – but you also insist that creatures he had no intention of healing were also healed. So just how does his healing work? If it is unintentionally healing mice, why wasn’t it also unintentionally healing every single living being within the experimental area?
If he can “heal” – is he sure he can and is the one doing the healing if he can’t even control “what” he his healing?
I don’t mind being called dense. I am regularly reminded I am not nearly as educated as some of the people who regularly comment on this blog (not by them; they are very gracious; rather, when they discuss things I haven’t had a formal education in I absorb what I can and try to read what papers are available without paying as I find them). Besides – if you’ll call Ph.D.’s who are arguing with you within their area of expertise morons, I consider being called dense a compliment…
On an subatomic level, yes. I don’t think that means that mice can become quantumly entangled, or that mere intention has effects on healing.
But Jones found that in pranic healing “the shielding of cells from EMF and gamma radiation had no effect on the results”, which excludes the kind of pulsing electromagnetic fields the article you linked to claims is responsible for energy healing. Something there doesn’t add up, methinks. That’s only one of several serious flaws a cursory glance at that article reveals.
Dear Mrs. Woo, I didn’t start out here by insulting people, I only began to respond in kind after several people (most notably @Antaeus Feldspar) insulted me. It is generally not in my nature to throw around insults but apparently I can be provoked into it.
To all: it is called “subtle energy”. It is not called subtle because it is hit-you-over-the-head obvious. People like Bengston, Oschman, Radin, Tiller and Swanson (among others) are trying to figure out what it is and what it does. People like you are flinging poop at their efforts and ridiculing them because you simply cannot even conceive of the merest possibility that what they are looking at is real. Labs and scientific journals are generally run by people like you, hence people like them have had to create their own society and journal to publish their results.
Bengston has been having a hard time even getting mice for his experiments. The mice always heal, but the ethics review boards say that putting them in Bengston’s experiments would expose them to undue hardship. He would love nothing more than to have the opportunity to do human studies, but no one will allow him to do one.(Of course my information here could outdated.) He could, for instance, do a study with newly-diagnosed stage-3 or 4 pancreatic cancer patients who are too far gone for anything other than palliative chemotherapy. If he healed a bunch of them, would you believe that what he does is real? Then, as a next step, he could do a double-blind study, if people agreed, in which one group received palliative chemo and sham healing and the other saline solution and Bengston healing (which he could do from a distance, so no one would need to be the wiser), and we could see which group does better. But quite likely the ethics review boards that wouldn’t allow mice to be exposed to the undue hardship of receiving energy healing would be even more squeamish about people.
If any of you have the clout to arrange something like that, contact Bengston.
Isn’t time we dredged up Occam?
Seriously: I once went to a presentation about veganism and auras: the aura person went through her beliefs and put up a white screen. lowered the overhead lighting and had people stand in front of it- including yours truly- she said I had a lavender and blue aura. A very nice one.
Looking this up at a reiki website today, I learn that I am ( was) good at communication and am a visionary. Oh!
Now anyone who studied art or visual perception can tell you that there is a phenomenon called simultaneous contrast where you will see the OPPOSITE because of what is going on in the receptors ( so light/ dark, red/green, blue/orange etc; long story- lateral inhibition, edge detection, horseshoe crabs etc). So if you place a red square on a white ground, you’ll see a tinge of green along the border, the reverse wih a green square. You can do this at home.
The theory of perceptual contrast assumes much less that the theory of aura perception which would postulate special abilities without known or measurable mechanisms of action. We can say: cells.
HDB,
Forgot to mention:
Me too, which by Jake Crosby’s criteria makes us practically related.
Do you really think you’re laying down some sort of novel trip?
Now, where’s the latitude dependence?
Had a few beers with Paul Sieveking though.
Me too
Like any true hipster, naturally I prefer those 1980s issues of Fortean Times in the A5 format… before it sold out and went commercial.
That was when Compendium Books was still going — before the pressures of mass tourism filled the streets of Camden with chain stores identical to every other tourist attraction.
I recently gave away my entire collection of FT (mostly of the commercial A4 variety) to an appreciative acquaintance, and donated most of my collection of books on the weird and esoteric to the Charles Fort Institute. It felt good.
donated most of my collection of books on the weird and esoteric to the Charles Fort Institute
You can never have too many volumes of Corliss’s Anomalies series
Gentlemen:
I do believe that me might have scared her off. Pity.
We probably said a bad word: (Occam, Hume, beers, hipster) are my top guesses.
WE might have scared her off….
@Narad
Different context.
But if you are going to invoke nihilism, and state that all phenomenology is flux, and reality should be placed in quotation marks, then you might well take an axe to Newtonian physics.
@DW
I do have a life & can’t spend all my time online. I don’t think Occam’s razor is quite applicable here.
But if pointless derision is all you can produce at this point, then this discussion has a probably come to an end.
“might as well take an axe” and “has probably come to an end”.
Six will get you four she comes back. Any takers?
In the words of the bear in the joke, I’m beginning to think that she doesn’t really come here for the hunting.
Oho! You’ve come quite close to hitting upon your problem.
And now you are missing the mark badly. I should note that I did not “invoke” anything other an extent reply of which I am fond to your actual invocation of “subtle energy.”
What in the quoted analysis do you actually object to? I don’t mind painting the target in fluorescent colors.
^ “extant”
Actually, behavioral scientists did it, not physicists. A number of studies showed that someone doing an experiment may be tempted, more or less consciously, to influence the result of the experiment accordingly to his/her expectations.
It’s called experimenter bias.
By example, provide a group of students with similar rats, but tell them that they randomly got a smart rat, or a dumb rat. And then, have the rats running a maze or something similar. Weirdly enough, the students who were told they got smart rats had better results.
Article: A longitudinal study of the effects of experimenter bias on the operant learning of laboratory rats.
Rosenthal, Robert; Lawson, Reed
Journal of Psychiatric Research, 2(2), 1964, 61-72.
Quite old, but there have been plenty of articles confirming the results since then.
Oh, wait, the experimenter’s influence is carried out by the physical handling of the animal, not by psionic waves. Carry on, carry on.
Actually, behavioral scientists did it, not physicists.
Didn’t they cover that in your physics classes? How the successful formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate at extremely low temperatures or the coupling of electrons into BCT pairs in a superconductor depend crucially upon the researcher maintaining the correct state of consciousness throughout the experiment? That was part of third-year lectures for me.
That’s what went wrong with cold fusion… Pons and Fleischmann allowed unsympathetic witnesses into the laboratory too early, and their skeptical consciousness banjaxed the effect. I believe there is an article on this in Edge Science.
@Marg
Then one wonders how the energy manages to heal anything at all. Gravity is also ‘subtle’, in the sense that it is a very weak force. Yet we can detect the presence of planets just from the effects of its gravity on another planet.
How is it we can’t measure energy healing but we can detect such other ‘subtle’ things? (And part two of that question: if we can measure tiny magnetic changes, how come we can’t measure energy healing which somehow uses magnetic forces?)
Serious question: has anyone tried to use the power of energy healing – or whatever it is – to move an (super strong) Earth magnet?
Ah, I get to use my bingo card…
Big Science conspiracy. Check.
What now? Can the regulars inform me whether this makes any sense? Because it doesn’t to me…
And Occam’s razor isn’t applicable? How is it not applicable?
@Denice
Thanks for that explanation about auras. I often noticed quite an obvious tinge around objects at times: but I wear glasses all the time and assumed it was to do with refraction. (Some of it would be for obvious reasons… ) Now I’m going to pay more attention to when it happens and see when it’s my glasses and when it’s not.
@ Herr doctor bimler
Shhh, I’m hunting wabbits.
I put a post with the words “experimenter bias” and “animal handling physically influences the outcome” following a discussion about a searcher who thought he mentally influenced the outcome of his experiences.
I’m waiting to see what sort of hare is going to rush out of the bushes…
Ah, so don’t go to sleep until your experiment is over?
That could explain a number of failed tests I experienced. The number of times I found on the morning that my instrument got jammed about one hour after I left the previous evening…
(eh, “recall bias”? what do you mean?)
Marg doesn’t get that we’re not the enemy: we just want to use words appropriately.
If you call research ‘science’ that implies certain characteristics- it means that you are demonstrating something, explaining certain effects, showing how effects are attributable to particular variables and not others, RULING OUT things, showing mathematically how the effect is not due to chance alone, linking this to past studies, showing OTHERS how to replicate your data, using parsimony etc.
On the other hand, there are also ‘belief’ and ‘faith’: it’s important to keep data and belief separate as Helianthus points out ( re the ‘halo effect’/ experimenter bias). That’s what controls, seeking confounders, using statistics, having multiple experimenters, blinding, replication et al. is trying to accomplish. We know that what we see is often NOT what is there without us: we need to control for our own effect.
There’s nothing wrong with having faith or belief: it’s just not right to call it science.. If a healer calls upon the power of her g-d/dess or upon the arcane powers of the universe itself: there’s nothing wrong about that. If she proclaims special powers or that immeasurable, invisible forces are at work, healing people- no problem.
There’s only a problem if you call what is rightly labelled ‘religion’, ‘science’: they’re different; they don’t follow the same rules; they have different purposes. Religious fervor interferes with scientific observation because it itself is a bias that tilts results in a pre-determined direction: the answer is known in advance. And can’t be wrong.
If a person wanted to scientifically study the effects of faith or belief: that is entirely possible but there is a need for controls, outside observers,statistical analysis and all of the usual methods of eliminating bias. You need testable hypotheses. This would be easy to do.
I imagine they’re considering the stress placed on the etheric bodies of the mice.
OK, I am now wondering whether Stephen Extra-Sensory Perception of Quarks Phillips is in fact a direct connection between Theosophy and Marg’s fantasy world. (E.g., here [PDF]; shouldn’t have hung your astral hat on the subtle peg of superstrings, Stephen.)
Oh wait, nobody has mentioned Fritjof Capra yet?
@Herr Doktor Bimmler
She comes back to yank your chains.
@Narad
But if you are going to invoke nihilism, and state that all phenomenology is flux, and reality should be placed in quotation marks, then you might well take an axe to Newtonian physics.
And now you are missing the mark badly. I should note that I did not “invoke” anything other an extent reply of which I am fond to your actual invocation of “subtle energy.”
What in the quoted analysis do you actually object to? I don’t mind painting the target in fluorescent colors.
I don’t object to anything in the quoted analysis. I am just pointing out that it is entirely inconsistent with a reliance on Newtonian physics for all things, which seems to be a favorite pastime of the posters on this thread.
I
This is just another incredibly stupid utterance on your part, Marg. Leaving aside the fact that you plainly don’t know a goddamned thing about physics, the invocation of the topic to support your mind-slop cosmic healing ideation is using the wrong tool for the job. “Bad Fazzm,” it’s been called.
@Narad
You are the one who hasn’t thought through the implications of the philosophy you cited. I am not impressed by your ability to cite complicated-sounding texts you don’t seem to understand.
@DW
Fritjof Capra.
“Complicated-sounding”? Well, I suppose you have already demonstrated that you’re rather the simpleton, so terms such as “Bad Fazzm” might confuse you. Trust me, O ye of the empty posturing, I know that which I quoted very, very well.
@Narad
No you don’t. Otherwise you wouldn’t have used it. You are full ot if.
“full of it”
No you don’t. Otherwise you wouldn’t have used it. You are full ot if.
Perhaps you’d like to elaborate on this devastating critique, Marg. Scholarship in this particular religious tradition is a rather specialized endeavor, with perhaps one or two dozen serious types on the planet.
I see we’ve moved past the intricate and detailed debate points of data and evidence to the more primary school debate tactics known as “you’re full of it”.
How about we just introduce glue and rubber and fully devolve the conversation to “I know you are but what am I?”
Now that the thread has evolved into a discussion of the philosophical and theological bases of the Neo-American_Church Church, I for one am enjoying the prospect of a debate between Narad and Marg as to who is more knowledgeable, and I know on whom I am betting my 50 quatloos.
Well, you don’t really have to be a Psychedelian to get Narad’s point. The depths of Marg’s obliviosity are truly unfathomable.
@Narad
The phenomenological body is always imaginary … The term “reality” is meaningless. Nabokov, a solipsistic nihilist, was right. It is the only word in the English language that should be placed, routinely, between quotation marks (to emphasize its mere idiomatic utility).
This would seem to imply that the phenomenological world is also imaginary. Newton’s laws appear to do an excellent job of propping up this world that “appears to be”. Your co-debaters appear to place great faith in Newton’s laws and this phenomenological world. Explain to them that it is all illusory, just as illusory as “energy healing”, which, like everything else, is an Instantaneous “manifestation” of capacity instantaneously “obliterated,” so to speak,
Oboy – a postmodernism discussion.
No wonder Marg isn’t interested in posting evidence: truth is perception after all.
@Flip
Just pointing out to @Narad the implications of his quote.
[Pulls ‘The Tao of Physics’ (“includes a fresh chapter on subatomic physics”) from the bookshelf, blows off a small cloud of dust, leafs through it, briefly considers rereading it, decides against it and replaces it in bookshelf.]
@Narad again
If the control probes are all at the same latitude, there is no discrepancy, and therefore no problem.
http://www.ann-geophys.net/24/1809/2006/angeo-24-1809-2006.html
@Narad
Or rather, if all the probes are at the same latitude … They were all on the same university campus.
Did you forget the part where the experiment was putatively replicated in different locations?
We were forced to deal with dualism/ etc publicly because we studied what is called the history of ‘pre-scientific psychology’- having had a few philosophy courses previously enabled me to amaze my fellow/ sister students who weren’t at all happy with the material…my ultra-posh prof was very pleased with me for not minding.
However the entire issue never caused me to lose any sleep: personally I look at it this way, it is possible that all is indeed one substance or the other ( probably not both) and that which we experience as mind is merely an epiphenomenon or that all is indeed an illusion that mind broadcasts into our viewfinder- which is also illusory..
it’s INSUBSTANTIAL
it doesn’t make a shred of difference because if the relationships within that ( material or illusory) world remain AND the systems of relationships of how we represent that so-called world to ourselves (including their linguistic stand-ins as well as whatever our selves ARE to us) remain, we are alright and can function and operate in that world..
So the world being a drift of ideas or illusions or objects is at heart the same thing and doesn’t matter in the least. I act as if it’s real or not in some sense or the other. As long as something ELSE doesn’t intrude into it, I’ll be fine.
I get things done. You would be surprised how well.
Hope I’m clear.
It is. So? This observation doesn’t mean that all of a sudden it starts doing whatever you want it to.
No, what “props things up” are the psychological wish and repression system of the subject, who is just as real as everything else, which is to say, not at all.
, is an Instantaneous “manifestation” of capacity instantaneously “obliterated,” so to speak,
Why would I “explain” an utter falsehood? There isn’t any “energy healing.” You seem to be under the impression that anything goes. The appropriate tool, McPozzm, for understanding the perceived physical world is the scientific method. “Energy healing” is Fazzm. Trying to pretend that it’s some sort of quantum mechanical yet also geomagnetic mystery healing fluid squirting around between plural minds is Bad Fazzm. Really, really, bad Fazzm. A solipsistic nihilist approach, which isn’t much different from a stripped-down version of Madhyamaka Buddhism (which similarly scorns magic) has nothing but derision for such occultist bloviation.
It does come in kind of handy if one is in need of talking down someone in the grip of paranoid delusions long enough to broach the subject of presenting at the ER.
@ Narad:
Oh, I know ( and wish I didn’t).
Newton has also come in handy a few times.
@ Denice
I believe you are.
To use an old joke, if i was to step up to one of these philosophers and slap him, he will feel the hit regardless of the reality of the universe.
Whether the world is really physical, the dream of one person, or that we are all connected to a virtual construct a la Matrix, we can function quite well by assuming the world is real and is governed by specific cause-and-effect rules.
Now, as you said, if something was to step in and offered us a red pill (or was it blue?), we will have to re-assess the way we can interact with the world.
But, to put the topic back on science, if this out-of-reality something exists and breached in, there should be ways to study its interactions with our reality.
Oh, I get it. When Siegel healed the tumor-injected mice, the Computer in charge of the Matrix noticed it (It notices everything) and healed the control mice, just to mislead us.
Forget energy healing. That we need is a bunch of hackers to rewrite the code.
Narad,
Thanks for the Kleps reference, which has led me into some head spaces I haven’t explored for quite some time.
@Narad
http://okneoac.org/dts/snazzm-fazzm-and-mcpozzm
I don’t think this privileges “mcpozzm” thinking as you seem to believe it does. It seems to privilege the personal, or snazzm.
Having led a sheltered life, I have never had to talk a friend on a bad trip off a ledge, which is apparently what this system is designed for. I showed/e-mailed the site to a number of friends who are not simpletons, including a scientist and a university professor, and the response I got was a) what the hell is this and b) why are you wasting my time with it? I actually found it interesting, although some of the distinctions are somewhat wobbly. It has a “Monty Pythonesque” feel to it.
Re: Mahayana’s rejection of “magic”, I believe the Elephant Path recognizes that once the mind is brought under control there can be so-called “magical” abilities, of which healing is one; these are not rejected as not possible but as not desirable if one is pursue the path to enlightenment.
@DW
Just reading Dan Falk’s _In Search of Time: Journeys along a Curious Dimension”. How interesting to read in the chapter on Newton that he attributed the intricate machinery of the universe to the divine. So when you/we use Newton’s theory to divorce science from God, we are denying Newton. Here is a sample from the General Scholium: “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being”. Newton believed in intelligent design: his clockwork universe had a clock maker.
Just saying. It still happens that advanced physicists and mathematicians come around to the belief that there is indeed a God.
@ Marg:
Newton was a creature of his times and used the language of his day. Whether he was a believer or not is irrelevant: his numbers stand on their own- I never saw a g-d constant written into any equations yet. No one has to divorce science from religion – they’ve been separated for a long time.
(-btw- ‘intelligent design’ is used to refer to the development of life forms TODAY as a substitute for evolution – not for the machinations of the solar systems and galaxies)
Most people of Newton’s day held that the universe was created by a deity: he was speaking to them, not to us.
And if some advanced physicists and mathematicians believe in a deity today that doesn’t mean anything or prove anything at all about the ultimate veracity of that idea : they are no better equipped than anyone else.
Given that I don’t think that McPozzm analysis is “privileged,” this is an odd remark to make. Would you like a cartoon to help?
Your ability to judge appearances is grossly inadequate, if that is what you think is “apparent.”
How did you answer these questions?
Such as?
Well, there’s something one doesn’t hear every day. Precisely what parallels would you draw between Python and Kleps’s writings?
The “Elephant Path”? I presume this is some sort of odd Nagarjuna reference that you picked up. This is a tangent, so I will not pursue it any further than necessary: There is no “path to enlightenment.” It is not a place. It is not an attainment. It is very simple, unless one’s head is full of crazy nonsense about geomagnetic microquantum mouse-healing chirp pulsations shooting out of one’s hands. (For the purpose of definiteness, I am asserting subitism.)
@Narad
It’s “Monty Pythonesque” in its erudite silliness.
Sidhis:
http://the-wanderling.com/siddhis.html
The Elephant Path is taught in Tibetan Buddhist meditation to attain calm abiding prior to proceeding to insight meditation.
I take it from the tone of your responses that you don’t practice meditation — or at least you don’t apply it much to daily life.
Namaste.
Do give me a pointer. I’m always curious to see what sort of hilarity the Lamaists are up to.
Go enlighten yourself 🙂
Orac is the ultimate alternative cancer treatment skeptic, who’s taken over from Stephen Barrett, who was barraged with so many lawsuits for untruths that he lost that he has been forced into the background. These guys are getting paid by the pharmaceutical industry to suppress the alternative med guys. Sure, he knows his stuff; he’s a trained researcher himself, but his views are tainted by filthy lucre.
Forgot to mention, Orac is developing a chemo drug for breast cancer, or so I’ve read, and stands to make a lot of bucks if it’s approved by the FDA
This is not a good answer, Marg. It would seem that the meditation isn’t helping. “All are hypnotized by the system of the jnanas, but none cares to realize his own self.”
I wonder why Marg is using Newton as some sort of argument from authority? I thought “Newtonian” was an epithet amongst her ilk. What does the religious beliefs of a 17th – 18th century scientist have to do with someone apparently curing mice (including the ones he wasn’t curing) by literal hand waving?
@Marg’s latest comment
Blah blah blah… Can no one come up with anything original anymore? It gets so tiresome after a while.
I find it fascinating though that Marg has now so completely given up on providing data to back up her cancer claims that she’s totally moved to discussions about religion and postmodernistic worldviews. With arguments from authority thrown in.
Does either have anything to do with cancer? No. But still she goes on…
@Narad
To be fair, Monty Python makes much more sense than many of the woomeisters. Especially if you consider at least one of their songs on the universe 😉
I meditate and I know a lot of people who do. They are just as likely to call dung dung when they see it as anyone else I know.
Because this isn’t the humanities, this is the sciences, where physical evidence is the currency of choice.
@Flip
Kindly explain to me what is wrong with “arguments from authority”, which is an entirely accepted way of doing business in the humanities.
@Narad
“go enlighten yourself” was my rejoinder to your request for a pointer about what the Lamaists were doing. You have a computer, you can use Google, just type in “Elephant Path”, and enlighten yourself as to what it’s all about.
Re: you privileging McPozzm, I am going by the statement you made, The appropriate tool, McPozzm, for understanding the perceived physical world is the scientific method. This statement doesn’t appear to be supported by anything I read here: http://okneoac.org/dts/snazzm-fazzm-and-mcpozzm.
Does anyone have any explanation as to why my reply appeared before the text I was quoting?
@Militant Agnostic
And yet the mice lived … 200+ of them, comprising nearly 100%. Someone suggested earlier that they were substandard mice that cured themselves; Jackson Labs, whose mice they were, might have a little something to say about that assertion, legally speaking. I am also not aware of a slew of cancer experiments where all the mice lived, rendering the research useless. The cancer research community might have made some kind of concerted response about that to Jackson Labs, which we would have most certainly heard about that. So how is it that only Bengston’s mice were useless, in 12 experiments over 30 years, at five different institutions?
Marg@10:24AM:
Because nearly all the mice in the control group lived as well. This indicates that they didn’t live because of the treatment, but because they were not ill to begin with.
The subject matter has disturbed the flux of the space-time continuum. Or some servers’ clocks aren’t synchronized properly. I prefer the former, as it’s more Pythonesque.
Marg,
I believe that in most cancer experiments on small mammals they are sacrificed (to the great God Science I presume, I can’t help resist a wry smile at that euphemism) long before they die, as leaving them to die slowly of cancer is considered cruel. Treatments are rated on effects on tumor growth or shrinkage; it is generally human experiments in which death is a chosen endpoint (human suffering not being as important as murine suffering it seems, but I digress). If I was pushed to choose between the possibility of a strain of mice developing a resistance to a cancer so that if left untreated they eventually recover, or Bengston’s energy healing having an effect, I think the former is very much more likely. A while ago I did dig around trying to find out more about the strains of mice and cancer used in the experiments, but I couldn’t find any solid data on how long they are supposed to live if untreated. I would like to see Bengston’s experiments properly replicated and debunked, as I don’t buy the skeptical indifference he claims he has witnessed in the labs he has worked in.
Tom Calarco,
He’s doing what? Developing an effective treatment for an illness that kills about 40,000 people* in the USA every year? That’s disgraceful. And he expects to get paid for it as well? Shocking. Only alternative treatment proponents deserve to live in luxurious $2 million mansions, after all.
*Men get breast cancer too.
If you are going to suggest that Bengston somehow managed to get defective mice for 12 separate experiments over 30 years or that trained lab assistants at 5 separate institutions somehow all managed to screw up his experiments, isn’t it time to invoke Occam’s razor, as @DW suggested?
@Grey Falcon
And yet they developed large tumors which histology showed to be cancerous. How strange.
So do most domestic mice and rats. They can survive for a while with tumors.
For more information:
http://www.fancymice.info/tumourarticle.htm
@Grey Falcon
Domestic mice and rats are not injected with tumors that normally kill them within 27 days.
And these mice did not just survive with the cancer but resorbed the tumors and went on to full-lifespan cures.
As did the control mice. Why was that?Oh, and if you feel that spiritual experience trumps physical evidence, does that mean I can accuse you of murder based on a dream I had last night, even if the alleged victim is still alive?
All of this brings back memories: as a student I read various writers influenced by Buddhist or Hindu religion/ philosophy- including Watts and Campbell- I even had a dream about Indra’s net**: no drugs, I swear!
Getting back to the mice: over @ PRN, the head honcho has been repeatedly re-living his past ‘research’ ( the 1970s?/ Institute for Applied Biology) – supposedly, he had lab mice with cancer/ injured by radiology research *healed* by several religious healers whom he had assembled. Earlier, he had also healed similar mice with nutrient rich juices himself. He claims rates of 100%. He explains that NO journal would print his research. So it is out there.
I am informed that he also uses energy exchanges to heal participants at his retreats over the past decades. And gives them juices/ a vegan diet as well. Insurance, I’d guess.
** I dreamt that I floated in a lightly self-illuminated, pale lime-green, gelatinous sea, whose un-breaking waves rose and fell -with which I could allign my breathing; the net was suspended at the surface- the interstices wherein the gems were affixed were 9 feet apart. I was in one of the spaces between…
Gee, why didn’t that occur to me? Oh, wait, it did. Nothing relevant comes up at the head of the class. Of course, if you had bothered to add “Dan Brown,” it would have simplified things tremendously. As stated above, I have no interest in “paths to Enlightenment” or other encumbrances that promise to unencumber one in x simple steps or your money back. (I do still feel a bit bad about failing to restrain a snort some years ago when informed that a coworker was going to be out for knee surgery as a result of his commitment to doing 108 five-limbed prostrations every morning, though.)
The use of “McPozzm” in that which you quote was transitional, not appositive. It makes no difference; you cannot meditate away ring around the collar. This is not “privileging” anything.
@Narad
The Elephant Path pre-dates Dan Brown & internet searches do produce relevant material.
Perhaps you would like to identify some items in this plenitude. As well as what it has to do with anything, given that I’m getting bored with scoffing at the useless earnesty of gradualism.
Domestic mice and rats are not injected with tumors that normally kill them within 27 days.
I’m gonna be boring and predictable and ask (again) for evidence that the tumours injected into Bengston’s mice *should* have killed them within 27 days. You’d think that if this was an accepted fact, it would be supported by the lierature, in textbooks somewhere. But no. Nothing.
“Earnesty” in the Oxford English Dictionary:
“No exact results found for earnesty in the dictionaries.
Did you mean earnest?
Did you mean earnestly?
Did you mean earnests?”
@herr doktor bimler
I’ve been looking too. Found this:
http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/26/11_Part_1/2297.full.pdf
See the second column under Results:
“The mammary adenocarcinoma (H2712) was originally ob
tained from the Jackson Memorial Laboratories at Bar Harlx>r
and transplanted in C3H/HeJ mice for a number of transplant
generations (approximately 50). Growth of H2712 was very
rapid (Chart 1). It was palpable 3-4 days postimplantation,
and rapid growth started 3 days later. At 11 or 12 days after
tumor implantation, the tumor reached a maximum weight of
3-4 gm. Also at this time some animals died, and by 15-20 days all mice had succumbed.”
Your utter failure is duly noted. And I put the neologism there with full awareness.
@herr doktor bimmler
This is interesting too:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/1097-0142(197108)28:2%3C340::AID-CNCR2820280213%3E3.0.CO;2-E/abstract
“We have investigated a new and as yet totally unevaluated method for retarding the growth of tumor cells by either transient in vitro exposure of tumor cells or palpable in vivo exposure of the tumor to a non-homogeneous magnetic field. Ten million mammary adenocarcinoma (H2712) mouse tumor cells were exposed to a 38 kilogauss magnetic field (field gradient, 12 kilogauss /mm) for 20 minutes, and subsequently, were injected in equal parts into C3H/HeJ mice, the carrier strain. Mice receiving tumor cells exposed to the magnetic field had a mean survival of 18 ± 1.3 days; the mean control survival was 9.0 ± 1.3 days. In addition, another group of C3H/HeJ mice with a barely palpable mammary adenocarcinoma tumor in the hind leg (48 hours post-injection) were exposed to the same field strength for 20 minutes, with a resulting mean survival of 18.3 ± 2.25 days, compared to a mean survival of 7.9 ± 1.4 days in controls. A repeated exposure of these in vivo tumors for 20 minutes at 72 and 96 hours post-injection produced a mean survival of 21.1 ± 2.0 days. Tissue temperature within the field remained normal, and there was no obvious damage to skin or surrounding normal tissues. These experiments have demonstrated that a non-homogeneous magnetic field is a potent inhibitor of tumor cell viability and growth rate, both in vitro and in vivo, and offers promise for clinical application.”
It also sounds like none of them lived to 27 days.
Some history:
http://www.biomedsearch.com/attachments/00/13/19/01/13190106/brjcancer00387-0217.pdf
The Tumor H2712 originated spontaneously in the mammary gland of’a C3H
mouse in 1948 at the Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory. This has gone through 86 transplant generations and shows 100 per cent transplantability in
C3H strains and their F1 hybrids. The histological type is an adenocarcinoma.
…
By means of graded Gomori reactions a more complete picture could be obtained
concerning differences between 4 tumors arising in the breast tissue of mice.
These tumors have been transplanted for many generations to their original hosts
and F, hybrids with a I00 per cent take. Thus a certain homogeneity of the
tumor strain should be expected. The three tumors E0771, H2712 and dbrB are
fairly identical in Itistology, as each is an adenocarcinoma with attempts at acinar
formations…
@Narad
What utter failure? I looked it up to show you that it was a non-existent word.
@Narad
The Oxford Classical Dictionary used to comprise some 26 volumes.
Marg, you can post as many links about H2712 as you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that Bengston’s ‘studies’ are poorly designed, improperly controlled, and contain no statistical analysis to speak of. The fact that you’ve tunnel-visioned onto this one point about survivability is very telling.
I’ve been looking too. Found this:
http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/26/11_Part_1/2297.full.pdf
As noted elsewhere, that paper was from 1966. The documentation for C3H/HeJ mice from the suppliers lists a number of mutations within the strain that have occurred since then.
Notably, around 1985 they became much less susceptible to mammary cancer.
The only reports about the life expectancy of *today’s* C3H/HeJ mice after tumour-cell injections are from this researcher called Bengston.
The fact that you’ve tunnel-visioned onto this one point about survivability is very telling.
Hey, it’s my tunnel vision too!
A comment is currently in moderation — too many links — but a 1985 report from the Jackson laboratory comments on a recent mutation within the C3H/HeJ strain (one of many mutations they have incurred over the decades) that makes them much less susceptible to mammary cancer. Meanwhile the H2712 cell-line mutates in different directions.
This came up in the other Bengston-related thread… papers on mouse survival from 1966 are not dealing with the same mice.
@AdamG
I was responding to @herr doktor bimmler’s assertion that there was nothing out there to indicate that the mice should have died in 27 days.
If you actually bothered to read what I posted you would have seen that the cancer is highly virulent, highly lethal & has 100% “take”. What kind of botched experiment is it where all these mice, programmed to die, survive to full life-span cures? You are the ones who suffer from tunnel vision, and whose understanding of statistics is so compromised by this tunnel vision that you can’t see the astronomical odds against ANY of these mice surviving, let alone most of them.
It does seem that this strain of mice has undergone at least one major mutation, making it resistant to endotoxins, since 1966 when the experiment Marg posted a link to was carried out. Also, only since 1999 has this strain been free of exogenous mouse mammary tumor virus, which could have a major effect on their mortality. It’s not tunnel-vision Marg, it’s eliminating the most likely explanations of what observations have been made. Magic? This strain of mouse doesn’t behave the same way it did umpteen mouse generations ago? Or something else went awry with the experiments? It’s how science works.
@herr doktor bimmler
The original Bengston experiments date from some time in 1970s, well before the 1985 mutation.
The original Bengston experiments date from some time in 1970s
Citation plz. The 2000 Bengston-Kinsley paper says nothing about the research being from two or three decades earlier.
It does seem that this strain of mice has undergone at least one major mutation, making it resistant to endotoxins
The 1985 paper on reduced cancer susceptibility in the C3H/HeJ strain does associate their greater resistance with that mutation.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2997536?dopt=Abstract
You are attached to names and forms.
Yes, Marg, I do have some familiarity with the trade. You’ve also misidentified the work that you’re aimlessly trying to gesticulate at.
Marg. it’s ‘botched’ because the control mice survived at the same rate that the experimental group did.
This means either the treatment didn’t work or the tumor was not properly administered. Neither explanation lends much credence to energy healing. Is this the best evidence there is for energy healing?
What do you mean by this Marg? On what basis are you claiming that our understanding of statistics is ‘compromised?’
Simple question for you, Marg. What statistical test should Bengston have done? Which test is appropriate here and why?
From Bengston & Krinsley:
The mice then lived their normal life span of approximately 2 years
If this experiment was indeed performed in the 1970s, this is quite an accomplishment in itself, since until the 1990s program of selective breeding that eliminated a carcinogenic virus, C3H/HeJ mice didn’t live that long. They developed spontaneous mammary tumours — originally at a median age of 40 weeks, shifting to 60 weeks after the mutation (reported in 1985, actual date not documented) that reduced their susceptibility, now over 80 weeks in the absence of MuMTV.
Now they tend to die of spontaneous hepatomas instead.
@Marg
Others will have gotten here first, but:
The clue is in that you use “humanities”. Arguments from authority don’t work in *science* which is what we’re discussing. We don’t talk about Newton because he’s a god; we talk about him because his ideas and data stand up after repeated pummeling and testing. The same goes for Galileo and Salk and all others. In fact, good science is all about ignoring where and who the data comes from. If it’s replicable and solid data, then that’s all that matters.
To put a finer point on it: even a young girl can come up with good data. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Rosa
If you really need this explained to you, then you don’t know the most basic principles of how science works. This is high school stuff.
Besides, as an artist who thinks very little of fame in the first place, I find arguments from authority to be utterly stupid when they’re used in humanities anyway. Most of the general public fall for the argument from authority when it comes to the arts, and it’s pretty bullsh*t for many reasons.
I am known for hating Shakespeare. Ask me why.
(Of course, my reasons have nothing to do with the obvious which is that in art no one actually bothers to check whether or not anything is based on reality and where postmodernism and “truth from feeling” rules the world. No wonder Marg thinks it’s acceptable for authority to win in humanities. Side point: if argument from authority truly worked in the arts, then no painter would need to die in order for their work to be worth anything. People would just recognise their genius on sight)
NONE OF THIS DISTRACTS ME FROM THE ISSUE THAT YOU HAVE POSTED NO DATA AND ARE COMPLETELY VEERING AWAY FROM DISCUSSING CANCER BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO EVIDENCE OR REFUSE TO POST IT. FOR WHICH YOU NEED TO USE SCIENCE, NOT HUMANITIES OR GUT FEELING, TO PROVE YOUR ASSERTIONS.
Do you know what replication is?
Argument from incredulity.
I thought I was having a discussion with MDs and researchers. It appears that I am having a discussion with artists who hate Shakespeare and Buddhist scholars who are familiar with the Oxford English Dictionary. Oh well. If all we can do is discuss philosophy of science and search the internet for mice, it is all quite a pointless exercise.
@herr doktor bimmler
Wouldn’t an externally introduced cancer qualify as an exotoxin rather than an endotoxin? It would be nice to find a cancer researcher who could tell us where these mice are at. The link you sent seems to suggest that they became less prone to developing spontaneous mammary cancer. Re: Bengston’s mice, since they developed immunity to the mammary cancer from which they were cured, they no doubt could live longer than their average cousins.
only Bengston’s mice were useless, in 12 experiments over 30 years
Just noting that the implication here — that Bengston’s research spans the period 1980 to now — contradict’s Marg’s later claim that he began “some time in 1970s”. It is also unsupported by any claims in Bengston’s papers (2000 and 2007) that the experiments had been much earlier.
trained lab assistants at 5 separate institutions somehow all managed to screw up his experiments
This seems to be a trend in the discussion of Bengston’s work elsewhere on the Intertubes. Here, for instance, a 2007 discussion of Bengson & Moga plays host to an anonymous defender:
http://skepstat.blogspot.com/2007/09/no-thanks-i-dont-need-any-treatment-ive.html
Anonymous said…
What you forget are the historical controls. No mouse ever, in any experiment, lived longer than 27 days with the form of cancer that these mice were injected with. […] Dr. Bengston is now up to 10 experiments at 5 different accredited institutions, including two medical schools, and the results have been replicated in all 10 experiments. Surely you could not accuse ALL the scientists involved of such gross incompetence that they could muck up ten experiments?
and later in the same thread:
Dr. Bengston had nothing to do with preparing the mice for the experiments. As I said, there have been 10 experiments in 5 different places.
Apparently to criticise the experiments is to CRITICISE THE STUDENTS who did the work, and how dare we do that!!
If the experiments were badly designed then it doesn’t matter two tugs on a dead dingo’s dick WHO performed them.
One notes that this discussion occurred in 2007, shortly after the Bengston & Moga paper described results from 5 studies (Bengston’s original four from 2000, plus one more), mentioned a 6th, and alluded to two ‘informal’ experiments; yet his defender is already talking about “10 experiments”. Rounding error.
@AdamG
The expected outcome of a woo/magical waving experiment involving mice with cancerous tumors is that all the critters die.
Re: Bengston’s mice, since they developed immunity to the mammary cancer from which they were cured, they no doubt could live longer than their average cousins.
Why would sending the H2712 adenocarcinoma into the cornfield also increase their resistance to their own spontaneous diseases?
Marg, it is merely your own posturing attempts at distraction that caused you to find yourself in such varied uncomfortable positions.
@herr doktor bimmler
The source for the experiments taking place in the 70s is Bengston’s book The Energy Cure and the talk I attended. The source for there being 10/12 experiments is also Bengston. When I attended his talk about 4 years ago he was talking about 10 experiments. In more recent talks on the internet he said 12, so I presume there have been two more since then.
How were the original four experiments badly designed?
@Narad
I am not the least bit uncomfortable.
@Narad
My audience has free will and can stop following the thread any time.
Yah, but what about your audience?
@Marg
Nah, I’m just the odd one out here. Plus, you’re repeating the argument from authority again.
Anyway, you’re still not posting actual evidence. Heck, even I could find a link that proves my point. (The wikipedia article) And I’m capable of reading and understanding a journal article. Ok, I grasp most of it. I still struggle with the maths.
I note that you don’t actually rebut my points. What, you don’t want to discuss the fact that you used a logical fallacy?
(By the way, it’s not that I hate Shakespeare: it’s that I don’t like the fact that people go to see it simply because the reputation must mean that it’s good – doesn’t matter if they can’t understand a word of it. My point, and I expected you not to ask me why I have that opinion, was that argument from authority in the arts leads one to ignore artists who are just as good, if not better, than the so called masters. People go to Shakespeare less because they like it and more because it’s familiar and safe and other people say it’s good so it must be. I only pick on Shakespeare because his reputation is known across all cultures; I could just as easily use another example from visual arts or literature or anything else. Eg. Neil Armstrong’s recent death. It’s sad and the world lost a great and courageous person: but we shouldn’t forget the thousands of engineers (etc) who worked so well to get him and the other astronauts there. Nor should the moon-auts be overshadowed by the great number of continuing scientists who travel up to the ISS whose names will never be known by the majority of the population. Their contributions are no less important to science. I make a more rational argument against authority than you do for it)
Hmmm…
This
should follow with:
and the performance is terrible.
As I said the arts is allowed or even expected to rely on gut feeling and New Age-y belief systems and post-modernistic views. That has absolutely 100% nothing to do with how science works, and the two are absolutely not interchangeable in how they should work.
Good science is repeatable data. Good art is doing whatever you feel like. If science worked the way humanities do, well, the Earth would still be the centre of the universe.
If this is true, then the fact that the mice lived means the experiment was not conducted properly. That’s a proper application of parsimony.
Marg, if I presented you with a clinical trial of energy healing in actual humans with cancer, and the main conclusion of the study was that not a single individual died (neither in the experimental nor the control group) would you conclude that energy healing cured their cancer? Why or why not?
This:
is in reverse. I meant that the ISS scientists shouldn’t be overshadowed by the moon-auts.
Sigh…
@herr doktor bimmler
Here is Bengston’s story paraphrased. Around 1970 or 71 he met a psychic/healer who wanted to be debunked and thought Bengston as a sociology student would be just the right man for the job. Bengston found the man interesting and hung around with him, watching and participating in his healings and asking him questions. He set up the first mouse experiment to test the man’s healing ability in a lab, but at the last minute the psychic balked and the two of them had a major falling out.
Bengston then decided to do the experiment with himself as the healer. He had no idea what to expect. He thought that maybe the mice would not grow tumors, and when they did he decided that the experiment was a failure. When the tumors grew he wanted to terminate the experiment because he did not want the mice to suffer. But then it was pointed out to him that the mice were not suffering, and that aside from having tumors and then ugly ulcerations they were looking healthy and acting quite normal. Then the ulcerations began to heal.
When he found out two of the controls died, he went to look at the remaining four to compare them to the batch that he was treating. He saw that the control mice in fact looked far the worse for wear. But after he looked in on them, they started following the same healing pattern as the experimental mice, with a few days’ delay, and in the end both groups remitted.
In the experiments that followed he says he tried to figure out what kind of parameters were necessary for the controls to die. He found that on site, they would remit. Off site, if he didn’t know where they were, they would die.
This is his story as he tells it. I cannot say whether it is true or not. From what he says, he didn’t set out to prove that the phenomenon was real. He is still not interested in proving that it’s real; he wants to do experiments to find out more about what it is and how it works.
The talk I went to had some MDs in the audience. The ones I talked to found him quite convincing and one even said he would take Bengston’s workshop out of curiosity even though he didn’t think he’d use what he learned. What Bengston says and shows is cumulatively quite convincing; he seems to have a body of research approaching the problem from a variety of angles; healing experiments with mice with strange results, the geomagnetic probes that show organized patterns when they should be random, and fMRIs of his brain, which does weird anomalous things when he heals.
When I saw him, he said he just wanted to be able to do more experiments.
Seems like the “psychic/healer” could have stopped right there and called it a day.
@AdamG
The expected outcome of a woo/magical waving experiment involving mice with cancerous tumors is that all the critters die.
If this is true, then the fact that the mice lived means the experiment was not conducted properly. That’s a proper application of parsimony.
Or, gasp, it means that energy healing actually works, although not in the expected way.
Marg, if I presented you with a clinical trial of energy healing in actual humans with cancer, and the main conclusion of the study was that not a single individual died (neither in the experimental nor the control group) would you conclude that energy healing cured their cancer? Why or why not?
Your example is not analogous to Bengston’s experiment because the mice did not just survive, they “remitted to full life-span cure”. My reaction would also depend on what kind of cancer you were treating. For instance, if you took a group of stage-4 pancreatic cancer patients and they all got cured (which is what happened to Bengston’s mice), I would have to conclude that something extraordinary happened. Your controls in that case would be all the other stage-4 pancreatic cancer patients out there who died, which is what stage-4 pancreatic cancer patients normally do. It would be impossible for you to do a statistical analysis, and everyone would say your experiment is useless. But if they said “nothing happened” they would be dead wrong, because you would have a bunch of stage-4 pancreatic cancer patients who had been cured.
And if you repeated the experiment again with the same results, I would be even more impressed, but a lot of people out there would be accusing you of using a bad experimental design, because there was no difference between your treated group and your control group, and besides, they were all supposed to die, so they clearly did not have cancer in the first place.
@Flip
I love your BLUE elephant and of course all the engineers and ISS scientists deserve their due as much as Neil Armstrong, even if their names will not be known.
I always hated going to the symphony/theater/opera just because it was the right “upper middle class” thing to do or because something famous was playing. If there is something on that you want to see or hear, that’s a different story. But I also tend to avoid things that attract multitudes.
At any rate, I lost you on my logical fallacy. Please explain.
The source for the experiments taking place in the 70s is Bengston’s book The Energy Cure and the talk I attended.
Whereof I cannot speak, thereof I must remain silent.
Marg, there are 2 competing hypotheses for why the mice survived. Either
A) The experiment was not conducted properly or
B) “it means that energy healing actually works, although not in the expected way”
One of these is true, the other false. What method can we use to determine which is true and which is false?
@AdamG
Do it again.
Marg, if you repeat a flawed experiment, you’ll still get flawed results.
How do we determine if the experimental design itself is flawed?
@Marg
Read: here is more unfounded anecdotal stuff that I pulled from a state of nirvana. Please ignore the lack of verifiable data as I have none.
Then why post it on a SCIENCE blog?
Yeah, maybe your reading comprehension sucks. AdamG said *parsimony*. It’s not A (no healing) or B (healing): it’s A, B, or C. C is where the study design is flawed so you can’t tell anything either way and parsimony suggests you go with A until better evidence shows B.
Oy…
Example:
Angelina Jolie comes up to you. She points to the sky and says the sky is red. You look up: it’s quite clearly blue. You tell her you disagree, you point to photos and spectroscopy and examples of blue paint for comparison. She doesn’t agree with you. She continues to say “it’s red”. You ask her to provide data that says the sky is red. She points to one small experiment which doesn’t use the right equipment to measure the colour of the sky. You look at the data she provides, but it doesn’t impress you. You show it to other scientists and they find many faults with it. Plus there’s 10 times more data going in the other direction and says the sky is blue.
Under your line of thinking Angelina Jolie is right simply because she’s famous. Or, because “truth is perception” so it’s red for her and blue for you.
Someone is either right or wrong. Nobel prize winners can be wrong. Young girls can publish peer-reviewed papers in well-known journals. The only thing that matters is whether or not the data or hypothesis stands up to scrutiny. Argument from authority is quite clearly a fallacy. And if you still don’t get it, you’re beyond help.
Or rather, if you still don’t get it, you’re refusing to budge because you’d prefer your postmodern worldview. At which point, I will repeat myself ad naseum:
Post some data. Other than your fanboi obsession with a single experiment.
How were the original four experiments badly designed?
I have no issue with the design of the original four experiments. Only with the *interpretation* — specifically, with the decision to ignore the ‘control’ nature of the control groups and treat them as additional Treatment groups (leaving no controls).
After that decision, it was clearly essential to have a *true* control group of mice who had been injected but offered no treatment at all — to check their life expectancy, for the current genetic make-up of the of mice, not the make-up they had X many years ago. None of this farrago of declaring groups of mice to be controls only to retrospectively relabel them as treatment groups (for increasingly complicated reasons of quantum entanglement) when they fail to die on schedule.
The source for the experiments taking place in the 70s is Bengston’s book
No. He may have first met his mentor in the 1970s. However, the book reviews I have perused — all on Bengston’s side — agree that he was a professor at the time at the time of the experiments, dating them to after he received his Ph.D in 1980. For instance:
And now, in honour of Bengston, I shall turn off this computer and play Alex Harvey’s “Faith Healer”.
@Flip
Where do you get “one little experiment”? There were 10. Five of them were written up.
@herr doktor bimmler
Do we understand that Bengston only LOOKED at the control mice?
Do we understand that the secondary controls were not instituted retroactively but as part of an experiment?
You are relying on reviews of the book to establish chronology?
I’ll have to peruse my copy of the book for the details, but I am pretty sure that he did not do the experiments as a PhD. I’ll have to get back to you on that.
@Flip
Correction, 12, at least according to Bengston’s latest comments.
@herr doktor bimmler
According to the book, Bengston did the first four experiments prior to getting his PhD. He says that after he failed to excite academic interest in his experiments, he chose to get back to his own field, and did not pick up the experimental trail again for two decades. The following chapter begins with the birth of his son and the attainment of his PhD in 1980.
Well, I have time because my car is being serviced.
To boil down the problem:
we want to see whether a treatment is associated with changes in the experimental group ( E) when compared to the control group ( C) that are significantly more than would be expected by chance alone..In short, diiferences between groups (BG) should be significantly more than differences within groups ( WG).( Pardon me but I can’t really do equations or draw on this machine)
To start, the two groups should be as equal as possible.
Thus, we have E= C. Hopefully.
The null hypothesis is that the two groups will remain equal despite treatment of E.
The alternate is that the E will change significantly AND C will not.
The results were that E=C. Which means that there is NO effect from treatment OR that something is amiss OR that B. cured all mice, some deliberately ( Es)
some inadvertantly ( Cs)
There are many ways to fix this that I won’t go into. The most obvious difference is B . himself : if he is the source of the cure ( or errors) remove him. OR have him present only for the E group, if HE is the treatment.
It’s much more parsimonious to believe that error is the source of the results than to suppose a new type of energy that can’t be explained by the laws of physics and biology. IF
there WERE past records of events resembling this, THEN B might have a leg to stand on so he might continue-
but there aren’t,
unless you count anecdotes and the fabled research of charlatans far and wide ( Institute of Applied Biology)
Basically, there are many ways to fix this research and B. didn’t follow up and eliminate other possiblities before trumpetting cure by energy or random looks.
@Marg
Even according to you, you *think* there’s 10 experiments, maybe 12. And you’re taking Bengston’s word for it instead of posting the citations. At any rate, I mistyped. What I should have said was
One experimenter. Not the ‘er’ on the end. In other words, you need more than one scientist and more than 10 experiments. Because 1 guy and a handful of papers does not trump the thousands of other data points and papers that suggest that faith healing doesn’t work.
And I continue to note that you have not posted further evidence backing up your assertions. Furthermore, I note you have not responded to my point about argument from authority.
You know what makes a conversation interesting? When people both ask *and answer* questions.
I love how Marg ignores questions she can’t or won’t answer and expects us not to notice. Here they are again Marg:
How do we determine if the experimental design itself is flawed?
What statistical test should Bengston have done? Which test is appropriate here and why?
@Flip @DW
Only in experiment one of the original four was Bengston the healer. For the other three he trained “skeptical volunteers” to do the healing. The experiments were run by the department heads of the biology departments where they took place. Other than train the volunteers in his healing technique, Bengston did not participate.
Bengston wrote his second paper to address the issue of the null hypothesis and said that it was a “Type 2 error”. The man teaches college-level statistics and sociology for a living, so one would imagine he knows statistics. BTW I illustrated the issue in a response above, using stage-4 pancreatic cancer patients as an example.
@Flip
Every scientist who cites another scientist’s experiment is using an argument from authority, as he himself has no way of knowing for certain that the experiment is valid. And it would seem many aren’t:
http://candidaabrahamson.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/a-fine-mess-were-in-majority-of-cancer-preclinical-research-findings-not-replicable/
@Flip @DW
Bengston only did the healing in the first experiment in the original series of four; for the other three he trained skeptical volunteers and did not participate himself. The experiments were run by the department heads of the biology departments where they took place.
@Flip
Every scientist who quotes another colleague’s research is resorting to authority, since he himself has no way of knowing how valid that research is. Apparently establishing validity has been a bit of a problem, particularly in cancer research: http://candidaabrahamson.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/a-fine-mess-were-in-majority-of-cancer-preclinical-research-findings-not-replicable/
@DW
Bengston addressed the problem of a false null hypothesis in his second paper, “Resonance, Placebo and Type II Errors”. I think I addressed the issue in a comment above, using stage-4 pancreatic cancer patients as an example.
My last two comments disappeared into the ether, maybe because they are being moderated.
See what happens to this one.
@Flip
Your prejudice is showing. This is not faith healing. Bengston has a technique that is not faith based and fMRI experiments that show marked changes in his brain when he performs the technique.
@AdamG
I believe I answered your question with the theoretical experiments involving stage-4 pancreatic cancer patients. What you are looking at it the short-comings of the scientific method.
@AdamG
_is_ the shortcomings
Marg, I’m asking, generally, how we can determine if the design of an experiment is flawed. You initially answered “Do it again,” which won’t work for the reasons I described above.
Additionally, you continue to make no effort to understand which statistical analyses are needed here and why they are so important.
What you are looking at it the short-comings of the scientific method.
What, in your opinion, are the shortcomings of the scientific method?
@AdamG
That it doesn’t appear to work with experiments based on consciousness.
In the two comments that disappeared I posted a link to an article about an alarming number of cancer experiments that were not replicable and resulted in a fairly significant number of scientific articles being withdrawn. Only in some of them were scientists fudging their results.
I think the problem of non-replicability is partly an issue of the experimenter’s consciousness affecting the outcome. I also think this will become a growing problem and eventually the scientific method will have to be re-evaluated.
You have not yet outlined the flaws in Bengston’s experimental design — which in fact was not his design, but the design of the department head of biology where the experiment took place. You are assuming that there was a flaw because of the outcome. The design was standard: experimental group + control group. The experimental group was actively treated, the control group was not. The control group was only looked in on, and no one intentionally gave it any treatment. Do other experimenters not check in on the control group to see how they are doing?
Maybe I should ask, how would YOU like to see Bengston conduct his next experiment?
They’ve gone to live with the subtle energies? Maybe there’s been some quantum tunneling in your avadhuti. Try holding your hands up to the screen and coaxing them back to the correct bardo.
@Narad
No. I put links in them and they are being moderated.
Uh-huh. Curing cancer’s no problem, but the magic stops with WordPress automoderation?
@Narad
All magic stops with WordPress automoderation 🙂
But this isn’t “based on consciousness,” remember? That’s what the “geomagnetic probes” are for. That’s what all the quantum bloviation is for.
Let me see if I have this straight. In 1971 (according to Edge Science issue 2) or perhaps later, mice that spontaneously develop mammary adenocarcinoma were injected with murine mammary carcinoma. They were then used in an experiment designed by a sociology student (instructor according to Edge Science) and the chair of the geology department to test the abilities of a healer who ran away (“circumstance had him back out at the last minute”). The sociology student/instructor stepped in to try being the healer, and instead of dying after a maximum of 27 days as expected all the mice lived for two years, control groups included. Control mice that were kept in locations other than the building the treated mice were in died as expected. The results of this experiment were published in 2000. Several other experiments were carried out at various academic institutions at various times, which all vary and/or are unspecified depending on which source you look at.
This raises quite a number of questions in my mind. Firstly, why inject mice that spontaneously develop cancer with cancer? That may be standard practice, it’s not my field, but it seems a bit odd breeding mice to develop a type of cancer that you then induce artificially. Secondly, why choose a sociology student and a geology professor to test if something has an effect on cancer? It is not even remotely close to their fields. Thirdly, why exactly did the healer (who sounds to me like a classic cold-reading con artist going by Bengston’s account in E.S.) run away? Fourthly, according to the literature these mice would develop spontaneous tumors by age 40 weeks and die aged less than a year, yet Bengston’s mice lived for two years? Fifthly, why the long delay in publishing and the discrepancies in when the experiments were carried out, how many of them were there, and where were they carried out? Sixthly, where is the corroboration from other scientists involved? I would especially be interested in the control groups that died as expected, for which we only have Bengston’s word, apparently.
Marg, I know this looks like nit-picking to you, but extraordinary claims have to be put under intense scrutiny and picked at ruthlessly. Only if they survive do they become accepted. I know you would love energy healing to be real, and believe me, so would I, as I have stated before. A whole new field of science and an entirely new and highly effective approach to treating cancer? What’s not to like?
But for me to believe it I need to see much more convincing evidence than Bengston and his mice. There have been other experiments on humans with energy healing of different flavors, and the results have been equivocal at best, closely resembling what I would expect from placebo. Results using hard endpoints, such as death, are all negative as far as I can see. If you can find a well-designed, reasonably large study that found that energy healing extended the life of human cancer patients, do let me know.
@ Krebiozen:
I notice an interesting parallel to the un- published- but much recounted- 1970s (?) studies I refer to above:
the PRN woo-meister noted that ALL treated (i.e. prayed upon… oops.. prayed FOR) mice were cured and lived a very long time.
Similarly, subjects in his innumerable ‘health support groups’ ALL do really well. As do ALL of those folks he ‘counsels’ in his daily activities. So far, 70K or 100K ( it varies) of them.
ALL is an interesting word. Nothing probablistic about it. It would suggest something out of the ordinary- not the sort of things one encounters in daily life. If you look at more mundane treatments, e.g. meds for common conditions, I doubt that we’d run into 100% cures or improvements.
Words like that make me suspicious.
It gets worse:
If you see a real doctor, you’ll break the magic. And, look, we never heard back from any of them!
You think that this is so, but that doesn’t make it true. Before we can arrive at this conclusion, you have to rule out the more likely explanation that the experiments were not conducted properly. I’ve seen absolutely no evidence to rule this out.
How do you propose we ‘evaluate’ the scientific method?
Curious that Bengston lists his Ph.D. as sociology and criminology. So, let’s see: he’s working as a lifeguard, meets a psychic who didn’t know he was a healer at the time, and recruits him to start treating cancer patients?
@DW
Nobody reads the articles. The first 4 experiments were the ones published in 2000. Only in the first of the four did Bengston act as healer; in others he used skeptical volunteers.
@Narad
Re: magic, I wonder what people in the 15th century would have said to what we take for granted today: the combustion engine, cell phone communication, microwave cooking, GPS navigation, to mention but a few. They would have called it MAGIC. Newtonian physics, relativity, quantum mechanics were all centuries away. No one in the 15th century would have predicted that they were going to be discovered. I wonder what it is that we cannot predict today.
@AdamG
It will be every interesting to see how the science community will deal with the problem.
@Krebiozen
I would like to see more experiments too. I understand what you say about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary proof.
@AdamG
_very_ interesting
@Narad
You are telescoping a few years into a very short paragraph.
It appears that Bengston & Moga also lied in the JCAM article:
The “experienced healer,” however, had no experience before Bengston “discovered” his “powers” and cultivated him. Then he runs away when scrutiny is on the table and Bengston decides that he’ll play the part instead.
@ Marg:
If the healer ( B or a volunteer) was the factor then you subtract that person from being in contact with the C group.
So, all is equal ( both groups of subjects matched; everything else in the vicinity made equal, etc) EXCEPT exposure to a treatment ( i.e. the healer whoever that might be). E has it/ C doesn’t. Easy to do.
One “Barbara” recounts that Mayrick was telling a different story from Bengston’s:
Obviously not, because the only evidence that you have for your ‘healing’ is what people you ‘treat’ tell you. That’s the opposite of extraordinary proof.
So Marg, you think that the scientific method needs to be re-evaluated, but have absolutely no idea how it would be evaluated. It won’t be ‘interesting to see how the scientific community deals with the problem because there is no problem. You have this fantasy in your mind that non-replicability is due to experimenter’s ‘consciousness,’ but it’s just that–a fantasy.
Watch this:
I think the problem of non-replicability is partly an issue of invisible, undetectable elves affecting the outcome. I also think this will become a growing problem and eventually the scientific method will have to be re-evaluated.
How is that any different than what you said?
@AdamG
No, I also consider Bengston’s experiments to be proof, even if the rest of you don’t. And yes, you will increasingly find that there is a problem with replicability. It’s already an issue.
Hang on to your hats, gentlemen (and lady). The next few decades are going to offer an interesting ride.
I agree with you, Marg. Where I disagree is that the root of this problem is ‘experimenter’s consciousness.’ Where’s the evidence for this? Why can’t the cause be magical, undetectable elves?
according to the literature these mice would develop spontaneous tumors by age 40 weeks and die aged less than a year
That was my impression — but continuing my education with the University of Google, I see that the spontaneous tumours to which that mouse strain was prone (at the time) were not particularly lethal. Slow-growing, non-metastatic. So their expected life-span is not clear. I can’t recall whether it was Narad or Krebiozen who went looking for information, without success.
According to the book, Bengston did the first four experiments prior to getting his PhD.
Evidently access to experimental animals was easier than I had believed, and the ethics committees were not as much of a hindrance.
There’s a well-known method of contacting the elves, for one thing.
@ Marg:
I realise that you truly believe in this BUT if you are familiar with the history of science and even more particularly, alt med, you’d know that we have often been promised results by *psi* folk, alt med or ‘psychical researchers’ for many years:
the 1890s were a period when we were told that there might soon be evidence for spiritual phenomenon and pre-cognition ( Wm James and Freud wrote about this); later on, Jung got involved himself ( astrology and marriage).
In the 1960s and later, culminating in the New Age of the 1990s, we were again told that proof was ‘ just around the corner’. New therapies would be revealed and shown to be superior to SBM.
Bengston ( and others) were ‘investigating’ this a long time ago. Has anything come of it? Research that takes all the confounders into account and eliminates experimenter error? This would be easy to do. Any of the *gentlemen* here, or I, could design an experiment that might test ‘energy healing’. If we were so motivated.
-btw- doesn’t Mr Randi have a challenge?
Marg @ August 31, 2:20 pm
Now we are told that he was getting mice well before he even gained his degrees.
It must be a quantum superimposition thing, where the mice are simultaneously available and not available, until you open the book and collapse the state.
It was easier to get mice in the 70s?
So off-topic and FYI Narad:
http://circumcisionnews.blogspot.com/2010/05/fatally-flawed-bollingers-circumcision.html
Eh, on the one hand it’s a sociologist/criminologist playing at medical experiments, and on the other, it’s some guy with a B.A. in industrial design playing at… well, I wouldn’t exactly call it statistics. Really, they should get together. Just because warts are out, there’s no reason to assume that the Healing Hand (sinister, in Bengston’s case, IIRC) can’t grow it some dong parts. (Thanks for the article.)
Narad: I just don’t have the fortitude to post again at that one over “there”. Catch you later 🙂
You know, there are easier ways to test whether ‘healing’ is caused/ speeded up by a ‘healer’:
rather than having mice with a heritable condition, experimenters might provoke a minor, temporary injury to a subject ( animal/ person) and photograph its healing over time: e.g. a mild burn from UV or a chemical ( or a small incision); in one group, a healer would attempt to heal the injury; in the other, a non-healer would be used ( we also might have to consider other controls). The amount of injury/ healing over time ( photos) could be judged by a panel.
Now, this is just a simple alternative that would be more controllable and I’m sure if I spent a little time I could refine it and think of many variants. Healing doesn’t need to be restricted to cancer: if you can heal cancer, why not a sunburn or a minor scrape?
Cutting to the chase: the healers have had lots of time, why haven’t there been many studies and variants?
I think it has been done:
“[Bernard] Grad studied the Hungarian healer Oskar Estebany’s ability to accelerate the healing rate of
mice with one-half by one-inch wounds. Estebany held the cages of mice twice daily for 15 minutes. The treated group healed significantly more rapidly than the untreated group (Grad, B., Cadoret, R. J., & Paul, G. I. 1961. The influence of an unorthodox method of treatment on wound healing in mice. International Journal of Parapsychology, 3, 5–24.)
And how about Joie Jones’s experiments with pranic healing and cells damaged by gamma radiation? It showed significant treatment effects.
A series of experiments with human wound healing using “derivatives” of energy healing modalities (not clear on what that means) proved inconclusive:
http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/acm.1996.2.493
Alas, it’s behind a pay wall.
All treatment effects were clearly caused by invisible healing elves. These elves are actually summoned by very specific hand motions, so it’s understandable that people thought that the hand motions healed through energy. Luckily the mystery has been solved. Sometimes scientific results are not reproducible, so I’ve re-evaulated the scientific method and determined that I’m right.
@AdamG
Joie Jones conducted 520 experiments with gamma radiation damaged cells and pranic healing (Claude Swanson, Life Force: The Scientific Basis) and found significant treatment effects. He also used controls that had predictable mortality rates, and electromagnetic shielding. No elves are mentioned.
From http://www.pranichealing.org/intlmd/Research/Jones%20PHMS%205_06.pdf (note that this is not a mainstream science publication): A new series of experiments involved three people directly: a Pranic Healer, a person that managed the cells, and a third person that observed the process. This third person telephoned a favorite charity during the treatment of the cells and made a donation to this charity using their credit card, willing that any good karma that came to them because of the donation be directed to the cells in culture and to their recovery from the effects of radiation. At this point, 100 such experiments have now been conducted.
Experiment. I do not think that word means what you think it means.
I’ll really never figure out why anyone publishes with Liebert. Anyway, for more on the lead author of the paywalled item, Daniel P. Wirth, this is kind of curious.
Marg, would you like to address the fact that Bengston & Mota made it out as though Mayrick was just some random well-known healer rather than someone who had directly gotten his start in the racket by virtue of Bengston?
And until you realize that “unexpected outcome” does not inexorably lead to the conclusion “paradigm changes; o brave new world,” discussion with you is fruitless.
Narad, you are a master of the art of understatement. Wirth is a grifter, and not a very talented one at that. Fraud, embezzlement, fake doctors in healing experiments, social security fraud, identity theft; what a grubby trail he has left behind him. Still, anyone who doesn’t believe his experiments is a blinkered skeptic unable to see the supernatural truth right before their eyes, I suppose. By the way, we have a very nice bridge for sale in London, if anyone’s interested.
A quote from the SciCop article that bears repeating here:
@AlisonG
Jones did 400-odd experiments demonstrating definite healing effects before introducing karma into the equation. Why do you discount those?
Richard Bartlett made an interesting comment about research: that in effect re-search means looking for what has already been found. “Experiment” in the true meaning of the word embraces what Joie Jones attempted to do. The word does not mean what YOU think it does, AlisonG.
@Narad
By the time Bengston did the experiments Mayrick was an experienced healer.
@Krebiozen
There appear to be plenty of fraudsters on your side of the fence too. Mark Spector of Cornell is one. Dr. Sheng Weng of Boston University is another. They both did cancer research and happily made up data as they went along.
This is from a link I’ve been trying to post unsuccessfully for two days. Google “cancer studies not replicable” and click on “A fine mess we are in” to see the full posting:
Reported the Wall Street Journal:
At the Mayo Clinic, a decade of cancer research, partly taxpayer-funded, went down the drain when the prestigious Minnesota institution concluded that intriguing data about harnessing the immune system to fight cancer had been fabricated. Seventeen scholarly papers published in nine research journals had to be retracted. A researcher, who protests his innocence, was fired. In another major flameout, 18 research journals have said they are planning to retract a total of 89 published studies by a German anesthesiologist …
Return Mr. Bagley, now going by C. Glenn Bagley, currently listing himself as former head of cancer research at ‘pharmaceutical giant Amgen and now senior vice-president of biotechnology company TetraLogic.,
Together with Lee M. Ellis, a cancer researcher at the University of Texas, he has published a paper in Nature sure to be unpopular with researcher, clinician, and consumer alike.
In “Raise standards for preclinical cancer research” they claim that, after much analysis and combing through studies at Amgen, that of 53 published studies described as ‘landmark,’ only 6 could be successfully replicated.
So an Amgen replication team of about 100 scientists got to work–fast–and, sure enough, they couldn’t confirm the results either. They promptly contacted the authors of the studies–and some researchers kicked in to help attack the problem. They discussed why the results didn’t replicate; some let Amgen borrow materials used in the original studies.
But some had a different approach. Some authors required that the scientists sign a confidentiality agreement that would bar them from disclosing data that contradicted the original findings.
“The world will never know” which 47 studies — many of them highly cited — are apparently wrong, Begley told journalist Sharon Begley [no relation].
Seems like he’s got something of a point there.
Amgen does not stand alone. Bayer Health Care in Germany analyzed its in-house studies–and was singularly unimpressed. In a 2011 paper that wins, in my mind, points for a clever title, “Believe it or not,” they looked at ‘exciting published data’ from their studies. Sadly, all too much of the data could not be reproduced. Soon Bayer had stopped almost 2/3 of its drug projects because experiments couldn’t replicate claims from the literature. A full 70% of those studies were cancer research.
As an additional cause of distress, some of these non-reproducible preclinical papers have taken on a life of their own and are quoted by secondary publications as if their word is law. Says Begley, these studies have “spawned an entire field, with hundreds of secondary publications that expanded on elements of the original observation, but did not actually seek to confirm or falsify its fundamental basis”
Marg,
I’ve read the nature editorial on repkicability. It’s controversial but well taken. It’s also irrelevant to energy medicine. You cite claims of multiple runs by specific researchers but little or no successful replications by third parties, poor controls and, particularly with Bengston, no follow-up experiments where he tries to refute his critics through isolating the critiqued element.
It appears the only people capable of producing good results using faith/energy healing are those who already believe it works. That might be a clue to something important…
@Marg
Faith healing. Energy healing. Tomato tomatoe. It stills works via directing thoughts/”waves” doesn’t it? The other thing that makes them interchangeable: neither has been shown to work or exist.
Your prejudice is showing. Maybe consciousness doesn’t work at all? Ah, but no: in Marg’s world the conclusion comes first and then the proof.
By not doing it – and instead having other (non-believing) scientists creating experiments so that people can see whether or not there is confirmation bias going on. Or winning the million from Randi will do nicely.
They’d say: look what science gave us. I’m willing to bet actually that if explained to a scientist and shown the mechanics/theory behind it all, they’d probably think it was scientific and reality-based. Show it to an average crank and they’d think it was magic.
Galileo might not understand the physics behind it, but I’m betting he’d love Hubble telescope and not consider it magic at all.
Well, there’s an original comment. Let me guess, proof is just around the corner and you’ll be laughing at all of us in X years.
By the way, still no explanation as to why you used the argument from authority?
@Denice
Surely that would be a breach of ethics?
This seems a bit familiar.
So, a question: How did the scientific community treat these fraudsters? Did they continue to cite them favorably, like you just did with Wirth, offer them speaking engagements, and generally treat them as martyrs? Or do they retract their papers, fire them, and generally treat them as pariahs?
I think I’ll side with the people that punish fraud, rather than the ones who reward it.
@ flip:
It’s purely speculation but I DO know someone who has been involved in research on sunburn/ product testing. A very white guy -btw-.
The problem might be if it’s worth inflicting minor burns on subjects for speculative *psi* type research.
Tu quoque? It’s true, but hopefully, and having worked with more than a few on “our side of the fence” I’m pretty sure of this, they are in a small minority. In the field of paranormal research I’m not so sure. Also I’m not citing research done by a known fraudster. Also, the reproducibility problem is an interesting one that our esteemed host has discussed on several occasions, and rarely has anything to do with deliberate fraud.
Couldn’t energy healers attempt to heal the hideously sunburned placebo group in sunscreen experiments?
Above, Marg engages in something that is achingly familiar to me: as a matter of fact, Mike Adams is doing something similar as well today ( Natural News).
Basically, alt med apologists tally miscreance from research, corporations, media or governements to illustrate that their work *in general* shouldn’t be trusted AND simultaneously suggesting that alt med IS trustworthy.
There is a problem here. First of all, the reason we know about these breaches is because there is regulation and policing – in addition, the adverserial nature of scientific research invokes competition by other scientists who would like to show the error of others’ ways, as well as colleagues would elaborate or expand someone else’s research.
I’ll take anti-vaccine advocates ( because most alt med mavens I survey also fall into that camp as well): they disavow any studies that support vaccination. If the research originates in a corporation, it is obviously tainted; if a university did the study, if was paid off; if a governmental agency or professional association advocates vaccines, their position is deemed to be compromised by connections to pharmaceutical companies; if the media reports that anti-vaccine research is sullied by poor methodology or outright fraud, invective is thrown at the entire industry.
Thus, we’re not to believe professionals, universities, corporations, governments or the media.. so who’s left?
And why woud THEY be trustworthy at all?
Part of their sales campaign involves frightening people about SBM and showing how ‘corrupt’ it is, which is then presented as a public service- a gift- then taking them by the hand and leading them to treatments have have NO data and NO acceptance by anyone. It is based on mis-placed and un-earned trust and emotional manipulation.
@ Krebiozen:
Actually, Gary Null claims that his ‘healers’ ( 1970s?) at the *Institute for Applied Biology* healed rats burned by radiation in the cancer ‘research’ going on there; supposedly, he also ‘healed’ rats by feeding them green juices and supplements. HOWEVER ( big however), although this was supposedly rejected by ALL journals, there doesn’t seem to be a paper floating around anywhere.
Maybe someday it’ll appear and we can read it.
@Denice
Thanks. I think I’ll have to put understanding medical ethics on my ‘to do’ list of reading.
Instead of looking for Atlantis or the lost ark, someone should be out there looking for all those promised papers that the government/Big Whatever is hiding. The number of missing papers would probably amount to a mountain’s worth…
No, he was a guy who had been riding the “healer” circuit for a while after Bengston had bought the horse, put him in the saddle, and smacked it on the rear. This strikes me as a relevant disclosure.
@ flip:
Altho’ I STILL am sort of searching for the ‘pearl of great price’. Freja’s necklace and those gems Tolkien wrote so much about. No luck.
@Krebiozen @DW @Kevin Wicklund
You missed this part:
So an Amgen replication team of about 100 scientists got to work–fast–and, sure enough, they couldn’t confirm the results either. They promptly contacted the authors of the studies–and some researchers kicked in to help attack the problem. They discussed why the results didn’t replicate; some let Amgen borrow materials used in the original studies.
But some had a different approach. Some authors required that the scientists sign a confidentiality agreement that would bar them from disclosing data that contradicted the original findings.
“The world will never know” which 47 studies — many of them highly cited — are apparently wrong, Begley told journalist Sharon Begley [no relation].
Seems like he’s got something of a point there.
Amgen does not stand alone. Bayer Health Care in Germany analyzed its in-house studies–and was singularly unimpressed. In a 2011 paper that wins, in my mind, points for a clever title, “Believe it or not,” they looked at ‘exciting published data’ from their studies. Sadly, all too much of the data could not be reproduced. Soon Bayer had stopped almost 2/3 of its drug projects because experiments couldn’t replicate claims from the literature. A full 70% of those studies were cancer research.
As an additional cause of distress, some of these non-reproducible preclinical papers have taken on a life of their own and are quoted by secondary publications as if their word is law. Says Begley, these studies have “spawned an entire field, with hundreds of secondary publications that expanded on elements of the original observation, but did not actually seek to confirm or falsify its fundamental basis”
So there are a whole bunch of invalid studies out there, which people will use and quote without any awareness that they are quoting falsehood and hogwash. I am not raising this to suggest that alternative medicine is superior, but to tell you lot to get off those mighty high horses you are sitting on.
Orac’s take on this particular study:
https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2012/04/30/preclinical-research-has-a-problem/
Suffice it to say, its significance is being exaggerated by antiscience types.
Marg, if you knew what “falsehood and hogwash” is, you would not be desperately wedded to downright crap.
I think everybody here knows what tu quoque means, Marg.
No I didn’t, Warg. See the blue text in my previous post? That’s a hyperlink. If you click on it, it will load another page. This page happens to be a discussion of that paper that we had back in April. Orac also linked to it.
Maybe, maybe not. Follow the link to see why. Pay particular attention to the definition of non-reproducible used in the paper (hint: Bengston’s research would be considered non-reproducible under that definition), as well as Orac’s example (towards the end of the OP) of a whole branch of cancer research.
This is interesting:
http://keithwommack.com/2012/08/11/essentials-for-better-physical-financial-health/
@Kevin
I don’t respond to posters who call me Warg 🙂
@Kevin
Maybe I will respond, now that I’ve seen this:
Begley defines “non-reproduced” as a term he assigned “on the basis of findings not being sufficiently robust to drive a drug-development programme.”
Bengston’s method will not be driving any drug-development programmes anywhere, any time, ever, therefore by this definition his research is indeed not reproducible.
Marg.
‘Not reproducible’ is not remotely the same thing as ‘non-reproduced.’
Honestly, you’re not even trying anymore. Why are you here?
I’m sorry, I thought you had declared today “Replace First Letter of Name with ‘W’ Day”
@AdamG
In the context of my discussion with @Kevin it makes sense. Read his link.
What, that people who want mystical healing also want other people to defray their costs, or that a guy who runs an HMO thinks he can pull some of the take on this deal and a Christian Science “practioner and teacher” thinks it sounds like an appealing proposition?
AdamG, if there’s any issue with the difference, it’s my fault.
follow up to @Tom Calarco
http://www.anh-europe.org/news/quackbuster-stephen-barrett-md-loses-appeal-and-leaves-home-town
From vaccines to acupuncture to chiropractic it is not all as clear-cut as Orac presents it to be.
So you’re down to non sequiturs?
Marg, it’s at least nice for you to admit defeat.
That’s what you’re doing, you know, when you stop trying to provide any evidence for your own assertions and instead try to attack the messenger. You might as well be waving a white flag that says “I give up; I cannot make an adequate case for Bengston and his energy healing, and therefore I will completely switch topics.” Of course, it’s foul that the topic you chose to switch to is a falsehood-filled assault on Stephen Barrett, but you wouldn’t be the Marg we’ve come to know if you didn’t prioritize believing in magical rainbow unicorn farts and their healing properties over the common human decency of not lying.
@Antaeus
How do you know it’s falsehood-filled?
@Antaeus
It seems to me that, as @Tom Calarco suggests, Orac is following in Barrett’s footsteps. Prior to our discussion of Bengston, there was Orac’s original post. I posted this link as a comment on that post. At least Orac has the wisdom not to attack individuals as Barrett did.
Because I have a few minutes before I must prepare for my other activIties:
it seems to be all the rage to spread falehoods about Dr Barrett- because his critics can’t answer him with data.
ANH is one of my all time faves but I’m surprised that Tim Bolen isn’t being directly quoted.
From my perspective:
first of all, Dr Barrett answers all the various charges and claims succinctly @ Quackwatch- so why don’t his critics link to that? I suppose they wouldn’t want their followers to read what he has to say! About himself or about alt med. And about THEM!
-btw- Gary Null calls him a “quackbuster”: if you google that, you’ll link up to Bolen, not Barrett. It is called ‘Quackwatch’ ( and has other affiliated sites)
Barrett wasn’t a cast out from his profession ( like Struck-off Andy), but retired in good standing. He is an older guy : he and his wife ( also a retired doctor) retired and moved to a warmer area. If you check out his CV, you’ll discover that he had many important positions as a physician- included several at one time- like many physicians do.
He was not considered to be an expert on a woo-ish specialty because he is not a practitioner…
@ Antaeus:
I am expected ( for a soiree) in the land of myth, magic and terminal artsy-ness alongside the river: I’ll say “hello” to the unicorns for you.
I was interested in Saint Joseph’s College attitude to Dr. Bengston’s work on energy healing and mice, so I wrote to the Professor and Chairman of the Biology Department there explaining that we are discussing his work here and asked what their official line is. I got the following response which I hope he doesn’t mind me reproducing here, since his name and email address are already in the public domain:
A nicely understated response which is somewhat easy to read more of between the lines. I thought it might be of interest to some of you here.
How come Barrett gets a crony when I have to make do with a (lazy and good-for-nothing) henchman? I’m contacting Lord Draconis (may His slime glands ooze forever).
@ Denice
Um, quackbuster rhymes with Mythbuster, or Ghostbuster.
The lapsus may be involuntary, but is Mr Null sure it’s a good idea to put his opponent in the the same category as two groups of well-known, sympathetic, successful media figures?
OK, one is fictional, but still. And the real-world one is also about revealing falsehoods.
@Krebiozen:
Maybe you should shoot for a myrmidon.
Marg,
A couple of years ago I had a long and heated argument about Dr. Barrett, which led me to spend a lot of time researching, checking and rechecking many of the various allegations, claims and counterclaims that have been flying back and forth for the past several years. I came to the conclusion that a great deal of the negative stuff written about Dr. Barrett is simply made up to maliciously smear him, and is spread by people who don’t bother to check their facts. The source of a lot of the most venomous material is one Tim Bolen, who charmingly refers to our breast cancer surgeon host here as “the nipple-ripper”. I would advise treating anything you read about Dr. Barrett with the greatest suspicion and check whatever is claimed carefully before linking to it. You might find Dr. Barrett’s account of how he got involved in Quackwatch of interest, as well as some more information about Tim Bolen. I might add that I have never yet found anything on the Quackwatch site to be factually inaccurate, which is more than I can say about Bolen’s drivel, and that many of the legal “triumphs” against Dr. Barrett that are trumpeted on sites like the one you linked to are cases that have been thrown out on technicalities and libel cases that were unproven, not an unusual occurrence in the USA.
Shay,
I learn at least one thing new here every day, and the word “myrmidon” is one of them, despite my supposedly classical education, and my spellchecker smirking at my ignorance by not underlining it. Anyway, I’m sold. I will petition His Most Tentacled Sliminess for a myrmidon forthwith, and should I be appointed one his first order will be to dispose of the henchman, which hopefully he will carry out unquestioningly as advertised (unlike the henchman, who is surly as well as lazy).
Marg, that’s like asking how I know a rant that denies that the Apollo moon landing occurred is “falsehood-filled.” Because when the truth on a subject is easily determined and someone is telling you something different, a falsehood is what it’s called. Stephen Barrett is a retired psychiatrist, not an unlicensed psychiatrist, and the difference is not subtle. Nor would anyone who actually looked at the Koren case and the Rosenthal case call them “virtually identical”; to name just the most obvious difference, Koren was the author of his own defamatory claims about Barrett (including the claim that Barrett was in fact de-licensed, which anyone can easily check for themselves and find is a false claim) while Rosenthal was instead parroting defamatory claims about Barrett that she’d read from others. Rather like you, Marg.
@Antaeus
Having quite literally just finished reading the deposition with Bolen/Barrett, it’s quite clear that Bolen was just parroting stuff too. He says he got most of his info from “credible sources” – whether or not he was obfuscating because he was lying or not is another matter, but based on the deposition I’m going to go with what he says… that he simply repeated and re-posted what other people had sent him without bothering to check his facts beforehand.
I doubt Koren actually writes stuff. It sounded very much like he just merges a whole bunch of PR and gossip into a newsletter.
I wrote:
I should have added that the rest appears to be distorted or misinterpreted in whatever way suits the author at the time. For example, at times Dr. Barrett is portrayed as a Big Pharma henchman (or perhaps myrmidon), constantly showered with huge checks to persecute poor, brave, maverick, alternative practitioners. At other times he is portrayed as a penniless recluse, running Quackwatch from his basement. Bolen’s website really is a goldmine of unintentionally hilarious material. For example:
Who knew?
flip,
That seems to be one way they avoid successful libel actions; correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that if you repeat malicious BS believing it to be true, it isn’t libel in the US, it’s 1st Amendment freedom of speech.
Or even, “1st Amendment protected freedom of speech”.
Oh I give up. You know what I mean.
@Krebiozen
I’m very glad that the whole feminism/skeptics debate isn’t at RI: this would cause a rather large outcry from certain people.
As for the repetition of libel, from my limited reading of Barrett’s cases, it would seem that may be the case. I don’t know US law, let alone libel law so I’m just going by what he reported on his site in terms of win/loss of law suits.
Personally I don’t know why suing people for criticising you is a good idea: especially when most of the time us skeptics are complaining about SLAPP suits and chilling effects. I think it cuts both ways and though I have sympathy for Quackwatch and others, it does make it harder for that person’s viewpoint (or facts) to be heard by fence-sitters.
That’s one of the frustrating things. IANAL and I don’t pretend to understand the Rosenthal case fully, but it was established in court that what Rosenthal was saying about Barrett was damaging falsehood, and that despite Barrett making Rosenthal well aware that the things she was saying were falsehoods, she continued to say them. To me, that seems like it should fulfill the requirement of “malicious disregard for the truth.” Yet the judge decided somehow that Rosenthal’s claims being passed on via the Internet was a factor somehow and meant that she could get away with her defamation.
In any case, this really has no more to do with the original post subject than sociologist Bengston’s “energy healing,” so Marg’s claim that she’s returning to the subject, rather than changing the subject because she can’t defend her claims, is shown to be nonsense.
A few things:
Helianthus: I believe that Bolen originated the term “quackbusters”, not the other idiot. I think that the latter uses it to mis-direct his followers AWAY from Barrett’s site ( if you google his name, ‘Quackwatch’ is amongst the top entries). He has spent lots of airtime talking up his own ‘education’ and ‘expertise’ to counter Barrett and Wiki ( he can’t sue B- time limits?- and lost a $100 million USD suit against wiki/ also $13 million USD against Lee Phillips for his expose- see Quackwatch). The reason he named his other project ‘PRN’ is probably also mis-direction away from bad press AND to capitalise on actually ‘progressive’ movements in politics and social activism- which he apes when he isn’t shrieking libertarian mottos and calling his country a “police state”. ‘PRN’ is also the name of a legitimate news service. Woos like to copy names of real agencies ( see ‘Whistleblowers’) as well as naming sites to sound official and authoritative ( NVIC).
@ Shay:
I like the term “minion’ myself: it conjures up images of someone slaving away over a hot keyboard dressed in pale lavender Christian Dior undergarments, drinking champagne and eating bons bons… not that I eat bon bons.
Getting back to energy healing:
Because I survey mis-information disseminators, I can report that energy medicine/ psychology is being championed and applauded as a viable alternative to SBM.
These ideas infiltrate bad science making it even worse.
At random, I just looked over a few sites and found this:
@ PRN, yesterday’s ‘Energy Stew’ show featured Jon Whale ( from Devon) speaking about the Assemblage Point. Jon has a website, Whale Medical Inc, where he hawks his books and sells electronic gem therapy, in which the lamps are filled with gemstones. Jon was “chosen by spirit”.
(The lamps sound like he stole ideas from Ayurvedism’s beliefs about metals and gems as healing)
If you read sites like Age of Autism or TMR, you’ll find that parents often believe that their autistic child has ‘energy issues’ and they might start talking about mitochondria and remediation through supplements.
Other woo-meisters characterise psychological phenomena as being energy based and ultimately fixable through attunement and re-allignment. Laying on of hands is also mentioned for physical and mental illnesses.
Energy is a useful concept for them to toss around because it is insubstantial and perhaps they think of it as being halfway to Spirit , while SBM deals in crass materialim. The energy of which they speak is not what you studied in science classes but something mystical, akin to Qi, Mana, Prana, Libido ( in the Freudian sense), spirit or soul. This slippery use of language allows them to slide right into religion: Mike Adams is up front about it and calls his new site “Divinity Now”.
flip,
Personally I agree, I think simply calmly and politely providing the facts and rising above the sort of grubbiness that oozes from the likes of Bolen is the best strategy. I suspect it also annoys them intensely as their lies are designed to provoke a response.
@Denice Walter
Why is it my mental image of you bears a striking resemblance to one of those old Mont Blanc pen advertisements?
Can’t they put a “review” function on this dam’ thing?
Wow. You guys have been busy.
@Krebiozen
Re: your letter from the bioology chair at St. Joseph’s College, the comment that Bengston’s approach did not adhere to the departmental mission and thus they ended any relationship speaks volumes. To me it says “energy healing is not part of the department’s mandate”. But I am sure you’ll have a different take on it. I think it’s very telling that not a single person personally involved with Bengston’s experiments has so far stood up to say that there was something wrong with them. You would think since the man is out there talking about his experiments, someone would.
It’s easily explained; just like you, they are operating on massive confirmation bias and no matter what they’ve seen and how blatantly wrong it is, they close their eyes to it and claim that the experiments were tremendously meaningful and positive. You only think it’s “very telling” because as meager as it is, “no one has actually yet confessed to willful misconduct” is actually one of the few things that can be put in the plus column for Bengston’s “experiments”; you can’t spot how much it’s damning with faint praise because praise is all you’re listening to and faint praise is the only kind Bengston gets.
So do I, but I doubt it’s for the reason that you do.
I’m having trouble locating a copy of the mission statement of St. Joseph’s Biology Dept. but I somehow doubt it mentions energy healing. That Bengston’s approach did not adhere to the departmental mission and thus they ended any relationship seems to me to be a polite way of saying that Bengston’s methodology was suspect or something else was dodgy. Maybe it was something to do with inadequate randomization, a complete lack of blinding, breaking experimental protocols in every single experiment or something similar.
If Bengston’s results could be replicated under strictly controlled conditions that would be potentially Nobel prize-winning. I don’t think conventional science is as closed-minded as you claim – look at Benveniste, Pons and Fleischmann, Gauquelin and several others whose unconventional research has been published in peer-reviewed journals (though admittedly they mostly haven’t fared too well since).
I’d interpret the chair’s response as a polite way of saying that energy healing is not part of biology. Period.
People who were involved with B’s experiments already have time and effort invested – as well as their ( I presume) good names: do you really think that they will now publicly disparage what they had formerly supported? Perhaps they don’t want to draw attention to themselves and their association with the project.. maybe they are now quietly moving on.
To begin with, I truly wonder about ANY biologist- even in the 1970s or 1980s- not questioning the entire set-up and premise of this research: it is rather far-fetched if you study natural science. Would most scientists be proud of being involved with this?
@ Krebiozen:
Now are we reading each other’s minds or is there a more parsimonious interpretation of our similar comments?
Is it synchronicity or similar education?
A point that I have not seen mentioned is that, according to Bengston, energy healing is *easy*.
According to him, he learned it and was able to do it perfectly — absolutely perfectly since he healed the control mice by accident — on the first try. He then taught it to four volunteers who each were able to do it absolutely perfectly on the first try.
They had to be able to do it perfectly on the first try since otherwise there would be some unsuccessful experiments mixed in with the successful ones.
Unless …
You don’t suppose …
There were a bunch of unsuccessful experiments that he neglected to report?
No, can’t be. Mice are hard to come by. Except when they aren’t, of course.
So we can conclude that energy healing is really easy and randomly chosen skeptics can learn to do it perfectly — can learn to do it so well that they heal cancer just by knowing about the patients.
I wonder why we have cancer researchers like Orac when energy healing is so easy. Maybe it only works on mice.
“biology”
Bengston now travels around, giving weekend seminars where he teaches his energy healing for a few hundred dollars a person. He claims anyone can learn it and it is indeed “easy” once you train with him.
Someone on the reiki for dogs thread claimed that Bengston is doing more good now disseminating his knowledge to the massives (so they can in turn become healers) than he could possibly do if he restricted his activities to doing all the healing himself.
Keep at it; maybe you’ll get down to a single syllable of Mystical Power.
But if it’s that easy, why hasn’t it been properly taught for centuries? Millennia, even? Why do practices like modern medicine, homeopathy, acupuncture, German New Medicine, and all the rest even *exist* if the ability to do energy healing is in all of us and its use is easily taught?
Well, see, first you need a lifeguard and a cold-reading psychic.
No, not perfectly. In the second experiment (I think) 3 of the mice treated by the students died. This is in both his papers about the experiments and in his book.
Personally I think the experiments were weird enough that any biologist worth his or her salt who participated in them (particularly any grad students who were forced to) would retroactively repudiate them if they believed something was amiss. Something along the lines of “I was a grad student, I was made to do it, I saw this and this kind of irregularity, and now as a professional scientist I feel it is my duty to speak out.” To date no one has done any such thing.
Where’s the list of these people, by the way? I presume they kept proper records.
Hmph. Apparently, it’s really, really easy.
Who needs university, grad school, medical school, specializations, internships and years of research and experience when you can learn to heal from Bengston himself in two days for only $295 (and that even includes lunch!)
http://fellowshipsspirit.org/bengston-energy-healing-method.php
(This whole “Fellowship of the Spirit” Learning Center is another hotbed of woo worth looking at another time…)
And yes, you will also learn distance healing and how to energetically charge materials like cotton and water with healing powers.
Bengston’s own Quack Miranda is quite entertaining:
http://www.bengstonresearch.com/disclaimer/
Classic:
“Bengston had all the workshop participants charge sterile rolled cotton to use for healing. I had read years ago that cotton, silk and water can be charged with energy and given clients for healing. While everyone was walking around the room charging the cotton I asked to feel his piece of cotton and he generously handed it to me. I may have held it for 45 seconds. Five minutes after I handed it back to him I realized the very significant headache that I had had all weekend from the Colorado altitude was now completely gone. That was really interesting. Really interesting.”
Wait a second (PDF).
Let me get this straight: The one tumor remembers the healing energy and can tell foreign tumor cells to do the opposite of what they’re supposed to? This reminds me of something.
I guess I should have noticed this before, but Bengston claims that Mayrick would suffer the symptoms of a person by virtue of handling one of their possessions, say, a watch. Now, in this case, where did the symptoms “go”? There seems to be a problem with the metaphysical plumbing system.
Alright… let’s see:
invocation of the unconscious
healing energy
laying on of hands
distance healing…
transmitting healing through cells and fabrics…
I do believe that I should turn in my cards because that is a royal flush.
Wow, Hey. Hey, wow. I hadn’t looked at this one for all of 12 hours and it’s full of new amusement. A royal flush? Sufficient to over-run a standard residential septic, I reckon. And I like Narad’s really, really easy comment/link, too. And the complete Quack Miranda.
How does an energy healer like Bengston turn on and off his powers? If he can heal by distance, what range is that distance? Why can’t he simply send out his anti-cancer signal to the entire world and cure everyone at once?
And who’s to say all the people he trains are going to use their super powers for good? Couldn’t an evil energy healer actually give someone cancer? What’s to say everyone taking his courses has good intentions?
I can see a Stephen King novel where someone takes a course like Bengston’s in order to exact revenge on those who wronged him by giving them diseases and messing with their energy.
I’m only partly joking about both these points above. They do raise questions, if you buy into the whole energy healing thing.
Oops, I left an italics tag open. I only meant to italicize one word. Serves me right for trying to get fancy.
This is an interesting question. I think that “promoting the body’s natural healing abilities” and so forth are pretty much out, given that the particle (or particles) that mediates the (anti-) healing force couples to and can be stored by inanimate objects. Moreover, the force seems to be parity-violating on the level of hands. It’s also unclear to me whether the healing effect is wavelike in the sense of some sort of phase cancellation with bad vibrations or particle-like, with cancerons and anticancerons annihilating (which would imply an entire family, since Bengston’s failure to cure warts rather than cancer would directly indicate that there’s an issue with sources and sinks of wartons and antiwartons).
Oh, for the love of G-d:
Denice,
Since your comment only appeared on my screen when I hit [Submit Comment] but appeared below mine and according to the time stamp it was submitted a whole 10 minutes after mine, it’s definitely something supernatural.
Someone somewhere knows more about Bengston’s experiments; perhaps some of those that Bengston mentions in his Edge Science article:
Are there really actual scientists out there who have witnessed “the most amazing thing they have ever seen” but lack the curiosity to pursue it, despite having all the necessary resources to hand? Or is there another side to this story? I am trying to track some of these people down, but thus far I can only find co-authors and others who clearly buy into the energy healing belief system, such as Dr. Margaret M. Moga.
We really have no reason to think this is a large group. How many mathematicians worth their salt would participate in an effort to prove that 2 + 2 = 5? How many physicists worth their salt would participate in an effort to develop a perpetual motion machine?
@Krebiozen
And what will you do if they corroborate Bengston’s story?
@All
What do you make of this?
http://noetic.org/research/project/markov-chain/
Marg, would you accept a study that showed cancer patients who received chemotherapy had exactly identical outcomes as cancer pateints who received no treatment at all as proof that chemotherapy was effective at treating cancer?
If not, why do you consider Bengston’s study as proof energy healing is effective, other than by reason of personal appeal?
If a researcher set up a trial just as Bengston did, using two groups of mice where the treatment investigated was a standard chemotherapeutic agent, and just as in Bengston’s case all the mice in both the control and experimental groups survived, would you argue that giving the experimental group mice a chemotherapeutic drus somehow, some way cured the control group mice who received no drug as well?
If not, why do you embrace this explanation for the failure of Bengston’s control group mice to succumb to cancer?
From Marg’s link:
” pre-cognition.. backwards-in-time… teleological pulls from the future may sometimes influence present-time decisions and events..”
Ok, I’ll only deal with pre-cognition.
More than 100 years ago, Freud dealt with folklore about dreams predicting the future**: he didn’t have to bow to ESP because he knew how people often use information- which is then assembled without conscious knowledge- to arrive at a conclusion or prediction. The solution *incubates* during problem solving- people have studied this- trust me.
I often find myself having strong feelings about how a partcular stock/ bond/ fund will perform- not entirely based on the numbers alone- but on the entire atmosphere of what is happening in economies at that time.
Let’s say I know government A intervened in bank a and goverment B took over bank b: I will therefore make assumptions about a’s and b’s futures that is not entirely based on data that I have now. In the case of a, its price dropped all out of proportion with its value and I made a great deal of money; in the case of b, it affected a friend’s family member’s pay and he left.
I predicted the future well enough to put money into a and speculate that Mr C would be very unhappy about his career.
I doubt that the future reached back and grabbed me.
I can use plain, old COGNITION to explain many events attributed to pre-cognition.
** I’ll put the dream into a modern day scenario: a father dreams that his daughter- who lives far away- will get a divorce: this contradicts what he knows because she calls him and always says how happy she is how great her husband is; he forgets about the dream and learns 6 months later, that she is indeed filing for a divorce.
The man may have recieved subtle cues from his daughter that all was NOT well and dreamt THAT, not what she TOLD him. People can read things in others’ voices and actions that contradict their words and may offer a glimmer of the real story.
“What do you make of this?”
Hind-sight is 20-20? There’s nothing there for me to make anything of. No description of methods or results, just a vague assertion that MMI (which isn’t defined) appears more likely to effect past RNGs rather than present or future RNGs. Or something. No useful description provided, just a link to buy the book.
(It’s possible that my 5-minute perusal of the site managed to overlook the information I’d need to be able to make any comment – however, it wasn’t where you’d actually look for said results)
@Denise Walter
I knew you were going to say that.
@Krebiozen
I understand the annoyance though and the potential loss of business because of such comments. But from what little I read of Barret’s (oh, I’m never going to remember his spelling right consistently…) time with Bolen, he seems to sue a lot of people and I don’t know why you’d want to go to so much effort when the other people have a perfect opportunity to scream ‘martyr’. Anti-slapp suits are one thing, continuously going after the people you criticise is well, Wakefield-ish.
I’ve been wondering… would his energy experiments be outside of what he normally does for the department? I have no idea how these things work, so what I’m wondering is if they discovered that he was doing experiments he’s not paid to do (ie outside of his field) and this caused him problems with the college…?
@Marg
Wow, you really don’t understand confirmation bias, do you?
A la Denice, today I surveyed a whole bunch of woo via writing requests. I think I facepalmed about 40 times in 20 minutes… sigh… Seems the woomeisters were out in force today.
Marg,
I’ll ask why they didn’t repeat the experiments using proper randomization, blinding and sticking to the experimental protocol, and eliminating all other possible explanations for the effect Bengston reports. I will also ask why they wouldn’t want to investigate the most amazing thing they have ever seen and go for a Nobel prize. If these results were proved to be replicable under carefully controlled conditions I would join you in asking why we aren’t finding out how this works and curing cancer patients with it right now. I wouldn’t go quite as far as Tim Minchin with his compass, but I would be very surprised.
flip,
Bengston is a sociologist who wouldn’t normally have anything to do with the biology department. The whole thing is strange and a bit suspect. That’s why I would like to hear the account of someone else involved in this.
@JGC
Here is my answer.
You are dealing with a different animal. Or, if you like, comparing apples and oranges.
When you are testing a substance, you can easily control for delivery. You are either injecting it into the body or making the subject ingest it by means of a pill. So you test active ingredient vs saline, or active ingredient vs sugar pill. Easy. It is clear which experimental subject received what.
How do you control for delivery with energy healing? Bengston can cure mice from 2000 miles away. Qi gong healers have also shown long distance effects too, so he is not alone in this. So how can you know which mice have received the active ingredient, and which not? I suspect this is why Bengston and Moga brought in the geomagnetic probes. Something about the energy healing was making the geomagnetic probes act strange. They acted strange in the same way both in the vicinity of the mice he intended to treat & in the vicinity of the cages where the control mice were kept. So that would seem to suggest that something anomalous was happening in both places.
Until we can control for the delivery of the active ingredient with energy healing, we cannot do controlled experiments on it. If anything, Bengston showed that controlled experiments don’t work with energy healing using our current experimental protocols. Someone mentioned using Faraday cages; but Faraday cages have not worked in shielding subjects from these effects.
I recall a quote from somewhere, and I don’t know the context or remember the speaker/writer, but it says “something unknown is doing we don’t know what”. That seems to apply here. I can see how that would drive humans crazy; particularly humans with a scientific bend.
Found it:
“Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”
Sir Arthur Eddington, comment on the Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, 1927
English astronomer (1882 – 1944)
Oh, spare me. “Gee, where could I have heard that?” Right.
Your Freudian slip is showing.
Dagnabit. Link should only be around the first sentence.
This is a conclusion that you draw from Bengston’s work. I, however, look at the same work and conclude that it shows that energy ‘healing’ is not effective. What makes your interpretation more valid than mine?
@AdamG
Valid or not, my conclusion is more interesting and could lead us somewhere. This is how science progresses. You find something curious, and follow it up. What you seem to propose is reductionist science.
@Narad
My Freudian slip has an attractive lace border.
That should have been “bent”, yes?
@AdamG
Your way of looking at things is how science ossifies.
Marg, this is not how science progresses. When faced with an array of possible interpretations, scientists judge them based on how likely they are to be true. We don’t just pick the one interpretation that we find the most interesting.
Let’s say I flip a coin 1000 times and find that I get heads 70% of the time. Two interpretations of this results are:
a) the coin is not fairly weighted
b) the flipper influenced the result through energy manipulation.
Which is a more likely conclusion? Would you say that (b) is true because you find it more interesting?
@AdamG
My 2:51 comment is in response to your 2:53 one. Time warp!
I should point out that this is one of the first things you learn as a scientist, and often one of the hardest things to accept.
When you arrive at a result that is entirely unexpected or particularly exciting, the very first thing you try to do is make it go away. You redo your analyses to see if you did everything right. You have colleagues look over the data to see if they are able to spot errors you missed. You do everything you can think of to try and make the result disappear. One of my former advisors was fond of calling this process “Death by Occam.”
Results that survive this process are the ones most likely to be real, the ones most likely to stand up to scrutiny within broader scientific community. Bad science happens when researchers forgo this process, blinded by the excitement of unexpected findings. The arsenic bacteria brouhaha is the latest high-profile example of this.
I’m still shocked that you think this is true. What led you to believe this?
Anyways, I thought you were in favor of ‘re-evaluating’ the scientific method anyways, so why do you even care how science progresses?
If “scientists” always stuck with what was already known, we wouldn’t have had Galileo, Einstein, Newton. We wouldn’t be flying and we certainly wouldn’t be computing.
Laughable, given that what I described has always been how science works.
How, specifically, is your way different than mine? Does it really just boil down to ‘be more willing to accept an unlikely conclusion because we want it to be true?’
You mean, I’m comparing fruit to fruit? Where’s the problem?
Yes–you’re conducting a properly controlled experiment.
If it’simpossible to control for delivery of healing energies, it’s impossible to make any claims that that its efficacy has been demonstrated.
How can he know, when you claim it’s impossible to determine if which if any of the mice actually received any of the purported healing energies Bengston tried to deliver?
Citations needed, please: I’m particularly interested in how those Qi gong healers controlled their energy delivery.
We don’t know that the ‘energy healing’ caused the result, I’m afraid. In fact, since the probes reacted both near the mice Bengston was waving his hands at and near the the mice he wasn’t waving his hands at, the most reasonable conclusion is that the hand waving had nothing to do with the probes’ reaction.
My point exactly–Bengston’s handwaving does not correlate with geomagnetic probes’ reactions.
Exactly! Something was happening, not associated with Bengston’s handwaving.
And until we can do controlled experiments, we cannot generate evidence it’s effective. Agreed?
Actually, if anything, Bengston has demonstrated his handwaving had nothing to do with the reaction of the geomagnetic probes.
I mentioned Faraday cages. Ctations needed–what evidence suggests that they would not have worked at shielding the subjects from putative energies associated with healing?
I recall a quote from somewhere, and I don’t know the context or remember the speaker/writer, but it says “something unknown is doing we don’t know what”. That seems to apply here.
Why then have you translated “something unknown is doing we don’t know what” as “Bengston’s handwaving cured both the experimental and control group mice of cancer?
Oh, please. I’m not saying that we should stick with what is know, I’m saying that it should take a lot of evidence to convince us of something new Those three individuals had sufficient evidence that there extraordinary ideas were true.
Again, that science produces and validates extraordinary hypotheses is not evidence that all extraordinary hypotheses are true.
@JGC
Bengston was waving his hands 2000 miles away from both sets of cages.
@JGC
The strange effects only happened near the cages of the mice & only at the times when he was healing — and yet had nothing to do with his “hand-waving”? How do you figure that?
@Marg
Perhaps I was waving my hands at the time. It wasn’t Bengston; it was me.
Yes, but you weren’t recording the times, and Bengston was, and on a time spectrum his hand-waving correlated with the effects.
Ah, but you have no way of knowing whether his timing just happened to coincide with mine. With no reliable means of detecting the purported energy, there is no reliable means of determining the supposed source. He may have been doing nothing more than waving his hands, and the probes’ behavior may have been the result of some other occurrence. You have no way of confirming that his results are reliable.
The idea that I, rather than Bengston, was the one affecting the probes is just as sound a claim as yours.
Then again, it could’ve been the action of the invisible flying unicorn in my garage, but I can’t be certain, since I can’t see it to be sure what it was doing at the time.
Being as Bengston’s magic healing rays go everywhere, I think it would be cool if he cured every mouse everywhere of cancer. This would get every researcher scratching their heads. If Bengston did this once a day, for, say, 3 months, the whole world would pretty much have to pay attention to him.
Defend each of these five assertions.
Belief ( a psychological event) can have powerful effects in our lives: it can motivate us to work, act, influence others and achieve (or conversely to slack off and shirk responsibility) – so we believe—work or influence— achieve. If we cut out the middleman we have something like what Marg is invoking: faith ( or belief or thought) ALONE “moving mountains” or healing cancer. No intermediate actions( or only spurious ones, like hand waving) are necessary.
I think that that belongs in the realm of religion not that of science. If there is a force, you should be able to postulate what it is and how it works; it should be measurable. If it is supernatural, how can we who exist in the natural world deal with it? Or, are only the Elect its arbitrators? If anyone can be trained to access it, haven’t we just rendered a hole in the fabric of reality ?
How likely is that?
Marg, why did you skip past these questions?
Let’s say I flip a coin 1000 times and find that I get heads 70% of the time. Two interpretations of this results are:
a) the coin is not fairly weighted
b) the flipper influenced the result through energy manipulation.
Which is a more likely conclusion? Would you say that (b) is true because you find it more interesting?
@Marg – why doesn’t Bergstrom just use his powers to heal all cancers everywhere within everyone?
I think it’s time to start using ultimatum questions in dealing with Marg.
The way this works, Marg, is we ask you a direct question, and if you make three comments on this or any other thread without giving a direct answer to the question, we treat your refusal to answer as an affirmative admission. Sometimes it’s the only way to deal with a person who changes the subject when the going gets tough, as you did trying to change the subject to Stephen Barrett.
If you actually understand science, then you understand the importance of the criterion of falsifiability.
Scientists do not try to find evidence that supports their hypotheses when they conduct experiments; they are instead searching for evidence which would disprove their hypotheses. Why? Because only trying very hard to find such disconfirming evidence and not getting it actually supports a hypothesis, actually gives us reason to think it’s true. If you had to trust your life to one single rope, trusting that it wouldn’t break under your weight, which rope would you trust? A rope that the manufacturers had tried like hell to break, subjecting it to every sort of twisting and knotting they could think of, hauling the heaviest loads with it they could tie up, and that had survived all those tests? Or a rope that had never been tested on anything heavier than a feather? That’s right; you’d choose the rope where the manufacturers had tried like hell to break it and didn’t succeed.
Now suppose someone comes to you with a hypothesis where disconfirming evidence can never be found. “Our special blessed God’s Will Rope,” they say, “never breaks! Except in cases where God Himself has decided, ‘you know, it’s really best for the Divine Plan if this rope breaks.’ But if God isn’t 100% consciously deciding that the rope will break, then by golly, it’ll hold!” What happens if that hypothesis – that the rope never breaks unless God wills it – is false, and someone puts it to the test? One of two things: the rope holds, and believers in the God’s Will Rope say “see! our hypothesis is right: except when God wills it, the rope will always hold!” Or, the rope breaks, and believers say, “Obviously, the rope holds unless God Himself wills it to break! Obviously, He willed it so just now!” No matter what the evidence is, no matter how false the hypothesis is, the evidence can’t show the falsity of the hypothesis. Such a hypothesis is not falsifiable. Just as you would not trust your weight to a rope which has never been tested on anything heavier than a feather, you would not stake anything important on a hypothesis which has never received real testing because it’s unfalsifiable and all tests say “Yes” regardless of what the true answer is.
Now that you understand the concept of falsifiability, Marg, answer yes or no: isn’t it a fact that energy healing as you claim it to exist is not falsifiable? If there’s no way to tell whether some healer within a 2000 mile radius is or isn’t trying to heal some subject, and if “consciousness” can interfere with that healing but again, there’s no way of telling whether it is or isn’t interfering – then any result you get can be explained in terms of “healing intent” working or “consciousness” interfering, even if that’s a completely wrong answer.
“Let’s say I flip a coin 1000 times and find that I get heads 70% of the time. Two interpretations of this results are:
a) the coin is not fairly weighted
b) the flipper influenced the result through energy manipulation.
Which is a more likely conclusion? Would you say that (b) is true because you find it more interesting?”
And if the coin behaves the same way for another flipper, does that confirm that the coin is biased, or is it (Oh My God!) evidence that the first flipper’s powers work on the coin even when someone else is flipping the coin.
I can only think of one way to solve this conundrum: Geomagnetic probes.
Thank you all for the good laugh.
I wouldn’t necessarily assume that the coin was weighted, but I would certainly try it for myself.
@Antaeus
Thank you for the illustration of falsifiability. I learned two new things today. The other was that “Lithoclastic cystotomy is attributed to Ammonius Lithotomos (stone-cutter) of Alexandria, Egypt,” who lived ca 296 BC. Who knew?
@JGC @Lawrence
It’s not that indiscriminate. Only mice within the scope of the experiment were affected.
The search for experiments with Faraday cages took me here:
http://www.esalenctr.org/display/confpage.cfm?confid=8&pageid=69&pgtype=1
Following Antaeus’ lead:
How could we make falsifiable hypotheses about energy healing?
First, we’d have to stipulate *what* kind of energy we’re dealing with and how it could be measured- rather than the amorphous *energy* B. talks about- perhaps even what might *block* it? Where does it come from?
Waves? Particles? Heat? Light? Dark matter?
In other tales of energy healing, I’ve heard about something that sounds like Qi;
then we’re told about ‘interference’ by consciousness and it affecting ‘geomagnetic probes’: so what type of energy could do either/ both?
What type of energy can consciousness block?
Oh, I know I’m *asking* for it!
@Anteaus
And then we have this:
Popper stressed that unfalsifiable statements are important in science.[5] Contrary to intuition, unfalsifiable statements can be embedded in – and deductively entailed by – falsifiable theories. For example, while “all men are mortal” is unfalsifiable, it is a logical consequence of the falsifiable theory that “every man dies before he reaches the age of 150 years”.[6] Similarly, the ancient metaphysical and unfalsifiable idea of the existence of atoms has led to corresponding falsifiable modern theories. Popper invented the notion of metaphysical research programs to name such unfalsifiable ideas.[7] In contrast to Positivism, which held that statements are meaningless if they cannot be verified or falsified, Popper claimed that falsifiability is merely a special case of the more general notion of criticizability, even though he admitted that empirical refutation is one of the most effective methods by which theories can be criticized. Criticizability, in contrast to falsifiability, and thus rationality, may be comprehensive (i.e., have no logical limits), though this claim is controversial even among proponents of Popper’s philosophy and critical rationalism.
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability)
Popper stated that “Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program — a possible framework for testable scientific theories” and also called all scientific theories conjectures, even the ones that had been successfully tested.
And this:
Thomas Kuhn’s influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that scientists work in a series of paradigms, and that falsificationist methodologies would make science impossible:
No theory ever solves all the puzzles with which it is confronted at a given time; nor are the solutions already achieved often perfect. On the contrary, it is just the incompleteness and imperfection of the existing data-theory fit that, at any given time, define many of the puzzles that characterize normal science. If any and every failure to fit were ground for theory rejection, all theories ought to be rejected at all times. On the other hand, if only severe failure to fit justifies theory rejection, then the Popperians will require some criterion of ‘improbability’ or of ‘degree of falsification.’ In developing one they will almost certainly encounter the same network of difficulties that has haunted the advocates of the various probabilistic verification theories [that the evaluative theory cannot itself be legitimated without appeal to another evaluative theory, leading to regress][38]
IMHO energy healing fits comfortably within a metaphysical research program.
You’ve just conceded the entire shebang. The core occultist concept is that energy is “stuff” that will do one’s bidding rather than a property. It has nothing at all to do with the meaning of the word in physics.
That’s two without answering the question, Marg. You’re down to your last chance.
@DW
The link I provided above, http://www.esalenctr.org/display/confpage.cfm?confid=8&pageid=69&pgtype=1, posits a number of theories and lists the kinds of things people tried to measure up to 2000.
The acronym ELF gets bandied about (and is mentioned as a reason for Faraday cages not working to shield the energy).
Bengston has suggested that it may not even be energy, but information that bypasses the conscious mind. In his talks he describes an experiment he was in, in which he had his head stuck in an fMRI while technicians placed envelopes in his hand which randomly contained either nothing or hair from sick animals. He had no conscious way of knowing which envelope was which, but when he held envelopes with hair from sick animals, his brain, quote unquote, lit up like a Christmas tree. So he theorizes that it is the sickness, or the sick individual, that initiates the healing response from the so-called healer, in the presence of a healing intent I presume. If the second of those is true, and it is the sick individual that initiates the healing response, then it is also possible for a sick individual to negate the healing intent by blocking the healing response.
Brainwaves somehow seem to be involved, because all the healers that have been tested had unusual brainwave patterns and in several studies, not only with Bengston but also others, a synchronization of the brainwave patterns of healer and patient were observed. So one possibility that comes up is that healing can occur in certain ranges that people don’t as a rule experience, and the healer takes the “healee” there through brainwave synchronization. That’s a hypothesis that can be tested.
This, not being responsive, is a concession that what you are plumping for is indeed not falsifiable.
Marg: It’s not that indiscriminate. Only mice within the scope of the experiment were affected.
How do you know? Were checks made on all other mice with tumours that could possibly have been affected? No? Then you don’t know if it’s indiscriminate or not.
Also, (Marg again, quoting Popper) Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program — a possible framework for testable scientific theories
It’s rare these days to see someone use ‘Darwinism’ as a substitute for ‘evolutionary theory’, unless in the pejorative sense… But anyway – my colleagues in evolutionary biology would be surprised that they are working in a field that isn’t ‘testable’, since they spend a fair amount of their time devising & performing research intended to do just that.
Thanks, alison. “Darwinism” bah! Popper blowing smoke. This Popper/Kuhn stuff sounds pompous & vacuous, certainly in the current context.
Marg grossly misinterprets Kuhn. The point that he makes with respect to Popper has to do with falsification of the current paradigm. I don’t know whether she actually understands the sleight of hand involved.
So use Permalloy.
And, finally, I’d note that by playing the card that Faraday cages don’t block slowly varying magnetic fields to imply a property of the magic energy du jour, one is implicitly asserting that Bengston’s left hand is a magnetic monopole.
The acronym ELF gets bandied about (and is mentioned as a reason for Faraday cages not working to shield the energy).
As Narad is hinting, Faraday cages do block dipole and quadrupole modes of ELF — except in the alternative physical universe occupied by crank-science websites — and the monopole mode does not exist.
If anyone feels the need for a headdesk, here is a website describing how to shield yourself from “HAARP ELF microwaves“.
http://www.iahf.com/other/20001106.html
I have a few thoughts on ‘healing energy’, for what they are worth. The concept of a life force or energy is a common one in many different ages and cultures for example qi, prana, ka, orgone, reiki and vril energy.
Sometimes we are told it is some sort of electromagnetic energy that is generated by and sensed by our bodies. At other times we are told that it can pass unhindered through a Faraday cage, so it cannot be electromagnetic (unless it is of a very low wavelength indeed). Qi gong healers’ hands supposedly emit low frequency sound waves that are responsible for healing.
Some claim that whatever this healing energy is, it acts instantaneously and distance makes no difference, which exclude all forms of energy known to science. Others claim it isn’t energy transmission at all, but resonance, like two tuning forks becoming synchronized. Some suggest that healers remove bad energy from the patient (rather than transmitting healing energy to the patient) and experience the same symptoms as the patient as they heal them (just like Star Trek’s ‘The Empath’ back in 1968).
Pranas can be accumulated by breathing exercises i.e. pranayama, but there appears to be no Hindu tradition of transmitting them to heal others; please correct me if I’m wrong, but Pranic healing appears to be a modern invention.
Orgone for some reason accumulates in containers with walls made of alternating layers of organic material and metal, or is generated by bits of metal and crystal embedded in resin (depending on who you believe).
I could go on, but I think I have made the point that there is very little if any agreement about any of the properties or even the existence of this putative energy. I think that’s because it’s a metaphor that has been taken literally.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone defend “magic” with such vehemence…..this guy may be doing something that may have some effect, but we’ll never be able to tell what, when, where or why, we should just accept, outside of all other rational explanations, that his healing powers are real……wow….and Marg, if you believe that, I have a bridge I need to sell you.
@Krebiozen
Thanks, that’s what I thought. It seems unlikely that the college would actually have anything to do with his experiments, then.
Isn’t this just a god of the gaps: we didn’t know what thunder was so attributed it to a god. We don’t know why some things are alive and some aren’t, so we attribute it to some unseen mystical ‘force’. Or, if you’re into it… dead aliens who mess with your health.
@Marg
As someone who actually tried Qi gong…. bullshit. The only thing it healed was my ability to have money after walking out of the session. (We could say maybe they just weren’t doing it right, but according to them they were trained by the Chinese master of this particular style of Qi gong and were ‘second generation’ masters. Maybe they’re all doing it wrong)
Oh blah – the Galileo card now. Can’t you at least come up with new wrongness?
Damn blockquotes…
Oh for [expletive deleted]. An empty envelope feels completely different to one that has something in it. How much hair are we talking, because I’m betting it wasn’t a single strand but more like a tuft.
PS. Define “information”.
Marg is actually a perfect example of what happens when people count the misses as hits. And also, jelly not sticking to a wall.
One more question re: those Faraday cages, marg: to your knowledge did Bengston actually try isolating control group mice from his ‘healing energies’ using a Faraday cage?
If not, why have you leaped to the a priori conclusion it wouldn’t work?
So Marg, by refusing to answer a direct question, has acknowledged that energy healing is unfalsifiable.
However, she tries to salvage her position by turning to a very strict interpretation of “falsifiability”, whereby those paying attention to the criterion of falsifiability are ready to reject any hypothesis as unfalsifiable if it cannot immediately yield 100% black and white answers. In Marg’s mind, all attempts to pay attention to falsifiability automatically constitute the sort of “falsificationist methodologies [that] would make science impossible”.
This is, needless to say, a straw man. Marg, if you say “we shouldn’t value falsifiability; we should be valuing some criterion which lets us entertain unfalsifiable ideas as possibly true while looking for falsifiable consequences of those ideas that we could then compare to the evidence to see if the evidence supports them,” you’re talking about falsifiability as everyone else talks about it.
But you aren’t practicing it. You aren’t entertaining the hypothesis that energy healing is possible; you’re stating it to be fact. You’re not looking for falsifiable consequences of the hypothesis, so that we can test the hypothesis against the evidence; you’re trying to trumpet useless “experiments” where any result that was obtained would have been interpreted as confirmation as somehow providing strong evidence.
Just as you did in the “reiki for dogs” thread when you tried to turn “I know one thing more than you do, which is that I don’t know anything” into “I know more than you do so I’m more likely to be right about energy healing,” you’re grabbing onto a premise and trying to take advantage of its positive implications while blithely ignoring any responsibilities or negative implications that come with it.
You claim that “Darwinism,” i.e. evolutionary theory, is unfalsifiable. Yet Darwin himself in Origin of Species offered an example of falsifying his hypothesis: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” Believers in “intelligent design” have invested countless hours and millions of dollars in trying to find just such an “irreducibly complex” organ, and failed. The continuing failure of highly motivated people to falsify evolutionary development of such organs is strong evidence that it is not false.
By contrast, what significance does it have that Bengston did ten “experiments” where no possible results would have been accepted as even casting doubt on the hypothesis, let alone causing it to “absolutely break down”? Not a gnat’s fart.
The Salem witch trials were horrific and cruel and wrong-headed, but they were more scientific than Bengston’s experiments. The villagers said, “Hold her under the water; if she drowns, then she’ll be dead but our premise that she’s a witch will be falsified!” By contrast, Bengston’s experiments only lead to one common result: “Buy my DVD!”
This in particular can be said more strongly. Such an interaction would break causality, upon which ALL science depends. The prior probability of such an effect is many, many orders of magnitude smaller even than homeopathy.
A long time ago, Jung wrote an essay about “psychic energy” ( not referring to ESP but to *mind*) in which he surveys pre-scientific concepts like Qi, Prana et al *vis a vis* more modern concepts in physics and biology ( for his day). He speculated that perhaps in the future, we’d bridge the gap. Well, he died over 50 years ago and so far…
People, regardless of what era they live in, all experience personal energy ( for want of a better term): you work hard at a task, pay attention, focus, feel strength, effort, intention, will, fierce emotion, pain…there are speciifc sensations associated with these feeling states. Some individuals seem ‘powerful’ by reason of their abilities, achievements or personality. Earlier cultures created a system of beliefs about what they experienced, some of which was codified into their theories of magic- what Frazer wrote about- and Qi, Mana, Prana et al.
More recently SBM has delved deeply into the secrets of physiology: so we no longer have to rely upon pre-scientific notions to explain what happens when a person thinks or has a seizure or is dreaming. So the gaps between our personal experience and knowledge of physiology become smaller and smaller with each passing decade.
When I listen to a person** speculate about energy and its relation to mental processes, health or healing, I realise that gaps are not equal in all people. Mitochondria are not Qi factories and healers don’t transmit neurological potentials from their fingertips.. if they did, we’d have already found it.
** e.g. Gary Null, Mike Adams, Teresa Conrick ( Age of Autism)
All of which leads me to query: if his brain ” lit up like a Christmas tree”, which parts were lit? Be specific.
I doubt that the area associated with sarcasm was involved..
I think that’s an important point that tends to get lost in these discussion. After centuries of people trying to obtain cures using it, if energy healing were effective we simply wouldn’t be having this discussion: there would be actual hard evidence it works and its basic operating principles would have been worked out.
@ JGC:
Sure. That’s exactly why I brought up (on this thread) James, Freud and Jung ( altho’ I’m only a big fan of Wm)- they were pioneers in psychology/ physiology who lived a very long time ago and even though we’ve witnessed monumental advances in these areas AND in technology since any of them were alive…
still no dice.
(All we all know that “consciousness loads the dice” WJ).
You mean, all the lights were out until you found that ONE DAMN DEAD BULB and replaced it?
@Antaeus
Perhaps you should be having this debate with Bengston. His contact info is available on the internet and he relishes debating skeptics. However, the stance that the stuff is impossible, and the man a charlatan that one hopes to see debunked, is not skepticism by any definition of the word.
@Antaeus
And further, how long did it take to show that Darwin’s theory was falisifiable? Newton’s? Einstein’s? Were they falsifiable on the spot, or did we have to evolve a bit more scientifically before they could be tested?
Geez. That should be “falsifiable”.
Yes, Marg, you trotted this out as kiss-off line in a failed declaration of flounce nearly two weeks ago.
If you’d ever actually read the writings of any of these three scientists, Marg, you’d know that all 3 describe in detail experiments that could falsify their theories, or, in the case of Darwin, describe in detail exactly what evidence would falsify his claims.
All you have to do to show that a theory is falsifiable is to propose a hyopthetical experiment, and its hypothetical results, that would convince you your hypothesis is false. Can you propose such an experiment?
You still misunderstand. Einstein’s theories were falsifiable from the get-go because he proposed experiments from the start that would validate or invalidate his hypotheses. That these experiments couldn’t be conducted at the time says nothing about the falsifiability of his claims.
If you can’t come up with an experiment that could produce a result that falsifies your hypothesis, what you have is not a scientific hypothesis but merely conjecture.
his brain, quote unquote, lit up like a Christmas tree.
One likes to think that Bengston’s brain was active *before* he was handed the envelopes.
Perhaps they meant that he was completely pixellated while providing a live BBC broadcast.
It took no time to show that evolutionary theory was falsifiable, since as stated it identified observations sufficient to require comprehensive revision or outright abandonment, such as the identification of organisms which violated a nested hierarchy of species (fish with lobed teeth, non-vascular plants bearing seeds or flowers, etc.)
@DW
Large parts were lit. I can’t tell you which. He has the slides.
Maybe we should say “the unconscious loads the dice”.
I would like to point out that between the 8th and 2nd centuries BC humanity seems to have made a jump in consciousness that gave us Homer, Socrates, Plato, the Old Testament, the Buddha, Confucianism etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age
An argument has been made that Newton, Freud, and Einstein were part of a second such leap, and that we are currently experiencing another. From what I see the current leap of consciousness includes a growing interest in and a growing ability to do energy healing. Just because we have not been able to do it effectively in the past does not mean that we are not heading in a direction that will lead us to do it effectively in the future, and that there are not individuals in existence who can do it now.
@Narad
It’s not a “kiss-off” line. Bengston has far more information than anything I can offer second-hand.
The stance that you have offered no actual evidence energy healing is effective, and that Bengston’s experiments where all controls failed does not constitute such evidence, is simply to acknowledge the facts.
What do you suppose your unconscious is trying to tell you with your series of dice rolls here, Marg?
@ Marg:
You know, I was just about to sit back, have a drink, do my nails ( pale almond is such a lovely shade) and observe the thread,
BUT..
you leave me no choice but to respond:
when you say,”large parts”…
could you be a little more specific?..was B. himself so vague?
the brain has many, many parts which are active ( lit?) simultaneously, most of the time. It is complex beyond your wildest imaginings.. it is not a few notes, it is symphonic multiplied and synchronised, a computer complicated and alive.
I almost don’t know where to begin
BUT “large parts” is a rather meaningless statement, it’s like if a person asked me what I did and I said, “move around”. Well, I do!
If there is a theory of WHAT it is exactly that emanates from a person who heals another creature, it should delineate where it originates and what it is ( type of energy; electrical, chemical, mechanical).. is it somehow emotional? that would implicate certain regions.. if it is ‘thought’, other places. Perhaps it is some sort of global, Gestalt-ising, over-arching judgmental process.. guess what? that has a specific locus as well. Maybe it has something to do with visualisation… also locii for that.. earlier I spoke about sarcasm, believe it for not, there’s a place a for that too.. ad infinitum, almost.
I have to take a break before I address the James quote and about 900 other issues…
How can you demonstrate that there are individuals in existence who can heal with energy if there is not an experimental result that could falsify this claim?
@AdamG
Pray tell what experimental result could possibly exist to falsify the claim that there are individuals in existence who can heal with energy?
That’s what I’m asking you Marg!
You’re still claiming that energy healing is possible but you can’t think of a single hypothetical experiment that would falsify this claim.
There’s no need. That’s what the “metaphysical” half is for. Marg has finally devolved into the Age of Aquarius gambit, in which the historical events she points to come from somewhere else and have returned to dole out “powers.” Naturally, not everyone has the keen senses to detect the sea change that is underfoot, which makes the sensitives a form of elect.
@AdamG @Narad
The statement “there are individuals in existence who can do energy healing” is not falsifiable.
See the following:
‘The concept [of falsifiability] was made popular by Karl Popper, who, in his philosophical criticism of the popular positivist view of the scientific method, concluded that a hypothesis, proposition, or theory talks about the observable only if it is falsifiable. “Falsifiable” is often taken to loosely mean “testable.” A common application or usage put loosely is if it’s not falsifiable, then it’s not scientific. For example, the assertion “ghosts exist” is not falsifiable since nothing could possibly prove that ghosts do not exist. But the state of being falsifiable or scientific says nothing about its truth, soundness or validity, for example the unfalsifiable statement “That sunset is beautiful.”‘
@Narad
Have you considered that we may be evolving?
@Orac
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/acupuncture-provides-true-pain-relief-in-study/
Q.E.D. You’re just a rank occultist, Marg. Why not drag out the Eight Circuits of Consciousness while you’re at it? It’s just around the corner for someone anointed with the Special Resonant Frequencies.
That word, I do not think you know what it means.
Sure it is, because it’s predicated on the premise “energy healing exists.” I view this claim as falsifiable. Do you?
Similarly, the statement “There are individuals in existence who can communicate with plants” is falsifiable because it is a claim predicated on the falsifiable claim that communication with plants is possible.
Utter nonsense. Assuming they mean the assertion “ghosts, the spirits of deceased humans, exist as entities that are detectable in the natural world,” this is completely falsifiable. That deceased humans have spirits is a falsifiable claim. That humans have ever detected such entities is a falsifiable claim.
@AdamG
If you read back along the thread, you will find that according to some posters the problem with energy healing is that it is NOT falsifiable.
No, the problem is that energy healing as you’ve presented it is not falsifiable. Bengston’s work is more than enough to falsify energy healing for me, but apparently not for you. Why do you care anyways? You want to re-evaluate the whole scientific method anyways. Why bother to couch your conjectures in the robes of science if you think science is useless anyways?
Let’s try to be specific, Madame Blavatsky. The question was whether Bengston’s possession of magic healing powers is falsifiable. You conceded by default that it is not.
I would like to point out that between the 8th and 2nd centuries BC humanity seems to have made a jump in consciousness that gave us Homer, Socrates, Plato, the Old Testament, the Buddha, Confucianism etc.
Quoting a single philosopher does not make it so. (Not even if he’s supported by a religious historian – which I shall take to mean, an historian of religion, since her personal faith needn’t come into it.)
Also, From what I see the current leap of consciousness includes a growing interest in and a growing ability to do energy healing.
Evidence, please. People saying they can do ‘energy healing’ is not evidence that they can do any such thing.
@AdamG
Go back and read what @Antaeus Feldspar said about the issue of falsifiability in science.
Marg, what are you talking about? A.F. and I are in total agreement. From his comment:
This is exactly what I’m saying. Why bother to promote Bengston’s ‘studies’ if no possible result could have cast doubt on the hypothesis? You can dress up magic to look like science but it’s still just magic.
Oh! Excuse me, Dr. Bengston! I didn’t realize that was actually you, posting here under the pseudonym “Marg”! If I’d known that, well, actually, I’m not sure what I would have done differently, but … what? what’s that? You mean “Marg” is after all a separate person from Bengston? And Marg is the person who made the choice to start a debate here in which she thought Bengston’s experiments were the trump card? And she would have been completely happy to accept the results of the debate if she’d succeeded in convincing people? Well, then, it’s pretty damn rude of Marg to be saying in effect “I only have time for you if you’re going to agree with me; if you’re going to disagree you should go do it elsewhere.”
You trying to lecture people about skepticism is like Idi Amin lecturing about human rights. If the choice is between “energy healing is impossible” and “energy healing is extraordinarily improbable, since people have believed in it and tried to make it work for millennia and yet even though it’s supposedly as easy as just having a healing intent no one can actually demonstrate it making a difference,” then the latter is closer to the ideal of skepticism. But “energy healing is real and it’s going to be the new paradigm and if the scientific method can’t find any proof it means the scientific method is outdated” is not even in the running.
Not long at all, since as already pointed out to you Darwin in the same volume where he proposed his hypothesis of evolution through natural selection said “Hey, here’s some evidence that, if anyone finds it, pretty much destroys my theory.” That showed right away that the hypothesis was falsifiable.
There isn’t an “it” in the world that doesn’t apply to. Seriously, let’s substitute “lay golden eggs” in there. “Just because we didn’t know in the past how to lay golden eggs doesn’t mean we won’t learn in the future how to lay golden eggs, or that there aren’t individuals now who can lay golden eggs!” That’s true, we do not have (and probably never could have) absolute 100% irrefutable proof that it is impossible to lay golden eggs, but where is the evidence that it is possible?? Neither Bengston’s experiments which showed no difference between the experimental and control groups nor your fanatic faith in those experiments constitutes very convincing evidence.
See, this is why I left Wikipedia: that sort of meaningless crap gets added to articles by editors who don’t actually understand the subject they’re writing about, and then it gets quoted by cretins who just want to win arguments and don’t care that they’re appealing to the authority of completely unknown strangers.
“That sunset is beautiful” is an aesthetic judgment; it is not only not falsifiable, it has no objective component that exists independent of an observer; it cannot be true or false. It has nothing to do with a claim like “certain individuals can exert a healing effect by simply willing it”; that is a claim about an objective state of affairs. If such individuals exist, the claim is objectively true; if such individuals do not exist, the claim is objectively false. Anyone who thinks that nothing is said about the truth of an objective claim by the fact that it is not falsifiable probably also thinks a rope which has never once been tested by the manufacturer is just as good as a rope which has undergone 100,000 hours of testing.
@Antaeus
Will you marry me? Provided that you are a man, of course…
Re: Bengston. Of course I’m not Bengston. If I were Bengston I would be able to put up a considerably better defense.
I will next toss out the gem that really, truly, there are no objective claims. Cue @Narad …
Unless you care to attempt to define your terms, you’re just continuing to smear yourself with word pudding. Ontology has already been dealt with, as has the Blobovian substitute for epistemology.
I personally have trouble with comprehending what people mean when they say “consciousness”- which I treat as an individual rather than a societal or cultural pheneomenon.
James was probably talking about consciousness developing as an adaption- selected because it was an advantage as species evolved. It loaded the dice. It helped.
It has been assumed in popular views, that the so-called unconscious is either a seething mass of instinctual aggression and sexuality ( the id) or the secret font of creativity, artistry and religio-mystical inspiration forever poised on the brink of a golden dawning of awareness.
I think of it as what is unverbalised or unverbalisable: what is below awareness, that which rules actions that are automatised and can proceed without verbal guidance and our past – lost because of constantl shifting updates. What we’ve forgotten. Feelings and instincts that need no words.
If we are on the brink of a New Age, I doubt that it’ll be one of spirituality, distance healing and faery dust: more likely a golden age of technology. Perhaps the last 40 years or so- with constant searches for harbingers of a new Golden Age of wisdom and spiritual values- belies a human reaction provoked by fear of technology and progress.
While Marg flounces about and jokingly proposes marriage, let’s not forget that she is still an utter fraud who’s taken what’s likely to be a decent sum of money from innocent people with her claims that her hand-waving improved their health.
Did you cite Bengston’s studies to those folks, Marg? What would they say if you told them you didn’t think energy healing could ever be proven to be real? I’d want my money back.
@AdamG
And now who is the one making unsubstantiated statements?
from you on the reiki thread:
The logical conclusion of this statement is that you do charge people who “experience a change.”
So, Marg, how much do you charge people who’ve “experienced a change?”
@Marg
Perhaps you should learn not to mention something unless you have actual physical evidence to back up your assertion.
Why do we not use argument from authority? Because believing what a person says is not evidence.
Like this, again stated as an assertion with no evidence.
Then why bother offering second-hand info in the first place? Or, more to the point, why bother coming to argue here if you have no evidence to back it up?
I find it interesting that she harps on about ‘large parts of the brain’ but doesn’t deal with my point about how much fur was in an envelope. A fairly basic children’s game is to get them to close their eyes and experience things with other senses – like touch. I’m willing to bet a five year old can tell the difference between an empty envelope and one full of fur… unless it was a single strand of fur or such a small amount. Can Marg respond to this? Probably just as well as she has in regards to how much of the brain was lit up…
Like Marg’s worldview, she is very hand-wavy and details don’t seem to matter.
Ah, we’ve now moved into ‘sci fi = doco’ territory. This should be some kind of logical fallacy…
And she’s pushed the “different ways of knowing” fallacy repeatedly.
Well, it looks like she really has nothing left of value to offer…
@AdamG
Because on some level I think she recognises that if it were given the appearance of scientific, then it would be accepted by a larger number of people.
@AdamG
Many people I treat for free; some I treat by donation. The donation is voluntary; no one has to pay it. People pay it willingly. If they ask how much, I tell them an amount but also add that it is up to them. I’ve had people give me more; I’ve had people give me less.
The pattern seems to be that after the first treatment change lasts a few hours to a few days; after the second treatment it lasts longer, a week or two; after the third or the fourth it can be lasting. It can also plateau, as for instance with torn knee ligaments. From experience I can tell you that when people work with physiotherapists they are willing to have a dozen or so treatments with gradual improvement before they give up. So they are willing to pay physiotherapists up to a point even if it doesn’t help — but they would not be willing to pay me.
BTW I meant to ask you, @AdamG, how many people ask for their money back after the chemotherapy they received, shown in laboratory studies to shrink tumors by X per cent and give, say, a median survival of 4 extra months, turns out not to work on them? And if not, why not?
@Flip
The marriage proposal was a joke. I have a soft spot for highly intelligent and erudite men.
Re: hairs. Bengston says even one strand is sufficient, so I doubt the envelopes were stuffed full of hair. Plus, I doubt that mice have that much hair to begin with. Take a few hairs from a mouse, @Flip, put them in envelopes, and see if you can tell apart the ones that have hair and the ones that don’t just by randomly holding them.
@Marg
Dear I won’t be doing experiments with envelopes. Not until you provide factual evidence of what Bengston actually did himself – your assertions of hearing it during his talks are not examples of documentation of his methodology.
Once again, you show an inability to ignore argument from authority. If Bengston said it, it must be true.
Hey, wanna meet Angelina Jolie – she and I are best friends and she taught me all about how the sky is red.
You two need an introduction to Randi and his million dollars.
As for the marriage proposal: I got that it was a joke. My point was that you have so little evidence to provide that you have nothing left *but to make jokes*.
I propose another way to look at the issue of ‘healing’ ( including reiki, prayer, energy healing etc):
it is not a SB ( data supported) medical intervention, it is instead an expression of faith and religious in nature.
It is not very different from a person recieving visits from a minister, rabbi, imam et al who might pray for or along with them. Many religious/ cultural groups believe in faith healing and prayer, including laying-on-of-hands, chakra balancing, Qi adjustments.
I am an atheist from a largely atheistic/ agnostic family but I have ABSOLUTELY no problem with people believing in faith-based interventions alongside SBM. I would worry if it was used to REPLACE SBM or if it was called ‘evidence-based’. I have heard the latter from an accomplished healer and woo-meister.
Religious practice may provide emotional comfort to those who were raised with it or accept it. It may be a means of connection to a larger community which share beliefs and historical similarites. And people DO make donations to communities of their choice.
Just don’t call it science because it isn’t.
Narad,
I quite like that model as an idea to play with; at least the first 4 circuits make some sort of sense. With circuits 5-8 I run into some teleological difficulties.
@ Narad:
@ Krebiozen:
Altho’ I’ve looked over the 8 circuits before, I subscribe to an entirely different view which might even take drugs into account- it involves how deeply something is processed and the lower you go the less language is involved.
However, I have witnessed even the agnostic resort to quasi-religious language if enough nirvanic substances/ etc were involved.
Marg:
I’m not Adam, but here’s my answer. Generally, no, they don’t get their money back, and here’s why: they were told ahead of time that there was a chance it wouldn’t work and told of all the risks. They made the decision to pursue it. If your mechanic doesn’t know what’s wrong with your car, but suggests he can try replacing a part and see if that does it, and it fails, do you ask for your money back? Well, maybe you do, but odds are the mechanic will not refund you. It’s the same principle; as long as they were upfront about what you were getting for the money, it was a fair transaction.
Regarding the unconscious….
I think we tend to put too much store by our consciousness, as it if it is some discrete entity. I don’t think it is, and I think the line between the conscious and unconscious mind is extremely fuzzy, if indeed there is a meaningful distinction at all. Certainly there are things going on in our brains that we are unaware of. Huge amounts of things. But these aren’t really below consciousness; we just aren’t paying attention to them, because we’d go mad if we tried and there’s not really any point. Things like vision. I’m a software engineer; if you look at the enormous effort that a computer has to put into synthetic vision, you’d have a staggering respect for the *magic* that the human brain pulls off so effortlessly. What you see is so much more than what your eyes detect. It’s heavily processed. Even if we set aside for a moment the amazing persistence of vision that smooths out our saccades and makes everything appear equally colorful and clear when in fact our visual field is very different depending on distance from the fovea, just think of this: you don’t see a photograph. You see *things*. You see faces, and expressions. You don’t usually have to think about identifying them; they are already identified. You even see faces where there aren’t faces, and can tease out many hidden patterns without even thinking about it. And then there’s writing. If you’re fully literate, you don’t sound out words. They just flow. And when you look at a letter, even a fake letter created for a sci-fi movie or something, you nearly always just know that it’s a letter. It’s not something else, it’s a letter. How do you know that? It is amazing the work the brain does.
This is all done without thinking about it — unconsciously. And that sort of thing is going on all the time with all of your senses, to levels that we haven’t even begun to plumb. Our bodies begin to react to threats and the presence of suitable mates before we consciously realize it. We’re also lagging significantly behind reality, but don’t realize that either because the brain adjusts the timeline without us being aware of it. We interpret speech effortlessly (most of the time, unless there is a problem with the ears or a neurological deficit — all of these things can be affected by neurological deficits). You don’t have to imagine something metaphysical to be amazed by it; it’s staggeringly powerful and beautiful.
Marg:
You seem to be arguing that there was some advance in human consciousness. I disagree. It wasn’t an advance in consciousness — it was a crucial innovation: writing. This is the oldest period from which the thoughts of great men and women survive. Before that, there may well have been equal giants, but there was no way to preserve their genius. Pictograms only go so far. Writing of course also permits greater collaboration; the joining of minds. It wasn’t an expanded consciousness in this period, it was better exploitation of that consciousness.
@Calli Arcale
I had the same thought, re: writing. For the first time, we were able to put our thoughts down in a permanent and easily interpreted form that could be passed down from generation to generation. As you say, there may well have been people equally as intelligent and insightful as those Marg listed, but they didn’t have any means by which to transfer their thought down through successive generations.
Where there are lapses in the occurrence of the “spark of genius”, it may simply be due to the fact that a written record was not left behind. For example, during the Dark Ages, very few people were literate, and what literature was produced was often very tightly controlled by the church. Many erudite documents were destroyed (e.g., the medical texts at Alexandria, among others). Oral tradition can overcome this to only a very small degree before it veers wildly off, rendering the original thought unknown (think the game “telephone”).
And then there are other the leaps of logic that the thinker either did not write down or whose writings just lingered in obscurity somewhere, lost to the sands of time. What we see are the things that got publicity, for lack of a better word.
To add to the writing, culture made a significant influence. A culture that embraces knowledge-seeking is more likely to find new knowledge than one that embraces rote-learning. If there was one thing that caused the scientific revolution, it was the realization that Aristotle wasn’t always right – and proving that he was sometimes wrong.
@ Calli:
See my discussion of the ‘unconscious’ at 10:42 pm. If you look at the full moon when it’s near the horizon- vs when it’s at the zenith- it appears to be much larger, although the visual angles taken up by its images on the retina are exactly the same- because other information is taken into account to calculate perceived distance ( same angle + cues for more distance = ‘larger’/ filled space looks to be more than empty). Perceptual illusions illustrate a conflict ( or sorts) between vision and knowledge.
@ Todd W.:
Some cross-cultural studies suggest that literacy changes how people interact with the world. Some might even say that we learn to ‘see’ it differently- i.e. look for different things, divide it up into parts differently.
@ W. Kevin:
Agreed. Yet some would have us go back to the naivete resplendent prior to the Enlightenment. Go figure.
@Calli
Wasn’t the development of writing a crucial leap in human consciousness? Esp. since seemed to occur across a broad spectrum of societies within a relatively limited period of time.
I thoroughly enjoyed your description of the workings of the brain.
@Narad
Thank you for the Eight Circuits of Consciousness. Why is there no room here for the energy healing model, particularly in the 5th and the 8th? I also found Leary’s proposition that the higher four circuits exist for future use by humans interesting.
Thank you all for this discussion.
You appear to have utterly failed to grasp the meaning of “bad Fazzm.” And that you don’t know what ‘energy’ means. And that the cosmic spook show churning around in your head is in fact just in your head. You wish to pretend that this séancey hokum is not just on par with fantastically detailed knowledge of the physical world, but somehow even better, because, darnit, there’s just not enough straight magic to be had in that dry field, and all you can understand is magic, and so “understanding” magic is special, and so you’re not an ignoramus. You’re wrong.
That’s why.
That’s the teleological difficulty I mentioned. Humans are born with higher brain circuits that are designed to be turned on by zero gravity? Designed by whom? The human brain is an astonishing thing but I think many of its most amazing abilities are spandrels.
The “Eight Circuits” are pretty much part and parcel of Leary’s prediction of wondrous happenings associated with the coming of comet Kohoutek, which he renamed “comet Starseed,” which name he presumably ripped off from Larry Niven and which was a dud in its appearance. Everything Leary was cheap and derivative after ~1960.
@Narad
What arrogance to assume that our fantastically detailed understanding of the physical world is complete.
You aren’t saying anything about the physical world. It is merely an imitative prop in a supernatural drama that you invoke in order to sell the sorry exercise to people who might notice that “I summon ghosts” is problematic, but not “I beam healing energy, and there are these ‘geomagnetic probes.'”
But Marg, I believe that what *you’re* talking about has very little to do with the physical world but can more kindly be described as encompassing spiritual, ultramundane and mystical phenomena.
And who in the world around here believes that he or she has all of the answers about how the physical world operates although MOST of us would probably agree that, as a start, what most refer to as psychological, mental, intellectual, social or even spiritual and mystical emanates/ emerges from a very physical place that proceeds itself from basic laws of physics, chemistry and biology. Bye bye.
Gentlemen: start your engines.
@Narad @DW
What I am trying to say is that the phenomenon I call “energy healing” (which may or may not turn out to have anything with energy) might be a part of the physical world that we do not yet know about/understand and that you are only attributing it to the magical because of our current state of ignorance about it. Five hundred years ago all the science we now take for granted would have been attributed to the fantastic and the magical.
@Narad
To what purpose did you bring up the Eight Circuits of Consciousness? And just out of curiosity, what is the scientific take on Kundalini?
@ Narad:
And I didn’t see your comment because I was editing my own.
@ Marg :
Just when I thought I was out…
Seriously, I attribute nothing to magic but *people* may attribute things that they don’t understand or things that don’t exist to magic or soul or deity. When I say the issue is ‘spiritual or mystical” I believe that those concerns will eventually resolve down to the psychological. For example, art and literature are products of human beings who are animals who create abstract and fanciful innovations. Technology is also a unique product of human ‘spirit’- in other words, I don’t see much beyond this life but it can be incredibly rich and un-concerned with physicality. Or not.
I think I should leave the kundalini to someone else. I should probably order a drink.
Do you know what “begging the question” actually means, Marg? Moreover, here you try to insinuate yourself into that which you desperately wish to appropriate with what “we” don’t know, although you plainly don’t know a goddamned thing about the physical world aside from the sort of thing that prevents you from getting run over when crossing the street. There is no “we,” Marg. It is a useful construction in certain situtations, particularly among peers, but you’re not a peer in this endeavor. What is going on is that you want what someone else has and thus declare it to be community propery of some sort held by The Cosmic Mind, to which all have access if only they can tune to the Right Frequencies, and so you can just toss around terms willy-nilly and expect to be taken seriously. All you are actually doing is engaging in marketing.
You have already played this card. You didn’t live 500 years ago, and as such, it’s just more self-serving fantasy, to put it mildly.
To see whether you had the slightest inclination to draw any sort of distinctions between different varieties of downright crap. Mission accomplished.
I think you can get a good view of it single-handed with a mirror, so perhaps you should check with it on what it has to say first.
@All
What I am talking about does have to do with the physical world. You just haven’t seen/experienced it yet. I have. Insulting me doesn’t make it go away.
No, it doesn’t. It is standard-issue occultist blab and common as dirt. If somebody got Central Casting on the blower, the actress delivered would be wearing a diaphanous gown and while twirling and ululating. Maybe some finger cymbals.
And “accepting donations,” of course.
Marg’s comments put me in mind of a case study I was reading this morning in employment law, wherein a woman sued for wrongful termination. Her dismissal was for repeatedly violating company policies on absenteeism, and her defense was that she used magic to make sure she got her work done.
(She fell into not one but two protected categories which I assume is how she convinced a lawyer to take her case).
I will at this point recommend the bound photo collection Aquarian Odyssey for flavor value should anyone run across it in a second-hand shop, even though the gossip I’ve heard about Snyder is anything but flattering.
Marg:
I’m arguing more that it was a crucial leap in technology, not consciousness. It did not occur at the same time worldwide, incidentally (not that we can know all the times that writing was developed; there are definitely dead scripts out there, and almost certainly many that have been completely lost to human knowledge). Writing arose in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC (cunieform, in Sumer) and by then was also in use in Egypt (hieroglyphics), and sparked the development of many other systems of writing across the Old World — our alphabet is descended from this. By 1200 BC, a very different system of writing was developed in China, although archeologists like to argue about whether it was a novel invention or whether the concept of language was adopted through exposure to the writing systems of the Mideast; I’m inclined to the notion that it was independent, as it takes a very different strategy to representing language. Around 600 BC, a completely independent invention of writing appears to have occurred in Mesoamerica. The Rapanui of Easter Island independently invented writing (totally from scratch, apparently) no earlier than the 13th century (a truly unique script called Rongorongo which no one alive can read), perhaps the most recent invention of writing (and not just invention of a script), although there is some debate whether the script actually predated European contact (which surely would have demonstrated at least the concept of writing).
The societies who did develop writing in close proximity in time (Egypt, Sumer) were also in close geographic proximity, so I wouldn’t read too much into that. They traded openly with one another; whichever came up with the idea first, the other would have quickly realized the value and devised their own script.
If somebody got Central Casting on the blower, the actress delivered would be wearing a diaphanous gown and while twirling and ululating. Maybe some finger cymbals.
I was more imagining Margaret Rutherford in the role of Madame Arcati. Showing my age.
They traded openly with one another; whichever came up with the idea first, the other would have quickly realized the value and devised their own script.
I imagine the Pharaoh of the day, hearing from his advisors of this “script” technology the Sumerians were using to record who had paid taxes and to write one another letters, calling together the greatest minds of the Upper and Lower kingdoms and telling them “We must close the Missive Gap!”
It is pretty obvious that Egyptian hieroglyphics were designed by a committee.
That sounds like a variety of ‘The Hundredth Monkey’ phenomenon which is, of course, a myth.
I reckon Marg has a kangaroo loose in her top paddock. Either that, or the energy imprint of one.
@Marg
You keep saying this, but have not succeeded in providing evidence for it.
For thousands of years people “saw” the sun going around the Earth. They “experienced” that. They might well argue that what they had seen with their own eyes surely outweighed any wisenheimer who claimed it was the Earth going around the sun instead. Except as we know, those wisenheimers were the ones who were correct, not the ones who said “You just haven’t seen/experienced it yet. I have.”
Even if every person’s senses and memories were perfect (they aren’t) and never perceived what they expected to see rather than what was really happening (which they do all the time) it still wouldn’t mean that that person was automatically the expert on why it happened. And that is what you are claiming here, that having personally seen/experienced “energy healing” means you couldn’t possibly be wrong about it being energy healing.
Furthermore, you are claiming that the same experience makes you similarly infallible on things you didn’t see/experience (Bengston and his quantum-entangled mice) or things that you couldn’t have seen/experienced (a “healer” exerting a healing intent and a patient 2000 miles away being affected by it.)
And how did what we previously attributed to magic become understood scientifically? By collecting observations, proposing hypotheses which explain those observations, designing and carrying out esperiments to corroborate or falsify those hypotheses, and gradually accumulating enough evidence to derive comprehensive, predictive and falsifiable theoretical models.
In fact, this is what Bengston initially tried to do with his mouse experiments–he beleived energy healing might be an effective therapy, he proposed a hypothesis , he tested that hypotheses (“If energy healing is real, if I take two groups of mice, give both cancer, treat one group with healing energy and leave the second group untreated, the treated group should survive longer/in greater numbers than the untreated group”), he got his results (“Mice in both groups surivived with equal frequencey for equivalent lengths of time”), and he reached the obvious conclusion (“I have failed to demonstrate that healing energy is any more effective at treating cancer than no treatment whatsoever”)
No, wait…somehow he didn’t reach the obvious conclusion. Instead, he asserted without evidence that trating one group of mice with healing energy somehow someway cured both groups of mice–even those which didn;t receive any. And that’s why his experimetns are a total fail if yone’s seriously interested in having healing energy move from the realm of magic into the realm of science. You cannot ignore results you’d rather not have generated. You can’t at the conclusion of experiment which failed to corroborate your initial hypothesis declare a completely new outcome to argue that it instead did (“Umm, I ACTUALLY predicted BOTH groups of mice would have identical outcomes…yeah, that’s the ticket!”).
In science you go where the evidence leads you, whether it’s where you wanted to end up or not.
I think that Marg mixes up the “evolution of consciousness” ( whatever THAT is) with cultural transformations that affect how people think and live:
a long time ago ( the Victorian era) those who visited less industrially developed cultures assumed that the *people* were less advanced than they themselves. They were really looking at culture: there was less literacy which made the outsiders assume that higher mental processes were not going on; later research ( compiled byCole and Scribner, others) have shown that less inductrialised societies DO use abstraction but you have to look for it! If you give them standard ‘western’ tests- they don’t fare very well ( Why should they?) BUT if you look at how they live, you’ll find complex business arrangements and trade, systems of social/ familial heirarches and even ways of speaking by allusion- so you can discuss your opponents in their presence ( guarded speech). All higher mental processes- what we might call ‘executive functioning’ and formal operations.
We might say that literacy and symbol manipulation make use of formal operational thought ( including the roots of scientific analysis) more LIKELY. Within ‘modern’ societies there is a vast range of levels of functioning which is most likely dependent upon social class. Something which education can address, not *consciousness*.
New Agey folks have co-opted that word so entirely that I am loathe to use it myself.
I have been reading Nassim Taleb’s ‘Fooled By Randomness’ and this passage, at the very beginning of the Preface, reminded me of this discussion:
Seeing patterns in noise and perceiving beauty in some randomly distributed light wavelengths that hit our retinas at particular positions of the earth’s rotation are part of what makes being human pleasurable. Thinking that random noise has hidden meaning or that beauty is a quality of a sunset and not something that happens in our brains is simply a mistake, and a very common one.
I was picturing Emma Thompson as Professor Trelawney in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Actually, that’s also the image I get of Marg every time she posts. Just wait until the moon moves into the seventh house, skeptics – then you’ll be sorry you laughed!
This is like trying to explain the color “red” to a bunch people who are only able to see in black and white, and what’s more are quite proud of it and firmly believe that seeing in black and white is the only way to see. “Prove it to me that red exists!” they cry in unison. The loss, truly, is yours.
@Marg – stupid analogy. Color is provable through various means. “Magic” on the other hand, is not…..
@Lawrence
Color being provable does little good to the person who cannot perceive it.
Please explain how this experiment does not show the validity of energy healing.
http://www.scientificexploration.org/talks/27th_annual/27th_annual_jones_pranic_healing.html
I don’t think the notion that this is all about your being “special” is really in need of reinforcement.
@ Marg:
Because it’s just an abstract with no details?
@marg – you seriously believe, in this day and age, when we can detect and measure the smallest particles in existence, see to the farthest corners of our universe, and continue our understanding of the natural world, that this one guy (and yourself, I guess) can perceive something that no one else on the planet can?
This is probably an earlier version, but Jones just seems to do the same thing over and over again, so it probably doesn’t matter:
Great data reporting, bro. I can’t even figure out what this is supposed to mean:
Um, when was this gamma shielding applied? One may of course think back on the “basis” of “Pranic healing,” which is perception of “auras” and “beaming colors” to color-corrrect the “aura.” Given that Jones seems to take 24 hours as an endpoint, perhaps he should get someone to “heal” half a dish and no more. Clearly, this sort of detail can’t present that much of a problem given that aura perception of a dish full of cells from 6000 miles away is a snap. Furthermore, it remains, as usual, unaddressed why “healing energy” for some reason can’t cause harm. It is merely “auric” knob-twiddling, after all.
Regarding the last point, I foolishly failed to repeat that what’s being “healed,” which is to say, saved from irradiation, are HeLa cells. Ergo, Pranic “healing” should be able to nullify radiotherapy for cancer.
@Narad
You see, even when you are presented with valid evidence you say “there is no red”.
@Marg – and it is valid, why exactly?
There might be a reason that people, over the aeons, see the universe as being infused with human values and forces which are ‘on our side’, or run contrary to our wishes-
we tend to view the non-human anthropomorphically which might have an adaptive advantage and was selected: Gestalt psychologists, like Kohler, believed that we might see a storm as “angry” or “malevolent” because some of its qualities resembled human emotions/ motivations; the key of Dmaj sounds “triumphant” to some ( including GF Handel); we see ‘faces’ in electrical appliances and other machines; certain abstract patterns of tones of grey seem “meditative”, while others seem “exciting” ( Josef Albers).
There must be an advantage in viewing the world as such- perhaps it is an ability to recognise emotion/ motive in people and animals that “overshot” its mark. The inability to read emotion and intent in others is seen as a disability. We’ve all read about it.
Postulating ‘healing” energies that benefit humans ( and animals, perhaps) are probably a reflection of that anthropo-centric view of reality. Not only do we see patterns that might not really exist but we see them tailored to fit our needs as well.
Marg, you have not explained anything to anybody. You showed up here with a fixed belief that something you call “energy healing” exists and is superior to chemotherapy, and you keep citing the same meaningless studies over and over as one person after another points out their flaws to you. Your devotion to this fixed belief is also preventing you from seeing William Bengston for what he truly is: a cheap huckster bilking money from the gullible and desperate. You can throw around all the science-y sounding buzzwords you want, but at its essence your argument is based on wishful thinking, which has never been proven to cure anything.
@Edith
I refer you to Dr. Joie Jones’s study. See above.
Really? How? Tell me precisely how based on the content of that comment.
Marg’s analogy completely falls apart unless you assume the very point that we keep patiently explaining that we are not going to accept without evidence a whole lot more convincing than what’s been presented so far; namely, that energy healing exists.
If we all saw in black-and-white and some people saw instead in black and white and red, there would be ways to test that claim. For instance, red-seers would tell us that blood is red. We, the black-and-white-visioned, could prepare a test where sealed glasses were filled either with a small quantity of blood, or with a dark ink that had exactly the same opacity as the blood. We would test the glasses by showing them to a large number of b&w-seers, and verify that they could not tell which was blood and which was ink by sight. Then we would get as many red-seers as possible to try to distinguish the blood glasses from the ink glasses. Even if only a small minority of those who thought they saw “red” actually demonstrated a consistent ability to distinguish red blood from black ink, too consistently to be explained plausibly by chance, it would still be significant scientific evidence that this mysterious “red” color did in fact exist and that some people could see it, even if not everyone could.
However, if someone explained that “oh, the color red disappears in the presence of skeptics, and that’s why whenever I’m receiving donations for my wonderful red-seeing abilities, they’re at full power, but when it’s in a laboratory setting I can’t demonstrate a red-seeing ability any better than chance,” it hardly needs to be said that it would convince no one but the very gullible.
Can someone please explain to me why Joie Jones’s study, in which pranic healing significantly affected the survival of cells damaged by gamma radiation in multiple experiments, does not qualify to show that energy healing real?
Oh, no, I feel another laughing fit coming on. Although one can heal through thousands of miles through the ether, one can also beam it over the telephone to a glass of water and presumably put it into an IV bag (PDF). Conclusion?
That’s right: “subtle energy” isn’t subtle energy.
Do you understand what HeLa cells are? Jones is trying to figure out a way to bump off cancer patients.
@Narad
You are simply saying “there is no red”. You are not providing any kind of critique that invalidates the experiment.
I did not ask you to simply repeat yourself like a wind-up doll.
@Narad
You are still not providing any kind of critique that invalidates the experiment.
You have not stated what was in my comment that means that I am saying “there is no red.” Try to f*cking read.
Marg, in what ways are HeLa cells different than normal cells of a certain tissue type?
Even if we accept Jones’s results at face value, why would we want to reduce the effect of radiation on cancer cells?
I meant you are coming from the firm belief that there can be no such thing as energy healing (= “red”). And now you are frustrated because you can’t provide anything concrete in Jones’s experiment that disproves the validity of his findings and resort to expletives for want of something better.
The issue is whether energy healing has a concrete effect or is the figment of someone’s imagination. Jones shows the former to be the case. That is all.
These people are laughably misinformed. The result of their own experiment, as they present it, is that Pranic Healing, when applied after radiation treatment, made cancer cells live longer.
How can you reach this conclusion without looking at their experimental design, their raw data, and their statistical analysis? Otherwise you are just blindly taking them at their word. You wouldn’t do that, Marg, would you? Do you have access to this information? If so, we’d love to see it.
In that comment, since you refuse to actually address the question, I did the following: (1) Noted that Jones’s “money table” excludes negative results. This is like calculating a baseball team’s win-loss record but throwing away the shutouts. (2) Observed that the “gamma shielding” business is completely unexplained. (3) Used mean, mean scare quotes in the process of proposing a different experiment than the signature one he does over and over and over again. (4) Raised the question (or, at least, started) what constitutes “healing.”
You have addressed none of this. Instead, you repeatedly barf up an apparently new, self-satisfied, cliche tag line. Color me unimpressed.
I am not “frustrated,” I’m tired of your behaving like a waterhead.
And I’m kind of curious what Jones’s gamma source is, to boot.
@ lurkers:
Whether you realise it or not, most of my comments are aimed at YOU- so I thought that I should clarify a few things:
I am comparing science and faith; if you take the definition commonly used by Christians, faith is belief in “things unseen”- in other words, it doesn’t need to be proven or shown: it is already believed in. Just like that.
Science-if it is worth that label- demands evidence and data. Variables that may confound the results should be controlled. Whatever causes bias should be taken into account and controlled.
Obviously, those who design and run the studies might be biased towards their own ideas and theories- thus, there is blinding, use of independent observers or testing, shuffling how questions are worded or presented because we know that ALL of those factors- and many more- can affect outcomes. Statistical analyses show the degree/ amount of the effect or whether there is any effect at all.
Faith may be the biggest bias of all: I often hear an advocate of alt med unreservedly accept any result or study- no matter how awfully bad it is- that fits into his view that “Natural is best/ Pharmaceuticals are dangerous” but tear apart any research that show that drugs work- even the most thoughtful, well-done, replicated studies that most of the SB world accepts as the standard.
People can cheat or fix data deliberately and also innocently see what they want to see. When we understand some of the tendencies people have ( why do you think I went through the entire *Sturm und Drang* about anthropomorphism above?) we can work to eliminate them.
A person who truly believes- has ‘faith’ in something- may see it even if it isn’t there: the job science has to do is to convince those WITHOUT faith in that particular paradigm by displaying unquestionable evidence- data- which accounts for all of the foreseeable confounders and biases.
So what would it take to convince me that distance healing or reiki works? Probably, clearcut, un-confounded data that would have been replicated by sceptics- maybe even myself. You might even say I am biased AGAINST it because it does not flow naturally from the laws of physics, chemistry and biology in THIS universe. It is UNlikely.
It would have to be powerful data to overcome that whole ball of wax..
@Marg
What’s that you say? Is somebody now channeling my comment about Angelina Jolie, argument from authority, and a red sky?
Why yes, yes she is.
My comment: September 5, 2:20 am. And yet, she still doesn’t seem to have gotten my point about argument from assertion.
@DW
The universe is a far bigger place than we can conceive of, and there are things in it that we cannot account for with all our science. I think all of you are coming from a place of fear: it’s like science is an amulet that protects you from all the great unknowns. So long as you believe we can control our world, you believe that we will be safe. I doubt that any experiment with energy healing will ever convince you.
I hate to break this to you, but that’s precisely what “energy healing” is all about.
(Hence the need for “we,” hence the need for an elect of “sensitives,” etc.)
What Narad said. If ‘energy healing’ isn’t underlain by a desire to control one’s world, then what – exactly – are its underpinnings?
This is like trying to explain the color “red” to a bunch people who are only able to see in black and white
A relevant example here is the career of the distinguished colour vision researcher Kurt Nordby, himself a black / white monochromat. He asked for evidence that this “colour” phenomenon existed; he received it; he studied the effect.
Same here. Show evidence that a phenomenon exists and we will study it. So far I’m only seeing bovine side-products that have little novelty, due to childhood on a dairy farm.
Apparently Joie Jones used a gadget called a Vital Force Technology™generator to prevent some of the cancerous cells being killed by radiation. In this article (PDF) by Dr. Yury Kronn, developer of this technology, Dr. Kronn explains that because both Dark Matter and Life Force are undetectable by science, they are obviously the same thing. Not only is this obvious, apparently, but this insight is the basis of Vital Force Technology™. I started counting the leaps of faith and non sequiturs in that article, but there are just too many of them. Lest anyone doubt that Dr. Konn is a proper credentialed scientist, his biography here is impressive, as long as you ignore the links to tattvas oils, amulets, gem elixirs, crystals and the like at the top of the page. None of this fills me with confidence in the reliability of Jones’ results.
Sorry, Dr. Kronn, not Konn (though very likely con, I suspect).
I would like to know just what this energy is? I think we have asked around this question, but Marg, of course has a difficult time answering direct questions or pointin us to an authority who can explain it. If this energy exists, how do we measure it? Use it? Manipulate it? How will we know that this energy is the ONLY source for this magic? I would have thought that the first issue is to define what you are testing, not just the outcome.
Wow, Marg, the results produced by Bengston and Jones are very impressive. A million dollars, no strings attached, would go a long way toward funding further research, don’t you think? And it happens that James Randi has a million dollars burning a hole in his pocket, just waiting to be won by anyone who can do what you say has been done easily and reproducibly. Of course Randi demands that this be done under conditions that exclude mistake, coincidence, and fraud …
It means they omitted the experiments where pranic healing failed to extendcell survival when they crunched the numbers.
Hey, it’s standard prcatice to through out any results that don’t support your preferred conclusion, right?
What do you mean, you don’t?
MArg, I’m sorry, but I haven’t seen Jones actually provide evidence that pranic healing protects HeLa cells from gamma radiation damage. Your link directed me to the abstract where Jones asserts this is the case, but it provides no relevant details regarding the experiment’s design (How the cells were grown, at what passage where they harvested for the experiment, how much and for how long they were exposed to gamma radiation, how cell survival; was quantified (cell counting? vital staining? MTT assay for cell activity), it provides no indication that experiments were blinded (did the people measuring viability know which samples had ben ‘healed’ and which had not prior to measurement?) And critically it provides no actual data from the experiments themselves.
Should I also note that this is the abstract from a talk, not a journal publication, and as such does not represent a peer reviewed source?
These details are important. Their omission requires we simply take Jone’s word that he’s demonstrated the magical healing of cells in culture, and I’m sorry–word alone is not enough. If it were, we’d logically have to accept any claim made by any alternative or faith healer as proven, even in cases when the claims themselves were diametrically opposed.
I noted in the final remarks from a previous talk Jones gave in May 2006 at the Seventh World Pranic Healers’ Convention in Mumbai, India the promise “Our study, the details of which will be published shortly in the scientific
literature, clearly shows that Pranic Healing can reverse the effects of radiation on cells in culture.” Try as I may, however, I can find no record of such publication in Pubmed or elsewhere. Until such time as Jones does publish in a peer-reviewed journal, providing sufficient detail to allow independent investigators to duplicate her findings, as evidence all you’ve offered is “Joie Jones says it works–isn’t that enough?”
Marg, here you’re wrong: positive results from several properly designed and controlled experiments, replicated by independent investigators, demonstrating energy healong was effective would convince me. In science you go where the data takes you, whether you want to or not. And truthfully it wouldn’t be hard to design and complete a rigorous experiment. No one promoting ‘energy’ or ‘pranic’ healing, however, seems willing to go to the effort.
If you’re honest you realize we all would be positively ecstatic if someone did prove energy healing works and detail how it could reliably be used to cure illnesses like cancers–the more effective tools we have on hand to address illness and suffering the better.
But no one to date has conducted such experiments and demonstrated efficacy, let alone had their results confirmed by independent researchers. The examples you’ve offer fall far short achieving this: Bengston says he has, but on examination it’s find his experiments failed (control group and treatment group outcomes were indistinguishable); Jones says he has, but provides insufficient detail to even begin to assess his claim despite his 2006 promise that those details would soon be published in scientific literature ( not to mention teh fact that he has the strange habit of ignoring negative outcomes when drawing his conclusions).
So once again I have to ask–are Bengston and Jones really all you can offer (other than anecdotal accounts) to support the claim energy healing works?
I had intended to be rather silent today because I am recalling a very dark day that occured years ago when there was nothing I could do AT ALL to affect its outcome….today is also the real anniversary of the Crash of 2008. And I am watch the Middle East unravell on television…
Science is not an amulet that wards off uncertainty, fear, doubt and catastrophe… it is a means of limited understanding and limited control in a very uncertain universe: a matrix of unknowns, if you will, in which we attempt to ground ourselves despite fear.
All of us recognise limits in understanding and personal control. As an atheist, I don’t believe that my own wishes, actions, intentions or needs can somehow influence an omnipotent force to tilt things in order to benefit me. Or even that there is a divine presence unless if we are speaking purely metaphorically about the majesty and grandeur of the galaxies and inner workings of atoms and cells.
I don’t imagine that the laws of physics, chemistry and biology can be suspended by courting divine intervention or through expressing the intention to heal in *precisely* the right manner. I’m sure that religious people who are also sceptics ( and there are quite a few here at RI) don’t expect their deity to waltz in and cancel natural law to suit their wishes, either.
I would imagine at most people at some time in their lives, it could be age 30 or 60 or later, realise that magic doesn’t work and that we exist and survive purely by chance. Our choices can frequently affect our fate positively but eventually, they will not. Then we are gone like the mist that clears away in the sunlight.
A metaphor from an Anglo-Saxon poet:
in a dark, raging storm at night, a bird flies into an inn that is filled with people- talking, eating and drinking, bursting with life-as they enjoy their warm shelter; then the bird flies back out into the darkness, never to be seen again.
We are that bird and the inn is our very limited life. We shouldn’t squander what we have.
Nah, I meant the bit about the gamma shielding that followed.
I feel like sharing a link from one of my blogfathers: “How do you prove photography to a blind man?”
To me, Marg’s “color argument” says more about a lack of imagination and obliviousness to the implications of discovery than it acts as a meaningful analogy. We know of no organism that can see radio signals, and yet we’ve scientifically proven that they exist with such a high degree of confidence we take the concept for granted.
It’s also a thought-stopping cliche, a way to feel superior, and a way to falsely treat science as if it were limited, like in fantasy shows where magic is invisible to “sciency” gadgets. Science is an inclusive method of developing reliable, testable explanations from available information. Science is not a tricorder with a predetermined standard set of sensors.
Or at least, if they try, they don’t then report on the fact that said experiment completely failed to support their position.
@All
Jones said only 88% of the experiments succeeded; 12% failed. And it was completely an on/off proposition, no in-betweens. So I don’t know where people got the idea that he did not report his failed experiments. Also, for most his experiments he did not associate with Yuriy Kronn and his machinery but used pranic healers. All this is explained in the various links that have appeared so far on this tread. After he got clear results in 400-odd experiments using pranic healers, he started doing variations. The strangeness of the limbs he went out on does negate the first 400 or so experiments that worked.
I got the clear sense from DW that she would believe in the existence of energy healing if she could do it herself. Newflash: any one of you could do it. Most likely not to the extent of healing cancer, but certainly well enough to help people with minor things like wound healing. But not one of you could do it with your current mindset. You are so bound up with it being magic or bound up with divine intervention that you could not allow it to be a natural phenomenon. I went into reiki as a total skeptic, not believing anything would happen. Something did happen, and it scared the living daylights out of me. It took years to accept that it was something real. I don’t believe in an elite of sensitives; I believe what James Oschman says that this is something that we all have that we just haven’t allowed to be. I’ve taught many people to feel energy. It’s a simple enough proposition; you just have to get out of your head into your body, and your connection with the earth. If you fail, it’s because you haven’t been able to get out of your head. Most of you would probably have a really hard time with it, most brainiacs do. But it’s worth trying.
That should be “does not negate”. Or a question, as in “Does the strangeness of the limbs he went out on later negate the first 400-odd experiments?”
@ Marg:
Not exactly what I said: I said that I might believe IF the experiment- unconfounded/ controlled- could be replicated by sceptics – even me- the operative word is ‘replication” and PLURALITY ( several times) by *sceptics*- i.e. not followers. Doesn’t need to involve ME. I wouldn’t expect this to happen because for the results to occur a suspension of a few laws of physics et al would be involved. I don’t expect that to happen any time soon.
I believe that others might respond to the rest of your comment… I think it’s about time I depart to the land of myth, magic and poetry ( REM sleep) I hope.
@DW
When you say skeptics replicating the experiments, do you mean skeptics running the experiments or doing the healing? Because, with all due respect to Dr. Bengston, I doubt that the latter would work.
This is either wrong or frankly dishonest. He excluded from his table presentation of the results total failures. If it were a “on/off proposition,” there would have been nothing to report other than a cartoon thumbs-up sign.
So I don’t know where people got the idea that he did not report his failed experiments.
He mentioned them in passing after eliding them from the money table. I would further idly note that he seems to churn out identical prose again and again with nothing changed (including the “a positive results” typo) but the number of “experiments.”
Oh, no, it just occurred to me that he doesn’t even define “survival rate.” How was this measured, Marg?
(To be a bit more specific, I was wondering yesterday why Jones was using this 5 × 2 design. If the whole plates are tallied as simply “healed” or “dud,” I haven’t seen Jones state it, although it might explain why he keeps repeating the exercise.)
@Marg
This sounds oddly like the ‘people only use 10% of their brains’ bullshit.
Tell ya what Marg – I am currently suffering from a chronic asthma problem. Teach me how to cure it with just positive thoughts and I *might* be convinced. (With one clause and that is that I don’t have to pay to access your supersecret techniques – can’t afford such things at the moment)
Ah, I see. If you fail, it’s your fault not mine. Perfect out for whenever it doesn’t work.
No wonder I haven’t cured myself of asthma yet – I’m just not trying hard enough. Evidently I just *want* to be gasping for air…
You really are no different than any other alt-med crank.
Now we get to cross off the ‘skeptic negative thoughts prevent it from working’ canard.
Marg,
I experimented with energy healing when I was in my teens and twenties and I had some remarkable results. Then I got interested in hypnosis, and had remarkable results with that too. In fact I found that there was nothing that I could do with energy healing that I couldn’t do with hypnosis. My conclusions were that humans are very suggestible, that if you sit with a person paying them attention for several minutes, they will feel better and that many apparently physical ailments have a significant psychological component*. I never found anything that convinced me that there is any unknown energy involved.
Incidentally healers often use hypnotic language, for example I think it was Judith who stated here that she just tells the patient, “let’s see what happens”, which contains a hidden presupposition that something will happen. The whole situation of healer/patient sets up a context within which a person can make psychological changes. Sometimes a person has physically recovered from an illness but hasn’t made the psychological transition to wellness, and a ritual like energy healing can provide an opportunity to make that transition. There is more to illness and wellness than medical and biological phenomena, there are important cultural and individual elements as well. I could go on, reaching back into my medical anthropology classes, but I’m sure you get my drift. I don’t think anyone here is denying that these things happen, but it is a major error to confuse these kinds of phenomena with the effects of an objective, measurable energy, whether composed of dark matter or anything else.
Have you ever successfully treated an illness that is not self-limiting (i.e. does not usually or often go away on its own if left alone), does not have a variable course (comes and goes, with exacerbations and remissions), or that does not have a large psychological component (e.g. painful disorders, anxiety, depression, insomnia)?
What is the most remarkable result of energy healing that you have ever seen that could not be explained by coincidence, regression to the mean (people seek help when their condition is at its worst) or the natural course of the illness?
* I think I have related here before that I once experimented with self-hypnosis and, to my utter astonishment, cured myself of a cat allergy I had had for over a decade. Before that single session if I was in the same room as a cat I would start sneezing, my eyes would redden and water etc.. Immediately after my self-hypnosis session I not only entered a room with two cats in it, but I stroked one and deliberately rubbed my eyes which, when I occasionally did this accidentally, would normally make me very miserable indeed. Nothing happened. Zip. Nada. Zilch.
That was 25 years ago and I am still not allergic to cats, though I do have a slight reaction on a skin test. I suspect that I developed the allergy as a child when I was terrified of my grandmother, who had a cat. By starting to sneeze when we visited I had a perfect excuse to go out into her large and beautiful garden which I loved to explore. Stick + carrot + cat = cat allergy? I’m not suggesting that all allergies are psychological, but there have been experiments in which Pavlovian conditioning has been used to induce IgE release from stimuli like a bell (are you salivating by any chance?).
@ Marg:
I would have sceptics conduct the experiment ( although if controls were adequate, it shouldn’t make any difference)…HOWEVER you mention an important variable: whether the ‘healer” believes or not; we could have a comparison of those who believe vs those who don’t. THEN we could see if THAT had an effect as well. I think that they would PREDICT different results – that doesn’t mean that there would BE different results.
Krebiozen discusses the idea that we can persuade ourselves of many things: *Persuasion and Healing* used to be on every student’s reading list in the late 1970s and later.
I happened to have studied with a prof who
reviewed studies about whether hypnosis is real or not: long story short, she concluded that it’s not any specialised state or condition, it is a strong case of suggestion/ persuasion. I think it’s not too different from making a decision, e.g. to quit smoking, to diet, etc., then following that through -with constant internal verbal cues and self-direction- BUT it may carry the added persuasive weight that this is a tried-and- true method that links with the mysterious unconscious self that REALLY controls things – or suchlike.
I once took a formidable comprehensive exam that required detailed knowledge of experimental psychology ( perception, cognition, developmental, aging etc) as well as theoretical issues, over the past 100 years or so, which obviously included thousands of studies ( experimenters’ names, date, conditions, importance, conclusions) which is a lot of material. I included a sort of self-hypnosis even though I didn’t really believe in it because of things I DO know: putting yourself in a confident position and dealing with stress can do wonders. And it did.
People are affected by symbolic actions they take: everyday magic. Athletes have ‘lucky’ socks or underwear. We behave in ways to limit stress and allow ourselves to focus on the task at hand. If I wear certain clothes, I feel better and probably behave differently. Actions like these can harness powerful emotions associated with them so that they do ‘our will” or at least, don’t ‘do us in’. Use your enthusiasm to push you on while curtailing the fear that inhibits you from doing what you’d desire.
This Bengston chap got a free advert in the Toronto Star a while ago.
Here is the genesis of his ability. He was lounging pool side with a window cleaner, staring at clouds. The window washer began making the clouds appear in any shape he put his mind to.
Naturally, this lead to his curing Bengston’s chronic back pain and from there to teaching the ability to Bengston and logically, curing cancer.
That this happened in the early ’70s may have some bearing on the ideas…
This has been done. The use of “skeptical healers” didn’t diminish the effect, if you catch my drift.
Why can’t Bengston heal warts, again?
Denice,
If you (as the hypnotist) behave as if it’s a special state or condition, most people will also behave as if it is. In fact whatever model you adopt regarding the human mind seems to work pretty well, even completely contradictory ones. In other words, as your mentor said, it seems to be based on suggestion/persuasion. As many grifters know, it’s amazing what you can get away with if you have enough chutzpah. Also, I have been reading about the power of conformity. I’m sure a lot of these factors are at work in CAM, antivaccine beliefs, and many other phenomena often discussed here.
@ Krebiozen:
Sure. Although I don’t believe in magic, I do have several pairs of “magical” earrings that liberate my arcane inner powers appropriately to the task at hand- garnet works well for improving my tennis game and black pearl helps my general mysteriosity rating- I have the latter on now.
OMFG! I sound Ayurvedic.
@Krebiozen @DW
I think it needs to be made clear that no one can heal anyone else: that all healing is self-healing. All the so-called healer does is help set up parameters that facilitate self-healing.
@Krebiozen
It also needs to be made clear that so-called energy healing does not need to involve hand-waving. You can just sit with the person and healing can happen. Bill Bengston speaks of a retired oncologist who has switched into energy healing and does just that, and says that she now feels she is more useful.
So if you are an adept healer, as you say you were, it doesn’t matter what you do. Handwaving, hypnosis, sitting with someone, it’s all good; it all facilitates.
People now go to the doctor and effectively say, give me one of your magic pills and heal me. They believe that healing comes from outside. But the doctor does nothing different: he or she too tries to create the right conditions for the body to heal itself.
As to it all being psychological, aren’t mind and body interconnected?
@al kimeea
He didn’t change the shapes of clouds. He dissolved them.
@flip
It’s not positive thinking.
@Marg – what a second, you’re saying now that this is “facilitating” the healing? How does that jive with the mice experiment, when the mice would have no idea they were injected with cancer & no idea that they would be “healed?”
Now you’re really somewhere in the twilight zone & can’t even keep your stories straight…..
Sure thing, Marg. Perhaps you’d like to enumerate these “parameters.” Or, I dunno, state whether you think “parameters” means “rules,” which means “rules of the universe,” which the “healer” has special access to the design and inventory of, because this is Really Special Sh*t for Really Special People to dispense to the Great Unwashed.
I would also like to inquire about just what on G-d’s green you think the utility of attempting to draw this distinction is:
Are clouds made of cancer?
@Marg
Then tell me what it *is*. I mean, if negative skeptical minds prevent the healing from taking place (as you seemed to imply above by saying that none of us could do it because we’re too close-minded), then it must help to be positive… right? You just said:
Can someone self-heal if they’re thinking negative thoughts?
And then you say this:
And yet, positive thinking has nothing to do with it?
What are these ‘parameters’ – tell me how, do I tap into this self-healing thing?
Let me guess: so long as you believe it works, it does…. because if the method (hypnosis, sitting, etc) doesn’t matter, then the only thing that *does* matter is that you believe it works.
Yeah, that’s positive thinking at work dearie.
@Narad
Read the read. Someone suggested that the man Bengston met changed the shapes of clouds. He didn’t. He supposedly dissolved them.
@Lawrence
The “parameters” need not be psychological.
Once again I have to come to conclusion that you lot, aside from @DW and @Antaeus Feldspar, are rather dense, or at the very least suffering from tunnel vision.
@whoever it was that asked this, yes there are other experiments, but since they were done with qigong healer in China, I doubt that anyone here will be swayed by them.
There is also this;
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10394674
Have fun.
You so don’t get it.
Or rather “read the tread” and “qigong healers”, plural. I’m using a netbook with a miniature keyboard and not much of screen.
Clouds don’t dissolve. They evaporate or precipitate.
You don’t “come to conclusions,” Marg, you haul notions around, freely label them with Wet-Pruf and a Sharpie, and thrash around interminably should they not be immediately accepted for delivery by parties who did not place an order for a colander of either watery or semisolid ideation in the first place.
@Marg
We’re dense, or you’re just bad at writing clear and precise explanations of what you mean?
For instance: how hard is it to provide a definition of what is healed (ie. does it work on everything?), how it’s healed (does one need a healer or can you simply ‘tap into’ this energy?), and how quickly it works?
If you’ve defined this somewhere in this comment thread, or somewhere else, I don’t recall you doing it. You can either provide it (again) or point me to your definition.
I will also continue to note that you refuse to actually respond to my comments – you just add throwaway lines with no value whatsoever. An easy way to fix this is to answer my questions. If it’s not positive thinking, what is it? Can you self-heal when you’re thinking negative thoughts? How do I tap into this self-healing? (I’d love to stop taking my prescribed inhaler every day)
I usually leave the paper-deconstruction to others who understand the methodologies so much better than I. However, I read the results of Marg’s latest linkage and saw this in the results:
That makes me suspicious of how well the experiment was designed. Who gets 100% for all outcomes on all test subjects no matter who performs the ‘healing’? That seems very unlikely to me.
Another thing about this study…
Does that mean what I think it means? What did they actually measure?
These seemingly random linkages between the ELF and gamma, etc., spectral ranges make me wonder if there was actually a bit more than was said in Marg’s “red” expedition.
Sorry @flip, I did not mean to ignore your queries.
The oldest form of “energy healing” is qigong, from China. It comes from daoist longevity practices. Traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture are related to qigong but it is believed that qigong came first.
It consists of a series of exercises which are like tai chi but much simpler and are meant to promote the movement of energy within the body, and to take in energy from the environment. There are many schools of qigong. Yes, one can heal oneself through qigong, and one can also receive external qigong from a designated qigong healer.
Healing is usually not quick. One does the exercises and at first nothing happens. But then one day suddenly you notice that your tennis elbow or knee pain or sciatica is gone, and you can’t remember when it disappeared.
The point of the exercises is overall health. They are akin to a moving meditation. The meditation is meant to move you from your head into your body; to calm the agitation of the mind, which is seen as a source of disease. It takes practice and it takes time. It helps to have a good teacher. Kenneth Cohen wrote a good book on qigong; he also has a video. Chunyi Lin’s Spring Forest Qigong videos on Youtube are also good (and free).
Someone in the tread above made disparaging comments about qigong, saying that it just separated him or her from his or her money. I can’t say I had the same sort of experience with it. Maybe I had a better teacher.
I think other forms of energy healing are related to qigong, though not necessarily the same. You could try therapeutic touch or reiki. I would say that from an energy healing perspective asthma would be considered an agitation in the lungs. In Chinese medicine the lungs relate to grief. As an energy healer I would treat the lungs to calm them, but might also look for the source of the grief. If you want to read a good book on Chinese medicine, and how the emotions relate to illness from their perspective, you could read “The web without a weaver”. I was fascinated to read that a good practitioner of the craft was expected to be able to diagnose just from seeing/hearing the patient.
I relate energy healing to meditation. When I treat people I go into a meditative state. In that state I become very sensitive. I’ve learned that if a question pops into my head, I should ask it. Or if I have an urge to put my hand somewhere, I should. I can usually tell where the pain is. I can also usually tell when it has stopped hurting. The feeling of it changes. It feels like something has let go, or it goes from feeling hot to cool.
Someone above asked me about healings that I could be sure were not psychological. I find it’s hard to separate mind and body. I had one amazing case where a woman who had severe shoulder and upper back pain for twenty-odd years was suddenly pain free — and has remained pain free ever since. That was interesting because not too long before an osteopath friend of mine had told me about someone he treated who had had shoulder and upper back pain as a result of adhesions from a hysterectomy. So in this case it came to me to ask the woman if she too had had one — and it turned out that she did. Everyone else she had seen treated her back and shoulder — I treated mostly her abdomen. I asked questions as they came to me and she answered them as the answers came to her. And something worked. She left pain free and remained pain free, and it only took that one treatment.
I hope this is useful. And I’m sure everyone will jump all over it.
@Marg
Yeah that was me. Someone wasn’t paying attention…
I also made a point of mentioning that the teachers were masters, taught by *the* Chinese master of this particular style. Either they got their teaching out of whack, or the original master wasn’t all that great to begin with. I’ll also note (I didn’t before) that outside of me and one other person, no other students were there despite weekly sessions. I attended for about 6 months, so I wouldn’t have called them raging successes at either promotion or healing.
I’ll also make a point of stating (again, I didn’t before) that I did read up on qigong at the time, so even if it were bad teachers, then it’d also have to be purchasing bad books as well…. And because you mentioned his name, I went and looked up Kenneth Cohen: it turns out that his book ‘The Way of Qigong’ is the very book I bought first. I studied it quite intensely… I believe it’s still lying about somewhere in the house.
Distilled qigong is a hand-wavey allusion to a magical mystical force where “bad” energy is excised and “good” energy is inhaled. Nobody seems to be able to measure these magical mystical forces, despite the fact we seem to be able to measure the gravitational effects of planets on stars millions of light years away.
And interestingly, in a country where qigong originated, it seems that most of its citizens have turned away from it and used “Western” medicine instead. I suppose that’s some sort of conspiracy… or as I see it, they used what works better.
Marg: I’m going to save you some trouble. Don’t bother replying to me unless it’s with citations. I tried qigong because I was stupid enough to fall for the “different ways of knowing” fallacy (aka East vs West medicine) and it was only after learning more about how science works that I came to see it as a ridiculous notion. Yes, this is one area where I’ll admit I have a bias and I’m not likely to be convinced – it would take a HUGE HUGE HUGE amount of evidence for me to think that qigong or “energy healing” works.
I can see now why you think it’s not positive healing because you genuinely think there’s some sort of weird force out there, but frankly, I don’t see it as anything other than that. There is no evidence of these forces, nor of this mystical ‘life force’ that qigong appeals to, and so all you’re doing is doing some exercises in the vain hope that they do something. Even assuming that there *is* some energy force, I have no idea why it would exist in the context of what else we know. The only way to make it fit (and here you’re assuming a conclusion before you have any data of any measurable effect on anything) is to assume it’s a vibrational thing: in which case you’d also have to invent some reason as to why things that vibrate or are ‘attuned’ to the force heal… In order to do that, you’d pretty much have to assume that the existence of life is not only inevitable, but that the universe was invented purely to satisfy life’s needs… Which gets back to special snowflakes and positive thinking.
Yep, there it is. See, I can agree that psychological issues affect the body. So why is energy healing better than say, going to a psychologist? Or talking with a friend? Or perhaps, making lifestyle changes? Or perhaps, just dealing with the grief as one might do after a death in the family?
As someone who’s probably not read my previous comments on this site, you’d realise just why I’m harping on about positive thinking so much. It’s because I suffer from depression. You suggesting that my health is related to my emotions is about as insightful as a child saying they’re hungry. If energy healing or positive thinking or whatever the *f* this magical mystical stuff is worked, it’d have worked by now. I’ve had decades of trying.
But again, it turns out I’m just doing it wrong. Marg gets it to work, and I’m not, so it must be something I’m not/doing.
Where I’m going with all this positive thinking stuff, is that, ultimately, most alt med is just victim blaming. Because the person who is sick is just not doing X, or not doing enough of X, or doing Y at the same time, or mixing it with Z and Y, or doing too much of X, or just not being in the right mindset, or just …. “just”.
So, I’m having asthma issues because of grief. This is nice to know…. except you’re about 1 year too late. I already thought of psychosomatic issues. Interesting that remaining calm, removing stress or changing lifestyle habits has not succeeded in getting rid of the asthma. But I’m just doing it wrong I guess.
Wow gee, you’ve tapped into the ability to… think. Colour me unimpressed.
You didn’t answer this:
PS. Don’t think I didn’t notice the argument from antiquity thrown in there. Or the fact that qigong has been made irrelevant thanks to people actually studying anatomy and figuring out that veins and blood have more to do with life than invisible channels of invisible energy. Pretty much every concept of ‘traditional Chinese medicine’ has gone by the wayside due to actual reliance on observational data and investigation.
And because you feel like we’re jumping on you, here’s something you can get all hot and bothered about:
quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/acu.html
This bears repeating, if only to add that plenty of actors experience this phenomenon too. It almost always occurs during improvisational classes or other acting workshops where they are taught to be ‘attuned’ to ‘the moment’. I wonder if the universe is tapped into an almighty improv class? Or is it just possible that being aware of one’s own body helps us understand what we’re feeling?
Artists must be especially capable of self-healing, they spend so much time in touch with their own selves…
I went off to find some citations to back up my point about Chinese people not using traditional Chinese medicine anymore and got lost in google… but found an interesting discussion at csicop.org/SI/show/china_conference_1/
Apologies for the multiple posting, but it occurs to me I forgot to ask a very important question:
Why are the lungs associated with grief, and how do you know this?
@Marg – any thoughts on Emily Rosa and her two trials of Reiki Masters which showed they were only guessing (and poorly at that)?
According to another free advert in the Star, this time for acupuncture, in Chinese physiology, the liver processes gamma rays in the skull. Therefore needling there will relieve chronic lower back pain…
How is this known and justified? Why do people buy into this at all?
The author of the piece had no trouble swallowing that tripe, but balked at the acupuncturists reasoning behind the way they run their “practice”.
Even more traditional – one big ward for treatment.
Marg,
You do appear to have difficulties in that area.
I noticed that ‘energy healing’ (and later hypnosis) was effective in some but not all conditions that were painful, such as lower back pain, migraines, headaches, joint pains, in the sense that people reported feeling better, often temporarily, sometimes for longer periods, occasionally permanently (as far as I could tell). I strongly suspect that the conditions that respond remarkably well to these modalities are psychosomatic in nature. For example I know a hypnotherapist who treated a woman (who I also know) who had had a throat constriction for several months that was making it difficult to swallow. She was scheduled for surgery but a single session of hypnosis relieved her symptoms completely. Was this some magical healing event? I very much doubt it, I think it is much more likely that the throat problem was psychosomatic, or possibly it resolved spontaneously and the hypnosis was a coincidence. I am very skeptical of your suggestion I was accidentally using energy healing while experimenting with hypnosis. BTW, if you can get hold of Derren Brown’s ‘Miracles For Sale’ , it is well worth watching (you can find a streaming video online). He teaches a man all the tricks of faith healing (not energy healing, but there are marked similarities), and gets him to impersonate one on stage in Texas. The section where he goes out on the street and heals people is particularly interesting.
I also noticed that people would report feeling better in other conditions that you could objectively assess, but I never, ever saw anyone healed of anything that couldn’t be expected to heal on its own. I don’t think anyone claims that energy healing can grow back an amputated limb, reverse kidney or liver failure, or cure type 1 diabetes, for example. Parsimony suggests that this is because such therapies work, when they work at all, on a psychological level. Remember the recent study that found placebos reduced people’s subjective assessment of the severity of their asthma symptoms, but had no effect at all on actual objective measures of lung function?
In my experience, such urges are best resisted, they can get you 2-5 years in jail in some jurisdictions 😉
flip,
If you look at TCM you find that the terminology is very confusing. When they talk about lungs, kidneys and liver, they don’t necessarily mean the physical organs we are familiar with. Disturbances in kidney energy are associated with depression, for example, which has no basis in science-based medicine. I don’t think kidney patients are particularly depressed, or that asthmatics suffer more with grief than anyone else.
In a similar vein, I once talked to a therapist who insisted that asthma was due to poor mother-child bonding, and that he could cure someone’s asthma by treating their mother with hypnosis. So flip, blame your mother for your asthma 😉 BTW I get bouts of asthma that are firmly resistant to self-hypnosis and relaxation, though panicking during an attack is not recommended.
Regarding Qi Gong, I did Spring Forest Qi Gong every day for over two years, and though it was quite nice to simply stop and do some gentle movement and clear my mind for 20 minutes or so, I didn’t notice any health benefits from it at all, so I gave it up.
Derren’s Brown ‘Miracles For Sale’ on a streaming video website that has annoying popups and may or may not be legal. The street healing section is at around 55 minutes.
Oops. I’ll try that again.
Here’s a working link, I hope.
So, logically, that means that under no possible circumstances could an outside observer look at what a healer is doing and say either “Yes, that healer is facilitating” or “No, that healer is not facilitating”.
Which logically means that anyone who says “This patient got better, and that proves that the healer’s facilitating was tremendously effective” has no basis for that claim. They have no idea whether the healer was facilitating or wasn’t.
As we’ve tried to explain before, the danger of constructing a hypothesis so that it’s unfalsifiable is that, even if it’s the falsest thing in the world, you will never know.
This is a pretty cheap attempt to bring science-based medicine down to woo’s level. The only people who ask a doctor for “magic pills” or who would accept “magic pills” from a doctor are the ones who would accept the same from a naturopath or herbalist or acupuncturist or faith healer. Everyone else is simply trusting the doctor to be a competent practitioner of science-based medicine. If I ask my doctor “Why is this particular medication the one you want me to take for my high blood pressure,” he’ll say “Because a high sodium level aggravates high blood pressure; this medication makes you urinate more frequently, which eliminates sodium from your body more quickly. Of course, sodium isn’t the only substance that will get eliminated more quickly; that’s why I want you to also take this supplement pill, which will put back a lot of the potassium you lose because of the diuretic. Of course, that’s not all I want you to do; I want you to change your diet and stop eating so many high-sodium foods, and I want you to get more cardio exercise; that cardio will improve your circulation so that your blood flows more easily and reduces the high pressure that the blood is under.” Does that sound like “magic” to you? ‘Cos it doesn’t to me.
Oh, Marg, Marg, Marg. Who’s the one suffering from tunnel vision here? No matter what evidence is presented to you, you can only see it as leading to your favored conclusion, that energy healing exists and is awesome. You cannot even describe to us hypothetical evidence that you would accept as casting doubt on that conclusion! You cite things that have no connection with energy healing as evidence for energy healing: “Science doesn’t know what dark matter is, therefore energy healing is probably something else that’s real even if science doesn’t know it!” To be honest, I have trouble imagining how anyone could possibly have more tunnel vision on the subject of energy healing than you do.
Interesting that we should wind up here:
about 20 years ago I worked for a non-profit that provided services for people diagnosed with a serious condition: amongst my tasks were interviewing and counselling clients and writing propaganda for the cause.
I had a great deal of stress and decided to try t’ai chi – which I thought might also provide a useful adjunct to counselling. So I studied the exercises and collected an awe-inspiring set of books over several years. I found that , like I already knew from my formal degree, if you get people to calm down, the situation usually improves measurably. Breathing exercises are useful for people who suffer a variety of physical problems and fear. MIld exercise often helps the sedentary or debilitated to feel more ‘able’ and thus, ‘in control’, which can’t be a bad thing.( I also learned a more active style- Chen- for my own exercise). I never taught those I counselled any exercises but suggested using breathing/ listening to calming music to quiet themselves down and trying activities like walking and appreciating nature.
I didn’t discover anything that I wasn’t aware of in SB medicine or psychology- they cover relaxation and exercise, you know; recreational activities are studied in regard to youths and the aging population. Yoga (I also studied that years before) and t’ai chi/ chi gong also possess a glimmer of the ‘mysterious East’ – that is something that may be a useful distractor, taking you far from your daily woes . Thus, how would that be SO different from harmless escapism? Some read Tolkien or watch television/ film sci-fi opera. Or go see show of 19th century Orientalist artists. Watch the brooding sea at nightfall. Write morose poetry.*Chacun a son goute*.
In my own view, most alt med faculties are things we already know about: diet, exercise, rest, recreation, distraction, persuasion, cultivating a sense of agency or even community. If people feel less helpless, they behave differently and their actions might lead to solutions- or at least distract them for a while.
The problem happens when the sense of agency becomes unrestricted by the bounds of realism and assumes powers that do not exist. I hear the results of unfettered belief in the impossible frequently on internet radio alt med shows AND they give dangerous advice about avoiding SBM as well. Sometimes those two ideas present hand in hand as they issue from the same source.
“You cite things that have no connection with energy healing as evidence for energy healing”
I see this quite often for any woo. Dogs hear real good, therefore psychics & naturopathy etc, are valid things. And there is no evidence for Einstein’s relativity, none. So, acupuncture.
@flip:
Anecdotes are not evidence, but a dozen Chinese healthcare professionals (mostly nurses, some physicians) on a State Department-sponsored tour were being escorted around our department two months ago when one of our staff asked them a question about traditional Chinese medicine and how it was integrated into public health in the People’s Republic.
There were politely pitying smiles from the group as the interpreter explained that in China, the only people who still use traditional Chinese medicine are a) in remote and lower-income areas with no access to anything else or b) elderly.
I got the impression (confirmation bias may be playing a part here) that in their opinion, “traditional” medicine was for rubes and those who cling to the old ways for comfort.
Shay @ 1:07 pm — That’s because TCM is widely known to have been something invented by Mao out of equal parts folk tales and his own vivid imagination. He did it because even after the confiscation of the estates of the nobility, he decided that China’s population was simply too big for real medicine to be made readily available to all without diverting non-trivial sums from Mao’s military and economic expansion and modernization plans.
So, just as it’s cheaper and easier (though not as efficacious) for most Americans to get a bottle of shark cartilage every month than get a knee or hip surgically replaced, Mao got billions of Chinese to buy into his own brand of woo rather than pay the big bucks to get enough real doctors trained and real hospitals built. (To be fair to Mao, having even fake doctors was more than what the Emperors before him did. )
@me
I just realised that I misread Marg’s comment. I thought she was talking about when she tries to self-heal, not what she actually meant which was when she tries to heal others.
My apologies. Although most of my remark applies to some of it in regards to healing others and being ‘in touch’ with what they’re saying. I’m good at cold reading too, and so are many mentalists, magicians and con artists. So I’m still not impressed, but the snark is over the top given the proper context of what Marg meant.
Anyway, as I said: apologies for the confusion.
@Al Kimeea
My guess is she doesn’t care. I posted about Rosa upthread and Marg never acknowledged it. Perhaps on purpose, because I repeatedly referred to the link I provided on Rosa’s work.
@Krebiozen
Marg did state she could heal a wound. I am tempted to ask how long it would take to heal.
Also thanks for answering my question. While I was at csicop I refreshed my memory on a number of things about qi and saw that much of it is due to a pre-scientific unwillingness of those in charge to allow anatomical investigation – therefore Chinese people knew very little about how the body worked and how the organs were related to X malady. Various herbs are used in a ‘like cures like’ or ‘tigers are dangerous, so have some for potency’ type stuff. In other words, they had no idea what was going on and were just throwing whatever they could at the problem to see what worked; and presumably someone somewhere coincidentally felt better and voila a miracle cure was born. It’s *exactly* the same pre-scientific views that were held in Western medicine. The only difference is that science (aka Western medicine) moved on, and TCM didn’t. (We both know this, I’m saying it for the lurkers)
What I find interesting in these threads is that most of the time when I mention my asthma, no one asks me if I’m physically active and/or eating a well-balanced diet. These are two ‘go to’ responses from alt-medders when they talk about how SBM doesn’t treat the whole person; and yet no alt-medder ever actually comes up with these replies to me (Pegamily got close but his shotgun scatter approach to causes kind of makes it redundant) . Marg did it above. She commented on how doctors give magic pills and don’t worry about the ‘inner’… but at no time has she mentioned to me anything about anything except some sort of vague grief. (And let’s not forget that saying an adult is grieved is like saying that fear exists. It’s about as precise and perceptive as astrology. Name me one person in the world who *isn’t* worried about something)
As for blaming my mother… I think this is a cue for some of Denice’s comments on psychoanalytics. 😉
And I too gave up qigong after seeing absolutely no benefits from it. As a meditative exercise, I find reading to be far more enjoyable and relaxing. For light exercise the movements became too ritualistic for me to have any actual interest in putting in the effort. As with Denice, once exploring it, I found qigong to be no more insightful than your average high school psych or arts class. In fact, most of what you learn in these ‘tap into energy’ exercises can also be learned in team-building exercises or on a wilderness retreat for meditation. It’s basically just teaching you to pay attention to what your body is doing – no wonder anyone can learn it!
@Shay
This is also my impression. But being a skeptic, I wanted to find some actual data on how many people in Asia/China use traditional medicine still. Unfortunately my google fu not being great today, the most I could muster that wasn’t from alt-med sites was csicop. — If anyone has a link to a publication or some stats, let me know!
@Phoenix Woman
I wouldn’t say it’s ‘widely known’. I didn’t know it until I started listening to Skeptoid episodes. The only thing I ever heard about TCM is that it was different to “Western” medicine (the implication being West=bad meds with side effects), that it was more ‘natural’ or herbal, and that it’s been used for thousands of years. That it had anything to do with Mao was very new to me only a few years ago. Oddly enough I actually studied the Cultural Revolution in a history class, and medicine was never discussed in the subject matter. This is one aspect that evidently needs to be talked about more by skeptics and SBM people. It may be widely known among skeptics, but I know from being around alt-med family members that it really isn’t in the general knowledge of the public.
@Antaeus
Energy healing exists and is awesome 🙂
@Al
If you mean the study by the child Emily Rosa, what she tested was Therapeutic Touch not Reiki, and I am not in any way impressed by how she did it. If it showed the opposite of what it did, you would be all over it about how unscientific it was.
@Flip
I am sorry you were not helped by qigong. And, no, psychotherapy is not the same as talking to a friend. Yes, we may all carry grief, but we all carry grief differently. Ditto with all the other emotions.
I do recommend, again, The Web without a Weaver. I also recommend Claude Swanson’s Life Force: The Scientific Basis. He cites many studies.
BTW the physical structures corresponding to acupuncture points have been found. I’ll look for the link.
Why does that seem funny to you? I find it sad when a grown person who could be sorting and weighing evidence reasonably instead thinks and acts as a fanatic. I find it particularly sad when that person does so knowingly. You certainly thought having “tunnel vision” was a bad thing that needed correction when you thought it was something we suffered from, but when I pointed out that you have a bigger case of tunnel vision than anyone else, all of a sudden it becomes just a joke, haha. You don’t try to deny your tunnel vision, you just suddenly decide that it doesn’t matter, if it’s your vision that’s tunnelled.
If you have right and reason on your side, Marg, why do you need the unfair advantage of a double standard as well?
Ah, what particular criticisms do you have?
Effectively the same whine presented by David Hufford; it boils down to the ironic assertion that true believeroonies can guarantee positive studies before even performing them but none of those meanyhead journals would be interested.
@ flip:
I would never psychoanalyse YOU! You’re fine! And I am in another area entirely
-btw- I think it’s more enlightening to look at what skills and abilities a person has if you want to understand what makes him or her tick…
Someone asked me if a certain 50-ish guy had ‘serious problems’ and I answered- by process of elimination- by focusing on what he DID- he is highly skilled in an exacting business where he has had to work closely with people- for decades- therefore he’s probably NOT mentally ill. Living independently is a big clue also.
Re the Mysterious East:
Amongst the woos, treatments or remedies that originate in places ‘long ago’ and/ or ‘far away’ carry premium mystique- AND probably it is easier to make up tall tales about them. There is a movement called “global herbalism” ( Michael Tierra) and MIke Adams promotes South American/ Rain Forest herbs. Indigenous people- of all continents- live ‘closer to Nature’ : we’re told their ancient roots stretch back to the Edenic past, when all people lived long, healthy lives, in harmony with Nature without SBM. And the ‘EAST’ is the epitome of them all.
Earlier today I listened to PRN archives where the woo-in-charge rhapsodised about how the simple farm folk in Italy lived, working in the fields at advanced ages, eating pure unadulterated fruits and vegetables, filled with love for family- even their pet dogs and cats have doubled life spans. Sometimes the tale is set in Italy or the southern US or an island off Japan.. but it’s always the same: vegetarianism, long life, hard work, simple values and purity prevail sans the unholy intervention of doctors and psychologists.
“Back to Nature’ fans always exhibit a belief that our ancestors knew best and that we should emulate them. Modernity causes cancer, CVD, mental illness and autism. The world is contaminated by processed food and devilish drugs, the air and water is polluted. But a change is a-coming, they say.
Actually, my ancestors were predominately business people who lived in large cities that were/ are the international forefront of art, culture, education and finance. I don’t mind emulating that. In fact, I usually DO.
Oh, my kind doesn’t count.
My ancestors were predominantly peasants and most of them died in their late 30’s. I think the quote about their lives being “nasty, brutish and short” applies here.
Hmmm…went back and checked that quote and it’s even more applicable. Hobbes was referring to “the natural state of mankind.”
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.
Greetings, RI friends. I’ve been coming to this thread for the past few days & find that you’re doing great – you know who you are, Flip, Narad. Denice Walter, Shay, et al., so much that I can’t add much more. DW’s latest summary is sopt-on, of course, and the Hobbes quote, very good…
typo, that’s “spot-on”, DW.
Here is the link promised link on acupuncture meridians:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15750378
@Marg
This is like the rooster claiming that his crowing makes the sun rise in the morning. Dissolving is what cumulus clouds do when the thermal that created them quits. Thermals are rarely continuous – usually a bubble of hot air forms over an area that is slightly hotter than the surrounding area and then detaches. Colder air flows in to replace it, shutting off the source. As the air rises it cools due to adiabatic expansion and the water vapour condenses to form the cloud. The condensation releases energy to the air, causing a positive feedback as the air continues to rise.Once the thermal quits, the water droplets that make up the cloud begin to descend and vaporize as they fall into the warmer air below. This re-vaporization takes energy from the air causing it to cool and sink acceleration the process. A good glider pilot can easily recognize a cloud that is still “working” (well defined flat or slightly domed upwards bottom) bottom and one that has quit “working” and is beginning to dissipate (poorly defined bottom and possibly even virga – precipitation that does not reach the ground). The duration of this cycle tends to be fairly consistent over several cycles, so simple observation is all that is required to predict when a cloud is going to dissipate – it does not even require a knowledge of micro-meteorology.
Oh, sweet Jesus. “It is likely that living matter is not in the ground state, but permanently electronically excited.” What? There are some other issues, as well. This is basically mid-IR thermography, rather a let-down after Marg’s inital promise that “the physical structures corresponding to acupuncture points have been found,” not that simply ignoring previous assertions in favor of new ones hasn’t already been established as Just the Way Things Work in Aura Land.
“Look at this. What is this?”
“It… it’s your hand, Buckaroo.”
“No, no, it’s a… formula, it’s an antidote of some kind. Whoever it was in that phony phone call from the President gave me information. It’s some… some electrochemical message that allows me to see what they really are.”
solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.
For me that description will always be associated with Robert Muldoon, New Zealand’s one-time Prime Minister.
Sometimes the tale is set in Italy or the southern US or an island off Japan.. but it’s always the same: vegetarianism, long life, hard work, simple values and purity prevail sans the unholy intervention of doctors and psychologists.
The other recurring element is the absence of reliable record-keeping… remember, people, census details shorten life-spans.
I remember when the centenarians choice all lived in the Caucasus, and their longevity could be ascribed to the diet of fermented milk. Isn’t that one due for a revival?
Bengston treats pancreatic, breast, bone, & rectal cancers, “cured gangrene” and helps diabetics reduce insulin dependence among a “wide variety of physical and psychological conditions”.
The article is headlined: “Proof of a healing touch”. It’s all assertion in a Q&A form.
And his website has the standard Quack Miranda.
If the results of Emily Rosa’s experiment were the opposite and I were to whine aboot it, I’d be the one in the wrong.
Her protocol could be improved, I think, so let us run it again with more professional energy healers of any stripe and see what happens. Results of 70% (maybe even higher, they are professionally trained after all) or better – consistently – would be very convincing.
Thanks, Marg, for linking to a study that appears to show, that lighting something on fire, on the skin causes some nerves to light up. And this is news, how? As for meridians, you are going to need more than ‘lights’ to prove they exist. Anatomists have looked and looked, even histologically and so far have failed to find structures that would account for these lines. Next bit of evidence please.
@Marg
Yes, you keep asserting this, but providing no valid evidence for it.
(By the way, even if meridians did exist, that doesn’t prove that humans are capable of tapping into them, nor that meridians have anything to do with a healing energy or an energy. All it would mean is that a previously invisible set of tubes/channels exist in the human body)
Er yeah, theapeutic touch, reiki, same thing. Same hand-wavey vague “heal by thinking” crap.
And of course you’re not impressed with it. It showed the effect your looking for doesn’t exist. If it showed the opposite, and was a good study, it would be one data point in your favour and one study that would have us scratching our heads.
But you keep believing the strawmen Marg. Whatever helps you get through.
Er Marg – you missed it. I am asking you what the difference is between sitting with a healer and sitting with a psychologist. As for the rest, again, your insight is not at all perceptive.
Thank you once again for ignoring my question. That’s two. Here’s the third:
I note you completely ignored many of my other points and questions (again), but I’ll harp on this one. If you answer it, I may just move on to another one. My next one might be about why actors are just as good at tapping into the moment as you are. Or why you seem to care nothing for Occam’s razor except when it suits your purposes.
Um, what now? The meridians have actually been found? These meridians that nobody can find *except* for TCM proponents? Yeah, I’d love to see your source.
… Now I’ve seen the source you posted. I read the abstract, then scrolled down to see the papers that cited this one. The authors seem to be saying that meridians are both a light source and an electrical charge? There was only an abstract, so I can’t tell much about the paper. But I read the other two that cited it. They stated that the resulting “light” were artifacts and not identical to TCM meridians that are used. The photos given on the paper seem pretty convincing of a light artifact due to reflection of the light source on the body itself – something you can do easily at home at night with a camera that has a flash, a reflective surface to photograph, and a torch. (I know because I had this same issue last week trying to photograph something only lit by a torch) Without seeing the original paper, it’s hard to make a comparison of their results vs the ones in response to it… but I’m not convinced they found anything unusual. (Er, nevermind, then I found Narad’s link and saw the full paper… and I stand by what I said. Not convinced) I’ll leave it to the others to pick apart in more detail.
Apparently my multiple postings yesterday got a bit much for Marg seeing as how her responses are not all that forthcoming. Still, at least I got her to describe her idea of energy healing.
@Denice
I thought you might start talking about Freud again. This psychic thing is hard to get right! 😉
Japan gets mentioned a lot here in reference to old age. I think the media forgets that Japanese health care is pretty good and is mostly reliant on “Western” technologies and discoveries.
@THS
Thank you. 🙂
Nice to be included with the other regulars who are far, far better at this and more knowledgeable than me.
@Marg
I am very impressed with your descriptions of the anecdotal reports of the benefits of energy healing.
Energy is clearly a very powerful thing, but it may be a two-edged sword. All that higjhly energised qi flowing through meridians and cells and organs … Who knows what harm it might do in the long term to the human biomass?
Hey, I assume the energy healing practitioners have done the studies looking at long term outcomes and possible adverse effects. They must have done surely, or how can they claim their treatment is harmless, or how can they know that the thyroid cancer my gran got 5 years after she had reiki for her arthitis are unconnected? Maybe acupuncture alters elecrtopotentials on cardiac myocytes, predisposing to arrythmias? Maybe therapeutic touch alters vitamin D metabolism, or potassium gating?
There will of course have been studies, you know, like the comprehensive phase I and II studies by bigpharma on new modalities – and I presume these will have documented all effects, good and bad, over a decent length of time in the proper, valid scientific manner, and have been published.
Can we see the results of some of these safety studies, Marg?
………Please?
…What, ….you mean no-one has ever done formal safety studies….?
Oh dear.
@ THS: I thank you for your kind words. I am happy to provide whatever I can.
To clear up a few issues:
because the ancestors were business people – not born ultra posh but they certainly did ‘clean up’ spectacularly well- I didn’t mean they they didn’t get TB, ‘Spanish flu’, scarlet fever or malaria ( in warmer climes) which they DID and I only know REAL details about people who lived post 1880 ( just a few before). Recently a cousin told me that her father ( who was from Ireland) used to tell stories about young relations dying suddenly there. Now her brother and niece found that they needed pacemakers; she has a minor verson of the same problem- many relations got tested. SBM at work.
The Tales of the Elders get wilder with each telling – btw- it’s not Japan in general but Okinawa- city residents are portrayed as living in squalor, stressed out, eating unnatural foods ( what? cellophane and plastic?), going to DOCTORS! Taking meds!
I studied psychology of aging that included a section about the exaggeration of age in cultures that revere elders and have poor records.
Fermented milk? Yoghurt! These days *les gens de woo* ( or is it ‘wu’, en francais?) talk about various fermented products and probiotics- sauerkraut, pickles, fermented soy products, kombucha ( oddly, no mention of wine, beer, gin et al/ they also hate bread and yeast). This trend is especially relevant for the anti-vax/ autism woo crowd ‘healing’ their kids with diets- parents @ TMR discuss the nonsense they feed children( food and ideas). Doesn’t sound exactly pleasant- but WHAT that can be traced back to the seminal GI-ASD reserach of AJW is EVER pleasant?
About psychology and ‘energy healing’: SB therapy is not purely persuasion but includes strategies that enable people to change how they behave and develop skills- especially those which involve social interaction and communication. Therapy should be more like school than church.
And while I am not a Freudian, his ideas have cultural import even today :’people are animals not spirits’ is his great contribution. Similarly James opened up the world of human experience to SB research. Both dudes followed in the wake of Darwin and regarded adaption and selection *vis a vis* humans.
I think that alt med has to hang on to spiritual/ soul-based formulae because it doesn’t buy the material basis of psychological and health phenomena. There’s nothing wrong with that- just don’t call it ‘science’. It’s philosophy or religion.
Indeed, Marg has been conspicuously silent about the issue of Joie Jones running around trying to protect HeLa cells from radiation despite the question’s being posed directly.
@Denice — I was stationed on Okinawa for 3 years…lovely place and I had a nearly-idyllic life there (if you don’t count the whole wearing a uniform and carrying a.45 thing). But I was 30 years younger, and single, and with no responsibilities other than seeing my platoon didn’t get drunk and in fights every Saturday.
But I wouldn’t exactly have called it a “natural life.”
But Shay..
you espouse the profligate decadence characteristic of western colonialism as an exemplar of the marauding empire upon which the sun never sets ( not the OLD one, the NEW one)..
OBVIOUSLY neither appreciates the purity of indigenous wisdom but instead, tempts innocent natives who live in harmony with Nature to raise fish for sushi to be eaten by out-of-touch office workers in Sydney or culture black pearls to satisfy spoiled fashionistas….
Oh wow, I can almost produce an ancient cultures rant.. but with bigger words. Thank you for the inspiration!
the marauding empire upon which the sun never sets ( not the OLD one, the NEW one).
What, we have a new sun now? Gene Wolfe was right!
Reluctant as I am to drag politics into this blog, I’ve noticed woo-sters (sorry, Bertie) yearn for ancient civilizations the way Republicans yearn for the 1950’s.
Neither group would enjoy the reality very much, I’ll bet.
@Militant Agnostic
Thank you for the interesting dissertation about clouds. Mayrick apparently did not pick his own but asked his audience to do it for him. Another chap who claimed to have the talent did likewise.
@All
I was having a chat today with someone I know, a woman who has two PhDs in science, one of them in biomedical engineering. During her working life she did quantities of experiments, but now that she is retired she has taken up other pursuits, including meditation and energy healing. I told her about our discussion to get her take on it.
She knows about Bengston’s experiments and has been telling me for a long time that they are not up to scratch. She was less than impressed with young Rosa’s efforts, which she also deemed to be not up to scratch. Apparently young Rosa and whoever put her up to doing the experiment completely misunderstood how Therapeutic Touch works. She says that all the studies she knows of have been too small, involving too few subjects, and that before anything can be proven, either pro or con, much larger studies will have to be done. And we both agreed that no one will likely come forward to fund them.
I told her about some of your criticism of energy healing and she asked me who you were. I said I thought you were scientists, and that some of you seemed quite learned and erudite. She asked me what kind of scientists you were, and I said that I didn’t know, but it seemed to me that you were all rather Newtonian. She said she didn’t know many real scientists who were still “Newtonian” and that a real scientist would have the curiosity to follow up interesting phenomena.
i told her our host was a surgeon and she said doctors liked to believe they were scientists, but most of them weren’t. She said “most of what doctors do isn’t really science based.” I said “I know. Only about 25 per cent is.” She said “oh no, that’s much too high”.
So I asked her if she thought energy healing was real, and she said it was about as real as anything else is. And I asked her if there was really anything to be gained by proving that energy healing worked. She thought there was; that we would be opening the door ever so slightly to a brand new form of knowledge and that we would all profit from trying to find out what it was and how it worked.
So there you have it.
I would be curious to know how many of you are actually scientists.
Wow, Marg reacts by yet again pulling the argument from authority card.
And the use of more anecdotes which have no bearing on the lack of/data on energy healing.
Three strikes and you’re out Marg.
I’ll say. Of course, “it” seems to have actually been delivered some time ago.
Marg, where to start? I’m sure you are, in your circles, a warm, empathic human being with many excellent human qualities. So please understand that it is not an meant as an insult to strongly suggest that you are willfully, woefully ignorant about science in general, and about physics, chemistry, biology & medicine in particular. Please, it’s not an insult – it’s a statement of fact. Every human being is born ignorant and educated as one might be, will remain ignorant in areas where she/he has no valid experience or learned instruction.
I do take issue with the willful ignorance you’ve displayed, but many people have their sticking points. One would expect that someone who has posted as much as you have on this thread might also take the time to read and try to comprehend the responses to your posts and other comments on this particular thread. If you are curious about the total content of Respectful Insolence and about the backgrounds, interests, and credentials of the blogger (Orac, also an easily identifiable biomedical scientist) you might read samples from this blog over the years. You might also read the responses in the threads with some care. You will find ample reference to the backgrounds & interests of the scientists who contribute. (Hint- look for references to grant applications, to the NIH, to Principle Investigators, to outright declarations and explicit identifications of who they are.) You will also find that others who have no formal training in physics, chemistry, and medicine contribute, and that these people have diverse backgrounds. One of my favorites, for example, is a psychologist who also has an interest in actively tracking and understanding the various flavors of “alternative medicine”, quackery and general woo. Others have no academic or professional background but are drawn to this site by their personal interests – some of these folks are notable for their ability to formulate a coherent argument and for their fine humor. For the record, explicitly, Orac is a physician and surgeon specializing in breast cancer and he also maintains an active research program in a biomedical lab. I’ve poked through this blog-site enough to learn a few things about the history of his research interests and I can assure you that he knows his science-medicine stuff. As for me, I’m not nearly as distinguished as many of the contributers to this blog. I’m a yoeman scientist; I’ve been around for a while and I’ll never be a bigshot. I’ve worked in academic research labs and in biotech. My Ph.D. is in Molecular Biology from a respected Midwest cancer research center that was, when I was there, oriented toward fundamental biological mechanisms. My background is a bit diverse, with two degrees in Botany from earlier academic efforts; at least I know about ethno-botany and all those South American Rain Forest wonders that seem to be popping up in the “alternative” crowd. Semi-retired, I’ve lately been sitting in on research meetings of some labs at the local University & the only notable issue there is that these folks are actually using quantum mechanics to probe the structures and mechanisms of protein-DNA interactions. Believe me, real quantum mechanics applied to biology (at any level) has no resemblance to the muddle-headed nonsense that has been peddled to you by certain pompous fools. As to the question of whether I’m Orac’s minion, well, no. But the significant differences I have with him regarding, for example, music and culture, are submerged by other interests.
“Apparently young Rosa and whoever put her up to doing the experiment completely misunderstood how Therapeutic Touch works”
I guess the 21 trained TT professionals do too as none of them – 7 were tested twice – mentioned this misunderstanding of their profession.
All these things claim to manipulate vitalistic energy. I presume it is the same energy – qi, prana, etc regardless of whether it is hands or needles or sugar pills.
In the case of hands, if the treatment doesn’t involve touching then what is duff about Emily’s “simple and elegant” study as described by other scientists who may also have 2 Plumbing heating & Drains.?
She flipped a coin to determine which of her hands to use or let the trained professionals pick which had the stronger energy, and used that one.
No need to touch, then no need to see the patient seems reasonable and it did to the 21 trained professional energy healers as well.
Unless they don’t understand how it woiks.
I have been doing a bit more reading about the origins of acupuncture (there’s a good article here). It does seem clear that when ‘needling’ is mentioned in ancient texts at all it is in the contexts of bloodletting or lancing infections, and the practice had no similarity to modern acupuncture at all.
Should anyone be in any doubt about this, consider that a TCM practitioner will take the patient’s pulse to decide which meridians are blocked or out of balance, and then stick needles in points on the meridians to solve the problem. As the article I linked to points out, taking the pulse is left over from the old bloodletting days. What does the flow of blood through blood vessels have to do with the flow of chi through the meridians? I think a brief perusal of pulse taking in TCM is enough to reveal its true nature.
Since Marg expressed an interest, I trained and qualified as a biomedical scientist specializing in clinical biochemistry in Cambridge UK, and have over 20 years experience. Despite the word ‘scientist’ appearing in my job title, I am not a research scientist, and don’t have a PhD, although I have been involved in a fair amount of research over the years, and my name has appeared on a few published papers, though not as an author, and I have had a few letters published in medical journals and a couple of articles published in a popular science magazine.
I have also taken an interest in alternative medicine and claims of the paranormal over the years, and have suspended my disbelief to experiment in a number of these areas which resulted in an increase in my skepticism.
I took a few years out to study social anthropology (known as cultural anthropology in the US) as well, was awarded a grant to carry out medical anthropological fieldwork in Egypt, and worked briefly as a research anthropologist for the Institute of Psychiatry in London before returning to clinical laboratory work.
@All
You stick your guns & I will stick to mine. I have a limited knowledge of science and you have a limited knowledge of energy healing. I doubt that either of us will convince the other. Yes, I have read your postings and your links; they haven’t made a dent. I would like to see scientists follow up on energy healing as an interesting possibility, not as something to debunk. So long as it is something to debunk, you will get nowhere. And I personally don’t need it to be validated: if it ever is, all that will happen is that the medical profession will take it over.
At any rate, I am now off until Sunday.
“stick _to_ your guns”
You have NO knowledge of science OR energy healing. You have repeatedly proven that.
Scientists HAVE followed up on energy healing – and repeatedly shown it to be complete bunk.
Have fun continuing to steal, cheat, lie, and defraud people. You are truly despicable.
Before I leave, I just found this:
http://www.skeptiko.com/william-bengston-hands-on-healing-research-ignored-by-cancer-industry/
I haven’t had time to listen to it, but the intro looks interesting.
@Marg
In other words, you have nothing to refute our comments with. Cue the flounce (again).
Hmm, the person who accuses the skeptics of being entrenched is herself entrenched and unwilling to even bother arguing the points made. What a surprise!
You’ve got it backwards. You or other people have to prove it exists. All we’re doing is holding to the principle of parsimony until good (extraordinary) evidence turns up. We’re not debunking so much as explaining how other things could account for the effects you’re seeing – that’s how science works. First you get rid of all other possible explanations. What’s left over is a possible new discovery of X.
In other words, you don’t care about it being proven at all. So long as you believe it exists, that’s fine for you. It’d be fine for most of us too (that you believe it, evidenced or not), except that you push this stuff on other people and pretend that it’s scientific. You’ve basically just admitted that you have FAITH, and not science on your side.
Oh and Marg…. try reading
skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/skeptico-not-skeptiko.html
I think I’ve written about the energy being investigated by physicists not being the same thing as personal experience of ‘energy’: healers are talking about the latter.
I’ve heard an alt med ‘expert’ talk about “energy exchanges”:
if you learn something from a teacher, are sexually attracted to someone or care for a child – “they are all energy exchanges”. His beliefs about ‘healing’ run on a similar track: a person who is ill or has psychological problems has disturbed energy patterns; the healer whose energy is perfectly alligned ‘adjusts’ the bad vibes to match his own.
*Et voila!* All fixed.
What people experience as energy runs the gamut of all their emotions, sensations and instinctual feelings- all physically based in their own bodies. People feel better if they are around others especially if they experience stress ( see John Bowlby- studies of attachment, separation- cross-species).
Alt med ideas mix up energy ( physics) with experiential personal ‘energy’ ( psychology) and religious/ philosophical notions about the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ ( which is also derived from experiential forays into abstractions and emotional content) over the centuries and across the globe. People also have inklings about their own level of learning and knowledge ( metacognition)- probably this is also tossed into the stew.
What the so-called healer refers to as “energy exchanges”, I can, by virtue of my various formal degrees ( ahem!), call other things: transmission of information via a role model are both examples of learning, sexuality is biologically based but carries distinct social implications and obviously, care of children involves emotional and instructional aspects. All of these things have been studied.
I find energy healing to be very naive: therapeutic touch might be better explained by phenomena that psychologists have studied for AGES: people are social and are comforted by touch. Believe me, it’s been studied, as anyone who has lugged around huge volumes of Bowlby can tell you. The ‘healer’ sidesteps the entire issue of communication- both linguistic and non-verbal- which is a huge part of the three interactions he described. It is also how we exist in the world.
A researcher could tease apart what people REALLY mean when they describe their own feelings about personal energy- I have my own little take ( which probably plagarises Hume a bit)- I think that we imagine ourselves *en assemblage* of our specific skills, tendencies and abilities and how we experience them: we shift the arrangement ( or the set inclusion of WHICH ones) around to suit our present needs. In other words, we’re not always the same person although we like to believe we are..
@ THS:
Flattery will get you everywhere. You might be interested to know that I started out in the arts with early recognition of ability in mathematics so I managed to get a great deal of natural science under my belt at a young age before I ever considered graduate work in the social sciences.
I have worked in other areas beside counselling.
Oh for fzzk sake. You, Marg, and your double-doctorate friend are both idiots. You are referring to the Zombie Fake Statistic That Will Not Die. Research it, why don’t you, and you will see what a fool you are making of yourself.
By the way, your friend with the two (count ’em, two!) PhDs utterly wasted her time and energy obtaining them, based on her ability to think.
That may be the most concise statement of the central blind spot of pseudoscience I have ever seen. Science, done properly, sets out to debunk everything; the null hypothesis is king. It’s well-worn, but the discovery of the role of H. Pylori in peptic ulcers is a pretty good example of this process. At first few people believed Warren and Marshall and only when several researchers had replicated their work was their hypothesis accepted.
In contrast, pseudoscience starts with a belief, and seizes upon any evidence, however poor or tenuous, that seems to support the idea, and ignores any evidence or prior plausibility to the contrary. Parsimony and Occams’ Razor are the antithesis of pseudoscience.
Marg, when you return, you might find this short YouTube video about dowsing of interest. The dowser at the beginning states it well when he says, “How does dowsing work? That’s the number one question, but nobody can answer you.” Notice the presupposition that dowsing works? Scientifically speaking, the number one question is, “Does it work?” and I think the video answers that question. Substitute ‘energy healing’ for ‘dowsing’ and I think you would see much the same results in a double-blind test. The dowsers are convinced they can identify bottles of water hidden in boxes, but consistently fail to perform better than chance. Most interesting is the denial and the excuses they come up with after their failure. One of them even claimed that God was having a joke with them. No doubt the truth is that dowsing pixies are scared away by the nasty skeptics Drs. French and Dawkins, just as skeptics scare away the energy healing pixies.
[Expletive deleted] Sorry about the link.
Skeptiko is run by a “a successful entrepreneur turned science podcaster”. Interesting perhaps, but a little credulous for my liking.
Denice,
Cross-cultural descriptions and expressions of mental health problems are also interesting. I know that South Asians often refer to sensations in their heart, such as “My heart is sinking”, when describing what westerners would call depression. I worked as an anthropologist with a professor of psychiatry who had written papers on this, which assumed that we (westerners) are better educated and more sophisticated than those from other cultures when we describe our feelings in psychological terms. Fresh from my social anthropology degree I disagreed with him, as I think it’s just different terminology for the same phenomena seen through different cultural filters. Perhaps in some ways describing emotions in somatic terms is more accurate. There’s an interesting book on such differences called, wittily, ‘Aliens and Alienists’ (one of the authors was on the interview panel when I got that job).
One of my psychiatrist colleague’s papers described an experiment with medical students who were asked to pretend that they were depressed, anxious or irritable, and took (IIRC DSM) diagnostic questionnaires for each of these conditions. Not surprisingly, those who were pretending they were depressed got high scores on the depression index, and low scores on the other two, and so on with the other tests. Conversely, when actual patients took the same tests, they got mixed results. A patient diagnosed as depressed would get a high depression score, but might get high anxiety and irritability scores as well. I would have concluded from this that diagnostic categories, or at least the diagnostic questionnaires, needed some work, but not my colleague concluded that the medical students were more sophisticated at describing their (imaginary) symptoms than the patients describing their (real) symptoms. I thought that was very interesting.
How do you propose scientists follow up on energy healing, other than as they’ve already followed up on energy healing without finding any evidence of efficacy (i.e., by desigining and conducting properly controlled studies)?
A simple question–can energy healing effectively treat inflammation, or COPD?
@ Krebiozen:
Sure. Although there are cross-cultural differences there are individual differences as well, reflecting personality and verbal abilities . I knew someone who provoked an entire line of cross-cultural research about Piagetian skills/ stages I also knew someone who studied how far people spaced themselves physically from others. I always liked Cole and Scribner’s book.
I just heard an amusing/ frightening ( not sure which) anecdote from my cousin who was told by the hand surgeon she consulted that she had a very high pain threshold because she manged to keep working when an old ligament injury- that had formed a cyst – somehow broke a bone, which now needed attention.. the break probably happeneda few years ago! She didn’t think felt all that badly.. until now.
@Krebiozen
Re: Skeptiko, you should see the link I posted. It’s an attempt to use someone else’s reputation and name. Sceptico (with a ‘c’) is an actual skeptic, though his blog is rarely updated. Skeptiko (with a ‘k’) is a woomeister’s attempt at trading on that reputation/name and muddling the waters with his more credulous posts.
I happened to be a reader of the ‘c’ Sceptico and knew about the two similar blogs. When I saw her post the link I knew immediately that there was something amiss… The ‘k’ Skeptiko has apparently done a good job of muddying his name with the other.
(Hmmm sounds familiar. Oh that’s right: Meryl Dorey attempted to do the same a few months ago with her ‘real Australian skeptic’ blog)
Dentistry. Never mind about cancer for a bit. Dentistry is a sub-discipline of medical science. Anybody wave hands and restore teeth? Yes, yes, we know that a sugar-rich “western” diet greatly increases caries, etc. But don’t try to dodge this one with a “natural diet” argument before you hand-wave away all those terrible abscesses found in human remains from various archeological digs or, for that matter, well-known dental issues in recent history. Dentistry. Surely there is woo-dentistry?
Pardon the typos above… some rude person was distracting me while I was trying to relate the amusing/ frightening ( ouch!) anecdote.
@THS
I’m betting there is, and it would have to do with being pain free.
Denice,
Mexicans and Americans, Brits and Italians differ greatly in that regard. Hence the old cocktail party game of using a person’s personal space comfort zone to subtly maneuver them around the room without them consciously even noticing… I once had a serious misunderstanding with an Egyptian I was talking to while sitting opposite me. He leaned over and put his hands on the top of my thighs and continued our conversation, which I was very uncomfortable with. I asked him politely to remove them, and he was surprised and a bit offended. I had interpreted it as a sexual advance, but I don’t think it was ( though I had a lot of them in Egypt, but that’s another story).
flip,
I followed it, and take your point. It’s deliberately deceptive. There are some interesting-sounding interviews there among the dross, with Randi, Chris French, Richard Wiseman, Steve Novella for example but I haven’t sampled them yet.
@ Denice: Wow, someone worked her way through that very long single paragraph I wrote, the one that demonstrates that I can rant, too. My impression is that many of the folks who comment have wide-ranging experiences.
@ Denice: Wow, someone worked her way through that very long single paragraph I wrote, the one that demonstrates that I can rant, too. My impression is that many of the folks who comment have wide-ranging experiences.
Today I am grateful for modern dentistry.
i find that interesting as well, in that, AFAIK, anxiety and irritability are very commonly seen in patients who are depressed. I find your colleague’s interpretation to be oddly simplistic and patronizing.
Briefly back with excerpt from Bengston interview. Those of you who have misgivings about his his experiments really ought to get in touch with him.
Dr. William Bengston: … Generically, belief scares me. Belief scares me and believers scare me. That sounds extreme but it actually is the case that believers scare me because they believe and they have the delusion that they have the truth. I don’t care what it is that they think they know or think they have the truth about. They just scare me because I don’t know anybody who has any truth. So you have in believers a tendency to act in defense of those beliefs.
So I, for example, have spoken to skeptical organizations. I’ve been invited by the such-and-such skeptic society and I usually begin a talk to a skeptic society by saying I’m probably the only skeptic in the room. That gets them all harrumphy. Then they fold their arms and legs and contort their faces and things. “No, we’re the skeptic society.”
“You’re not really skeptics. You’re believers. You already believe that the things I haven’t yet said are wrong.”
Alex Tsakiris: How do those talks go?
Dr. William Bengston: Well, they harrumph and harrumph and harrumph and again, they go into pretzel mode and contort themselves. And it’s a very interesting socio-psychological phenomenon because I suddenly present my data and so I have mice, I have many experiments in all sorts of things, many dozens and dozens of experiments in a variety of things in healing, and the experiments of experiments.
So the issue is have I done something wrong? In which case I’m absolutely interested in what I did wrong. If I haven’t done anything wrong and these are the results and it’s a reliable phenomenon, what’s your beef?
And so they’re there contorting and they can’t find a flaw in what I did. Sometimes there are oncologists in the audience and sometimes there’s physicians of various stripes and sometimes there’s biologists and nobody can find a flaw. I’m saying, “Hey, if you can find a flaw I would say ‘Thank you.’ If I screwed up, I didn’t know I screwed up. But if I did, show me how and I’ll make it better.”
So I present this stuff and they can’t find a hole in the stuff that I do. The interesting socio-psychological phenomenon is since this is a skeptic society (it’s really not, it’s a believer society) they have a certain amount of social pressure. They’re not allowed to go, “Wow.” They’re not allowed to convert because they have to defend their beliefs. They’re not skeptical; they’re believers.
So what happens at the end is I’m cleaning up or doing this or that and the hall will start to thin out and one by one they look around to see if it’s safe. They come up to me and they go, “That was great.” Then they run off because they can’t be seen speaking to the crazy guy.
What is this, the third time you’ve tried to pull this routine? No. Bengston didn’t show up and start blabbering, you did.
@Marg
So, to support your claims, you produce Bengston’s claimed experiences at skeptical gatherings? First off, that doesn’t support any of your claims. Second, what reason do we have to believe his statements? Better to provide video or audio from one of those appearances.
Now, do you have any, y’know, actual data to support your claims re: energy healing?
(By the bye, I can’t believe this thread is still going and Marg still hasn’t supported her assertions.)
One might also wonder precisely what sort of sociologist begins a presentation by insulting the honor of the group he’s addressing.
How could scientists possibly follow up on it, when you yourself have admitted it’s not falsifiable?
There is a science-fiction story by the late Douglas Adams which involves a being called an Electric Monk, a humanoid robot whose programmed function is simply to believe, fervently, in whatever you instruct it to. It was employed by a race of aliens, which went extinct when one of them, instead of checking the safety of their vehicle, which might have resulted of a verdict of “not safe,” simply told the Electric Monk to believe the vehicle was safe instead.
Marg says she wants scientists to follow up on energy healing; what she really means is she wants them to be Electric Monks, who simply tell her what she wants to hear. The last thing she actually wants is for scientists to follow up on energy healing with science, because they’d most likely come up with the same results they got the last 79,000 times they looked into it, namely, there’s no good reason to think it exists.
THS,
But of course.
There seems to be a disproportionate number of nutty dentists about too: Weston Price, Leonard G Horowitz, Orly Taitz, J.E. Bouquot, Hal Huggins… (look the unfamiliar ones up on Quackwatch if you’re interested)
TBruce,
I suppose that attitude was of its time – I looked it up and found it was published in 1978, unless I misinterpreted it, but it seems just as I recalled. I worked with the good professor over a decade later, and he was a very nice chap. I don’t think he had experienced a sea change, and his attitude was by no means unusual. I had just escaped from a bunch of smug post-modernists, so immediately running into the polar opposite was a bit disconcerting!
Dammit, I have a blind spot for missing close link tags. I must repeat my affirmation, “I will not post without closing link tags. I will not post…”
The opening one isn’t in the best shape, either (it’s a link to this page).
Krebiozen,
It occurred to me before I logged in, OMG, I’d forgotten about all sorts of dental nonsense and I am happy to see you picked up on that. How could it have slipped my mind? At the very least, there’s all that crap around filling amalgam, and I’m sure there’s a lot more beyond all those big-hearted folds ready to replace all your fillings.
But a toothache is so intrusive, I wonder how much relief one would get from the civic-minded energy healer in the next county who’s decided to address the Dental Problem. Oh, too, let’s not get going around fluoridation-panic nonsense.
I think I’ll check out the link you left me – thanks –
Sorry, I’m doing too many things at once – it should have been this page. It seems a link with just “” gets filled in with the current page URL.
K: Wow, thanks for a good chuckle. It was the first link that took me to the tooth fairy. The second one (above) went to legit Pubmed abstract about psychiatry.
On to Quackwatch for more dentists. As I said before, there are some RI regulars here with a wicked sense of humor.
Among the lesser lights, Nancy Montgomery-Ware, Ed Kendrick, Elaine Brown, and John Hall.
@Marg, I salute your perseverance and thickness of skin, the willful ignorance is annoying because healthcare ain’t cheap and people want this stuff covered
Interesting possibility or something to debunk is irrelevant. In her own words, Emily described her motivation for her wee study was to “see if they really could feel something.”
Her results are damning. So she attempted to debunk energy healing and not examine it as an interesting possibility? Or is it because she studied the validity, the truthfulness, of the mechanism of energy healing; rather than assuming it works and torture some lab animals to verify it?
Why is what Emily Rosa did a debunking? Didn’t your PhD’d friend explain why she(?) thought Emily’s study was flawed? Sure only single blinded, but she flipped a coin or let the professional choose to balance for that.
As to how science works, IIRC, Robert Miliken attempted to debunk Einstein’s ideas in the ’30s. He did not consider them valid.
Miliken grudingly admitted Einstein was right based on his own results gathered over ten year period.
“They just scare me because I don’t know anybody who has any truth.” – Bengston
But he and his mentor claim to be able to manipulate matter at a very great distance. They claim their ability allows them to truly heal gangrene frinstance.
And you don’t care if it is ever validated and reject any honest attempts to do so because the results aren’t what you’re wishing for.
toothyologists?
About the Bengston interview quoted above:
he asserts that the sceptics can’t find ANYTHING wrong in his studies. Then ( the “socio-psychological phenomenon”) they can’t say “Wow!” and convert in public. However later, they come up to him individually and say how great his work is and then skulk away.
I don’t really believe this: most of us here could probably think up a few criticisms at the drop of a hat. Perhaps some audience members don’t speak up because they have sympathy for him. I’m sure that at least ONE person ( if they are sceptics) had at least ONE critique during at least ONE event.
Perhaps I’ve read too many stories about scientists employed by pharma confessing to witnessing malfeasance having to be “off the record” and doctors saying “Please don’t quote me” after agreeing with alt med (as told by alt med advocates).
Science proceeds from debate and researchers ‘battle’ in the journals: I remember a tale about 2 researchers who taught at the same university ( in Canada, I think) who fought about memory for images in print for years but avoided each other at their place of employment.
Bengston’s statements seem designed to impress his audience: he makes it sound as if he has the implicit support of
oncologists, physicians and biologists who are either too timid or subject to peer pressure to speak their minds. You’d think that someone might write him.
Anteaus: Which story was that? I won’t be able to sleep until I know.
Marg: That gets them all harrumphy. Then they fold their arms and legs and contort their faces and things. “No, we’re the skeptic society.”
Okay, I call bull. That’s even more fact-free then all of the posts before it. I refuse to believe that a responsible adult would use the word ‘harrumphy’ in an interview. ‘Contort their faces?’ Can’t he just say ‘frowned?’ And you’re asking us to trust a guy who talks like a demented high school student?
There are not enough ‘really?’ gifs in the world to express my feelings right now.
What, we’re still rearranging electrons around Bengston – anything? There has been no credible logic, argument or evidence coming from Marg, only a determination to somehow have the last word. I’ve seen threads like this. Won’t happen. Hey, how ’bout them (fill in local college football team)?
@PGP: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. To tell you the truth, there’s still aspects I’m trying to figure out, twenty years after reading the book the first time.
@DW, THS: It comes back to the principle of charity. Unless Bengston is trying to claim that literally no skeptic ever who has confronted him has had a better refutation of his experiments than “we don’t believe that, we’re skeptics”* then he is deliberately hiding all the times his claims were really put to the test to brag instead about how handily he defeated the weakest opponents he ever encountered.
* And this is especially ridiculous considering that such a refutation would be “Hey, your experimental group and your control group had the same results; no matter what explanation you have for that, it still doesn’t support the conclusion ‘look what a huge difference the experimental intervention made!!'”
You say you’d like scientists to follow up on energy healing (presumably in some way other than how they’ve been following up on it for decades without finding evidence it works better than placebo’s or faux treatment) but haven’t said how they should follow up differently.
The most logical course for sicentists to ‘follow up’ with is to treat energy healing exactly as they do potential small molecule or biologic therapeutics–invsetigating it’s use in standard, validated animal models such as they do for products developed to treat inflamation, asthma, COPD, etc. ? These models generate objective, numerical read-outs (% induced paw edema, eosinophil/basophil/mast cell counts in bronchial lavage, etc.)
Would you find this approach acceptable? If these models demonstrated that energy healing performed no better than negative controls, would that be sufficient to convince you it was ineffective?
(I suppose a more immediate question would be “Why haven’t Bengston and other proponents of energy healing themselves followed up in this manner, by using validated models rather than messing around with poorly designed, uncontrolled experiments, ‘imbuing’ cotton balls with healing energy, etc.?”)
Since you and Bengston seem to be on such good terms, perhaps you could suggest he stop messing around with mice, cages, magnetometers, etc., generating results that are of no value (i.e., where the treatment and control groups are indistinguishable) and contract with a reputable laborator(eg.g, Charles River, perhaps) to run a validated protocol.)
Anteaus: Okay, I thought I’d read that book. And yes, Marg is a living embodiment of an Electric Monk.
I wonder if someone could do a study to see if dentistry and cheerleading are co-related with gullibility or a lack of intelligence. I think some dentists do go into the profession to help people, but a lot seem to get shunted into the field because they can’t reconcile certain truths of biology with their faith.
@ Politicalguineapig:
@ Antaeus:
Bengston’s description has the ring of a set piece about it to me; often I’ve heard about the stodgy old sceptics/ scientists who are set in their ways/ faithful to their’ religion.. you know the drill as well as I do.
The ‘every’/’no one’ meme sounds like the woo-meister who won “every SINGLE debate” he had with the Orthodoxy ( sic). And the young ‘investigative reporter’ who confounds every single vaccine advocate he stalks…. uh, *questions*- queries which that they can’t answer AT ALL..
Words like “all, every, none” usually illustrate black-and-white thinking about a topic. Rhetorical hyperbole can be useful but in this case, it’s ridiculous. I really doubt that events transpired as reported.
PGP,
Nah, the mercury fumes send them bonkers 😉
What do you mean, “I need to install a special ventilation system to continue administering NO?” This is an outrage! And no, under no circumstances am I going to take off the lead apron, so you can just stop staring at it right now, jackboots.
under no circumstances am I going to take off the lead apron
Wait, what, have the Freemasons turned Heavy Metal to appeal to the kids?
Krebozien: That explains a lot. Dentists are the mad hatters of today. I’ve also noticed a strong correlation between being dumb as a brick, cheerleading and creationism. I leave it to the commentariat to draw their own conclusions.
Herr Doktor Bimmler: Don’t know about the Freemasons, but the internet insists that the Illuminati are into indie rock.
The Freemasons are strictly into house music these days.
Trust me.
And Politicalguineapig:
the first rule of the Illuminati is that we don’t talk about the Illuminati.
Capish?
I go away for one day and see that not only does Marg not stick the flounce – again – but also has posted yet more anecdotal data about her beloved Bengston.
And yet again posts nothing to rebut my points.
@flip – she did mention being off until Sunday, so maybe in a few days she’ll avoid listening to your points again
It’s interesting what people consider a rebuttal. Even lawyers can behave as Marg.
On a political site of the progressive bent, a poet contributor wrote an article that basically said “science, therefore indigenous people are under represented in the culture at large” while using the fevered ramblings of Charles Hoy Fort about the paranormal to support it. He uses a Fortean strawman about colours separating reality as a deepity I think, in a variation on the gaps argument “science doesn’t know everything, therefore this thing has merit.” Like TT, HT reiki…
I turn the conversation to acupuncture, homeopathy, naturopathy and psychics by asking if science doesn’t know everything, does that give license to make shit up?
The lawyer shows up with “dogs hear real good, therefore woo” “arrogant to think we’re all the same” “anecdotes put the lie to those who say bunk” “be open minded” – twice. The second time it was folded into the lie about there being no evidence for relativity, “Einstein was a pretty open minded guy”.
Earlier he said we need the evidence of the scientific method to determine quackery.
al kimeea,
It does seem a lot of ‘rebuttals’ by those whose logic has been shown to be faulty are in the form of, ” ooh look, a squirrel!” BTW a great deal of “the fevered ramblings of Charles Hoy Fort” were very much tongue-in-cheek, I think, but some people have taken him a little too seriously. A lot of the Forteans I have encountered have been ruthless skeptics; others, not so much.
Antaeus:
One thing that helped me a great deal was the realization of how much of it was recycled from Adams’ “Doctor Who” scripts. Although it’s hard to find now, the VHS release of “Shada” was particularly illuminating, as “Dirk Gently” is mostly a reworking of that untransmitted (and incomplete) serial plus a bit from “City of Death”. Professor Chronotis is a major character in both; he’s a Time Lord, and his study moves around because it’s actually a TARDIS. And the exploding spaceship in the distant past is, of course, the Jaggaroth spaceship that Scaroth failed to prevent exploding in “City of Death”. The Electric Monk is probably the most interesting innovation in the book.
“Shada” is now being novelized (Adams had refused to allow any of his scripts to be novelized in his lifetime, but is no longer around to object), and an effort is being made to try to duplicate his style. I wonder how much will be borrowed back from “Dirk Gently”? 😉
@Denise Walter
But they make such nice candles!
Calli: I’ll see if I can scare Shada up; it’s gotta be on the tubes somewhere. It makes sense in an odd kind of way that Adams would’ve worked on Dr. Who. I’m surprised I haven’t heard about that before now. Clearly, I do not have enough nerdy friends. (Or my friends are not nerdy enough.)
Thanks for the link, whenever it shows up.
D.W. and Todd: I’m laughing myself sick over here. Thankfully, I haven’t had my afternoon tea yet, or you’d owe me a new keyboard.
I do have one question: if the Freemasons are responsible for house music, and the Illuminati are in rock, who the F was responsible for dub music? There’s gotta be some secret evil organization behind that.
@Politicalguineapig
The insectoids.
Gentlemen, and Lady (@DW)
Here is some more eye-opening stuff on your precious gold-plated, double-blind studied, evidence-based medicine:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/21/drugs-industry-scandal-ben-goldacre
Doctors have been clearly as hoodwinked as the rest of the public.
@ Marg:
While I am currently occupied but will return postehaste-
Orac’s ‘friend’, the Doctor discusses that @ SBM and yours truely riffs off an alt meddler’s reaction to Dr Ben @ the “Forced” thread here.
So Marg finally returns and posts yet another comment that is designed to distract us from the fact that she has no rebuttals and no decent data.
And so, the world continues turning….
Oh, Marg. You shoulda stuck the flounce. Don’t you ever get tired of humiliating yourself?
The fact that these firms have managed to circumvent the safeguards we have against deceptive results by simply doing multiple studies and selectively presenting only those which favored their products is not good. No one pretends it’s good.
But you, you are still trying to argue that energy healing is better. Better, despite the fact that it doesn’t even pass the elementary criterion for success, that the experimental groups outdo the controls.
Do you have any idea how ridiculous you sound? You’re like the fat, wheezing couch potato who gets out of breath simply bending down to tie his running shoes, mocking the marathon runner who ran the whole twenty-six miles but didn’t make a time good enough to get a medal.
Any simpleton can jeer. The question is not “can you jeer, and sneer, and be nasty?” but “do you have something to offer that’s better?” And because the criterion for “better” is “less susceptible to error” rather than “gives a gullible woman a sense of superiority,” the answer is no, you don’t have anything better to offer.
Todd W: Well played, sir! I would’ve guessed the Scientologists, but they’re just not that cool. I’m personally rather baffled by the dub phenomenon, but each to their own.
I enjoyed reading a question for Dr Goldacre ( @ the Observer):
hot coffee asks-
Is clinical depression an illness invented ( with the aid of marketting) by the drugs (sic) companies? If not, when did science discover that “clinical depression” is caused by a “chemical imbalance” in the brain?….
(he continues in this vein for a while…. I won’t)
I HAVE heard this before: like the woo-meister I describe on another thread, this fellow ( I assume) takes what BG says and inflates it to mean that SBM is fiction and drug companies ‘invent’ illnesses to market drugs to trusting patients. There is NO chemical imbalance. Anti-psychiatrists and woo-meisters like to tell their audiences that depression ( or SMI) is not caused by chemicals ( neurotransmitters actually) but rather it is a consequence of everyday life, a nutritional deficiency or a spiritual dilemma. Of course, you don’t need PILLS for that! You need to straighten up and fly right! Eat correctly, be more spiritual!
I would say that this is like a trip back into the 19th century except that even then they believed that mental illess was a condition that was treated by medicine and doctors.
Alt med objections to SBM often betray black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking, e.g. the Nirvana fallacy – drugs/ vaccines are not perfect, have side effects and don’t work 100% of the time THEREFORE
they’re worthless crap.
Note that this scoffer denies that there is research about ‘chemicals’ being associated with depression; it is necessary for woo-sympathesisers to believe this because they don’t believe in drugs and drugs are a chemical means of changing the situation that sufferers experience.
Notice that I say SUFFERERS.. because that is the issue at hand. People suffer and often aren’t able to live how they would like because of mental ( and other) conditions: pharmaceuticals are developed in response to consumer demand as well as corporate game plans.
Marg– how about some eye-opening stuff on energy healing…surely three days of frantic Googling must have gotten you something?
Nothing? Well, then.
@Denice
I bet most people who come up with this crap have never heard of a mentally ill person who is below the age of puberty. Ie. that it’s a social construct that is developed along the way, rather than something that can exist at any time for any person.
It’s also partially to do with a misconception that what you (ie. normal person) feels is the extent of what someone else feels. It’s projection of what one person can cope with onto another.
Chemicals exist *outside* the body, don’t you get it? And the only way they can enter the body is if you ingest them… so it makes perfect sense if you forget that actually your own body is made up of chemicals.
Note that this scoffer denies that there is research about ‘chemicals’ being associated with depression;
If I understand the research correctly, the research linking neurotransmitters with depression is all of the form “These drugs were discovered through serendipity to treat depression in many people, and they as if they should affect the levels of a couple of the known neurotransmitters”. There are logical flaws in the reasoning. No-one argues that ECT treats depression successfully in some people, therefore depression must be caused by a shortage of electricity. Then there are the drugs that were carefully *designed* to adjust neurotransmitters in controlled ways, which turned out not to work, obliging the pharma companies to lie about them.
SO I will stay with the position that no-one knows how antidepressants work, and this did not stopping me from taking them. Because they worked.
Dr. Goldacre tirelessly campaigns to improve the accountability of drug companies, for example by having to report they are doing a trial before it starts, so it can’t be hidden later if the results aren’t what they hoped for. He frequently writes about the problems in clinical research. I think this is a very good thing. However, Marg seems to think that since people sometimes abuse the system we should abandon our “precious gold-plated, double-blind studied, evidence-based medicine” in favor of magic, unicorns and pixie-dust. “Evidence? We don’t need no stinking evidence”.
Similarly, in the criminal justice system, since people sometimes lie under oath, perhaps we should replace trial by jury by deciding people’s guilt on their appearance, or what they like to eat for breakfast.
““Shada” is now being novelized (Adams had refused to allow any of his scripts to be novelized in his lifetime, but is no longer around to object), and an effort is being made to try to duplicate his style. I wonder how much will be borrowed back from “Dirk Gently”? ”
“Shada” – the novel – came out a few months ago. It was pretty good (and included some oblique references to current “Doctor Who” events).
@ herr doktor bimler:
Among those I survey there is NO admission that meds do ANYTHING for any mental condition- they just make kids commit suicide or shoot up school buildings.They have a magical belief that proper nutrition, exercise and meditation are what helps. As if what occurs in the brain is unrelated to how a person behaves or feels. But they do talk about niacin and herbs like valerian and St John’s Wort. So go figure.
Although we don’t know how anti-depressants work, it must have something to do with physical and chemico-electrical properties in the brain or else there would be no need to take the physical pills and we could just wave a wand or something. Which would save money on research.
@ flip:
While I’m not technically ‘depressed,’ I occasionally have gone through brief periods when I have felt awfully bad but never without feeling anxiety/ the effects of stress. I have taken meds to help wth the latter aspect- which also alleviated the former as well. Interestingly enough, a gentleman I know- who has more standard and moderate depression- isn’t exactly thrilled with SSRIs and loves him those benzodiazepines. Something tells me serotonin is somehow involved here.
Of course, children DO experience psychological conditions which can be treated with pharmaceuticals: woo-meisters are most up in arms about doctors prescribing meds for them.. remember these are the same folks who hate vaccines, ARVs and any SB innovation .Meds for LDs might really make a difference in certain children’s experience of primary and secondary education, giivng them more choices for their lives.
@DW – re the woo-meisters prejudices about mental illness: I believed depression was a normal consequence of everyday life too, until I found myself mired in one that didn’t resolve on its own like previous mild episodes had. I am certainly not qualified to diagnose anyone including myself, but I suspect there was a “cascade effect’ of multiple stressors that I probably could have dealt with if they’d happened one at a time instead of all together, And I love how the one-size-fits-all woo “prescriptions” don’t acknowledge the fact that most depressed people can barely summon the energy to get out of bed, much less embark on ambitious diet and exercise programs. I imagine that would be a challenge for those with other types of mental illness as well. .
I was in therapy at the time I started taking the pills – my family doctor took the time to explain the way they worked and that she’d had good results with other patients, so I decided to trust her. Luckily, I responded very quickly to the pills – I know that’s not a typical reaction. I also think the effect was genuine (as opposed to placebo) because it wasn’t just me that noticed a difference. Other people who didn’t know I’d started medication noticed a change in my moods and demeanor as well.
There is some very interesting research going on into depression and how it affects the brain- this study was in the news recently: http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v18/n9/full/nm.2886.html. There’s also a good summary here of Professor Duman’s previous research on depression: http://www.yalescientific.org/2011/02/uncovering-the-biology-of-depression/
Not that any of this would make a difference in woo-world since they prefer to make their own reality, but I for one am grateful that people in the real world are studying what depression does to the brain and ways to treat it, even if it eventually leads to more profits for
Lord DraconisBig Pharma (!!! )@All
I repeat: evidence based medicine, my gold-plated tushie. To wit:
Because researchers are free to bury any result they please, patients are exposed to harm on a staggering scale throughout the whole of medicine. Doctors can have no idea about the true effects of the treatments they give. Does this drug really work best, or have I simply been deprived of half the data? No one can tell. Is this expensive drug worth the money, or has the data simply been massaged? No one can tell. Will this drug kill patients? Is there any evidence that it’s dangerous? No one can tell. This is a bizarre situation to arise in medicine, a discipline in which everything is supposed to be based on evidence.
Do you know where the lies, prevarications, omissions, and distortions are buried? Do you know which studies are valid and which are not? I doubt it. Your faith in science is simply that: faith. And paradoxically doctors like Goldacre are now reduced to observing from their own experience which drugs work and which don’t, and which are harmless and which cause harm, because they simply can’t trust the drug companies.
I sent the link to the Goldacre article to a friend of mine, formerly employed by Big Pharma, and her response was simply “right on!”
@DW
EFT does well with depression. Also PTSD. BTW I have wondered for a long time which arises first, the depression or the brain chemical profile. Or do they arise simultaneously?
@Edith Prickly
You are relying on personal, empirical evidence, which I have been told time and again on this discussion board is absolutely unreliable. One mustn’t rely on one’s own impressions, oh no, because, as you know, people believed for centuries that the sun revolved around the earth based on the evidence of their own eyes, and they were wrong. Your friends’ and relatives’ impressions don’t count either. Only studies published by “scientists” do.
@Marg
You might want to get in touch with Ben Goldacre and ask him if you are understanding his findings correctly – to whit, that doctors are “reduced to observing from their own experience which drugs work and which don’t, and which are harmless and which cause harm, because they simply can’t trust the drug companies.”
You might find that you are mistaken in your conclusions.
What exactly do you mean by “does well”, as you’re using it here–are you suggesting it can effect a cure or result in significant, measurable improvement? If so I have to ask you identify the evidence from which you’ve derived this conclusion.
@JGC
http://www.eftuniverse.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=18&Itemid=#depression
@Todd W.
Goldacre: “this problem of negative results going missing in action is … so prevalent that it cuts to the core of evidence-based medicine”
http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_know_about_the_drugs_they_prescribe.html (at 5:32)
Oh, great, Roger Callahan.
@ Todd W.
Goldacre: “Half of all trials go missing in action … This is a cancer at the core of evidence based medicine.”
@Narad
What’s the opposite of argument from authority? That’s what you are doing here.
No, Marg, I’m not, as that’s Callahan presenting himself. EFT is simply a product of Callahan student Gary Craig, and now Callahan gets to make a buck circularly “upgrading” the marks (and offering an affiliate program).
Let’s cut to the chase: Is there any “form of energy healing” that you have critically evaluated and rejected, or does it all trigger the same miserable self-interest response in you?
Sorry Marg, not taking the bait. You wore out your entertainment value quite a while ago. Anyway, isn’t it bad for your aura to keep hanging around here soaking up all our nasty negative vibes?
Once again, Marg, do you have anything to offer that’s less susceptible to error? No, you do not. On the contrary, you actually want to replace SBM with methods that are more susceptible to error, purely to serve your selfish interest in profiting emotionally and financially from erroneous notions about “energy healing.”
Marg’s back with the same drivel and I’m bored.
Don’t you have more gullible people to wave your hands at and ‘accept donations’ from?
@ Marg:
Although I am currently working on a RL project, I can chime in intermittently- without going into great detail- I’m sure that others will fill in what I leave out:
First of all, WHO says EFT is effective? Mercola? It involves tap, tap, tapping on accupuncture points whilst ‘dealing’ with emotional issues; thus it is based on accupuncture – and other whimsy-based therapies like energy medicine and NLP- all of which have unlikely mechanisms of action. The Skeptical Inquirer has a piece on it. Orac may have mentioned it but he does have articles here de-constructing- in great detail- both accupuncture and energy medicine upon which EFT relies to explain itself. The search fx here is free of charge or so I’ve been told.
Though we don’t know precisely HOW meds work it doesn’t mean that they DON’T work and because they don’t work perfectly for ALL people who suffer these conditions without side effects DOESN’T mean that they’re worthless.The mechanisms of action proposed to explain their effects are based in physiology- electrical-chemical, physical reality- not esoteric theories of universal life energies and suchlike.
If you notice, Dr Goldacre doesn’t say that we should not use meds but that there is misleading information about their comparative efficacy. He wants the BEST meds for his patients: if he didn’t believe in ANY meds, I venture that he would say so.
@Narad
I say the opposite of invoking authority because you try to discredit the studies, without even actually looking them, apparently, by bringing up the name of someone whom you deem to be disreputable, for no given reason.
@DW
I love your statement though we don’t know precisely HOW meds work it doesn’t mean that they DON’T work and because they don’t work perfectly for ALL people who suffer these conditions without side effects DOESN’T mean that they’re worthless. Especially the part where you say “we don’t know precisely HOW meds work”. But that’s okay, is it? We also don’t know precisely how energy medicine works, but that’s not okay. Do you people realize that you are worshipping at a shrine?
Marg,
This is all a very transparent big tu quoque straw man exercise. The dodgy science Ben Goldacre is complaining about isn’t the science that has established that the prior plausibility of energy healing is practically zero. Large amounts (probably most – too lazy to check) scientific research is not done by drug companies. I think the solution is better regulation, something which I have been supporting for years, having regularly followed Ben Goldacre’s blog and newspaper articles. He’s also a very entertaining speaker.
Things are getting better, slowly. Double-blind placebo-controlled studies are still the best way we have of getting to the truth, as far as I can see. Ben Goldacre is a great supporter of them, and has even suggested using a version of them to decide government policy for things like education. Just because someone abuses an extremely useful tool doesn’t mean we should stop using it.
@ Marg:
The mechanisms SBM proposes are processes involving neurons, synapses and neurotransmitters, i.e. physical realities we can study and measure.
Look up what ‘SSRI’ signifies- it describes a process wherein a specific substance is inhibited from being taken away from a specific locus on a neuron.
Not the same as ‘balancing energy’.
FTFY.
You have not advanced any studies in favor of your newest addition to your energy-healing soup, Marg. Allow me to repeat the question: Is there any “form of energy healing” that you have critically evaluated and rejected?
@marg
Let’s put it this way. If you don’t answer Narad’s question within 3 replies, you tacitly admit that you have never critically evaluated energy healing at all.
Just so you can stop Gish galloping all over the place.
I await the entertainment from marg’s answers. Better get the popcorn ready.
@DW
Those may be the mechanisms SBM proposes, but the operative word here is proposes. Perhaps people should take a look at the work of Fritz Albert Popp.
@Narad @Novalox
I don’t claim sufficient knowledge of every single form of energy medicine out to make that distinction. In the ones I do know there appear to be similarities that seem to suggest a common provenance, with variations. The biggest problem with all of them is the variability of talent and experience from practitioner to practitioner. And that would be a problem even if energy medicine were proven in principle through a dozen double-blind studies. So I would be less likely to evaluate methods than individual practitioners.
@All
I don’t reject science. I am merely pointing out that medical science, claiming to be evidence based, is an idol sporting huge clay feet, covered in muck.It may have once been gold, but it is no longer. I certainly hope Goldacre and others like him succeed in cleaning it up.
@Narad
Do you actually look at links that are given, or do you just immediately go to your keyboard and spout?
@marg
Strike 1, and strike 2.
Answer the question, marg.
I feel no particular compulsion to don full-body waders in order to plod further and further into the wide, wide river. Now, if you could be so kind as to get down to the point.
@DW
Actually, just about everyone who is selling it or teaching it. Those who have looked at it scientifically not so much. I have found one paper on it by someone from The Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience showing it had no effect beyond placebo.
What Goldacre describes is not a phenomenon peculiar to medical science but applicable to all scientists. I am not surprised by Goldacre’s findings because science is done by people.
Are we to assume those who promote positive $CAMedicine studies are immune from this?
Reiki, HT, TT, acupuncture & EFT all manipulate the same energy, the “common provenance”?
All shown to have no clothes by a 4th grade science project you have rejected out of hand.
You’re a poor liar, Marg. Here’s you in this very same thread back on the 5th:
You’re not “merely” trying to point out an imperfection in the practice of medical science, Marg, you’re trying to discredit anything which doesn’t let you believe your fantasies that your “energy healing” is anything but a waste of time. People who are interested in the truth examine the evidence and see where it leads them. You don’t do that; you start with the conclusion you crave and you shamelessly adopt or dismiss premises at the speed of sound, based on whether they seem to support your desired conclusion.
When you think “energy healing” can be sold to the rubes as “science” you’re completely willing to dress it up and pretend it’s science. When you see that won’t fly, you start claiming that science itself, not only in practice but in principle, needs to be revised, changed around until once again it props up your delusions.
I’ll be frank, Marg. When you natter on about how energy healing is surely the paradigm of the future and surely Bengston’s quantum-entangled mice prove it, I find you a pathetic yet somewhat amusing fool. But when you resort to tearing down others’ real achievements in order to make your non-achievements in “energy healing” look meaningful, I find you disgusting and contemptible, like the lowest purse snatcher on the street. You covet what others have, and you try to steal it from them, rather than putting in even a hundredth of the work they have to earn it.
Marg, you appear to have conflated clinical trials that demonstrate whether or not a drug is clinically useful that can, regrettably, be manipulated by unscrupulous drug companies, with medical research into human physiology, genetics, immunology, neurology, biochemistry and numerous other fields that is not paid for by drug companies, and even when it is, is carefully checked and replicated by scientists all over the world.
We don’t believe that SSRIs inhibit reuptake of serotonin and help depression just because a drug company tells us so, though it was a scientist working for Eli Lily who discovered them. We believe it because large amounts of research, has confirmed that they do – there are thousands of research papers on SSRIs on PubMed, and the evidence that SSRIs benefit many people with moderate to severe depression is very convincing.
I spent several years working with a large number of medical scientists most of whom who were carrying out research for the Medical Research Council in Cambridge UK. MRC funding comes from central government, not drug companies and they have produced 29 Nobel Prize winners. Please don’t slander decent, honest and brilliant scientists by confusing them with disreputable companies manipulating science for profit.
Your arguments here are as silly as promoting a magic carpet and denigrating the internal combustion engine because a car manufacturer faked some of its road tests.
Marg:
Among other things developed by scientific methodology, one was Ohm’s law, which was used to prove that long-distance telegraphy was possible. To question the scientific method is to question the existence of your own computer.
Marg, I’m afraid I didn’t find evidence that EFT effectively treats depression etc. at the website you provided–I’ve found claims that it does, but once again no adequately controlled studies suggesting the self reported improvement in pain and symptoms are due to anything other than placebo effect. Nothing, for example, comparing groups of patients tapping the ‘right’ energy meridian points versus a control group tapping the ‘wrong’ points. No attempt at blinding the cohorts so that neither the subjects nor those evaluating them are aware if they’re getting ‘genuine’ or sham EFT.
Why, if energy healing is so darn effective, are there no successful, well-controlled studies demonstrating this in diseases that are not self-limiting, that generate objective indications of effectiveness?
I asked earlier, but perhaps this time you’ll answer the question: can energy healing effectively treat inflamation? Can it effectively treat asthma or COPD?
Recently amongst the woo-meisters I survey there is a claim that science itself has been corrupted by special interests and that rather than cleaning up malfeasance or increasing regulation, we need to throw out both the baby and the bathwater and start afresh.
The new paradigm should include more “spiritual” aspects and not be based purely in reductionalist materialism. Obviously that’s the real problem: the scientific method leaves out spirit and soul. Probably that’s why it keeps getting so corrupted: it looks outwards to the things of this world rather than inner, immaterial treasures.
My question is: Who is going to do this? People who sell supplements on the internet? You can hang a label on yourself proclaiming that you are pure as the driven snow bu it means absolutely nothing. As far as I can discern, these cries for revolution and reformation are usually part of a sales pitch to get customers to admire the carnival barker alt med salesman so that they’ll buy more to reward his high ideals and greatness of spirit.
@Marg
Strawman. We don’t particularly care about the mechanisms of energy healing, other than that they are at least plausible. First, just like with a lot of drugs, you need to show that it actually works, i.e., that there is actually something there to be studied. If there is no plausible way that it could work, then you need some pretty damn convincing evidence that it does work. You haven’t provided that.
Let’s put it another way (h/t to Harriet Hall):
We don’t know precisely HOW the tooth fairy enters a room, takes a tooth from under the pillow and leaves money behind, but it clearly happens. I mean. The child goes to sleep, placing the tooth under the pillow, then in the morning, it has been replaced with a quarter!
In that scenario, before we start studying how the tooth fairy accomplishes these feats, we need to establish that there actually is a tooth fairy in the first place.
And to continue in the mode Dr Hall has so creatively and graciously provided for us:
we might discover that there is NO tooth fairy at all but that the tooth-money transaction was implemented by a PERSON- usually the child’s parent.
Similarly, we may discover that the supposed actions of energy medicine, EFT and accupuncture are also explicable by much more MUNDANE actors rather than esoteric manipulations of intra- and trans-personal energy systems ( i.e. by what we already have studied/ know in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology et al)
as a matter of fact, I’ll venture that we already HAVE discovered that ( see search box above).
@Todd w
According to Ben Goldacre Pharma hides half of all clinical studies, to hide the truth if drugs don’t work. In many cases results cannot be replicated, but scientists insist that this not be revealed. This is bullshit. Clean up your act before you cast stones at altmeds. We think you are thoroughly corrupt. We think that if you corrupt your own studies to show effectiveness where there is none, you will sure as hell corrupt altmeds studies to show that they don’t work. For every dollar altmeds practitoners make, Big Pharma makes millions. For every patient who comes to grief through altmeds Big Pharma kills tens of thousands. And it was not Mercola who was fined billions for fraudulent practices but GlaxoSmithKline et al. You are all believers and worshippers in the great new church of Modern Science and so-called Science Based Medicine.
@marg
Strike 3, yer out.
So now we can all assume that there is no form of energy healing that you have critically evaluated and rejected.
Marg, isn’t that just another reason you should try to meet decent standards?
@Marg
So, because pharma companies are less than ethical (no argument from me there), magic works?
Once again, I recommend that you get in touch with Ben Goldacre to see if you are correctly understanding what he’s writing.
Also, way to dodge my post about tooth fairy science. Brava.
You might want to tend to that plank in your eye.
Potential conflicts of interest and other biases are why we have independent replication. Universities and government organizations do research as well as pharmaceutical companies. There are also other countries out there with their own governments. All of these groups have different interests, sometimes in direct conflict of one another. If one group goes bad, the others can act as a check against them. The sheer number of players involved on the international stage makes it absurdly unlikely that one faction could dominate the field. This adversarial system paradoxically leads to a unified consensus precisely because adversaries are highly motivated to tear down bad ideas with logic and evidence. Ideas that remain standing despite the intellectual assaults are the ones most likely to be true.
If and when the scientific process is corrupted, there are established ways to discover and expose error. Science as a culture operates on the core assumption that errors can and will occur. A responsible scientist suspects his own results and seeks verification. Fraud can be exposed by these methods because it is essentially intentional error. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best we’ve devised so far.
The altie way is blind trust. Alties as a culture prefer to shout down people who dare question a positive result. Alties prefer not to even entertain the notion that one of their own can be mistaken. Requests for elaboration on an error-checking procedure are often ignored, evaded, or denounced as “negative.” Alties eschew adversarial checks and balances in favor of an unconditionally supportive environment. This support easily leads to false ideas being coddled instead of challenged. Alties defend their own, not caring about right or wrong, but on group identity.
Marg, the lesson I get from your article is that standards and ethics are needed in medical studies, and that all people, great and small, must be held to them. If the heads of major pharmaceutical companies must be held accountable for their crimes, why should we give you a free pass?
@Bronze Dog
Not only that, but every problem that has been found with drugs has been discovered, not by altie practitioners, but by other members of what Marg describes as a corrupt, crumbling edifice.
FYI – this isn’t evidence for energy healing either
To remix the message, we have a choice:
Choice #1: Peer review, a system of science that has multiple checks and balances designed to prevent any one group from controlling the consensus. Everyone answers to everyone else, and anyone who does the appropriate hard work can potentially overturn an incorrect consensus.
Choice #2: Mob rule anarchy, where the mob supports the mob unconditionally and answers to no one. There are no hard and fast rules, just the whims of popular fashion.
Marg is so fixated on throwing stones at the imperfections of peer review that she doesn’t realize she lives in the mob’s inherently unstable glass house. Yes, the peer review process needs improvement and has known problems. But the system has a lot of merits that make it worthwhile despite those problems. Marg’s competing system has absolutely no merits that I can see.
Analogy irony: Peer review generally strives for greater transparency and accountability in how it operates. The mob’s glass house, however, strives for greater opacity.
So where then are all the altmed community’s rigorous, well designed, appropriately controlled, uncorrupted studies demonstrating energy healing works?
After all, there’s no necessity (even if one were corrupt) to skew a study to falsely demonstrate something doesn’t work, when there’s no real evidence that it does.
Part of Marg’s problem is that she seems to understand the concept of rules, and how they can be applied, but does not seem fully aware that rules also apply to her. She shouts out “Don’t just accept what people say at face value!” and then looks horrified when we don’t accept what she says at face value.
Marg has now conceded two points:
1. Energy medicine as she conceives of it is not falsifiable, i.e., the only evidence that counts is that which favors her position.
2. Despite her broad expertise in the field, no imposters have been found, i.e., the only actual requirement is to call something energy medicine and, by default, there’s no way to show that it doesn’t work.
as I think I mentioned waaay upstream, an acupuncturist told his patient, suffering chronic back pain, the physiology involved in his condition is the liver processes gamma rays in the skull – so he was punctured in the head
I spoke with a co-worker who also saw an acupuncturist for the same malady – he was needled in the lower back and hip
@al kimmea
That’s because each individual is their own special little snowflake.
You should all be reading Rupert Sheldrake’s new book, Science Set Free, in which he turns the dogmas of science into questions. http://www.dailygrail.com/Fresh-Science/2012/8/Biologist-Rupert-Sheldrake-Explains-the-Ten-Dogmas-Holding-Science-Back
Here are the 10 dogmas:
1 That nature is mechanical, machine-like.
2 That matter is unconscious.
3 The laws of nature are fixed.
4 The total amount of matter and energy is always the same.
5 That nature is purposeless.
6 Biological inheritance is material.
7 That memories are stored as material traces.
8 The mind is in the brain.
9 Telepathy and other psychic phenomena are illusory.
10 Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.
Marg, without evidence, your claims are meaningless. It’s as simple as that. If you’re willing to demand we hold other people to high standards, why should we not expect the same from you?
Marg, we’ve been through this crap already. With the exception of No. 4, which I think is actually the payload despite its position, this is nothing but whining about monist materialism. Monist materialism is not necessary for the scientific enterprise. You can’t reiki-wash the goddamned dishes. It’s just straight-up occultist compensative personal-power fantasy.
Yes, Marg your claim that scientists insist that “this not be revealed” is indeed bullshite. It is scientists who are blowing the whistle on this. I find it hilarious that you keep quoting Ben Goldacre – we are very familiar with Ben Goldacre, in fact he is held in regard by us. He is most definitely not on your side.
Marg you are like someone who has discovered that the internal combustion engine in their car only delivers about a third of energy from the combustion of fuel to the drive train and then proposes to replace it with a wood stove which will deliver none of the energy from combustion to the the drive train.
I forgot to mention in my comment regarding EFT that EFT founder Gary Craig believes Uri Geller was actually bending spoons with his mind. What a gullible idiot.
@marg
Answer Gray Falcon’s question within 3 replies or you tacitly admit that you do not believe that you hold yourself and your “energy healing” to the same standards as scientific review and peer review.
Sheldrake again? I have waded my way through quite enough of his wild speculations and poor science over the years, thanks Marg. In my opinion he’s a religious fanatic who had some sort of vision of ‘the true nature of the universe’ while meditating and/or under the influence of psychedelic drugs, and has wasted the rest of his life trying to prove that this vision is real in an objective sense. That’s the antithesis of the scientific method. He’s a classic example of getting the inner and the outer hopelessly mixed up.
I still like Shermer on Sheldrake, by the way.
Sheldrake appears to be the reincarnation of Charles Hoy Fort – the father of the paranormal
Marg – Sheldrake, Fort – this is all a variation on the ‘god of the gaps’ with the gaps filled not by deities, but by their own BS
1. it is a metaphor, but a very apt one
2. so the fecal matter left behind by my wee pup knows it has been dumped?
3. I would hope so, or this universe would be even more random and chaotic than it is, perhaps to the point where complexity is untenable – according to Kaku
4. this has been shown repeatedly
5. what was the purpose of 200 million years of dinosaurs or billions of years of microbial life?
6. so my P&M didn’t make the beast and their DNA material didn’t combine and squirt me out 9 months later?
7 & 8. What and where are they then?
9. yeah OK, dogs too – I have a dog, very clever, but doesn’t get and apply the peanut butter simply because I think it
10. anything shown to work – like anesthetics which we’re not sure how, but very obviously do work – is medicine
none of this is evidence that what you sell isn’t snake oil any more than quoting Hamlet bolsters Sheldrake’s ‘science’ – which by the way the lawyer also trotted out as evidence for psychics and Fort’s ‘science’
How cute. Marg thinks she’s got non-mechanistic medicine. If energy healing worked, that would mean there’s a mechanism for it to work through.
It doesn’t even matter if it’s boring old matter and energy or chi and reishi spiritual particles. You can’t escape science by positing exotic entities and treating them as if they were magically immune to inquiry. Science isn’t some Star Trek tricorder that doesn’t pick up magic, it’s a method of asking good questions and finding clever ways (experiments) to answer those questions.
Interestingly, the criticisms appear to emanate from someone ‘on the outside looking in’ or else firmly esconced in the era of Wilhelm Wundt.
By their language choices, ye shall know them- and this reeks of an era – perhaps late 1960’s- mid 1970s- when it was fashionable to reject whatever was generally ‘accepted’ by ‘authorities’ and replace it with floatier notions of reality, infused with a healthy dose of rebel universal deism.
I have often listened to a pretender speak about psychology and methods of counselling people: he talks about “conditioned responses” and “self-actualisation”: your words betray your level of understanding of a topic- like it or not- as well as the era from which your perseverations spring.
It seems whenever I encounter new age-ish, altie psychology (and we have Jung to ‘thank’ for much of this), it portrays the state of the art that it rails against as either as watered-down psychoanalysis or tarted-up Watsonian or Skinnerian stimulus-response-ism. No one has throught this way for 40 years. It has very little to do with my own concerns.
I like that Sheldrake’s criticism characterises medicine as being “materialistic” and “mechanical”- as if it were a set of tinker toys- it may *look* that way to him because he doesn’t know enough about what scientists study in any detail. For example, Orac has shown a chart that illustrates why cancer is so hard to treat: it pictorially represents the pathways of wrong-ness that must occur in order for the process of malignancy to begin and why it is so terribly difficult to stop. It is a symphony rather than a few single notes glued together *en pastiche*.
This sounds like a variant of the common altie illness that despises experts and wishes to supplant them: probably involves jealousy and inability to acurately assess their own personal incapacity to judge what is going on in a field. It has more to do with grandiose visions of the author than any grand vision of science or of the universe.
The statement about memory is just precious.
On the topic of the universe being mechanical, isn’t that essentially how every human views it?
Input (Cause) -> Processing mechanisms (natural forces) and varying conditions/circumstances in the system -> Output (Effect)
Oh, wait, that’s right, we aren’t talking in useful metaphors, we’re talking in emotional language. Marg doesn’t like the fact that human beings have peeked inside a lot of the black boxes of nature and demystified them. I never understand how some people recoil in horror the moment you tell them that rainbows are caused by light refraction of water droplets, like somehow knowing that makes it less beautiful. They must live in a truly dreary world.
Kind of reminds me of a game concept I was working on years ago. The main character was essentially an IT guy for one of his world’s magically-powered transit systems. “This isn’t something mystical or mysterious, this is magic! It’s a well-understood force operating on known physical laws! If something goes wrong, there’s a traceable cause for it!”
I wonder if Marg just stumbled onto Goldacre’s piece, or if she was already familiar with his work…
@DW
Re: meds for kids… I’m not sure how I feel about them, but then I haven’t really looked at the literature on it. Naturally one can’t equate vaccines with SSRIs, etc.
@Edith
I am similar in that adding numerous stressors all at once has taken a big toll.
Totally agree. Plus, it assumes that one has access to good food as well.
@Shorter version of Marg =
Here’s some unrelated stuff that shows that science is really all religion and materialism; therefore energy healing works. Cause, that’s why.
Please, don’t look behind the curtain… I don’t want people to notice there’s nothing there. I don’t have rebuttals or evidence or answers to questions. I just have my special snowflake gut feeling.
<i.Here are the 10 dogmas:
Hey, those dogmata aren’t ‘science’, they’re Theravada Buddhism.
Sheldrake appears to be the reincarnation of Charles Hoy Fort – the father of the paranormal
Not a fair comparison. Fort had a better sense of humour, while his work has inspired far more science-fiction novels than Sheldrake’s.
Herr doktor bimler, mein freund
I tend to agree with this:
It is as BronzeDog said, knowing something takes the fun and beauty out of it for most people (Is this down to the apple & snake?) it would seem, including Fort and Rupert. To this they add ‘we don’t know everything, therefore we don’t know anything’ as justification for wu.
I would venture that Sheldrake likely is far better educated in science and the history of science than most of you. I would challenge you to hold on to all your beliefs after you have read the book. He makes a most persuasive case.
Having met more than my fair share of Forteans, I would tend to agree with Gardner’s assessment. Fort did seem to enjoy baiting scientists just for the fun of it, which isn’t really very helpful, though at times it is quite funny.
@Herr Doktor Bimmler
Don’t let @Narad hear you say that…
Why? It doesn’t get filed under Hinayana for nothing.
If so, he has squandered that education in pursuit of blinkered religious dogma. His is a hypothesis in search of evidence, and that’s not how science works. There’s a good critique of Sheldrake here which Sheldrake, to his credit, hosts on his website.
Marg, with regards to dogmas 7&8, why is it then that those suffering physical damage to the gloop in our noggins also suffer mind/memory damage? This correlation is inarguable, but you say Sheldrake has a persuasive case otherwise, care to share?
You’re confusing “mind” and “Mind,” silly.
@Krebiozen
If so, he has squandered that education in pursuit of blinkered religious dogma.
Funny you should say that, because that’s exactly what he says about scientists who subscribe to the materialist dogma.
What our friend Marg ( Rupert also) is addressing is real and exists HOWEVER it is not verifiable within the physical plane of reality with which science is concerned.
That’s why they both get so huffy about ‘materialism’ in science and our own peculiar bent in that particular direction. So, if they aren’t overly enamoured of the material world it’s because they are interested in something else: the immaterial spirit or soul which they sometimes call Mind.
SB psychology does indeed study the mind, brain and ideas – thoughts, memories, attitudes, beliefs- that come from it but does not divorce them from the base material from which they emerge or consider it likely that they exist without it.
If you want to do that you have to call yourself something other than science or you will appear to be a hybrid like ‘Christian Science’ or “Scientology’ which also aren’t based in physical reality or science themselves. Similarly, fiction doesn’t rely upon physical existence nor does art, especially design, you can create new worlds or plans for cities that have nothing in common with the reality we all trudge around in daily. You don’t even need to draw anything or write it down, you can just talk about it or think about it.
HOWEVER, you tend to need a brain fuelled by a body to do that. Although religionists might think otherwise.
@DW
I think Sheldrake’s point is that if you put together said body and brain from its raw materials and fuelled it, it still wouldn’t be able to think.
I’m curious:
How can one say that energy healing has something to do with electromagnetic fields, but also hold to the idea that science is nothing but materialism? Especially when one holds up scientific experiments by Bengstrom as backing for one’s arguments?
Someone’s cognitive dissonance is showing.
@Marg
Ah, the irreducible complexity gambit. How creationist of you.
@Flip
It’s true. Show me where scientists have been able to create a complex life form from its constituent parts. Or, heck, even something as “simple” as a carrot. Should be a piece of cake, eh, given everything we know?
And it’s not necessarily a creationist point of view. In fact Sheldrake points out that the people who created materialist science, such as Newton and Descartes, all believed in a creator who set the “clockwork universe” in motion. Materialism requires an outside agency. What Sheldrake advocates is not creationism but organic self-development.
I don’t think any of you have thought through your position in any kind of systematic philosophical way, whereas he has.
@All
Just curious, how do you think the universe came into being?
Your preferred occultist alternative, oddly enough, doesn’t appear to be faring too well on this front either.
I think you’re wrong, and that you would benefit from studying a bit of the history of philosophy yourself. I spent three years studying social anthropology which involved very little but thinking about these kinds of philosophical issues. I don’t think Sheldrake’s position comes from any sort of thought at all. He is trying to rationalize a mystical, religious vision.
Perhaps you could cut to the chase and let everyone know where you were before you were born.
Oh, and I’d also like to know where the True Meanings of songs reside. Please also address the phenomenon of “thinking” that a song is “better” when one actually has the lyrics wrong. Are there Mind versions of Gödel numbers?
Stephen Hawking has some interesting ideas on the subject, probably not too far removed from the views of most commenters here.
Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait…
The Earth began to cool,
The autotrophs began to drool,
Neanderthals developed tools,
We built a wall (we built the pyramids),
Math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries,
That all started with the big bang!
“Since the dawn of man” is really not that long,
As every galaxy was formed in less time than it takes to sing this song.
A fraction of a second and the elements were made.
The bipeds stood up straight,
The dinosaurs all met their fate,
They tried to leap but they were late
And they all died (they froze their asses off)
The oceans and Pangea
See ya wouldn’t wanna be ya
Set in motion by the same big bang!
It all started with the big BANG!
It’s expanding ever outward but one day
It will pause and start to go the other way,
Collapsing ever inward, we won’t be here, it won’t be heard
Our best and brightest figure that it’ll make an even bigger bang!
Australopithecus would really have been sick of us
Debating how we’re here, they’re catching deer (we’re catching viruses)
Religion or astronomy (Descartes or Deuteronomy)
It all started with the big bang!
Music and mythology, Einstein and astrology
It all started with the big bang!
It all started with the big BANG!
Believe it or not, when I was but an apprenticed, teenaged materialist, I was forced to study modern philosophers in order to get degree credits ( I wasn’t forced actuallly). Later on, I had more with Pre-scientific Psychology. Also studied related topics like Frazer and Campbell…cross-cultural studies.
On the beginnings of the universe, I think I would hold more with Mr Hawking and his colleagues than I would with Bronze Age speculations.
Marg,
Just curious, who do you think created the creator? Or is it turtles all the way down?
Marg, you still haven’t answered my question: “If you’re willing to demand we hold other people to high standards, why should we not expect the same from you?” Since you refuse to answer it, I’ll assume you don’t hold “energy healing” to any standards.
@Marg
Doesn’t matter what I think – it matters what can be proven. Once again, you continue to insist that if science doesn’t know X, that means Y is true. Honey, first you must prove Y is true.
Er, yes it is.
I agree with Narad, re: Perhaps you could cut to the chase and let everyone know where you were before you were born.
(By the way, Descartes never had neuroscience. Perhaps if he had, he wouldn’t have gone on about mind/body stuff. The point you keep missing is that you’re stuck in old ideas, whereas science has moved on)
I repeat:
@Shorter version of Marg =
Here’s some unrelated stuff that shows that science is really all religion and materialism; therefore energy healing works. Cause, that’s why.
Please, don’t look behind the curtain… I don’t want people to notice there’s nothing there. I don’t have rebuttals or evidence or answers to questions. I just have my special snowflake gut feeling. And I won’t bother to actually state what I think and why: it’s too much fun being vague and hand-wavey and then complain afterwards that everyone else is just too materialistic and detail-oriented.
This Gish gallop is fun and all, but I spent a lot of time in postmodernist world of literature and philosophy, especially reading existentialism. It’s nice and all, but it has nothing to do with actual science.
It’s pretty much all a “what if” scenario. Science is a “what is” scenario.
The only people who go on and on about ‘materialism’ are the people who want you to think “what if” and take it as seriously as everything else. What if my flying invisible pink unicorn is sitting on your shoulder? Oh, you can’t see it? Well, just trust me, it’s there. You won’t trust my word? You want proof? Why? Why isn’t my word good enough? All you have to do is BELIEVE/OPEN YOUR MIND/IMAGINE and it’s there….
Basically calling ‘materialism’ is just a way of getting around the fact that you have no evidence and a sincere desire to convince people anyway. It’s a way of pretending that the world acts the way you want it to.
TL;DR… Marg is the religious one. Faith in all things invisible, so long as you’re open minded enough to think “what if” and ignore “what is”.
@GF
Well, that would make it three things that marg has refused to answer, in all her cowardice.
@Johnny
Thank you for the lyrics — but where did the Big Bang come from? Conservation of matter and energy and all that — but then suddenly there it all was — out of nothing?
@Krebiozen
If you believe Gandhi, it’s big white elephants all the way down.
And I sincerely don’t believe any one of you is in a better position to know what really happened than Sheldrake or myself.
… and vice versa.
Puny, arrogant humans.
@Flip
Good luck proving how the universe came into being 🙂
Matter plus antimatter equals nothing, so conservation of energy and matter isn’t a problem.
I would expect an astrophysicist to have a better idea of what happened than a religious mystic/biochemist (or an energy healer). At least scientists try to make their hypotheses consistent with the available evidence, which you and Sheldrake don’t seem concerned with in the slightest.
Maybe it wasn’t *nothing* but a balance of matter and anti-matter with all-ness emerging when there was more matter accumulated… read that earlier..physics
Be that as it may, but today I was looking at a something and its shade as labelled – storm- led me to synopise this thread with Marg as a RL enactment of Tim Minchin’s piece:
she is Storm
we are Tim.
Among which you number. Marg, there’s a core issue that has been repeated to you but which you don’t seem to have energy-wrapped your head around: You are trying to elevate yourself to and above the clergy within something. Your putative lever arm, however, is a crude, magical construct that inexorably leads you to know less rather than “extra.”
@Denice Walter
Pure conjecture, all of it.
@marg
What about Denice’s comment is conjecture?
You have 3 comments to answer my question, otherwise, we must assume that you are deliberately lying or are pushing a falsehood.
We already know that you do not apply the same scientific standards to “energy healing” and that you do not apply the same standards to yourself as you do to other posters here.
What the heck, let’s see if marg can make it a superfecta.
Our local community college catalog arrived yesterday and is offering a Reiki certification course. I am so tempted (purely in the interests of science).
On the other hand, there’s a digital photography class that looks much more useful.
@Novalox
Everything we know about the Big Bang is conjecture.
Conjecture (from Wikipedia)
A conjecture is a proposition that is unproven. Karl Popper pioneered the use of the term “conjecture” in scientific philosophy.[1] Conjecture is contrasted by hypothesis (hence theory, axiom, principle), which is a testable statement based on accepted grounds. In mathematics, a conjecture is an unproven proposition that appears correct.[2]
And “Marg” unintentionally shows her true colors. What are you, Marg? A reptilian under Lord Draconis? A red Lectroid from planet 10, who reached Earth through the 8th Dimension? Or perhaps you were irradiated with gamma rays and. like the Incredible Hulk, will smash puny humans? Are you a follower of Magneto and a member of homo superior?
Marg – you should really talk to a physicist about the big bang. While there is, admittedly, quite a lot of conjecture there, there is an awful lot that is backed up by evidence.
You might want to check out http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/. The author, Ethan, is a very nice guy and explains advanced concepts in astrophysics and cosmology pretty well.
Why, no, it’s not. Cosmology bridges the largest and smallest scales. Big bang cosmology rests upon everything from the Standard Model to WMAP and further. That you would parade around babbling about “subtle energy” and quantum-entangled mice and so forth merely betrays the fact that you are trying to bring that which you aspire to down to your own level. In other words, a Sad Sack.
@Marg
What a pathetic and inept rebuttal to the many, many points made. And also proving my point about it being philosophy and not science. What makes you think it’s impossible to prove? Arrogance is saying “we’ll never know” or saying “I know better despite not having a shred of evidence to back me up”.
Oh yes, the creationist tactic: nobody knows what happened, therefore godidit. You really are a god of the gaps lover.
Marg, you’re utterly banal and more arrogant than all of us. We say “we don’t know YET”, and you say “…”
Actually, we don’t know what you say, because yet again YOU FAIL TO OFFER ANY EVIDENCE FOR ANYTHING. Including your own opinions on anything. You Gish gallop all over the place and leave out your own opinions and then expect *us* to tell you what we think. You’re a hypocrite, as has been pointed out many, many times already.
*cough*Bullshite*cough*
I wonder how many times I need to say it before you clue in.
For the others: yeah, I’ve moved *way* past giving Marg chances. As far as I’m concerned, this last de-flounce is nothing but troll.
@Mephistopheles O’Brien
Thank you for the link. While physicists are pretty much in agreement about what happened AFTER the big bang, they are less so about what happened BEFORE that led up to it. That’s where the conjecture comes in. I just read a book by Dan Falk about time, and he talked about the various theories in one of his chapters, in which he discussed whether “time” came into being with the big bang.
@Flip
You show woeful ignorance about the meaning of the word “conjecture” and prove my point to a T about arrogance.
Wrong. Getting to a theory of the shortest timescales will require new physics, which is not code for “making a jackass of oneself by pretending to have magic vibration powers.” There is no issue of “t < 0."
@Narad
My bad about being inexact in my phrasing. @DW was talking up what led up to the big bang. I should have said everything we know about what led up to the big bang is pure conjecture.
Do you really fail to understand why this statement doesn’t mean anything? Time is not “stuff.” Energy is not “stuff.” Time t is just a coordinate. That’s not what you perceive. The constancy of the personality is an illusion. Send Time to the corner with its pal Space, and you get “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.”
@Marg
Nah, just some respectful insolence thrown your way. Of course, if you’d care to have me be a little more polite, you might want to try answering people’s questions and providing evidence for your statements.
I won’t hold my breath, considering this is the billionth time I’ve suggested it.
This is like creationists complaining evolution doesn’t deal with abiogenesis. The BB theory deals with the BB – it answers *that specific* question. What comes after or before has nothing to do with the BB.
But I’ll note you Gish gallop around the fact that you continue to use a god of the gaps fallacy.
I’ll be ‘less arrogant’ as soon as you stop talking in circles.
While physicists are pretty much in agreement about what happened AFTER the big bang, they are less so about what happened BEFORE that led up to it.
Untrue. Only someone who has never spoken with a physicist could make such a sweeping and completely false generalisation about the views of physicists.
Actual non-fictitious physicists agree that there IS NO SUCH CONCEPT as “before” the big bang. That is how “big bang” is DEFINED — the time dimension is only defined (and definable) afterwards. It’s all in the coordinate frame. So questions about “Before the big bang” are vapid, meaningless, internally contradictory… akin to asking “What is North of the North Pole?” (as John Wheeler was fond of saying).
This is elementary stuff.
@marg
Strike 1, strike 2, and strike 3, yer out again.
If this was baseball, marg would have been sent to pee-wee league a long time ago. And that would be an insult to the 5-6 year olds.
So you cannot answer Denice’s question nor can you say anything that is wrong about it.
You really are proving yourself to be an ignorant coward.
@Narad – i should mind what I say
@All
I have a friend who keeps taking me to physics lectures. One of them was entitled “It’s about time”, and it was a debate between physicists and philosophers about the nature of time. As I said, I also just read Falk’s book about it. Trust me, there is debate out there. Just because you are ignorant of it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. To wit:
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/02/qa_turok?currentPage=all
Essentially none of you seems to know enough either about physics or science to make the sweeping statements you are making.
Marg, let’s keep our focus on “energy healing”. The experiment you brought up gave inconclusive results, how would you change it to remove the bias that you claim caused both sets to survive?
@Gray Falcon
Which particular experiment are you referring to?
@Gray Falcon
If you are referring to Bengston’s, there wasn’t one, there were 12. Compute for me please the statistical possibility of 12 experiments over 30+ years all being somehow screwed up by inadequate mice or inadequate handling of mice.
@Marg: The statistical possibility? Near 100%. I work in engineering. I know that incompetence has no limits.
@Gray Falcon
That is just a flip and meaningless answer.
@Gray Falcon
It also doesn’t say much for the state of engineering as a field of endeavor. If it were true, all our bridges and buildings would fall down.
@Marg: Bengston ran one experiment, got inconclusive answers. He ran the exact same experiment, got the same inconclusive answers. He does this twelve times. Does that sound like the work of a competent man?
In engineering, Murphy’s law is: “If there are more than one ways of performing an action, and one of them leads to disaster, then someone will perform it in that way.” This is what I meant.
@Gray Falcon
The experiment Bengston ran was a standard model. After the controls survived in the first experiment he theorized that there was a field effect. He then set up a second batch of controls in an outside location that was unknown to him. Those controls died as expected. In a later experiment he set up geomagnetic probes around the cages of both the experimental and nearby control mice, as well as other random places, to test for the existence of this “field effect”. The probes showed an anomalous effect around the experimental mice and the control mice, but not at the other random locations. This does not sound like incompetence to me.
I’ll need a citation. There’s still an issue with the control mice from the second experiment: Were they set up and handled in the exact same way as all the other mice, save for the energy healing? The issue was simply that Bengston didn’t properly induce cancer in the first place.
the idea Turok proposes is not new, big bang-big crunch etc
the evidence dinna support this
@Gray Falcon
Bengston did not induce the cancer. The experiments were created and conducted by “disinterested biologists” at two separate institutions, one of them the head of the biology department at the Brooklyn Campus of St. Joseph’s College. Outside controls were set up in experiment 3 and 4 (not 2 as I previously said). In both cases the outside controls died.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/gtpp/Documents/jse_14_3_bengston.pdf
If one can get beyond the immediate knee jerk reaction of “this is not possible”, I think there is an interesting phenomenon here worthy of further exploration. In his talks Bengston says that after his first experiment succeeded in any one location, the biologists on site took it as a challenge and were extremely rigorous in the second experiment. He himself never touched the mice.
@Al KImmea
What evidence?
Finally, some documentation. I’ll have to read it later, though, I’ve got other things to do.
12 experiments where the control group was supposed to have all died but instead they overwhelmingly survived? No one has to compute a statistical probability that the experiments all got screwed up; the proof that they were is right there.
Actually,theories about the beginning of the universe are not purely conjectural but were based upon certain observations made when technology allowed researchers to look at the movement of distant galaxies and closely at sub-atomic particles: theories were built to explain certain data that they *already* had.
Be that as it may, something I’ve observed myself about those who support alt med: while they may cast aspersion upon standard work in general ( consensus), they sure cling to their own so-called data. They also retreat into material that is not amenable to research- like life energy, soul or other quasi-religious notions like chakras or qi.
In addition, alt med frequently relies upon the personae of its chief investigators/ expounders. These often acquire a status that *assumes* trustworthiness and correctness, even if that is based on emotional factors rather than *data*, i.e. a string of excellent studies ( see AJW, Burzynski,
Duesberg et al as well as promoters like Adams, Null, Mercola et al).
What? M. cites a wired.com interview with a cheerful physics don speculator to spout nonsense about who knows science or physics? And I’m taking the bait? A slow day – and Bengston remains nonsensical & now I’m wondering if there’s just nothing more than lying. That or willful delusion. “Experiments” that show nothing, if they were done at all. If there is no difference than an experimental treatment and the control group, the conclusion is that the treatment has no effect. If the control group has a condition other than what would be normally predicted, the experiment is a failure. And DW continues to accurately summarize the frame of mind of the perps.
I tried to keep it simple so you’d understand. You ask how the universe began, and when that’s answered, you ask what happened prior to the beginning. Allow me to introduce you to MC Hawking.
*Not safe for work or children*
*Not safe for work or children*
*rapping*
In there beginning there was nothing
not even time–
no planets, no stars, no hip-hop, no rhyme.
But then there was a bang like the sound of my GAT:
the universe began and the s*** was phat
The universe began as a singularity.
Nobody knows what went on then, G.
For ten million trillion trillion trillionths of a second,
the state of the universe cannot be reckoned.
The fundamental forces were unified–
we’ve no theory to describe that,
though I’ve tried. Then the forces
split and the universe was born–
it was hotter then a priest watching
kiddie porn.
Protons, neutrons, and electrons came to pass
as photons collided, changing energy to mass.
Three minutes go by, temps to cool one billion
down from one hundred million trillion trillion.
This reduced heat allowed a new event:
the formation of heavier elements,
still it was millions of years ‘fore the first star glowed.
IF YOUR DOWN WITH THE BANG SING ALONG HERE WE GO!
It was the big pow piz-ow bang a dang diggy diggy boom diggy boom pow boom the Big BIZANG.
the big pow piz-ow bang a dang diggy diggy boom diggy boom pow boom the Big BIZANG.
Hold on now, what about inflation?
That’s a little tricky and could use some explanation.
Inflation, one could barely state,
was the time when the universe expanded at a rate
that was faster then the speed of light, but that over-simplifies and it ain’t quite right. Still the for purposes here, it will have to do, ‘cuz I ain’t got the time to explain it to you
ROCK
DAMN
It was the big pow piz-ow bang a dang diggy diggy boom diggy boom pow boom the Big BIZANG.
the big pow piz-ow bang a dang diggy diggy boom diggy boom pow boom the Big BIZANG.
The beginning of time, and the birth of all matter
Say it took seven days, you’re as mad as a hatter.
It was millions of years ‘fore the first star glowed, if your down with the bang sing along, here we go
It was the big pow piz-ow bang a dang diggy diggy boom diggy boom pow boom the Big BIZANG.
The big pow piz-ow bang a dang diggy diggy boom diggy boom pow boom the Big BIZANG.
the big bizang…
The big bizang…
BOOOOOM….
the big bizang.
*/rapping*
As al kimmea points out, Turok’s ideas are not really new – see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bounce
Note the paragraph
Well, one can clearly see how Marg would immediately be drawn to something styled as “ekpyrotic cosmology.” I don’t think that you understand what’s being gotten at: For one thing, the anthropic landscape is tossed right under the bus, which is going to be uncomfortable for the concept of “healing energy.” It’s also going to fall right back into the stringy pit of untestability that it crawled out of unless it’s actually falsified by future CMB B-mode polarization findings.
(And, Marg, again, “geomagnetic probe” doesn’t mean anything; it’s just sciency blab that basically nobody but Bengston uses. Until the instrumentation is actually described in detail, you get to make no claims about what popped out of the “probes.”)
I am sorry but I have come to the conclusion that you all simply don’t know enough about science for any kind of meaningful discussion.
Fixed that for you.
Fixed that for you.
As for the citation, you’re just messing with us now, right?After reading the journal’s guidelines for authors description of their review process and mission statement I’m afraid I can place no confidence in the accuracy of the claims made in Bengston’s publication.
Do you have anything from a credible journal, one whose reason for existence isn’t promoting pseudoscience, reporting ‘apparent anamolies’ or popularizing ‘paradoxical phenomena belonging to no extablished discipline”?
That is, do you have any actual, credible, scientific evidence to support your claims?
I think we have discussed the paper Marg has lined to before. See, for example, my comments above on September 5, 2:28 pm .
In that case you should be able to find quite a number of problems with Sheldrake and Bengston’s views.
Which reminds me, according to Hawking, in the link I posted above, “philosophy is dead”.
I think the issue is that you believe Sheldrake, who appears to know less than nothing on the subject, instead of physicists who know a great deal about it.
Now I’ve hurt myself laughing and I may need some energy healing.
However I’m very upset that I wasted all those years of study, and all those qualifications and decades of experience are worth nothing. I’m sure many other commenters are equally shocked to discover they are scientific ignoramuses.
@Krebiozen: Thanks for reminding me, I haven’t been able to look through this thread in detail.
And thus Marg reinvents the halting problem. You may not be able to project “healing energy,” but you sure can project.
@ THS:
I again thank you for your kind words- unlike RL, it’s lovely to be appreciated for what I say rather than for other factors. Might be my twisty hair, for all I know.
@ Krebiozen:
One of my courses nearly 30 years ago, creatively referred to certains topics in philosophy as “pre-scientific psychology”. I’m sure that that may get a few people upset.
Why? It doesn’t get filed under Hinayana for nothing.
I find myself imagining a special episode of “Top Gear” in which the resident car enthusiasts discuss the merits of the Mahayana and the Hinayana, before taking each vehicle for a spin.
@Marg – everything is accelerating away from everything else and it doesn’t look like it will stop, eventually the only galaxy we’ll see is our own – see what Johnny said
These experiments of Bengston’s can’t be pricey, they’re just mice and cages and waving hands
won’t NCCAM touch him?
Johnny: Tell me that’s not the ICP? Please?
Marg: I have to salute such dedication to ignorance. I’m actually surprised you can breathe on your own.
No, not the ICP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MC_Hawking
The sad thing is that either of the songs I referenced have more science content than anything Marge has posted.
Marg@10;34
Summary of the 4 experiments Bengston describes in the paper you link to earlier today:
First experiment—both control and experimental group mice survived. No significant difference between no treatment control group and “healing energy” treatment group observed
Second experiment– both control and experimental group mice survived. . No significant difference between no treatment control group and “healing energy” treatment group observed
Third experiment: Mice treated at home lived, mice treated in the laboratory died. Control mice in the lab survived. Control mice sent to another city died. Control and experimental groups kept on site again display no significant difference in survival.
Fourth experiment—despite having demonstrated the complete inability to accurately predict which mice will survive and which will die following injection, Bengston asserts he can accurately predict which mice will achieve complete cures and which mice will not prior to death, electing to abandon measuring survival times and instead sacrifice all mice from all groups 38 days after injection, then going fishing for a different parameter that can somehow, some way be interpreted to suggest efficacy. WTF?
This is really what you consider the best evidence supporting the effectiveness of energy healing?
And we’ve come full circle again. Bengston pops up once more, Marg suggests she’ll flounce off, and we’ll be back here in a week’s time to argue over more of her vague concerns about X.
Or the problem is that you simply refuse to engage properly. Care to actually respond to my questions and criticisms? Or anyone’s? No, you’ll just continue to act like jello in a dodgeball game.
You’re going to get lousy pickup without a subilytic converter.
Avatar in a reasonably priced Bodhisattvayāna?
There’s no point in continuing to engage with Marg.
I suspect that she posts here largely because of a need to feel like she’s ‘winning’ in some great battle between paradigms or whatever.
Her self-image as a disciple in a ‘new wave of thinking’ or ‘new era of discovery’ or whatever is a necessary construction of her own cognitive dissonance.
The price of realizing that she’s cheated innocent people out of their hard-earned money is too great for her to bear.
It’ll outrun a Therabant any day, and the doors will stay on without siddhis.
I used to practice Lada Samara, but it broke down so I replaced it with a Ford Granada.
Stealth lepidoptery duly noted. The rotor returns; the plugs are gapped.
The Top Gear team discuss Tantra practice:
Did not King Milinda debate the composition of Chariots with the Venerable Nagasena?
Better to drive a silver ghost than to be a hungry ghost.
Took a while to catch up. Was fun to see how out of touch Marg was with cosmology. It’s sad to look back at all the discoveries made over the course of my life and woos as a culture haven’t paid any attention beyond picking up buzzwords.
One thing that really sticks out is the ignorance about neurology and what we know so far. Dualists keep speaking about consciousness as if no one has ever studied the human brain. It’s like they’re trapped in the era when Greek philosophers could prove things by thought experiments alone.
Of course, there are still plenty of mysteries out there, but our ignorance isn’t evidence that anything supernatural is real. Not knowing what, if anything, caused the Big Bang is not evidence that magic works.
@Bronze Dog
Out of touch my tushie. Given that I’ve been attending NASA lectures for years and also reading the stuff, either my “informatnts” our out of touch or you are. The problem with the lot of you is that you suffer from “intellectual phase locking” and are relying on your outmoded education.
@Marg: Funny you never give any more detail than “NASA lectures and reading the stuff”. What do you hope to gain from being so vague?
@Gray Falcon
Do you expect me to remember the title of every lecture I attended over the past five years? One book I quoted earlier: Falk’s _In Search of Time_. The message of most of the speakers at the lectures was fluidity — i.e., that because dark matter and dark energy comprise about 96% of the universe and we know nothing about them, and because the expansion of the universe, believed to be caused by dark energy, confounded earlier expectations, the future of the universe, and its past prior to the big bang, are up for debate and conjecture. Physicists seem to be quite excited about this state of affairs.
@Bronze Dog
Funny that you should bring up dualists and consciousness, as I am just reading that chapter in Sheldrake. He offers a “panpsychist” alternative to materialism and dualism.
@Marg: Absolutely none of which does anything to prove “energy healing”. Here’s some advice: If you’re having trouble with people not believing you, perhaps the issue is on your side.
Rolling out some Richard Chambers Prescott, Marg?
Marg, this thread:
Marg, reiki thread:
It sounds to me, Marg, that you’ve been to exactly one lecture. And it doesn’t seem like you really took that much actual knowledge away from it.
@AdamG
Please enlighten me on your level of knowledge on the subject, giving full quotations, of course, if you know more than I do. My only point is that there is debate and not a single set of accepted events and parameters, as some people here seem to believe. I have, in fact, attended several lectures and on the reiki thread was referring to the most recent one. But of course as you and your colleagues here are all the most knowledgeable people on the planet on all subjects scientific including cosmology, everyone must defer to your superiority. I think I have bandied about the word “arrogant” a number of times here. It fits. Wear it.
I slogged through “A Brief History of Time” and read “Hyperspace”. Einstein is still relevant. I’ve been following science and its ch-ch-ch-changes since the mid 60s.
Bang-Crunch was the prevalent idea back then.
How cum, Madame Au Courant, u ain’t aware that it’s all flying apart? At least for now and perhaps even after we’ve been recycled and until it gets very dark and cold?
None of which explains what was wrong with Emily and her protocol and why it shows I too can heal like a Reiki Master?
Since Falk is from Toronto, here’s my Grade 13 sched – Calculus, Algebra, Functions, Biology and Chemistry
No Physics ’cause teach was a penis with ears
Falk is an interesting distraction, nuthin more
OK, Marg, time to play a game. Imagine that you have two iron bars that are identical in appearance. One is magnetized and the other is not. Tell me how you can tell which is which without the use of any instrumentation.
ya mean like I=V/R or V/n=k or E=mc2 or a myriad of other reality describing things like z(n+1)=zn2+c?
sup and sub no workie
Marg,
You claimed that Sheldrake, a failed biochemist and religious fanatic, knows more about the origins of the universe than physicists. Does your NASA physicist buddy agree with Sheldrake, since he is infinitely less arrogant than we are?
I am reminded of the Far Side cartoon about what we say to dogs versus what dogs hear. The dog owner is telling Ginger about how many times he told Ginger to stay out of the garbage and how upset he is, What Ginger hears is “bla bla bla bla Ginger bla bla bla bla Ginger bla bla”
I suspect what Marg hears is bla bla bal bla fluidity bla bla bla 95% bla bla we dont know bla bla.
As far as I know, the discovery of dark energy and dark matter has not changed the models of the past and the Big Bang very much – any astrophysicists care to enlighten me.
All I know is what I read on Ethan’s Starts With a Bang blog.
@Marg
Let’s say you’re right. That science is tentative and that what we know currently needs some adjustment due to new discoveries.
How and why does that prove that you’re right about energy healing (or anything else)?
(My guess is you’re just using yet another standard tactic of saying “science was wrong before, so it’s wrong now, and therefore my pet theory must be right”)
Why is it that the only people allowed to be wrong in this conversation is us?
@Militant Agnostic
From what I’ve read, the only thing it does is require some tweaking of what we know. Ie. Dark matter just means there’s something else out there; dark energy means that expansion of the universe isn’t quite as well understood as previously thought. Neither of these things contradict the BB.
There’s probably some good stuff on it at Bad Astronomy or Astronomycast or Universe Today.
al kimeea October 2, 7:01 pm
al kimeea October 2, 7:02 pm
al kimeea
I slogged through “A Brief History of Time” and read “Hyperspace”. Einstein is still relevant. I’ve been following science and its ch-ch-ch-changes since the mid 60s.
Allow me to recommend Misner, Thorne & Wheeler’s “Gravitation” if you ever have a chance to acquire a copy. If nothing else, holding the damn thing is good exercise for the arm muscles.
It is completely untrue that Steve Jobs was inspired to invent the Apple after a copy of ‘Gravitation’ fell on his head.
Duh.
Again, I misplaced a slash. It should be obvious what is blockquote and what isn’t. What’s not obvious is the random handling of HTML entities. I can see no pattern to it. the ampersand entity seems to usually work, but not always; the superscript 1, 2, and 3 show up as the entity code, not the character. The x seems to get dropped on hex-coded entities; but the superscript 0 was a decimal example coded with the ampersand entity, so it showed have shown as the entity, not the character.
In other words, the “science” blog software is even less science friendly than I realized.
thanks Bill Price, I had hoped it would work without resorting to your suggestion. the last equation is a Mandelbrot set for those unfamiliar.
Thanks Herr Doktor, I will look for the gravity well. 1279 pages will twist the fabric of space. Although it looks a good read, I’m skeptical as I have it on good authority there is no evidence for relativity, none, from a place called ‘axis of logic’. With a name like that it must be so.
@Al Kimea
Not Reiki master. Therapeutic Touch. Emily didn’t go anywhere near a Reiki master.
@Krebiozen
I claimed nothing of the sort.
@All
There is scientific agreement on there having been a big bang. There is mostly agreement on there having a singularity, except e.g. the M-theory people who say it was ‘branes colliding. The million dollar question is where the singularity came from. I was amused to read in Sheldrake that the Vatican was thrilled with the big bang because it supported the biblical description of creation, as in “and God said, let there be light” and there was a big flash and the universe came into being.
Marg, every time we ask for evidence supporting your claims, you change the subject. Is this honest?
Just for fun:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=secrets-of-the-phallus&WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook
Marg, every time someone points out that you change the subject, you change the subject. Is that honest?
If you survey creation myths, there is usually an outside force (g-d) initiating the universe rather than it emerging on its own. The view of history preponderant amongst diverse believers maintains a natural order simultanous to a supernatural one and (sometimes) supernatural interventions to explain phenomena in the natural one ( the holy spirit visits the blessed; Krshna dances with gopis et al)
People understand nature anthropomorphically if they are left to themselves: making things as a human occupation is tranlated to a cosmological scale. In everyday life, we see faces in appliances and films of random dots’ movements are interpretted as one chasing the other and other human/ animal-like activities. We’re perhaps built that way.
I would guess that beliefs about healing and life energies/ essences are a reflection of the very human tendency to ‘put a face’ on the processes of nature and the universe itself that needed a little outside help to get going.
@DW
Still, it’s strange that the singularity that became the big bang just came out of nowhere.
@Gray Falcon
http://www.transitiontoparenthood.com/janelle/energy/support.htm
This should keep you busy for a little while, should you choose to read it.
Marg, do you know why “peer review” exists?
yadda yadda yadda energy yadda different energy yadda
Marg was a quack here at R.I.
on a thread that just wouldn’t die.
She loves mystical forces
but won’t cite any sources
for her claims which no one can falsify.
‘Healing’ is her occupation
But oh no, she won’t ask for compensation
but if you feel grand
after she waves her hand
she’ll be happy to ‘accept your donation!’
It would be stranger still if time had endpoints but not a starting point. Now, Marg, given that you have repeatedly insulted your audience’s knowledge of physics, please get on to the magnet question. It’s about at the level of a Car Talk Puzzler segment.
So, according to the link you’ve provided above, you seem to be arguing
1)We can detect electrical activity associated with biological processes, and generate electrocardiograms and electroencephalograms, and
2)The application of alternating magnetic fields for 8 to 10 hours a day has been seen to help heal broken bones, therefore
3)Waving your hands at cages of mice not only can magically heal their cancers, but also the cancers of other mice you didn’t wave your hands at.
Is that about right, Marg?
I wrote to Marg:
Marg replied:
Apologies if I misunderstood the following exchange.
Marg asked:
I replied:
Marg replied:
A long time ago, someone proposed that there are two ways of looking at the cosmos – a daylight and a nightime view,IIRC. The first infuses it with purpose and rationality, striving towards goals like a businessperson with a deadline or an artist contemplating an internal visual image of the final product. The other sees it as cold and unfeeling materia and forces that we happened to have been thrown into, much to our own consternation. I would call these views maybe ‘warm’ and ‘cool’ myself. The latter might also be called “soul-less” by some of the opposing camp.
I would however find it to be a highly emotional place if you are a person understanding his or her own limited place within the huge, cold and dumb, unthinking vastnesses of time and space, buffeted to and fro by unseeing forces. Think about that! Isn’t it more exciting than the other way?
@Krebiozen
Ya consistency is not Marg’s strong suit, earlier she said energy healing has a “common provenance”, but they are NOT the same
@Marg
Avoiding my questions again I see. I must be on your ‘avoid’ list or something…
Marg, every time we ask for evidence supporting your claims, you change the subject. Is this honest?
Marg, every time someone points out that you change the subject, you change the subject. Is that honest?
@AdamG
Great poem! 🙂
Marg October 3, 10:05 am
It would have been much stranger if there had been somewhere else for it to come out of, rather than nowhere.
@Bill Price
But that’s a value judgement rather than a scientific one. In fact it coming out of nowhere violates the laws of thermodynamics.
@Marg
The issue is: do YOU have any evidence to provide that the big bang (or the universe, if you prefer to couch the question that way) came from somewhere in particular?
Good G-d. No, Marg, you’ve got the order wrong. We can do the grand canonical ensemble after you get to bar magnets.
May I point out that you are all taking it on FAITH that the big bang came out of nowhere?
This impending failure on your part was priced into the comments some time ago, Marg.
@Marg
Nice strawman.
Personally, I have no clue as to where the BB came from. Without evidence of anything, I have put it in the “we don’t know YET what’s going on” file.
You on the other hand seem to be putting it in the “science doesn’t know therefore I’m right” file.
The issue is: do YOU have any evidence to provide that the big bang (or the universe, if you prefer to couch the question that way) came from somewhere in particular?
@Marg
However, the laws of thermodynamics do not prevent someone from “dissolving” clouds by pointing at them?
BTW Marg, I have a BSc in Mechanical Engineering (amongst the regulars here this means I am a relative dumbass), so I probably know rather more about thermodynamics than you do. I also used to fly sailplanes (Schweitzer 2-33 & 1-26, Blanik L-13, Grob Plastic Pig & Jantar Standard 2) so I have been “up close and personal” with more cumulus clouds than you could wave a hand at in a month of Sundays. They are much larger and much more powerful than you think they are. Stopping a charging elephant or even a fast freight train would require less Ju-Ju than dissolving a cumulus cloud by pointing at it. I suspect Bengston’s buddy was relying on the fact that all Cus dissipate after a while plus the fact that people remember the hits and forget the misses. Alternatively Bengston made the whole thing up either deliberately or through the faulty mechanisms of human memory. A couple of the regulars here are psychologists and I think they will back me up on the inaccuracy of human memory.
@Flip – that’s what I thought I haven’t heard of any drastic revisions about the early days, minutes, seconds etc. of the universe resulting from the discovery of dark energy however I think it has changed expectations about the future.
@DW
I read a science fiction story about beings who created universes as an art form. The protagonist screwed up and created one that kept on expanding instead of re-collapsing like a proper universe should. At first he (and the others) considered it a failure, but eventually he became famous due to his unique creation as it formed stars and galaxies and eventually life and even intelligent life appeared. I liked the idea that we were the result of an artists mistake.
“My only point is that there is debate and not a single set of accepted events and parameters, as some people here seem to believe.” – earlier Marg
“In fact it coming out of nowhere violates the laws of thermodynamics.” – later Marg
u r cherry picking here. Is Bengston not also in violation?
But back to the magnets:
OK, Marg, time to play a game. Imagine that you have two iron bars that are identical in appearance. One is magnetized and the other is not. Tell me how you can tell which is which without the use of any instrumentation. – Narad
“I liked the idea that we were the result of an artists mistake.”
The Missus likes to tell people we are an alien ant farm minded by a brat. The looks of horror are priceless.
@Militant Agnostic
I have to admit I need a refresher on the details of it, but that’s my understanding. Plus, a lot of the evidence for dark energy/dark matter follows up research on the BB.
And Marg also doesn’t seem to consider that the BB theory is the ‘winner’ amongst a number of competing hypotheses. Why? Because the data showed that the BB was the most likely and the one that best explained the observations.
Marg October 3, 10:45 pm
My value judgment (“much stranger”) is there to mirror your value judgment(“strange”), Marg. It is in fact a scientific judgment as well as a value judgment.
The context (if I may use such word for such a difficult concept) in which the Big Bang seems to have arisen is ‘nothing’, which includes ‘nowhere’ as a degenerate tautology. It is understood (to the extent that this context is understood) that ‘nothing’ is an unstable (or at best, metastable) state. Being unstable, it’s liable to spontaneously undergo a state change into ‘something’. That spontaneous state change is currently called “The Big Bang”, although it wasn’t very big (to begin with) and it didn’t go bang.
Thus, “[coming] out of nowhere” is to be expected; coming out of somewhere would be considered quite bizarre.
In fact, according to the thermodynamicists and cosmologists, it doesn’t. The physicists tell us that even in our kinda-stable ‘somewhere’, particle-antiparticle pairs are constantly appearing and vanishing with nobody giving them a citation for thermodynamic violation. That’s just the way the universe actually works. contrary to the inadequate imaginings of the creationista and spiritualista.
Indeed, although we sometimes refer to the BB as a ‘singularity’, it’s not clear that it actually is one. For example, an antiparticle, paired with a particle, just appeared beside my head, and was annihilated a few femtoseconds later. I could conjecture that that pair was actually a universe and an anti-universe; at a space-time scale of perhaps 1/googol from our own; that each universe had its own big bang, inflation, etc, and lasted its own (sub-infinite) eternity in its femtosecond life (at our scale). Each universe would see its own BB, at its scale, as a barrier that couldn’t be seen through; they might call it a singularity. Each would have its laws of physics, that might differ from those at our scale, and possibly between the two.
It’s an interesting conjecture: it doesn’t violate any laws of nature that I’m aware of, though a few laws might get bent a tad at the edges where we cannot yet investigate. There is no reason (except possibly arrogance) to assume that the universe we inhabit is privileged, in any way: thus, the conjecture generalizes to our universe being a particle in a larger universe, which operates at a scale maybe googol ‘slower’ and ‘larger’ than ours. It would be turtles all the way down, and turtles all the way up as well; but the infinite regress is not problematic, since it’s part of the conjecture.
The conjecture is unfalsifiable, since each universe interacts with its ‘parent’ at an unmeasurable level. This is by my design ;). Sibling universes could only interact via their parent: but such interaction could not be completed during the lifetime of the siblings (being much smaller than Planck scale in the parent).
I maintain that my conjecture is much more plausible than your conjecture of what you call energy healing. My conjecture is unencumbered by evidence: in this respect it is exactly like yours. Your conjecture requires a sibling universe, ‘beside’ and presumably co-extensive with our own. Your extra universe provides whatever facilities you imagine to support your “energy healing”. It interacts with this universe through a mechanism that you imagine to exist, that supports “energy-healing” interaction. Your sibling universe, however, must not interact with this universe in any way, lest it be detectable, measurable (at least in principle), understandable and falsifiable. In particular, this universe must not provide any mechanism to support our end of the “energy healing” interaction, lest even that mechanism be detected, measured, understood and possibly falsified.
Besides the plausibility distinction between my cosmological conjecture and yours, I would not promote mine as having any utility beyond personal amusement. In particular, even if my ethics were to allow it, I find no way to produce income from mine. You seem to have not encountered either difficulty (or you have overcome them both).
Marg,
No it doesn’t.
Wait a minute! How did we get from energy healing, cancer-ridden mice and hand waving to the LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS….
Yes, Militant Agnostic, you are entirely correct that memory is not the most reliable cognitive function and not only might we place less emphasis on what we don’t like ( misses) and more on our desired outcomes ( hits) BUT we can also be distracted from the ENTIRE focus of our discussion very easily by bright, shiney objects.
For some reason, physics seems to be woo-dom’s means of gaining un-earned respectability and impresssing audiences: I have heard this all over the place. It’s hinting that because the woo understands this difficult, arcane material therefore they must be right about their woo as well.
However, isn’t physics reliant upon mathematics and probability- like all real science? I don’t see much of that served up alongside the physics.
@Bill Price
Not just one extra universe. Many.
@Al Kimeea
I like your wife.
@Bill Price
I maintain that my conjecture is much more plausible than your conjecture of what you call energy healing. My conjecture is unencumbered by evidence: in this respect it is exactly like yours.
So if yours is exactly as unencumbered by evidence as mine, this makes yours right?
Sorry, Marg, multiverse mania isn’t going to help you in any way.
@Narad I don’t see why not.
Perhaps you should consider whether this is for the same reason that you can’t answer a simple question involving a static magnetic field.
@marg – why the hell are you still posting?
@Lawrence
Why the hell are you?
@Narad
What is the point of setting silly tests?
The magnetic field is weaker in the middle of the magnetic rod. Touch one to the middle of the other. If it sticks, that’s the magnetic one. If it doesn’t, it’s the non-magnetic one. At least that appears to be the most popular answer on the internet.
I have one for you. Find a person you’ve been told has an injury. Find the site of the injury just with your hands by feeling his or her energy. That you can’t learn from the internet.
So, you had to Google that (I did not to produce it), and you have the unmitigated gall to declaim that “essentially none of you seems to know enough either about physics or science to make the sweeping statements you are making,” and you got the explanation wrong?
@ Marg:
Can you be sure that you’re feeling ‘energy’ or possibly swelling, throbbing, heat and/ or the person tensing or flinching in reaction?
Don’t vets do this all the time?
@DW
The difference is that I don’t actually touch. I do it from about 6 inches away. Or more. I did it recently with a neighbor who had broken his leg. I thought it was a more or less vertical spiral fracture of the femur, because that’s what the grapevine said. When I hovered my hands over his thigh there was heat at the top end near hip and at the bottom end near the knee. He then explained to me that that’s where the breaks were. At that point the injury was a few weeks old.
@Narad
So what’s the explanation? BTW just because you know about magnets does not make you an expert on what happened to lead up to the big bang.
And… Marg, given that your self-assigned Healing Powers are well known to be Of A Form That Transcends Time And Space, I’d be happy to tell you that I have an injury, assuming you can define this concept, and allow you to try to find it remotely with your mystical hand-antennas. Surely you’ve already got a Vibrational Profile.
You seem to be missing the point, which is that if you had to look up the answer but still bungled the reason, you sure as hell don’t get to be taken seriously when you start going on about “geomagnetic probes” that you can’t even describe, or Schumann resonances, or, heaven help us, speculative theoretical cosmology.
The explanation is simple. I will rephrase the answer that you cribbed as follows: Arrange the two bars in the shape of a letter ‘T’. If the upper one is the magnet, symmetry tells you that there will be no net attraction.
In fact, as I definitely seem to have picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue, I will pose another to you, Marg:
Why the hands?
You may recall that you just have been carping about how something could come out of nothing (while simultaneously dismissing the first law of thermodynamics by way of Sheldrake’s “dogma 4” yet happily attempting to invoke the second law to “support” your as yet unascertained point). If you would, please also address whether quadrupeds are capable of Wielding the Power and the reasoning that underlies the conclusion.
Marg October 4, 3:54 pm:
OK, then, you imagine many universes, none of which having any interaction with the universe we inhabit. That doesn’t help your conjecture of some sort ‘energy healing’ interaction. It also brings up questions — about interactions between and among these extra[neous] universes, about the the number of these extraneous universes that are involved in your ‘energy healing’ conjectures, about the identities of the involved vs non-involved universes, and so on. These questions are irrelevant to anything, so I chose to describe all your imagined universes as one imagined universe.
If I misrepresented your imaginings in any significant manner, I would apologize and request some clarification from you, including the significance of your corrections.
Marg October 4, 4:01 pm :
When I was a child, ca seventy years ago, I learned that the purpose of language is communication of facts and ideas; to make this possible, we use words; that specific words have specific meanings; and that the use of a word calls out its specific meaning. Ever since then, I have made it my practice to use words that best express the meaning I wish to convey. I’m sometimes mistaken in my choice of words: at age 7, I was corrected for using ‘deep’ when I intended the meaning denoted by the word ‘steep’, for instance. That mistake, and my friend’s correction of it, was a major milestone in my learning.
In this case, I purposely used the word ‘plausible’ to denote the idea of – hold your hat – plausibility. I did not abuse the word ‘plausible’ to denote ‘correctness’ or ‘right’.
I specifically chose to use the word ‘conjecture’ to describe both ideas, because both ideas are purely conjectures — a conjecture is a statement of an idea that does not make a claim as to correctness or of being right. I allow you the grace of ignoring your spurious claims about your conjecture, for the moment, and chose to concentrate on the conjecture itself. Those claims are another matter, distinguishable from the merit (or lack thereof) of the conjecture itself.
In this particular use, as you quoted, I said that my conjecture did not contradict anything I knew (at the time of writing) or understood about how the universe actually works. I specifically contrasted my conjecture with yours, stating that your ‘energy healing’ conjecture is much less plausible — in other words, your conjecture does indeed contradict what’s known and understood about the universe.
In my lifetime, I have observed (and learned about) exactly two ways conjectures and other imaginings are treated. The first is the humility of the scientific community (notwithstanding – and partly because of – the arrogance that some scientists display). The scientific community treats a conjecture by honestly seek evidence (again, the dishonesty of some, like Wakefield, is not a counterexample) to support and contradict the conjecture, if the conjecture has any plausibility to begin with. Should supporting evidence fail to show up, the conjecture is set aside. Should contradicting evidence appear, the conjecture is abandoned as implausible after all, possibly to be replaced by a new or modified one.
The other ways conjectures and other imaginings are treated is the arrogant woo/religions approach: insist that, since the proponent can imagine it, the conjecture must be the Truth™, that plausibility and supporting evidence are not necessary except for whatever can be faked, and that contradictory evidence is false or irrelevant. In your arrogant approach, implausibility with contra-factuality is not a bug, it’s a feature.
I constructed my conjecture to compare and contrast with yours (I learned about compare and contrast in grade school). They are comparable in their total lack of supporting evidence, by design in mine, by apparent arrogance in yours. I chose the word ‘unencumbered’ as a mild snark in both directions. I note that my conjecture is plausible, in that it is neutral with respect to contrary evidence, where yours lies in the face of available evidence.
Thus, your question “this makes yours right” is not even wrong: nobody competent in the English-language communication would make that response unmaliciously. Introducing this false dichotomy as a serious response is most likely a sign of lack of comprehension, of malice in discussion, or both.
@Narad
Just for the fun of it — and I take the risk here to be absolutely wrong since I have no clue who you are or where you are and theoretically one needs a picture and a location to do this — I get right knee. I do sometimes mix up left and right — and I am also getting a whisper of a hunch that you are going say “aha! wrong! tennis elbow!” Now please be reminded that this is all in a spirit of fun. I am not actually expecting to be right. BTW I also get something around the thyroid.
You really need to lighten up on the sarcasm.
@Marg
Now do it blindfolded. And without asking the patient any questions, and without receiving any cold reading from them without your/their knowledge. With double-blind controls, randomisation, and proper study. Then show us your data. Not anecdotes.
Oh wait – someone did that… Emily something or other… (slight sarcasm to be read: I mentioned here way way way upthread)
You still refuse to answer my questions and criticisms. Am I just too negative/arrogant to deserve a response? I guess the others are just a little less arrogant than me, since you keep replying to them.
How is it possible this Gish gallop is still running?
@Flip
You need to lighten up on the sarcasm too.
No, I was offering to inflict upon myself an injury, which is why I asked for the definition. Obviously, it would be a minor one, but if you were tuned into the signal, it would represent a spike in the “field.” Do you want me to provide the local geomagnetic field strength based on latitude?
@Marg- So, you admit Flip has a valid point? Because you never said he didn’t.
@Gray Falcon
No. Emily’s study was flawed and was only published in whatever journal it was published in because she proved something the powers that be were gleeful about. Had she actually proven with her feeble study that TT had merit, you would have never heard of the study because it would have never been published. And if it saw the light of day, say, on the internet, you would have torn it to shreds for being inadequate and proving nothing.
What a nasty bunch you are (with some exceptions).
Marg, your tedious, rambling, and occasionally frankly insulting efforts have been the recipient of remarkable patience.
@Narad
And how is your right knee? You never said.
My right knee is just dandy, thanks.
@Narad
Happy to hear it. But even if it weren’t, I doubt that you’d admit it.
Why do you think I offered to inflict a minor injury? We could escrow it with a third party. Fiirst, you need to define “injury.” Is it a quantized object in the healing field?
@Narad
Nope. No self-inflicted injuries. I don’t think minor cuts would register.
Oh, great, we have a qualifier, but not a definition. Fascinating. So, why did you miss totally? I’m not a spring chicken. Surely, it couldn’t be this operating principle.
“What a nasty bunch you are”
Cette animal est bien mechant
Quand on l’attaque, il se defend.
JAMA, Marg. The passive-aggressiveness is duly noted. Have you ever considered sending reiki back through time to avert this disaster?
@Marg
You know what else you can’t learn from the internet? How to make an interplanetary spaceship out of used Volvo parts.
Way to miss the point of Narad’s question – I solved it in my head without having to Google in a couple of minutes. I suspect most of the commentators and lurkers did the same.
Bill Price @ 11:04 PM
Bolding mine (if it works)
Marg @11:34 PM
Bill Price – perhaps you should apply for the JREF million dollar prize. 😉
Marg – would you care to enlighten us as to why Emily Rosa’s study was flawed? I can think of one minor objection, however, this objection does not “invalidate” the results.
Geomagnetic probes
If the term ‘geomagnetic probe’ (GP) has any meaning, it refers to a magnetometer, probably portable, that measures at least one vector of the ambient magnetic field, and is optimized around the range of interesting values of the geomagnetic field (25,000 to 65,000 nanoteslas (0.25 to 0.65 gauss), per Wikipedia). A less meaningful variant would measure only the magnitude of the field, with some arbitrary built-in coefficients for the three vectors required. A really useful one would read and display all three vectors. Of course, a simple magnetic compass could be characterized as a GP for some trivial and parochial purposes since it roughly measures and indicates a rotational dimension of the field direction (but not magnitude): some can even be used to indicate the ‘dip’ of the field, but these tend to be more expensive.
By being optimized for the nominal geomagnetic field-strength range, a real GP will be sensitive to small variations: if it’s not sensitive, it’s not very useful as a geomagnetic probe. Because of its sensitivity, care must be taken to recognize and account for magnetic noise in its readings: keep in mind that the geomagnetic field component cannot be distinguished from any other magnetic field component. If the geomagnetic field is the actual object of measurement, an extreme low-pass filter (milliHertz or lower) can help by reducing noise above its cutoff. In a compass, whether terrestrial, aeronautical, or marine, liquid damping is useful, but only when longer-term observation is added to the filtering. If the object of measurement is the non-geomagnetic contribution to the ambient field, the geomagnetic component can probably be treated as a constant.
Even with extreme filtering, care must be taken: single readings are useless, as are real-time displays. A recorded time series, sampled often enough, can be processed heavily, thereby reducing or amplifying transient effects to get ‘good’ measurements.
Any civilized portion of the earth (such as a laboratory containing mice) is rife with non-stationary magnetic and electromagnetic fields. Even such ‘minor’ artifacts as an electric watch or a cell-phone with a vibration feature may have enough remanent magnetic field to disturb a measurement, if they close enough and the GP is sensitive enough. Obviously, a refrigerator in the same or nearby room, an elevator in an adjacent shaft, or a truck in a nearby driveway can cause time-varying magnetic effects: these must all be accounted for.
In any case, care is required to calibrate and control a GP in situ, before and after any measurements of interest. The required control is lost if the GP is moved.
In order to be considered meaningful in any way, GP measurements must take all these factors into account, along with some that I may not have considered. Any experimental results generated using GP measurements must report on all these elements, and then some.
—————————————————————————-
The above is a non-expert analysis, based on trivial consideration of known properties of magnetic fields, known requirements for any valid measurements, and other facts of life in the real world. It is subject to correction and refinement by anyone with appropriate expertise.
Marg’s reports of Bengston’s adventures with GPs fail to have any meaning, because of lack of data on the characteristics of the GPs used, their deployment, their calibration, the control measurements, as well as numbers for the times and vectors of the “geomagnetic disturbances” being bruited about. These fatal defects can, naturally, be eliminated by proper protocol and reporting on Bengston’s and Marg’s behalf.
“Oh, great, we have a qualifier, but not a definition. Fascinating.”
This is like that kid from BC I refuse to name who claims a similar remote healing ability but only if u send a colour photo – no B&W – wrapped in money so that he can see u down to the molecular level and heal u.
Except when he doesn’t.
These healing claims are not very holistic are they? They don’t play very well with what we do know about big and small things. And they don’t fare very well when subject to scrutiny using methods that help define these things either.
So there’s another set of rules for these healing things we are completely unable to figure out but Marg et al have the ability to feel and manipulate even at a distance.
Just not under scrutiny.
That’s why Emily Rosa’s experiment is flawed.
It’s funny how all these different healing methods aren’t always different, just when they need to be.
You have to admire Marg. Her tenacity is entertaining. Few trolls hang around this long. She has yet to state her evidence in any kind of way. I understand. She is too invested in her beliefs to hear otherwise and thus can’t really defend her corner. I can tell you that as a health care professional of over 20 years I have changed many things over the years in the way I interact with patients. Marg continues to wave her hands. What would it take for her to change?
Perhaps Marge can try waving her feet? 😀
@Marg
Tone trolling now?
I see the best you can do to reply to my questions and criticisms is to … continue ignoring them.
I see… nothing to do with it being repeatable data that was backed up by actual scientists doing other experiments, or the fact that plenty of people seem to publish outside of scientific journals anyway. Or not winning the Million Dollar Challenge. But yes, call conspiracy. That’s convincing. (Ooops, my bad, sarcasm again!)
But thanks for sidestepping the point, which is that if you actually study the issue using proper protocols, you might actually prove something. Instead you offer anecdotes which, from your limited description, I could easily see a number of reasons why you might think you’re getting a hit, without actually having any energy healing involved.
Care to respond properly now I’ve painted my point in neon colours?
So this subtle energy thing works for cancer but doesn’t work on minor cuts? Why not?
Does negative thinking affect one’s ability to self heal Marg?
@Narad
I’ll say. The only reason I’m getting more sarcastic in these posts is because I’m losing my patience.
@Al Kimeea
Marg did the same thing above with the knee injury. She said that she might be wrong – using the old standard of making it vague enough that you can count a hit even when it’s a miss.
Marg, let’s assume that you could actually wave your hands over someone and detect a site of injury. You do understand that, while interesting, it isn’t evidence that waving your hands can also cure cancer in mice (or anything else in any other species, for that matter)?
As for the Emily Rosa article in JAMA you’re so dismissive of, how was her experimental design flawed?
Be specific: tell us exactly what needed to be done differently for you to accept the finding that Therapeutic Touch practioners ability to detect ‘Human Energy Fields’ is no better than chance?
Surely you don’t consider it’s flawed simply because you it doesn’t support your preferred and predetermined belief in energy healing–right?
( @ Agashem: this thread reminds me of a cafe where you drop in and converse as you drink your chai latte)
At any rate, my familarity with energy healing derives from many tales I’ve heard told by a woo-meister who calls himself a sensitive- an ability he inherited from his mother.
It seems that he can sense disturbances and blockages in the life force that circulates within each of us which leads to his pre-cognition of health outcomes based on what will come to pass if the sufferer continues on his or her path of un-righteousness. He adjusts the un-ruly energies via laying-on-of-hands, bringing them into synch with his own superlative patterns. In addition, he prescribes diet, exercise, meditation and supplements which will keep the energy upon the right path. It seems that particular foods and constituent parts of foods ( phyto-nutrients) work to balance energies while other foods and drink produce unhealthy vibrations and health consequences.
All of this ties in with Rife who ‘discovered’ specific frequencies wherein disease or health transpired. Each condition has its own healing frequency which can cure it. Needless to say, his activities were abruptly curtailed by the rivalling parties of orthodox medicine and the government.
The aforementioned woo-meister was privy to Rife’s notes which were hidden in an old farmhouse, watched over by his keeper-of-the-flame, an elderly woman who allowed the woo to read them in the 1970s.
He went on to try various methods of healing rats burned by radiation or which had cancer via nutrition or prayer- and healing by well-known religious healers of all faiths. Needless to say, the results were spectacular but NO ONE would publish his work.
Alas the prophet is not recognised in his own place or times.
Hey, I know a cardiologist who can do the same thing.
@ Narad:
But aren’t we all doing this in some manner always? We assess others’ relative health, abilities and emotional states and speculate about their future by using everyday perception and imagination. I can’t see how we can avoid doing it.
The doctor uses instruments as well.
Here is an interesting discussion on the Emily Rosa experiment:
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=18852
Flaw number one was that Emily herself was the subject whose energy field the TT practitioners had to feel. People critique Bengston for participating in his own experiment, so that should apply to Rosa as well. Emily should have used another subject and acted as observer.
Flaw number two: experiment size. A small sample of 21 nurses was used.
Flaw number three: where is your control group?
Also, where is your replication by reputable scientists?
I think the best test of the validity of this experiment is to ask what the reaction to it would have been if the TT practitioners could feel the energy field.
As one poster said:
Originally posted by T’ai Chi
Come on Claus! Let’s turn this around. If I did an experiment in my basement that had strong evidence of TT, published it, you really think you’d say ‘Mm, T’ai Chi isn’t a scientist, but man, his evidence sure it good! Therefore, TT is real.’, no, you’d say ‘what a bunch of unscientific claptrap, this guy isn’t even a real scientist’, and etc.
To which I will add that there is no way on this God’s earth that Tai Chi’s successful experiment would have turned up in the JAMA
Aside from all that, using the hand only as a target was an inadequate way to test TT. It should have been a whole person. I.e., someone standing on the other side of the blind or no one there at all.
Here is another critique
http://www.academia.edu/1329833/Transgressing_the_boundaries_of_science_Glazer_scepticism_and_Emilys_experiment
“The last serious error occurred when the authors calculated the power for Emily’s experiment, leadingto a misstatement of the likelihood that skilled TTPswould pass Emily’s experiment. Power refers to theprobability that a TTP skilled at a prespecified level,at tasks identical to those tested, will pass the test. Infact, TTPs make no claims about their ability to detecthands so, appealing as it may be, the test may notapply to routine TT practice at all. The JAMA authors failed to adjust their power calculations for the two phases required, resulting in a clear bias against TTPs in Emily’s experiment compared to generally accepted biomedical research standards which call for a power of at least 0.80. The authors suggested that TTPs with moderate skills such as two out of three (three out of four) correct answers should pass Emily’s experiment. However, the true power of Emily’s experiment, at the authors’ specified skill levels, is less than 0.10 (0.28). This bears repeating: at the authors’ specified skill levels there is a 90% (72%) chance that TTPs will fail the test. There is simply no justification for these values or their incorrect calculation in an article published in a journal of the status and regard of the JAMA.”
@Marg
Those are fair points, and my only comment would be that practicality might have something to do with the study not being perfect. (All except the one about replication, I’ll get to that in a second)
However, my problem is:
Even if this DOESN’T prove anything about energy/faith healing, where’s your evidence that energy/faith healing DOES WORK?
See, it’s the consensus and total of the data that matters. We talk about Emily’s experiment because it’s one of MANY studies and sometimes it’s easy to pick one to talk about.
You use Bengston, we counter with Emily’s study. One cancels out the other. Now let’s look at the whole: the majority of studies show no effect whatsoever, let alone a mechanism. There’s a whole lot of evidence to say energy/faith healing DOESN’T WORK, and very few (good) studies that show any effect at all. (I’m trying to find a meta-analysis, but darn if Pubmed chooses this moment to stop working for me…)
… I’ll note that what you complain about isn’t the stuff that I suggested you try: blindfolds, getting rid of cold reading cues, no conversation, etc. At least Emily used some controls, whereas all you have to offer is an anecdote.
Where are your double-blind randomised trials with several hundred participants and control groups?
ONCE MORE: JUST BECAUSE SOMETHING IN SCIENCE CAN BE PROVEN WRONG DOES not MEAN THAT YOUR FLAVOUR OF WHATEVER HAS BEEN PROVEN RIGHT.
As for your linking to the Randi forum, I wonder if you just go looking for ‘evidence’ after the fact to suit your points. I see nothing in that thread that proves that energy healing works or that Emily’s study is so flawed as to be useless. Basically you’ve pointed to an argument – that you clearly agree with – that she tested something other people don’t claim to be able to do. In which case, I say: woomeisters have billions of different ideas of how it should or does work, and to test them all would be impossible. Study it yourself for ** sake.
If it was well-designed and stood up to replication, sure it would.
PS. Does negative thinking affect one’s ability to self heal?
I believe in Emily’s experiment the nurses themselves said they could detect the hand with no problem. That afterwards the criticism that detecting hands is not part of TT (why is it called touch when there is nothing touched I wonder?) is lame to say the least, especially given these nurses were confident they could do so with their super sensitive healing hands.
As I’m sure I have mentioned before, but can’t locate in this thread, in my experiments with ‘energy healing’ I found that I could often tell where a painful area was by holding my hands a few inches away from a person’s body and scanning. Since painful areas are usually inflamed, and thus giving off more heat than non-painful areas, and since my hands are equipped with exquisitely sensitive infrared detectors, applying Occam’s parsimonious razor I tend to assume that was the energy I was detecting, not some energy unknown to science. Add a little cold reading, and attribute any false positives as picking up an energy blockage the patient is unaware of, and there is nothing mysterious left to explain.
Marg,
I disagree that the ‘flaws’ you point out in Emily Rosa’s study are flaws:
I don’t see why that is a flaw. Emily is a human being with, allegedly, an energy field that the nurses claimed they could detect. In fact they specifically claimed that they could reliably detect the energy field of her hand that gave off the most energy. Are you are suggesting that she can deliberately turn her energy field off to confuse TT practitioners?
It’s easy to see how Bengston’s participation could have resulted in bias, but much more difficult to see how Emily’s could. Do you have some suggestions as to how that might have happened?
Sample size is important when you are trying to distinguish a small signal from noise. In this case the TT practitioners claimed that they could reliably detect a human energy field. You don’t need a large sample size to investigate this. Either the nurses could detect the energy field as they claimed or they couldn’t. If they had claimed they could detect it 5% more often than you would expect from chance, a larger sample size would be required, but they didn’t and it wasn’t.
The controls were the occasions when Emily didn’t hold her hand over the nurses’ hands. What other kind of control group do you think you would require to test the null hypothesis, which is that the nurses were unable to detect an energy field?
Why do you need to replicate such a clear-cut negative study like this? Studies quite often give false positive results, for various reasons, which is why they need to be replicated. Or something entirely unexpected that does not fit with our current understanding, like cold fusion for example, requires replication. These results are not unexpected, they are exactly what current scientific understanding would predict, they are not equivocal, there is no fuzzy gray area as there are in ESP studies, for example, where you can claim that there is a small effect over chance. In fact the nurses did slightly worse than you would expect by chance, though within the statistically expected variance. If there is something wrong with the study, where are the studies by TT practitioners that replicably show that they can detect the human energy field? Randi’s million dollars are waiting for anyone who can pass a test like this.
It’s not true that experiments with unexpected results never turn up in reputable scientific journals as I pointed out above on September 9, at 7:30 pm.
Special pleading and goalpost moving. The nurses were quite confident they were able to do this, and clearly couldn’t. If you believe you can reliably detect a whole person on the other side of a blind, I suggest you go for Randi’s million dollars.
BTW, my statistics are a little rusty, but the second critique you linked to doesn’t seem to make much sense. I will take a closer look later.
Argh. Krebiozen’s reply is so much better than mine. Darn you for being right.
My major gripe with energy healing is that its supporters postulate that ‘energy’ passes between a healer and a subject yet:
no one tells us *exactly* what kind of energy it is and
no one has attempted to measure it.
We live in an era in which astronomers measure what is occuring in distant galaxies, physicists peer inside the atom AND ITS PARTICLES and measure the un-imaginably small and physiology has taken us inside single neurons and measured minute charges; even human vision can detect light at the level of photons ( in darkness).
SO why haven’t energy healers attempted to measure that which they believe to be veridically present? If they claim that:
the energy caused an instrument to go absolutely wild and
healing led to marked changes in the brain ( MRI?) and
some healers claim that they feel heat or electricity-like sensations in their hands,
why doesn’t anyone try to measure this or record this?
Instead all ‘results’ are filtred through people who report what they experience.
Wow, hey, we’re still at it? A humbug remains a humbug no matter what the special pleading may be. And as for “Transgressing the boundaries…” – didn’t A. Sokal dispose of that quite neatly? And as long as we’re still at it, I continue to enjoy flip, DW, K, at al.
@Krebiozen
Experiments with negative results may turn up but more often than not don’t (see Goldacre).
I have said time and again that it HAS been measured. See Oschman, Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis.
Herewith a summary from http://www.reiki.org/reikinews/sciencemeasures.htm
Projection of energy from the hands of healers.
In the early 1980’s, Dr. John Zimmerman began a series of important studies on therapeutic touch, using a SQUID magnetometer at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver. Zimmerman discovered that a huge pulsating biomagnetic field emanated from the hands of a TT practitioner. The frequency of the pulsations is not steady, but “sweeps” up and down, from 0.3 to 30 Hz (cycles per second), with most of the activity in the range of 7-8 Hz (Figure 2). The biomagnetic pulsations from the hands are in the same frequency range as brain waves and scientific studies of the frequencies necessary for healing indicate that they naturally sweep back and forth through the full range of therapeutic frequencies, thus being able to stimulate healing in any part of the body.
Confirmation of Zimmerman’s findings came in 1992, when Seto and colleagues, in Japan, studied practitioners of various martial arts and other healing methods. The “Qi emission” from the hands is so strong that they can be detected with a simple magnetometer consisting of two coils, of 80,000 turns of wire. Since then, a number of studies of QiGong practitioners have extended these investigations to the sound, light, and thermal fields emitted by healers. What is particularly interesting is that the pulsation frequency varies from moment to moment. Moreover, medical researchers developing pulsating magnetic field therapies are finding that these same frequencies are effective for ‘ jump starting’ healing in a variety of soft and hard tissues, even in patients unhealed for as long as 40 years. Specific frequencies stimulate the growth of nerves, bones, skin, capillaries, and ligaments.”
@Flip, re: “negative thoughts”
There are three elements to “energy healing”. One is the person in need of healing, the second is the “healer” or “facilitator” and the third is “the energy source”. The job of the so-called healer is to hook up the “healee” to the “energy source”. (God knows why the “healee” cannot do this for him or herself; if we could figure that out we would not need either healers or doctors.) At any rate, Bengston theorizes that the healing impulse does not come from the so-called healer, who is in fact the middle-man. Nor does it come from the energy source. It comes from the person in need of healing. So yes, negative thoughts can interfere. You can jump on me all you want about “blaming the patient”, but my experience has been that I can successfully treat people who are skeptical but open-minded, but people who cross their arms and say this stuff is bullshit will get very little from it, if anything at all. And, BTW, that’s why animals are easy to treat, because they don’t have any preconceptions (or little arms to cross).
Sorry!
Are you referring to publication bias? I don’t really follow what relevance that has to Emily Rosa’s experiment.
Time and time again we have disagreed. See Harriet Hall’s review of Oschman’s book which mentions Zimmerman and the “huge pulsating biomagnetic field emanated from the hands of a TT practitioner” he claimed to have detected. How do biomagnetic fields differ from regular electromagnetic fields, by the way? Is it really so remarkable that human bodies, which are electrochemical in nature, have electromagetic fields around them? Do you have any citations for the following claim?
As Dr. Hall puts it, of Oschman’s book:
@Krebiozen
And then, I presume, Dr. Hall goes on to list all the studies showing negative evidence.
I am with Oschman. I believe studies have been dismissed simply because “science” does not recognize their rationale. What’s more, “science”, or rather scientists, are totally disinterested in the topic, so studies are few and in between.
And I fail to understand how publication bias does not apply to Emily’s study. How gleeful do you think the folks at the JAMA were about it? How likely would it have been to see the light of day, seriously, if the results had been the opposite? Nil.
The fields Oschman speaks of were detected with trained practitioners but not untrained controls.
This really comes down to a question of whom you believe. I choose to believe Oschman because my observations support what he says. You can choose to believe whomever you want.
As much as I’d like to continue along the natural vs supernatural path, I have just gotten myself appropriately dressed to the proverbial nines for my soiree and gotta go.
“few and far in between”
Really, Marg, you are a practitioner of this baloney. Come up with your own studies and publish them. And tell me, oh enlightened one, what have you changed in your practice since you started raindancing around people? What has changed in this supposedly ancient practice? Nothing? And yet you claim it is somehow scientific. As I stated earlier, in just the 20 or so years that I have been practicing, things have changed. What would you change to improve what you are doing or are you going to try and convince us that you have 100% success? And how do you measure your success?
Marg,
Why do you believe this? Which specific studies have been dismissed for this reason?
Sorry about the blockquote fail.
Here is an MD in the other camp, which takes energy medicine seriously.
http://www.faim.org/energymedicine/energy-medicine-united-states-historical-roots-current-status.html
I was very interested to find out about the work of Mae Wan Ho on the physics of biological organisms
http://www.amazon.ca/Rainbow-Worm-Organisms-Mae-Wan-Ho/dp/9812832602
It sounds like this Bengston needs lessons.
Marge said –
But today at 11:43 she says –
Maybe needs to give up on his ‘geomagnetic probes’ (whatever they are, I sure can’t find a description of them), and use a SQUID magnetometer , which does in fact exist. See –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID
How sensitive, you ask?
I am still waiting to hear what Marg has learned and therefore changed in all her years of “practice”.
D’oh.
Not only did I mess up the blockquote, I somehow messed up the second of Marge’s quotes (don’t ask me how).
Scroll up to read at 11:43 that Zimmerman used a SQUID.
@Agashem
I got better 🙂
Marg Oct 6 1:33 pm – my emphasis
This is why you are unscientific. You’re basing everything on your own beliefs. I note you didn’t support Oschman with any other studies (and no, the “ahead of his time” Yale guy from the 1920-30’s Oschman mentions doesn’t count, nor does the review of Oschman by Maret you linked) – but just your beliefs.
If you are going to continue to complain about the lack of studies I will suggest (again) that you write a grant and run some of your own.
I said this months ago, but apparently it bears repeating: Believe what you want to believe. Just don’t try to dress up your beliefs in what you are mistaking for science, because it isn’t. The bottom line is that your beliefs remain your beliefs.
And yes experience teaches one a lot but how can YOU measure how much better you have gotten? I know how I can measure – validated tests that have been replicated and have been shown to have good inter and intra tester reliability, so what is your proof of better???
Marg, I have previously asked you this question: why the hands? Please answer it. Remember, you are positing that “sensitives” can access an “energy source” via “the multiverse.” The level of anthropocentrism is breathtaking. I would also like to know where the field lines close back and why they get to defy the inverse square law.
Why would there be sound in addition to electromagnetism? Is it just that any periodic phenomenon will do? Where are the sensitives that can emit in the visual range?
Yah, to “detect” an effect the frequency of which could be measured just fine, even though its amplitude was “outside the calibrated range.” By contrast, Seto et al. got their ~3 mG result with two solenoids on a stick.
He’s most definitely on the other camp, and set up residence there several years ago. Karl Maret, M.D., M.Eng. is the President of ‘The Dove Health Alliance’ which states as its mission, “to discover, validate, and disseminate the principles and practices of energy medicine on personal, societal and environmental levels”. It also has Dana Ullman on its “outstanding advisory board “. Nuff said.
Mae-Wan Ho is director of the ‘The Institute of Science in Society’, which is apparently a UK society (I live in the UK), though I had never heard if it before wading through gallons of CAM nonsense, perhaps ‘Improbable Science’ says it best.
The kindest thing I can say about Ullman is that he isn’t as barking mad as that other proponent of homeopathy John Benneth. Posting references to these people is not helping your case at all Marg.
Marg, Seto et al. didn’t use a precession setup, did they? The abstract doesn’t say.
@Krebiozen
Open minded, are we?
You don’t get it Marg. You’re a standard-issue cosmic-mind occultist. You are at the center of the universe by decree, and there’s nothing but evasion and fog when things come down to brass tacks. Science, as it were, is merely a prop in the I’m Special Show, and therefore you feel entitled to condescend despite being a demonstrable ignoramus: it’s there to do what you say, not start asking impertinent questions. This observation requires nothing more than the ability to recognize the same old crap that has been recycling through these circles for ages.
@Narad
You don’t get that it’s all illusion anyway and we are all each of us at the centre of the universe, not by decree, but by the way things are. Science is merely prop in the “my, aren’t we humans special” show and in universal terms we are all demonstrable ignoramuses, yourself included.
Colossal fail, Marg. It’s perfectly reasonable to assert that one is “the system.” Only low-rent occultists assert that they are the the center of the universe, and the notion that “we are all each of us at the centre” is even a step more miserable than that, on the grounds of once again not even meaning anything.
@Narad
No, not colossal fail. Merely a difference of opinion from yours. Last time I looked you were not yet the supreme deity elected as arbiter of all things in the universe and of the opinions mere mortals were allowed to hold. Get over yourself.
Marg @October 6, 11:34 pm
Back at you.
Marg, you do know you espousing a system one can refute with a tire-iron to your leg?
Ah, Marg is abusing the word “opinion” to mean “any belief about any matter whatsoever.” The wise old saying is “you are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts”; Marg wants to put all the claims that are necessary for her sense of self-importance in the “opinion” category, so that she can wheeze and whine and play the martyr if anyone contradicts the things she wants to believe.
Here is an honest oncologist:
http://www.healthbeatblog.com/2009/01/a-very-open-letter-from-an-oncologist/
In case anyone’s wondering, I was not intending to make a threat with my last comment. Perhaps I should rephrase: If Marg’s philosophy were accurate, couldn’t we cure cancer by deciding it didn’t exist?
@Gray Falcon
We probably could, if enough of us decided to do it.
@Marg
Uh Marg – the function of martial arts is rather the opposite of healing. Could you explain what went wrong with this guy’s amazingly powerful chi energy field?
The M. Eng is red flag for crackpottery right there. I am wondering if I can make an arrangement with the University of Calgary Physics department whereby if I ever send them a refutation of relativity or my evidence that the sun is made of Iron, they will send a Grad student to shoot me.
@Marg
Get your story straight. Further upthread you said people could self-heal if taught the technique. Now my question was specifically a repeat of an earlier post of mine in reference to that.
I was SPECIFICALLY asking about a situation where say, you Marg, try to self heal a wound or any other kind of illness/whatever.
But thanks for confirming my suspicions about what you think of negative thinking. Yeah, you’re right: it’s bulldust. You have a perfect excuse when it doesn’t work, and a perfect excuse when it ‘does’.
As for the rest: You know what Marg? I’m done talking to you until you learn the difference between posting links to peer-reviewed studies, and links to everything else. Or at least, learn the difference between a proper study and vague philosophising. Or you know, publish your own darn studies – at least if you do it, you can be assured that you won’t fall under the evil spell of those conspiring publications. (What I wouldn’t give for my high school psych books right now – I realise that they had excellent explanations of good methodology, etc.)
You pick and choose where and when you want to answer a question and never actually respond to criticisms of how you approach energy healing (ie. proving it yourself, instead of complaining, god of the gaps style, that it just hasn’t been disproven yet), and you have not done anything to convince me you have more than logical fallacies, conspiracies, and wishful thinking up your sleeve.
As Narad says:
I’m done, I’m bored, let’s stick a fork in it, she’s overcooked now.
@THS
Thanks.
@Krebiozen
Feel free to do it again. Every time you folks post something better than I could put it, I learn something.
Plus much of what you said I probably would have said had I thought through my reply better.
couldn’t we cure cancer by deciding it didn’t exist?
we probably could, if enough of us decided to do it
Yes, that worked so well for AIDS.
@Shay
Maybe it will work for global warming.
If not, then all these energy healers who can evaporate a cumulus cloud by pointing to it could be put to work generating electricity. It shouldn’t take many of them to replace a coal fired power plant. Even burning the methane Marg is producing would be a step in the right direction.
Ain’t it fun, fisking Marg? She’s just so easy.
Marg, October 6, 11:43 am
I observe that this screed has no references . Thus, it gives no way to evaluate the conclusary statements that it’s full of. Therefor. we know not whether any of the stuff it’s summarizing is related to his summary.
The summary is unattributed, but here is the blurb from the bottom, which may, or may not, be related to the source of the summary:
Should he be, indeed, an ‘academic scientist’, then he knows, and ignores, science. The third endnote to the summary offers a list of their articles, but none of the actual sources, if they even truly exist.
Back to Marg’s quote from the summary:
Dr James Zimmerman should not be conflated with Dr James E. Zimmerman, the developer of SQUID magnetometry, but it’s likely that the reiki audience would conflate them, if given half a chance.
I must presume that the Colorado magnetometer is not at all similar to the SQUID magnetometer diagrammed in the summary. The diagrammed one shows a magnetoencephalograph sensor, not well suited to measuring hands. It’s said to have been in Helsinki, not Denver, so it’s not likely related. Since MEGs are no longer rare, there may well be one there, too. (Even though I live in a country town, miles from anywhere, I suspect that there are between one and three MEGs within fifty miles of where I sit.)
UC’s medical school is now in Aurora, BTW
Without references, it’s impossible to determine how, and whether, Zimmerman separated any ‘biomagnetic field’ from the ambient magnetic field. (In my essay of geomagnetic probes, above, I mentioned the principle of superposition, without naming it – that’s just the observation that a magnetic field is a magnetic field, regardless of the sources of its components. The Wikipedia article on Magnetoencephalography q.v. discusses some to the issues, better than I did.)
The illustration that Marg omitted from her quotation shows variations in some measurement, but no pulsations. One must presume that the ‘pulsations’ mentioned are just the variations shown.
What studies? As to be expected from woo-peddlers, no references are given. The recognized RRG/MEG ranges extend above the ELF range (3 through 30 Hz), by the way: I find no lower bound on the Delta range, usually defined as “up to 4 Hz.”
I thought we we reading about ‘biomagnetism’. How is “Qi emission” related?
This sounds impressive (woo peddlers like to use impressive-sounding numbers and terms – impressing the rube is easier than meaningfulness is). But let’s take a look. There’s not much we can do with the number, except speculate, but our speculation might be interesting (or not. Skip to the second blockquote down, under the lines of ===, if it’s not interesting).
Let’s assume that it’s 80,000 turns in each coil, rather than in toto. Let’s further assume that the coils are solenoidal (toroidal, doughnut-shaped) and have a square cross-section across the dough of the doughnut. That would be 283 rows of 283 turns each. Let’s further assume that it’s tightly wound, in orderly fashion (random or scramble wound might help the task, but it hurts this back-of-the-envelope analysis) and that it doesn’t have a ferromagnetic core that it’s wound on.
I dust off my 12th printing, second edition “Allied Electronics Data Handbook”, Allied Radio Corp, Chicago, 1960, and turn to the section on Coil Winding Data. p 26. There it gives me a formula for a ±1% approximation. It tells us that the inductance of such a coil, in µH approximates
where r is the mean radius of the dough, and l is its height. (I’ve lost my ARRL handbook, long ago.) The numerator evaluates to 2 × 10↑10; changing the unit of inductance from µH to H, the numerator becomes 2000.
The inductance depends on the wire size and the radius of the doughnut. A reasonable size range would be 30 awg to 40 awg, using enamel-insulated wire. At 30 awg, the height and width of the dough would be (using the wire-gauge tables on the same page – this only goes to 40awg, which is why I don’t analyze 42 awg) about 3-1/8 inches; for 36 awg, about 1.6 inches; for 40 awg, really close to 1 inch. Let’s assume 40 awg, for a 1-inch thick coil. Then l, in the above approximation, becomes 1.
Now to work on the doughnut hole. We have no idea how big the hole is, but the bigger the hole the smaller the inductance and thus, the sensitivity. A good guess would be 1/4 inch diameter (larger if it actually has a core). Thus, the inner radius is 1/8 inch; the outer radius is 9/8 inch; the mean radius is 5/8 inch. This gives us an bogey inductance of 2000/(6×5/8 + 18) or 2000/21.75 or 92 H. Hefty.
This bogey uses about 2π× 5/8 × 80000 inches of wire, call it 314159 inches or 26000 feet. The next page of my magic handbook tells me that 40awg wire runs about 1 ohm per foot at 68°F, so we’ve got about 26 kΩ in each coil. Assuming a bigger coil, of course, increases the resistance. Adding a ferromagnetic core increases the inductance but doesn’t bother the resistance (except for how making the thing bigger increases the resistance). Magic Handbook tells me that 40awg weighs about .03 pounds per 1000 feet, so it’s about 9 oz of wire per coil.
I have no idea how to analyze the distributed capacitance of the thing, so I won’t. But with that much inductance, any interesting capacitance could have quite an effect on frequency response. Throw in the required amplification, and you’d better be careful about oscillation and damping.
A solenoid-wound coil is kinda directional: it would be most sensitive along the axis of the doughnut hole. If it has a ferromagnetic core, the directionality would be increased. If we assume that the two coils are oriented at right angles to each other, and to the direction of the prevailing magnetic field, they might be measuring other than tectonic effects on the geomagnetism.
On the other hand, they might be measuring vibrational effects. After all, moving a wire within a magnetic field is the way nearly all our electricity is generated, and all the coil can measure is motion between the coil itself and the magnetic field it’s in.
==================================================
[citations missing]
QiGong practitioners are noisy (“sound … fields”), glow in the dark (“light … fields”), and hot (“thermal fields”)?
[citations missing]
[citations missing]
My wife’s neurosurgeon ordered a pulsating-magnetic-field stimulator to help her heal following her spinal fusion. That surgery still qualifies as ‘failed’. Yes, that’s anecdotal – YMMV.
[citations missing]
This time, my HTML mostly worked, but my typing had a problem.
RRG/MEG should have been typed EEG/MEG.
Marg,
So much so I have been accused of naive gullibility by skeptics, as a matter of fact. I’m willing to entertain ideas that are scientifically implausible, play with them and experiment with them to some extent. I do eventually get bored when nothing remarkable or unexplainable occurs, and I’m not open-minded enough to ignore overwhelming evidence. That’s personality disorder and mental health problem territory IMO.
You aren’t really defending homeopathy, Ullman and Benneth are you? You should really read some of their writings on homeopathy, and perhaps you will understand why I am no longer as open-minded as I used to be in that area. You do understand what homeopathy actually is don’t you?
Yet:
So the universe’s all an illusion and doesn’t exist, and you are at the center of your non-existent universe, but Narad isn’t allowed to be at the center of his? If you create your own universe, are the center of it, but are not the arbiter of all in things in it, and you are the equal of the other illusory humans in it who have different ontologies, how does that work exactly?
[Trans: Hmm, these people don’t seem to be buying this “the universe is an illusion” BS my clients lap up, time for a distraction. Ooh look! A squirrel!]
Is the universe not illusory and energy healing not effective in the UK, where I live (and I suspect you do too), and where few if any of Dr. Peter Eisenberg’s complaints are relevant? How does this complaint about the way the US insurance and reimbursement system is set up have anything whatsoever to do we have been discussing here? Even if it was relevant, why link to a “Buy my book and DVD” website instead of some real evidence?
Bill,
No, there’s definitely a gremlin in the system that steals characters and replaces them with randomly selected wrong ones when you hit ‘Submit Comment’. It stole “with what” out of my penultimate sentence in my last comment.
I met a teaching assistant once, who told me she had been working with some sort of researcher. She claimed he had discovered an injectable substance that magically healed broken bones (I can’t tell you exactly how quickly this healing apparently occured but it was supposed eliminate the need for casts, etc). I was dumbfounded that if this teaching assistant really believed this injectable existed that it wouldn’t be heralded from the rooftops. Especially in this country with government funded health care. Trust me, they are looking to cut costs at every turn. Now here is Marg asserting that waving hands cures cancer and what? All of the countries whose governments spend billions of dollars a year aren’t screaming for this to become standard treatment? Seriously, it beggars belief.
I thought that meant they sparkled. We’re talking about vampires, right?
(I hope I got the html right. This was easier when we had preview.)
I have taken a closer look at Thomas Cox’s critique of Emily Rosa’s TT study that Marg referred to above.
His main complaint is that the nurses chose the correct hand fewer times than expected by chance. If the hands were chosen randomly you would expect “between 124 and 156 correct answers in 280 trials, in about 95% of such experiments”, yet the nurses got 123 correct answers. An anomaly with a 1 in 20 chance of happening by chance or something more significant? Perhaps Emily’s negative energies made the TTPs worse than chance at getting it right. How can I restrain my sarcasm when presented with something like this?
Using an analogy from an area I am familiar with, if a patient’s blood rhubarb test result was 123 µmol/L when the reference range for serum rhubarb was 124-156 µmol/L and the patient had no clinical symptoms consistent with a low rhubarb result (analogous to there being no good reason to think this putative ability actually exists) I would have no hesitation in declaring that rhubarb result as very probably normal.
Cox also complains that the JAMA paper says that there were 123 correct answers yet Quackwatch says there were 122. Were the nurses even worse than chance at guessing (I do think that’s the appropriate word here) if there was a hand over theirs than the paper stated? Has Dr. Barrett made a mistake or is something more sinister going on? I think Cox should stick to critiquing the study itself, and not what has been written about it elsewhere.
Another complaint is that, “The data presented by the authors suggest that when tested for a hand effect the TTPs answered correctly 27 out of 72 times with right hands and 43 out of 78 times with left hands.” Is the fact that there is a barely statistically significant difference between the hands of any interest or significance, when the guesses themselves appeared to be right or wrong purely randomly? Were the TTPs really worse than chance at guessing when Emily’s hand was over their right hands and better than chance when it was over their left hands? I very much doubt it.
I don’t buy Cox’s criticisms at all. This isn’t a study that is looking for a tiny effect against background of noise, it’s a study that test a very specific claim made by TTPs. The ability to detect the human energy field is described by TTPs (here for example 30s onwards) as a diagnostic tool they use to tell where energies are imbalanced and where they need to concentrate their healing energy. A diagnostic test that gives results that are no better than chance is useless.
The diagnostic blood tests with the worst specificity and sensitivity I have ever used all give far more reliable results than the TTPs demonstrate in Emily Rosa’s study. Those blood tests are used as screening tests to decide which patients get a more invasive but far more sensitive and specific test. For example PSA can be used to help decide which patients require prostatic biopsy, and prenatal maternal screening for Down Syndrome which is used to decide whether the mother requires amniocentesis and a diagnostic cytogenetics test.
The TTPs diagnostic handwaving test is used to decide which area of the patient is worked on, so even if energy healing worked, most of the time the TTPs must surely be working on the wrong area.
… Not quoting anyone here, Marg just reminded me of this particular sentence from postmodernist literature.
Suppose we were to believe that EVERYTHING were an illusion then why should we then accept ANYONE’S system of explanations about how it functions? Aren’t these illusory as well? If we cannot trust our senses, reasoning processes or authorities in diverse fields, why should we trust someone just because they SAY so?
Here is a parallel situation: I listen to and read alt med partisans eternally informing me that what I know/ studied is without value.. I am just a poor little sheep wot has gone astray…The educated elites (*comme moi*) are indoctrinated into a dogmatic, illusory system of knowledge that is created by the powers-that-be to benefit a select group of corporatists and governmental officials who also control information and decide who is an expert.
If an inspired researcher manages to reveal how skewed the “Official Truth” is, he or she becomes a pariah and is publicly disgraced and cast out from the society of acceptable authorities, like Mr Wakefield. Indeed those who tell me these tales, continue on about how they themselves are persecuted, rejected and ridiculed by the elites. Just like I’m doing now. Usually a diatribe follows about how corrupt and dissembling we , as a group are, because if you want to be considered an expert you have to do what you’re told and believe as you are instructed to believe. In an ILLUSION.
Thus I am to toss out whatever I believe in and accept instead the word – and ideas- of someone who benefits from the public’s acceptance both financially and through increased personal prestige. Who’s to say I can’t set up my own little system that declares the woo-meister’s totally invalid and illusory as well? -btw- it is.
I have often invited my critics to read what I write and compare it to what well-received woo-meisters write and judge honestly- and to themselves- no need to tell me- who has a firmer grasp on reality and is more likely to be addressing you in a way that will ultimately be to your benefit not our own.
Given that Seto et al. describe the apparatus as a gradiometer, I’m pretty sure that the two coils are axial solenoids mounted on on their mutual axis, with opposite heliticties, and connected at their near ends, with the idea being to achive some rejection of fields external to the measurement area between the coils. Now, since 80,000 turns of such a coil are the same as 80,000 single loops stacked on top of each other with a factor for the inclination of the winding, it could probably just be modeled as two single loops titled away from each other on their mutual symmetry axis. I’m rusty enough that this would be a tedious and error-prone exercise.
Now, if instead one winds the coils on a water-filled cylinder, one has two proton-precession magnetometers, in which case one is presumably going to have to further pulse the curves in order to decent relaxation times nd the details of the signal processing become essential. Absolutely nothing useful is describe in the abstract, just “80,000 turns” that are “carefully wound.” It’s certainly an ESL case, but without the actual text, which I haven’t turned up, nothing is revealed.
^ Ah, the switch from half- to all-decaf is not having a happy effect on my typing. The worst is “in order to get decent relaxation times and.”
@DW and others
No one is asking you to toss out what you know. Just to entertain the merest possibility that you don’t know everything and that there may be things out there that do not conform to your knowledge base or your philosophy.
@ Marg ( excuse my brevity… I have a guest arriving)
In order for me to accept the basics of energy healing I would HAVE to toss large swaths of what I DO believe to be accurate reflections of ‘reality’ ( as defined in common parlance).
This has nothing to do with the sum total of my knowledge or anyone else’s. I don’t know everything and there are secrets of tfhe universe which remain hidden to ALL of us- I doubt that energy healing is one of them. I am not an expert in everything – only one or two tiny little areas of one field- I DO have a good basic grasp of general science, even better in social science. I bow to others’ expertise often.
What I do ascertain is that many of those in alt med who scoff at SBM and SB psychology often have poor knowledge of general science, as well as those disciplines- scattershot and patchy- although they would speak to their enraptured audiences as though *ex cathedra*.
Freaking blockquote.
And a cackling virtual gremlin adds another clawful of characters to its cyberspace cache.
For aficionados of woo, I have been meaning to mention here my favorite manifestation of energy healing BS, ‘Matrix Energetics’. ME appears to be a New Age form of charismatic Christian faith healing, complete with marks, I mean patients, falling to the ground in rapture. As the website puts it: “the person being worked on experiences a smooth wave of transformation and the body seems to drop in a completely relaxed wave instantly”. Do watch the ‘Exclusive 2-Point Video’ available on the ‘Watch Videos’ page, where the practitioner pointedly says that what he is doing, “at the quantum level collapses the pattern of what you’re measuring”, just as the mark collapses. Meaningless drivel with a hypnotic command embedded in it. Clever and despicable in equal measure.
A typical quote:
Just your cup of tea Marg, I imagine.
Marg @ 2:17 pm
Marg, I don’t have a problem with acknowledging I don’t know everything. Here’s what I do have a problem with: your smug suggestions that you do know better than everyone here.
Your comment is particularly offensive given the fact that for months now you have demonstrated over and over again that you do not really have a basic grasp of scientific method, or what should constitute convincing evidence. You ignore criticism. Instead of thinking about the questions posed to you, you toss out reading suggestions that are books, or random websites which “ conform to your knowledge base or your philosophy.” Hmmm. Can you see where I’m going with this?
Please, Marg: take your own advice.
Yet another tour of distractions away from the fact that MARG HAS NO EVIDENCE THAT ENERGY HEALING WORKS.
Or, what Chemmomo said.
@Chemomo
Especially her smug suggestions that she knows far more about physics than we do. I find this assertion is common among woos whose knowledge of physics is at the “What the Bleep do we Know” level. These people do not even know what the “quantum” in quantum physics refers to. I also find it both hilarious and annoying when she invokes the second law of thermodynamics (a favourite of anti-science types like creationists and AGW denialists) as an objection to the Big Bang while happily believing someone could evaporate all the water in cumulus cloud by pointing at it and projecting “energy”. Apparently she believes she has more knowledge of thermodynamics than an astrophysicist.
When posed with the “which bar is the magnet” problem, she immediately resorted to Google instead of trying to solve the problem by thinking about it. And she accuses us of blindly following authority.
It still beggars belief that she continues to post random thoughts without thinking about what is being said. I continue to be stunned that she carries on blithely waving her hands over all and sundry without acknowledging that things in the medical world have changed and evolved since she started the charade of her ‘energy healing’ practice. I am getting more than frustrated with her and on a level that the Thing dong troll used to make me feel…..
@DW
In order for me to accept the basics of energy healing I would HAVE to toss large swaths of what I DO believe to be accurate reflections of ‘reality’ ( as defined in common parlance).
What better illustration that is all predicated on belief, as Sheldrake suggests.
ARRRGGHHHHH!!!!!!
Any actual evidence Sheldrake’s right, to counter the near infinite body of evidence there’s a real world out there that doesn’t give a damn about who beleives what?
I’m sure that lurkers ( if any are still around) are asking themselves, ” Where is this thread going?” besides than tying itself into Celtic knots or wrapping itself into a Mobius strip?
If you were to read alt med lit or listen to a profound lecture on the nature of the soul or reality, you would encounter similar material and your own bias of belief would be questioned while the presenter would bury you in tons of soft material that *proves* the altie point.
I have some pretty strong beliefs: when I look around the room, I assume that what I perceive has a bit of congruence to physical reality; if I take a plane, I assume that a certain amount of lift is required to get the thing off the ground; should I have a conversation, I rely on the rules of etiquette and formation of complex verbs somehow holding up; the rules of matrix algebra or the market won’t suddenly collapse into a heap …. I hope you get my point.
But the alternate vision isn’t concerned with these facets of practical reality but immerses itself into a flight of stylistic ideas that have absolutely no grounding in the muck and gravelly sand of everyday living and grappling with its vicissitudes.
An example: last night’s PRN Talkback ( archived) included a woo-meister’s advice to an older guy who suffered from a history of panic attacks- the woo-meister suggested Chi Gung, “tapping” (EFT), juicing, supplements, meditation, spirituality et al.
People who experience panic attacks have a different physiological make-up from others who do not experience this symptom. It’s just how it is.
The guy is suffering and is led down the garden path of altie distraction and high sounding invocations about his ‘spirit’. A ‘little yellow pill’ would help him almost immediately and calm the other physiological symptoms ( CV especially) that could harm him in *other* ways. He would be told ( by alties) that the pharmacological solution would be at risk to his health, perhaps even to his soul.
I find advice like this to be a public dis-service because it mis-leads trusting people who suffer and provides no real relief for them. Only talk and mis-direction.
This seems pretty much analogous to my perspective on Creationism. To accept Creationism and reject evolution, we would have to give up all our understanding of life on Earth, dismiss all the accurate predictions we made as coincidence, and replace the understandable connections with chaos and abject ignorance. Evolution is what makes all the scattered facts of life fit together so well, and they haven’t provided a decent alternative.
To accept energy healing would be quite similar. We have a pretty reliable understanding of how the human body works. We use that knowledge to devise and test new treatments, which expands out understanding in consistent ways. To accept energy healing and reject the “reductionist” material model of medicine, we’d have to believe that the underlying mechanisms behind those reliable, working treatments is wrong and that all our collective successes are the illusion of dumb luck on an unbelievable scale.
That’s the problem with a lot of woo. They want us to dismiss humanity’s successes as epic coincidence and accept their old alternatives based on much flimsier ground than well-evidenced, continually updated and corrected scientific theories. They don’t seem interested in the scale of what they’re asking, treating our position like irrational brand loyalty or a youthful rebellion.
DW – good first sentence that gave structure to my own thoughts when the recent entries in “Recent insolence returned” showed that this thread is still marg-mired. The purpose now seems to be nothing more than the determination that m. will not have the last word no matter how repetitive – not a new argument from (her) since the first round. A humbug remains a humbug no matter how much “soft material” (good phase, DW) is piled, higher or deeper.
Hi Marg (and hello to the rest of you too). Seeing as the dialogue has devolved into snide one-liner remarks and occasional links to random/marginally related pages on one side, and frustrated repetitive answers on the other, would you care to answer a few questions?
You don’t need to answer all at once, as there are quite a few questions below, but I (and others I’m sure) would surely be interested in your answers.
I
What’s the limit of your healing ability (to the best of your knowledge)? Are there any wounds/injuries/diseases/ailments you cannot heal, and what’s your theory as to why?
I’m not asking about specific patients who failed to be treated, due to scepticism, negative thoughts or sun spots, buy rather the generic scope of your talent.
I think you mentioned that small wounds wouldn’t register, but could you still heal them if you could inspect them? If not, what constitutes a small wound? Would an infected wound register better than a non-infected wound?
You tried diagnosing Narad over the internet, although admittedly, the connection was less than ideal. What is the minimum connection needed to heal a injury/ailment?
What is your success or failure percentage?
II
Are there any frauds in the healing business?
Have you ever heard about or met anybody who claimed they could heal via magic or vibrations or whatever but was just faking it? If yes, how was he/she exposed? If not, why do you think that is? Is healing so easy, is self-regulation so successful/non-existent or is it not in your interests to keep track of other healers?
III
Can you rate different healing techniques (Qi Gong, Therapeutic touch, faith healing, reiki, etc. and so on) for their healing ability and potency, or are they more or less of equal efficacy? If yes, which ones do you feel are inferior in quality to your practice?
IV
Does geographical range diminish the effect/does it stay the same/improve? Why do you think the answer is what it is? Is there a perceptible time delay in healing over great distances? Is healing several patients at once more or less effective than healing a single one? Does it matter if they are not in close vicinity of each other (like in a cage?) Is it possible to accidentally heal someone you had no contact with, but who had the same ailment as the real target? Is it possible to heal the stranger instead of the real target (meaning, how accurate is distant healing?)
V
Is the ability to dissolve clouds part of the ability to heal, or is it a separate skill? Are there other abilities/talents the gifted healer can do, separate from sensing injuries and facilitating healing.
How about it Marg? A great chance to disprove all the remarks about soft material and abrupt subject changes.
Looking forward to learning new things.
Thank you in advance.
-gaist
@ THS:
I thank you again for your kindness. I try to create succinct phrases of my own so that I am not tempted to steal from other writers.
As you may know, there’s a great deal of soft material in alt med and I have waded through most of it : it seems as if the public eats it up like custard- I think that its popularity illustrates a public desire to learn more about the world, people and how everything works ; pseudo-science sells and internet media- like the steaming swamps of irrationality I traverse-is becoming wildly successful because people are searching for solutions : woo-meisters blithely promise but can’t deliver anything… except soft answers to hard questions.
@Agashem
Loved the response.
@Gaist
All very reasonable questions.
I
I never make any assumptions ahead of time that what I do is going to work. There are variables out of my control, many of them to do with the person I am working with. I can tell you for certain that there is not much I can do about the common cold or even its attendant misery. Since the misery is caused by the immune response, that’s probably just as well. So viruses are out of bounds. I can tell you anecdotally that soft tissue injuries respond well. I can tell you that because I’ve had many instances where I’ve seen a positive response. The reason I told Narad a small self-inflicted cut might not register was that we were discussing distance diagnoses, and I thought a small cut was too minor an issue for that. I cannot tell you my rate of success at distance diagnoses because it’s not something I do all that often. I do know that in person I can more often than not pick the spot that’s in need of treatment. Usually what registers is heat or a general feeling of congestion. I don’t put my hands on the person so the heat I am feeling is either radiated or energetic. What I am most often “called to” is inflammation.
II
There must be frauds in the energy healing business just as there are in other fields of human endeavor. I would say it would be difficult to expose them. A large number of patients would have to come forward to say that this person had lied to them or took advantage of them. But this is true of medicine as well, as in the case of a gynecologist who was so supremely incompetent that he maimed dozens of women and kept moving (from province to province in Canada and then to the UK) to avoid his accusers. Then there was the Canadian pathologist whose false testimony wrongfully sent many parents whose children died to jail.
On the whole I am mistrustful of people who create “empires” or large businesses out their healing ability. For instance, I liked Dr. Bengston better before he had a CD to sell. I still believe him on the subject of the mice, but I would like to be shown that he can also cure people, and that he can teach people to heal to the same degree he can.
I think I mentioned before that the big problem with energy healing is that the ability varies greatly from practitioner to practitioner. I think Bengston says that it’s like musical ability, ranging from a few Mozarts to people who can manage to play Chopsticks on the piano. I have no idea how regulation will be managed, but the first step to regulation is to recognize it as something viable. And the second step after that is some kind of measurement.
III
My answer to III is a corollary to my answer to II: it’s in part dependent on the practitioner. I wouldn’t rate any particular method as lesser or greater on its own merits, although I would not rate prayer per se as a “healing technique”. I would also admit to a certain prejudice against “faith healing” of the televangelist variety. I don’t “faith healing” and “energy healing” as synonyms.
IV
I wouldn’t impute a range. Accuracy is an interesting question: Claude Swanson cites a qigong master who could kill cancer in a petri dish from thousands of miles away and deliberately leave another petri dish on the next shelf untouched. Based on Dr. Bengston’s performance with the mice, I would say he is not very accurate. And again based on Bengston’s experience I would say it might be possible to affect the wrong person, or an adjacent person, unintentionally — but then how would we know?
V
Cloud busting may or may not be a correlate to healing ability. That’s something else that hasn’t been tested. Individuals might have other correlated abilities, but that would be individually determined.
One of the reasons I would like scientists to take energy healing seriously is that I do believe their input to be valuable. If we could go beyond studies trying to debunk energy healing (such as Emily Rosa’s) to studies that tried to figure out what it was and how it worked we could understand it better. If we understood it better we could make it more reliably effective and perhaps figure out a means of delivery that did not require the waving of hands. A partnership of scientists and healers instead of the current state of discordance could lead to something truly revolutionary.
A small number will do, with appropriate word of mouth.
We could cure cancer if you would just believe hard enough’d.
@Narad
The internet would be a great venue for word to get around about such people. I occasionally google names of healers with the word “fraud” or “exposed”. I don’t find much. Usually it’s skeptical websites such as this one accusing them of being fraudulent without any evidence. But you would think that unhappy customers who feel they have been fleeced would make lots of noise.
@Narad
Mind like a steel trap. Tell me, where is it? Is your mind in your brain? In your head? Outside? How big is it? Does it encompass the universe?
That’s a rather naive point of view. There are a lot of social factors that discourage people from doing that.
1. Altie culture strongly discourages criticism of one of their gurus. Some people risk becoming a pariah among their social group. Same thing happens among religious communities.
2. Altie culture indoctrinates people into the idea that if a quack treatment doesn’t work, it’s always the patient’s fault. They were thinking negative thoughts. Their faith wasn’t strong enough. The didn’t want it bad enough. They cheated on their ultra-strict diet by splurging just once, ruining the entire thing. If the patient believes the excuses and blames himself, he’s not going to blame the guru. Again, same thing with religious groups.
3. People don’t want to admit they were fooled or that they were wrong. Some people puff their egos up so much they don’t dare suffer embarrassment for being foolish, so they avoid drawing attention when wronged.
4. If a treatment doesn’t work, altie culture has stressed “what works for you” in the vaguest sense, to encourage patients to keep trying more altie treatments until they find one that seems to work. The key is that there’s seldom any rhyme or reason behind why one quackery would work for one person but not another. It’s usually nothing but ad hoc hypotheses. Quite often, if someone keeps trying ineffective treatments, they’ll be fooled by the regressive fallacy into thinking one worked.
Of course, there are exceptions, as Narad links to, but from what I’ve seen, they’re a minority.
Right in front of my nose.
That would make for a very small mind.
That’s your trip, Marg.
Size 9-1/2.
Ask the cat; it knows the answer.
OK, now I have one for you, only a two-parter: (1) Where does thinking come from? (2) Where does it go?
@Narad
If it’s in front of your nose, how do you perceive it?
If it’s not inside your head, because it’s too small, how can it not be outside? Also, if it’s in front of your nose, how can it not be outside?
Thinking doesn’t come and it doesn’t go. It is.
Why should we be obligated to prove that they’re fraudulent when they’ve failed to provide good evidence that their treatments work? Do you think we should just believe in everyone’s accuracy and honesty by default? Is trust supposed to be given away blindly?
Here’s another hint, Marg: We don’t claim they’re all conscious, knowing frauds. A lot of them are sincere but deluded. It’s hard to tell the difference much of the time, so I prefer to judge by the plausibility of their claims and evaluate the evidence, rather than play psychic.
We believe in the accuracy and honesty of doctors, scientists and pharmaceutical companies. And how sometimes we are deceived. I have to keep coming back to this: many more people have died unnecessarily in the hands of doctors and after taking prescriptions drugs than at the hands of alternative practitioners.
“prescription drugs”
You give me this answer, and I drop an anvil on your head. Where is your thinking now?
@Narad
You don’t know. I don’t know. I could still be somewhere thinking, “crap, I don’t believe he just dropped an anvil on my head.” And you be going to jail, bro.
I’m not the spiritual four-flusher here.
Good start. Now, reconcile this with your statement, “Thinking doesn’t come and go. It just is.”
You are unconscious. Where is it?
You are saying thinking and consciousness are the same?
@Narad
In the NDE literature people are quite happily thinking while unconscious, in a coma, under anaesthetic, or to all intents and purposes dead. So that would suggest to me that consciousness and thinking are not inextricably linked. Or even that consciousness and being physically conscious are.
I am asking you a question, Marg.
And here is my response:
@Narad
In the NDE literature people are quite happily thinking while unconscious, in a coma, under anaesthetic, or to all intents and purposes dead. So that would suggest to me that consciousness and thinking are not inextricably linked. Or even that consciousness and being physically conscious are.
You are attached to name and form, Marg. Small mind.
How do you know those experiences happened while they were under, rather than, say, while they were drifting off or while ‘rebooting’? Our memories don’t have timestamps and we don’t have precision clocks. I also doubt there’s a genuine brain state that is completely “off.” Consciousness has a spectrum, not a binary on/off thing.
Oh, and Qualia Soup conveniently released a couple videos on some of the topic recently:
Substance Dualism part 1 and part 2.
@ Marg:
There is a huge difference between the groups you mention and alt med practitioners:
professionals are made to jump through a series of HOOPS, each held a bit higher than the last, from approximately the age of 12 at least until they retire- you need to fulfill admissions requirements, interviews, studies, exams and other qualifications that increase in difficulty as you ascend.
You are monitored if you are entrusted with care of patients ( or subjects) by your fellows and the government.
Similarly, pharmaceutical companies are regulated and must fulfill rules, being subject to sanction/ fines by overseers in the government’s agencies.
Science is an adverserial system: if your research appears to be suspicious, you can be assured that another scientist will be eager to show you the error of your ways PUBLICLY , guaranteeing eventual recognition of his or her OWN work.
Alt med practitioners often answer to NO ONE:
their schooling may be neglible, spurious or entirely absent. Their trade is not really monitored – either by professional organisations or by the government – UNLESS someone dies directly under their physical care.
Of course, they ARE being watched by concerned people who observe too many charlatans getting away with too much prevarication becoming wealthy at the expense of gullible followers. Some surveyors even enjoy their work.
@Denice Walter
And that is why pharmaceutical companies keep killing people and find themselves at the receiving of class action suits and multi-billion dollar fines?
“receiving end”
@Narad
And you keep moving the goal posts.
Go drink tea.
@Narad
Excellent idea.
@Marg
Blah blah blah no guarantees, get out clause, no evidence, just assertions, blah blah
As Brian Dunning is want to say: first we work it IF there is an effect to study. Then we worry about what it is and how it works.
Right there is your problem Marg. You’ve focused so completely on the latter you’ve forgotten you first need to prove the former. Which by the way, is exactly what Emily was trying to do.
Blah blah philosophy, blah, postmodernism, blah more assertions, blah
Is it me, or has Marg’s arguments become “I know you are, but what am I?” sort of style?
Nice to know she’s not even bothering anymore.
Here’s a funny idea: let’s find out HOW these people were discovered. Did someone wave a hand over their body and realise that they’d done something wrong? Or perhaps, was the scientific method used to discover fraud?
As for the rest, I see a pattern. Marg will respond in detail to any person who isn’t on her naughty list, until she realises that they won’t change their mind, and then, on the list they go.
Marg,
I strongly suspect that’s because energy healers, like other CAM practitioners, do nothing but exploit suggestion, expectation, confirmation bias and regression to the mean in conditions that have a large psychological component, are self-limiting and/or have a variable course.
The rest is unfalsifiable stuff about balancing energies, chakras etc.. I’m surprised you don’t claim to be able to affect colds, as even homeopathy can reduce the duration of a cold from a whole week to only 7 days.
You still completely miss the point. The important point is that millions of people’s lives are saved every year by prescription drugs and millions have their quality of life greatly improved by them. To return to my favorite example, anticoagulant drugs cause more serious adverse events than any other type of drug, thousands die every year, yet hundreds of thousands of lives are saved. Would you have us abandon them, and condemn hundreds of thousands of people to death every year? Can energy healing replace anticoagulant drugs? What about insulin, antibiotics, antiretrovirals, thyroxine and many, many others?
I have yet to see any convincing evidence that alternative practitioners have saved anyone’s life ever, except perhaps by noticing a serious health issue and referring them to a real doctor.
I want to add a little meat to my last comment, since deaths due to adverse drug events comes up with tedious regularity. This study carried out in a Norwegian hospital gives an idea of the circumstances in which fatal adverse drug events usually occur. The average age of these patients was over 70, most had comorbidity with more than 20% having 8 diagnoses or more, and more than a quarter had concomitant heart and obstructive lung disease.
Short version, these patients were elderly and very sick, with multiple serious conditions requiring a variety of drugs. This is an old study, but I doubt much has changed, apart from better safety standards being introduced, as we have aging populations and increasing polycomorbidity.
I get increasingly frustrated with people pointing out the number of people who die from medical interventions when they have absolutely no alternative to offer. What would you do for these patients Marg? Wave your hands over them while they died in agony?
One last thing. I would like to point out that over 30,000 people die in road traffic incidents in the USA, while none died in magic carpet accidents, apart from a few who failed to get to the hospital in time when in need of medical attention. We should surely encourage the use of magic carpets for transportation instead of cars and trucks.
wow, go to Nippising for a few days and the zombie lives still.
But asking the question Emily asked is out of bounds? It is unreasonable to better understand something by examining the ability of the claimants?
500 consumers, 1/2 healthy the other with various soft tissue issues. Marg gathers herself and those whose incomes fall below her threshold of trust.
We segregate the professional energy healers and double blind it by having someone else – Oprah? – know which consumer has what.
We let them loose on the study group and record the results. But they cant ask where it hurts, just pass the hands over the body to find the afflicted area.
I predict not only will the energy healing pros perform as poorly as under The Rosa Protocol, they will also have a broad range of diagnoses and excuses for their woeful inaccuracy.
Ever know anyone who’s had a stroke Marg? Some people can’t walk, or their faces droop, or they lose great chunks of memory or develop aphasia. The damaged areas of the brain are evident and known.
God answers all prayers. Sometimes the answer is no.
Having coffee and getting bored with debating with fundamentalists
@Krebiozen
Many of those people die from the drug cocktails they’ve been imbibing for decades. They get prescribed one drug, get side effects, get prescribed another drug to deal with the side effects and so on and so forth. If the first condition was properly treated in a non-pharmaceutical way they likely would not need the cocktail.
@Al Kimeea
Just because the radio is broken and cannot pick up signals does not mean that the signals are all inside the radio.
@Al Kimeea
I did suggest to Marg a study where cold reading wasn’t allowed and the healer had to be blindfolded. She had no response. And by hers to you, I’d say she’s still stumped.
Apparently directing healing at mice in cages from a distance is allowed, but healing close up without using cold reading is just too scary a thought!
@Krebiozen
24 people have recently died in Canada after committing suicide after taking a smoking-cessation aid called Champix.
Some people are now estimating the number of deaths from Vioxx at 500,000, based on a steep declne in mortality rates after Vioxx was pulled from the market:
http://blogs.wickedlocal.com/holmesandco/2012/05/16/the-vioxx-body-count/#axzz28o7gDOtK
Are you implying that when the elderly die from prescription drugs it doesn’t matter because they are elderly and they would have died anyway?
@Flip
I’d take up that challenge, but I can’t speak for my fellow practitioners.
Yet another tour of distractions away from the fact that MARG HAS NO EVIDENCE THAT ENERGY HEALING WORKS.
Or knows how to post reliable sources of information. Or knows how to make a comment without resorting to logical fallacies.
Feel free to post the peer-reviewed study when it’s published. Put up or shut up.
@Flip
Don’t miss the train.
@flip – we aren’t supposed to determine if there’s any actual effect, any legitimacy to the claims because Marg
I wonder where the signals in her head come from? Fort thought human affairs were directed from Mars…
Marg, did you read the comments to this article? They blow this premise of 500, 000 deaths right out of the water. With such a sloppy approach to things, it’s good that your so-called energy healing doesn’t really do a damn thing.
@Flip
You sound like a politician. Repeat a statement in capital letters over and over again doesn’t make it true.
The Bengston experiments provide adequate proof if you are willing to think hard enough.
I find it very interesting that all of you seem willing to defend the authority of science to your last drop of blood yet at the same time are quite prepared to believe (and completely unfazed by the notion) that trained scientists at university laboratories would have screwed up 10 or 12 of Bengston’s experiments either by providing him with faulty mice or through inadequate handling of the experimental animals.
“repeating”
I think what I find most frustrating about Marg is her limited imagination.
This is a tired old trope. Why does a soul need a brain to act as a “radio”? All you’re doing to the question of how the mind works is adding a middle man, artificially inflating the complexity without good cause.
Out of curiosity, Marg, do you think that drunk people’s souls are floating out in the ether, screaming at their body for doing stupid things, only for it to not respond? From what I’ve heard, their consciousness only does that after the event, after their livers break down the alcohol content in their bodies. And that’s assuming they remember any of it.
Can we build a spiritual Faraday cage around someone’s body to block their reception that doesn’t involve altering their brain?
@Al Kimeea
Was there an end to your sentence that’s gone missing? The gremlin seems to be back.
@Marg
Honey, I’m just trying to move you off the Gish gallop. If you posted something that wasn’t repeated ad naseum already, it might help. If you stopped running all over the place, that’d help too. I’m simply trying to get you to reply to questions that have been asked over the weeks; and to remind regulars and lurkers that you continually avoid doing so.
That it annoys you suggests that perhaps you don’t like being called on the fact that you have nothing but 12 studies up your sleeve – bad ones at that.
Mmm, no they don’t. Replication is key. Something you keep ignoring.
Anyway, I’m not defending science. Rather, I’m defending the principle of parsimony and the need for extraordinary evidence. What you don’t like is that our level for that evidence is higher than yours, and because we won’t accept your assertions without proof, you think that’s somehow being dogmatic.
I’d change my mind if you had something more to offer than… wait for it…
Logical fallacies, conspiracies, appeals to philosophy rather than evidence, lack of evidence, contradictions, and anecdotes. Oh, and the Gish gallop.
Now, I think I’ll be taking that train. Anyone want to join me on a trip to Piccadilly?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/07/proof-of-heaven-a-doctor-s-experience-with-the-afterlife.html
This is from a neurosurgeon, folks. One of your own:
“There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.
But that dimension—in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states—is there. It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey.”
…
“All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations. According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.”
…
“What happened to me demands explanation.
Modern physics tells us that the universe is a unity—that it is undivided. Though we seem to live in a world of separation and difference, physics tells us that beneath the surface, every object and event in the universe is completely woven up with every other object and event. There is no true separation.
Before my experience these ideas were abstractions. Today they are realities. Not only is the universe defined by unity, it is also—I now know—defined by love. The universe as I experienced it in my coma is—I have come to see with both shock and joy—the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their (very) different ways.
I’ve spent decades as a neurosurgeon at some of the most prestigious medical institutions in our country. I know that many of my peers hold—as I myself did—to the theory that the brain, and in particular the cortex, generates consciousness and that we live in a universe devoid of any kind of emotion, much less the unconditional love that I now know God and the universe have toward us. But that belief, that theory, now lies broken at our feet. What happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large.
I don’t expect this to be an easy task, for the reasons I described above. When the castle of an old scientific theory begins to show fault lines, no one wants to pay attention at first. The old castle simply took too much work to build in the first place, and if it falls, an entirely new one will have to be constructed in its place.”
This is in response to the discussion about brains and thought. Happy Tuesday.
By the way Marg, I’ll note that you have no response to my suggestion that you go and make your own study. If you’re perfectly happy to do it, why not shut up, go away, do the study, and come back when it’s been published?
Instead you simply remark on trains. Gee, that convinces me that you care about providing scientific evidence, doesn’t it?
Science is fine when it provides you studies you like: but a paradigm to be ignored when it doesn’t.
This is exactly the reason I’m repeating myself. If you had any sense you’d go away and do the science to lord it over us later.
Marg,
Do you actually have any evidence for this claim? I’m sick of people who have never worked in a hospital or otherwise had to deal with really sick patients making these stupid claims about death by medicine that don’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny. Do you have any examples of clotting disorders, insulin dependent diabetes, atrial fibrillation, rheumatoid arthritis, cancer or any other serious illness being “properly treated in a non-pharmaceutical way”? This is truly ignorant, arrogant BS.
I might respond by pointing out that half of all smokers will die of a smoking-related illness, so overall the drug probably saves lives, even if it does genuinely lead to suicide, which is far from certain. Nicotine withdrawal can make people pretty miserable too. Yet again you are trying to distract us away from the fact that alternative practitioners save no lives at all.
As TBruce pointed out, that doesn’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny either. Let’s look at Vioxx, since it’s another favorite target of alternative practitioners – apologies to regulars who have seen this before. Vioxx was associated with a 24% increase in heart attacks in a large Canadian study of elderly patients (PMID:15809459). That equates to 2.2 extra heart attacks in 1000 patients taking a low dose of Vioxx for a year and 7.7 extra heart attacks in those taking a high dose. Vioxx, as we all know, was taken off the market because of this increased risk of cardiovascular events.
Calcium supplementation increased the risk of a heart attack by 86% (HR=1.86; 95% CI 1.17 to 2.96) in another study (PMID: 22626900) of younger people, “aged 35-64 years and free of major CVD events at recruitment”, and those who used calcium supplements alone more than doubled their risk of a heart attack (HR=2.39; 95% CI 1.12 to 5.12). If Vioxx has killed half a million, how many millions have died from calcium supplements? Aren’t these the same calcium supplements recommended by those alternative practitioners who do no harm?
Please don’t be so obtuse. The point I was making was that the vast majority of people who die from adverse drug events are very sick elderly people with multiple serious, life-threatening conditions who are extremely difficult to manage. With an aging population hospitals see a never-ending stream of patients with diabetes, COPD, congestive cardiac failure, cancer, pneumonia, fractures from a fall and other serious comorbidities. These patients are undoubtedly going to die without treatment, and often the treatment may have serious side effects. We all have to die of something, and often the end of our lives will be in a hospital with a medical team having to decide when to stop aggressive treatment.
What is your alternative? Travel back in time to wave your hands over them to stop them getting sick in the first place? The implication I come across time and time again is that otherwise healthy people are dying in their droves from the effect of drugs prescribed by their family doctor, when this is simply not true. In my experience when a young and relatively healthy patient dies from an adverse drug event or from an error it makes it into the local and regional press. The picture you are painting is both inaccurate and dishonest.
Argument from authority. Argument from anecdote. Argument from personal incredulity AKA argument from lack of imagination.
My previous post was in response to the neurosurgeon who jumped to unwarranted conclusions solely from subjective experience and apparent ignorance that some people still have brain activity while in a comatose or coma-like state, as well as have brain activity in the process of going into or coming out of such states.
Question for the regulars – has Marg achieved the Dochniak level of persistent trolling yet? She’s not selling a book, but I’d say she’s just as committed to a completely unproven theory as he was.
@Bronze Dog
Yep. She could fill up 20 bingo cards all on her own. In fact, I just went to yourlogicalfallacyis.com and I think I counted all but two she hasn’t used (although I don’t remember word-for-word this whole thread).
@Marg
I never make any assumptions ahead of time that what I do is going to work. There are variables out of my control, many of them to do with the person I am working with. I can tell you for certain that there is not much I can do about the common cold or even its attendant misery.
Can you reduce fever? If yes, is there a difference between fever caused by a disease or fever caused by inflammation?
How immediate is the pain relief, and how quickly do other symptoms disappear? Do they usually disappear fully or lessen? Are there some ailments that always require several visits, or are they one session treatments? If some require more sessions, do you have a theory as to why?
How well do you follow up on your patients? What kind of instructions do you usually give to your patients as they leave, or is the repair quick enough that there is little need? If you do give such instructions, do you think they differ greatly from instructions a medical doctor would give for a similiar injury? Do you recommend pain medication for inflammation you’ve treated?
Do you think there are more fraudulent healers than conventional medical professionals, or less? As these frauds obviously are a health hazard (in as much as they leave ailments untreated), is there a possibility of the frauds and/or incompetents diminishing the whole field (like, it seems, bad drugs do the whole pharma industry)?
Do you think healers could benefit from similar regulatory system that is in place in modern medicine? Would licensing, periodical re-examinations, medical boards, malpractice insurances and peer-review improve the standard of your field? If yes, is there any effort into creating one (or is there one in place and I’m just ignorant)? If not, how come?
My apologies.
Do you feel there is a danger of, for example, getting rid of the wrong bacteria inside a body (instead of treating an infection or getting rid of a parasite healer wrecks the gut flora) or damaging the patient otherwise, via inaccuracy (either of position or of force, e.g. trying to treat high blood pressure and either making it drop dangerously low or increase even higher)? Or is there some innate safety mechanism in healing (can a healer for example harm a parasite in order to heal the host)?
Here’s an anecdote about the whole separate consciousness deal. Can’t remember where I heard this so sorry, no source, just an anecdote. A group of anaesthetists decided to test the out-of-body experience claims made by some people who had undergone major surgery. They wrote a phone number on top of a high shelf, only visible to someone floating in the middle of the room, and wrote “If you saw this in an out-of-body experience, call this number and I’ll give you $1000.” Nobody ever did.
If we are all projected from somewhere else, are the originals as different as we are, or do our brains just scramble the incoming signal? Do our brains broadcast back to the source, or is our memories only within ourselves?
It’s best to avoid the Northern Line whenever possible, in my experience.
I’ve got a counter-experience to the neurosurgeon’s. It’s from surgery. I was talking with the anesthesiologist as the IV was flowing into my arm, and all of the sudden, I woke up groggy and in pain several hours later when (I presume) a nurse called my name. I reasoned that a moan was the most succinct way to communicate that I was (partially) conscious and in pain. I didn’t spend those missing hours floating in the ether waiting for my body to pick up the phone. I was spending those hours being unconscious, or at the very least, in a minimally conscious state that didn’t involve transcribing long term memories I could later refer to.
Another related thought – if energy healing could have adverse effects, like stimulating an autoimmune response, killing off some essential gut flora or interfering with the ‘biomagnetic’ activity of the heart by mistake, would we know, even if they were of the same order of magnitude as those associated with Vioxx?
That’s a rhetorical question, but I’m pretty sure the answer is “no”. Would Marg even notice a 24% increase in heart attacks in people she has treated, over the course of a year? I very much doubt it. Is there really such a thing as a treatment that has effects that are only ever beneficial?
@ Marg:
Why would pharmaceutical companies want to kill PAYING customers? Seriously, life has been extended through the usage of SBM and meds: why do you think that so many LIVE long enough to NEED several rxs for conditions like CV, diabetes?
Here’s an anecdote that reflects population data:
part of my family has clear records of members’ births/ deaths in TWO countries over the past 125 years or so. Quite a few people died young near the turn of the last century from illnesses that would be either unheard of today or easily treated ( flu, TB, infection et al). All of these folks were white, middle to upper middle class, business-oriented, big city dwellers. In addition, LONGEVITY has increased in my family, just as it has in the general population: no reached the age of 90 until the 1980s and there have been several since then and EVERY SINGLE ONE of them was on heart and/or bp meds- they didn’t do it through juicing and supplements!
Marg, your material soungs like Gary Null ( Death By Medicine): I expect better of you – your IQ is most likely a sd higher and you have a much better command of the English language.
Whenever someone complains that people died from a drug, I ask ” Why did they take it IN THE FIRST PLACE?”
Why are these patients Krebiozen describes on multiple meds at all? Not because they’re healthy.
@flip – nope
I was knocked unconscious playing football (hand-egg to most of the rest of the world)
when I came to, I thought I was waking up from one of those flying dreams
until I hit the ground, 1-2 seconds after impact
The neurology of near death experiences
Nice distillation of the point.
Once upon a time, health was a luxury you couldn’t buy because no one could offer an improved chance at it. Now that science has made some level of health relatively affordable for people in developed nations, alties now assume that health was the natural state all along and that illness is artificial. It’s sickening.
To add to al kimeea’s last comment, that neuroscientist’s account reminded me of a very vivid and realistic ‘out-of-body experience’ I had when I was younger, not under the influence of drugs or anything like that, just taking a nap one afternoon, and experimenting with some techniques for inducing ‘OOBEs’ I had read about.
I saw my own body lying on the bed, passed through walls and ceilings, encountered and even battled with various entities and had a number of adventures in extraordinarily beautiful realms.
However, I also apparently witnessed a couple of things that I was able to check on later – I saw some people in another part of the house I was in, and saw some objects in a part of the room I was in that was out of my sight. Neither of them had any basis in reality – I had imagined them.
As vivid and compelling as that experience was, and it certainly was, the most likely explanation I have to accept is that it was an exceptionally vivid dream or something similar. Of course I wasn’t in a coma, but I somehow doubt even the most sensitive neurological tests can detect every flicker of consciousness. That’s why deciding on brain death isn’t as clear-cut as you might think.
Actually no, Marg: there isn’t. There are people who, after recovering consciousness, recovering from a coma, or after the anesthesia has worn off, asserted that while unconscious they were actively thinking/observing or famously ‘hovering above their bodies ” as a spectator, but there’s no actual evidence indicating these reports are accurate representations of actual events or experiences.
The Bengston experiments however found that energy healing treatment is no more effective at treating cancer in mice than no treatment whatsoever: both the treated and untreated mice survived, remember? No amount of wishful thinking, hand-waving or invoking buzz words like “quantum entanglement” can alter that simple fact.
Would you accept a clinical trial which found patients who receive a chemotherapeutic drug had absolutely identical survival times as patients who received absolutely no treatment whatsoever as proof the drug effectively cured cancer?
If not, why do you keep citing Bengston’s studies as if they were evidence that energy healing cures cancer?
One thing I’ve been informed of: This guy’s a neurosurgeon. Michael Egnor’s also a neurosurgeon, right? One of the sad and disturbing things I’ve learned from Egnor’s example is that being able and licensed to perform precision cuts on a brain does not necessarily involve an understanding of the brain or consciousness, or even being at all aware of the trends or current state of neuroscience. Either that, or it doesn’t rule out heavy compartmentalization, able to believe in monism while prepping for surgery but able to believe in dualism while on the internet.
Noteworthy point: This neurosurgeon wrote about these experiences over a period of time after the coma. Human memory isn’t an objective recording of events. People can unintentionally invent false memories. We’re story-driven creatures, and we feel a need to fill in gaps in our personal narratives.
JGC:
I just thought this bit of JGC’s comment was worth repeating.
On a political topic on another blog, I just posted a comment about a spectrum I perceive: There are principle-oriented people and position-oriented people. The former strive for a consistent rationale in how they reach their position. The latter start with an arbitrary position on an issue and then fish for principles and rationalizations to support their predetermined position. I think Marg is heavily position-oriented, and I expect her answer to JGC’s question would be revealing in that regard. Of course, I won’t be surprised if she avoids it.
As we have pointed out, the literature does not support Bengston’s claims about the mice involved, and their life expectancy. Remind me again where we can find details of those 10 or 12 experiments in reputable peer-reviewed journals, or any journals for that matter? Or anywhere that Bengston’s claims about these experiments are corroborated by these “trained scientists at university laboratories”?
I have only see one account written by Bengston published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine decades after the experiments were carried out. That particular journal is full of what looks to me like credulous nonsense.
I’d also like to point out that, like with vaccines, some people who take medications indulge in risky behaviors like swimming, sky-diving and riding or driving cars. A lot of quacks tend to ‘fold-in’ deaths by misadventure to drive up the numbers.
For example, let’s say a woman is undergoing chemotherapy, and gets into a car with, say her 16-year old grandson who just got his licence. They get into a car crash, and she dies of her injuries. For another example, consider a toddler who drowns two days after getting a vaccine. Now, in both cases, what was the cause of death? For bonus points, what would Gary Null say was the cause of death?
@Flip
Glad to be so entertaining. Let me know when you fill your bingo card. Do you get to win a dog?
@gaist
The pain relief and gain in mobility usually happen during the course of the session. I like to keep working until the pain goes to 0 (from 0 to 10) or as close to 0 as possible, because in my experience it’s less likely to return then. A lot of people need only that one session. In other cases the pain returns at lesser intensity — in some people within a few hours, in others within a few days, in yet others in a couple of weeks. I then do another session. As I said, three or four sessions ought to be sufficient. With one person who had a chronic injury I did about a dozen short ones and each time she experienced a noticeable gain in mobility.
After the session I tell people to rest the affected body part because the tendency is to overuse it once the pain is gone. I can’t prescribe pain killers. Even if I could, I wouldn’t; besides they don’t seem to be necessary.
I treated a man in a hospital once (at the request of his doctor) who had stage-4 pancreatic cancer that had gone to his liver. He had had as much conventional therapy as his body could handle, and he was in considerable pain. His doctor wanted to see what energy healing could do. I asked him before I started working what the level of his pain was, from 0 to 10. He said ten. After 45 minutes of energy healing I asked him what his level of pain was. He said two. I don’t know how long the pain relief lasted because that was the only time I treated him. He was then sent home, and “home” was too far for me travel to treat him, and “energy healing” was a strange enough concept for all of them that “distance healing” was not something they were willing to entertain.
Another man I treated with a colleague. He also had terminal cancer. When he came in he was ashen, and bent over with pain. By the end of the session he was cracking jokes. When he left his color was much better and he was also much lighter on his feet. Pain relief for him lasted about two days.
I have no way of knowing if there are more frauds out there in the energy healing business than in science or medicine. Generally speaking energy healers get their business not through advertising but through word of mouth. Somehow I can’t imagine frauds would get much business through word of mouth.
I don’t think it is desirable to reduce fever, unless the fever is life threatening. I have never encountered anyone with a life threatening fever, so I can’t tell you whether anything I do could affect it.
I think there is built-in safety mechanism in energy healing, which is that it is purposed not by the healer but by the body wisdom of the “healee”. All I can intend as a healer is wholeness. Bengston relates that when he was healing the cages of sick mice they all ran to his left hand (which he calls his “healing” hand). If the cage was spun around, they would run to his left hand again. Once they were healed they were no longer interested.
Do all/most patients report back to you, do you check on them, or do they talk about previous effects during the next session? What I’m asking is are patients whose session wasn’t effective less or more likely to report the failure, thus tilting the “statistics” towards one side.
Do you give any other advice, (apart from eat well, rest and take care)? What would you say if a patient asked you should they stop taking their meds if the ailment is gone?
If the patient’s mental outlook affects the outcome (or even dictates it), would anti-depressants or other psych medication have a effect on healing?
Admittedly a personal assessment, but I thought the 10 in 1-10 scale was pretty much screaming-until-you-fainted sort of agony.
I take it that (to the best of your knowledge) neither recovered from cancer?
I personally have no problem viewing energy healing as palliative care, in the same vein as how mommies can kiss a pain away, rubbing one’s temples alleviates headache and reading a really good book can distract you so well from a broken wrist bone in a too tight cast that you forget it’s there until you bump it against the armrest. But every claim that energy healing could offer more than palliative care seem to be based either on personal anecdotes, hearsay or studies that fall short of rigorous scientific norm.
Well, at least many televangelist healers (whom you mentioned having less faith in, pun only partially intended) don’t seem to be lacking in patients.
Do you think energy healers should be licensed and regulated like medical personnel? Would such regulation improve the standard and rate of healing? Do you think peer review of medical boards should have oversight?
Are there any experimentation in healing processes and techniques to see if they could be improved? You hoped for a fruitful co-operation between healers and scientists, which might help uncover new, less hand-wavy forms of healing. Is there such process of trial and error going on now, even without the scientists?
(apart from sniping at petri dishes, unless they were to test a new technique or hand-wave or thought pattern…)
Say someone with a fever of 42 degrees centigrade (107,6 Fahrenheit) comes to you for help. Would you try healing them or call an ambulance?
So the body knows best? So if the recipient is “unwilling”, is it more likely a mental problem (overt scepticism/bad mojo) or is the body itself unwilling to heal?
Both my parents and their siblings and my one living grand parent are on high blood pressure medication, and have been for years – as is my older brother so in all likelihood there is a genetic cause (from both sides of the family). Do you think their bodies (and probably mine in a few years) are at their healthiest high-pressurised, or is the body mistaken? Most of them live quite different lives, so I doubt it would be that everybody has the same knot in their energy fields. If the body is mistaken, can it be mistaken about other aspects of itself?
Does the body also identify with beneficial gut fauna, or can it mistake those for unwanted alien bacteria/fungi/protozoa?
In the instances where a patient requires several treatments, do you think the reason is the body or mind of the patient is unwilling or distracted? If the symptoms return, is it the fault of the patient for “returning” to bad energy ways?
Could you rid a patient of parasites, or would the parasite’s “self” resist it?
As a side note, on the whole outside consciousness-bit. A hundred years ago there were less than 2 billion humans. Today we are close to 7 billion. Did the source multiply, were the 5 billion stuck in limbo somewhere (and if yes, how many there are still in limbo waiting for overpopulation to reach the apex?) are we somehow “lesser” because the whole human consciousness-thing has been individualized into over 3 times as many beings, or are there 3.X me’s running around somewhere?
@gaist
Generally speaking the patients for whom the healing wasn’t effective feel nothing during or after the healing, so the feedback is immediate. Others usually report back.
I would say that the conditions that require several sessions are more chronic in nature.
I’ve been told that stage-4 pancreatic cancer is one of the most painful things a human being can experience. Both these patients were on morphine but still in great pain which even the morphine could not manage.
Televangelists have a larger schtick than just healing. Faith healing is just a sideline in the Jesus business.
No, it’s not the patient returning to “bad energy ways”. It’s more an issue of habit. The body returns to what it’s accustomed to, so it might need more treatment to nudge it.
I don’t know why bodies can’t “self-heal”. It puzzles me that intermediaries should be needed.
No clue about parasites, as I don’t have any experience with them. The same is the case with anti-psych medications or anti-depressants.
If someone with a 42C temperature came to see me, I would call an ambulance first and treat them while we waited for the ambulance. Similarly, I would never tell anyone to discontinue their medication.
I really wish scientists got curious about the phenomenon of energy healing to work with us. I think there are on-going efforts by individuals to improve on techniques. I know of one: Kurt Peterson of http://www.cancertouch.com. He also claims to have a good track record with cancer.
Perhaps they’re filed somewhere near Judith’s stash of hospital records regarding the miraculous energy-recovery from pancreatic cancer that was sadly cut short for wholly unrelated reasons. (Marg’s invocation of which malady as a talking point above is no doubt completely coincidental.)
Now, would you take that temperature with your hands, or do you routinely use a thermometer? Moreover, do you think someone with that level of fever would be likely to “come see you”?
The treatment was successful but the patient suddenly died, as I recall.
Televangelists have a larger schtick than just healing.
A bold claim, given that your river of shtick seems to have no far shore whatever.
And “energy healing” is just a sideline in the equally as venerable occultist business.
Oh, look, you can pay the $2000 deposit for your $7500 “session” using Paypal! Holy f*cking Christ. Good work, Marg, really good f*cking work.
By the way, this is probably not the brightest thing to put into a disclaimer, legally speaking:
You have now hit rock f*cking bottom, Marg.
Sorry about the link scope, I had to go outside and really express my feelings for a bit.
@Narad
Don’t have an aneurism over this.
Peterson says he kept extensive patient records and that he follows up on everyone he treats for five years. He claims very high success rates, which ought to be verifiable.
@ Bronze Dog:
*Merci beucoup, mon cher chien*.
I guess I’m rather good at ‘distilling’ as I am descended from a guy created fine spirits c. 1870s-80s. I have an essay entitled *The Distilled Essences*- it’s not about gin but photosynthesis; I really should complete it some day.
At any rate, the woo-meisters would have us believe that prior to the advent of SBM, people lived long, healthy lives free of disability and chronic illness. Naturally.
They believe that SBM CAUSED the chronic problems people suffer today. People in intensive care die BECAUSE of the care they receive. HAART causes hiv. Pharma kills.
Why did they take the heart meds or bp meds ? SSRIs are deady- or so we’re told- so why take the miserable poisons?
Alt med has to conjure up a vision of a poisoned world in order to answer these questions: it’s not just the meds but toxins in food, water and air.. and bad thoughts, I guess.
@ Krebiozen:
I have also had visions and dreams of remarkably splendid realms without drugs. I think I described the dream above.
I used to try to put myself into a trance of sorts so I could feel calmer or to recall the massive task I was assigned for a qualifying exam. Now I stick to more mundane visual imagery.
It certainly ought to be verifiable, but I can’t seem to find anything of the sort on his website. By the way, I love his variation of the quack Miranda:
So an oncologist treats you successfully, or not, and you pay a scam artist $7,500? I do sometimes wish I had no moral compass, I could be rich.
So do you, Marg.
Is your claim verifiable?
No, screw you. You are acting innocent and now digging yourself even deeper over some goddamned picece of trash who charges cancer patients $7500 to wave his f*ckiing hands around. This is no longer the game where you get to pretend you know a goddamned thing about all the crap that you flail around with while posturing about how other people just don’t know enough about physics to interact at your level, or your comical attempts at philosophy. This is where people with serious problems get taken advantage of, and you have No F*cking Problem. If you think I don’t have anyone in my family who could fall prey for this sh*t, you’re sorely mistaken, Blavatsky.
There is not a goddamned bit of difference between you and the Burzynski lice, and if you think the “who, me?” routine is going to serve you in this regard, you are sorely f*cking mistaken.
@Narad
Tell us how you really feel.
@Narad
Why do you assume he is lying?
Marg, a humbug remains a humbug regardless of the fee. Narad knows this, too.
On a different topic – I attended a wonderful seminar – Luis Parada from the U of Texas Southwestern Medical center at Dallas.
@THS
Why do you assume he is a humbug?
@Krebiozen
What do you think happens to stage-4 pancreatic cancer patients who are in liver failure?
Marg, I’d really like to complement you on sticking with the “who, me?” routine. It has inspired me to look into which regulatory agencies are in play, given that interstate commerce and the wires are, when one directly insinuates that 71% of patients do go into remission as a result of having thier bank accounts fleeced. I’m sure Kurt will appreciate the advertising.
@Marg
Because that is what Occam’s razor as well as history suggests. Every other person who has made such an extraordinary claim about curing cancer from Gerson through to Burzinski has turned out to be a fraud.
Because if a decent human being had discovered they had such a great cure with cancer they would be publishing their results (advertising is not the same thing as publishing in a peer reviewed venue) instead of profiting from them.
For the same reason that it is reasonable to assume that someone who is offering a risk free investment investment with an annual rate of return of 25 to 50% is lying.
Because he is using the standard Cancer quack technique of taking credit for the success when the patient is also undergoing conventional treatment.
So does every quack – where has he published the results in a venue where they can be verified? Dollars to doughnuts, if someone asks for those records he will use patient confidentiality as an excuse not release these “extensive patient records”.
Marg if someone rents a chainsaw from Home Depot (with new chain, a full fuel tank, a full oil reservoir, a gas can with extra fuel and a container of chain oil) and brings it back with an empty fuel tank, an empty chain oil reservoir and a chain so worn that it is almost falling off the cutting bar and then doesn’t want to pay for the rental because they couldn’t get the chain saw to run, what is more likely?
A: A mysterious energy field (unknown to those narrow minded scientists) sucked the fuel out other fuel tank and the oil out of the oil reservoir and caused metal to vanish from all the wear surfaces in the chain.
B: The customer is lying in order to scam a free rental.
I wonder if Reiki can cure SIWOTI syndrome?
“Energy healing is now considered to be the most effective alternative cancer treatment known” – Kurt Whatever
Un-fucking-believable. For $7500?
In fact, all too believable, given he is preying on the desperate.
And we see just where Marg’s threshold of trust lies.
Is Marg short for margarine because you’re displaying the moral, ethical and intellectual weight of a tub of that oily melange.
You are a thoroughly modern Allardyce T. Meriweather and deserve his fate.
Marg,
You seem to have a touching faith in people’s honesty. Have you not yet realized that a great deal of what you find on the internet is not true? Much of it is simply mistaken, but a fair bit is deliberately deceitful and designed to part you from your money.
I know what happens, unfortunately, having followed the progress of many of them over the years. They die, most quickly, some more slowly. However, Peterson claims he can cure them, so perhaps Judith (or was that you?) isn’t as skilled a healer as he is. Perhaps she should learn his “DNA Signature Destruction Methodä”. Then again, Gonzalez claimed to have great success with pancreatic cancer, but when his treatment was subjected to clinical trial, patients on conventional chemotherapy lived 3 times longer than his patients.
It should be very easy for Peterson to prove his claims, using anonymized medical records. Why hasn’t he?
@Marg
Feel free to post the peer-reviewed study when it’s published. Put up or shut up.
As for the rest, blah blah blah no evidence, more anecdotes, blah blah
Oh and this:
Marg said on October 9, 6:20 pm
Marg said on September 15, 5:00 pm
Someone needs to clarify her language.
@Krebiozen
I’m so glad *someone* knows what I’m talking about. King’s Cross is the next stop!
I’ve had a couple of lucid dreams, and though still dreaming I was not only aware that I was doing so, but could hear noises (people getting up in the morning) and was aware that it was light outside.
I guess that proves I’m ‘sensitive’.
Because she’s got nothing else and she knows it.
@gaist
There’s research on near death experience where there were playing cards placed on top of furniture.
drpennysartori.com
See the publications page.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=penny%20sartori
Also: a big internets should be awarded to you for both getting answers and asking questions. You turned a dead thread into an interesting one again.
@Al Kimeea
That was either well played or I have no idea what’s going on.
@Adam G
Of course not. If it was, she’d be rushing to take up my suggestion and post some data to lord over us.
if i were morally and ethically bereft
i could participate in the theft
of patient’s hard earned gains
by easy removal of their pains
in this there is no shame
as i am only helping, not to blame
for when my methods do not please
it is down to the mark for the progress of the disease
@Al Kimea
I think that’s what the pharmaceutical companies do.
@Krebiozen
Have you ever known one to reverse the course of his disease, even temporarily?
@Militant Agnostic
Occam’s razor and history never dreamed of quantum physics.
@ flip:
I know what you’re talking about! Appropriately so!
More seriously:
There’s a grain of truth in this because bodies do self-heal TO A POINT- minor cuts close up, bones mend, an immune response is mounted against infection, there is activity against cancers et al.
But to assume that this has nearly unlimited potential and application…
One of the alt med creatures I surveille trades on the public’s general knowledge that the body can mend itself ( to a degree) and then expands upon this propensity unrealistically and baroquely.
I just heard his tale about Josef Issels’ ideas on *boosting immunity* ( first you pull out bad teeth, give juices, use imagery about battling cancer etc) He fails to mention that this costly and bizarre treatment has been bought by many famous people- including Bob Marley- we all know how that turned out.
I recently ran into a documentary which sadly illustrated the musical innovator’s last days, trudging through the snow in Germany,pathetically thin and obviously dying. Awful.
You’ve already had it explained to you exactly what gave rise to the necessity for quantization, you evasive apologist for your theiving “colleague.” Go eat a bag of salted dicks.
Marg,
It’s quite common for cancer patients to have a brief period of feeling better just before they die, for some reason, which is what Judith’s description sounds like.
If you mean a failed liver recovering, pancreatic tumors disappearing etc. then no, I have never heard of that happening, and I don’t believe you, “Judith”, Ellen Lewinberg or Kurt Peterson have either. I would have to see before and after scans and biopsy results before I would believe that.
Then, do you believe you should hold “energy healing” to the same standards you advocate for mainstream medicine?
Marg, do you even know what Occam’s Razor is?
For some reason healers never seem to be able to persuade severed limbs to grow back – that would impress me. You would think that since the morphogenetic field is still there since you can see it on Kirlian photography, it should be easy*.
* Please note, both morphogenetic fields and Kirlian photography are imaginary, my sarcasm is playing up again.
@Gray Falcon
I think we ascertained earlier up in the post that marg does not hold energy healing to the same standards as mainstream medicine.
marg is pretty much a hypocrite through and through.
I think it’s cute that Kurt Peterson leads with an epigraph from Bobby Fischer before casually letting letting slip that, at his current rates, he would have made $15 million over the past 13 years with this scam. I can certainly come up with some other choice remarks from Fischer.
except in my case, it is the exact opposite as to how I was treated and cured by Big Pharma
Marg, I’ll be willing to entertain the notion that kimeaa’s poem might apply to clinically tested, FDA/EMEA approved pharmaceuticals when you can demonstrate there’s no credible scientific evidence that things like statins, antibiotics, antifungals, antivirals, vaccines, NSAIDS, TNF inhibitors like Enbrel for arthriti,…well, the list just goes on and on doesn’t it?- actually work.
Until then suggesting energy healing is analogous to FDA/EMEA approved small molecule drugs or biologicals isn’t even a false analogy—it’s a dishonest one. We’re not talking about wrong on the level of comparing apples to oranges–that at least is comparing fruit to fruit. We’re talking comparing orchids to bicycles, or fish to rainbows, or mudguards to War and Peace
As for quantum physics, show your math: explain exactly where quantum physics violates Ockham’s razor by multiplying entities without necessity.
Oh cripes…I can’t believe that this thread is still going on.
Way upthread “flip” stated that Marg appears to be Pegamily…rebooted.
If Marg isn’t Pegamily…then it is another crank troll trying to beat Pagasus’ and Emily’s personal bests for the most comments on RI (1,300 + and still going strong).
In case anyone is wondering, Pegamily made herself legendary, in her defense of fasting as medicine, by claiming the following:
@ lilady:
This thread is like a cafe, you order your cappuccino or chai latte while the 1300+ comments load…especially since I am a lady of leisure today.. lounging around the maison.
Although I am often highly entertained when I espy alt med types portraying themselves as health experts, dieticians, biochemists, immunologists, epis, physicians, economists , physicists and even psychologists ( AoA today has riotoous comments re dx NPD), still something in me wants to scream-
“If you presume to play the role, do the REAL work involved before you start reaping the benefits”.
This irks me although I am probably more tolerant than most sceptics. Perhaps I should allow my own mean self to emerge and shine through more frequently… and believe me, it IS mean but above the mean, if you know what I mean.
Drifting, self-promoting dilletantes ( see Natural News/ PRN/ TMR/ AoA) cast aspersion on professionals’ serious, hard work and dedication as they take shortcuts, make up stuff, decorate themselves with phoney degrees and strike poses,
@Krebiozen
Not just feel better temporarily, but have their lab work return to near normal?
Marg, are you willing to apply that same standard to “energy healing”?
@ Denice Walter:
I saw the posts on AoA about NPDs…which most of them exhibit.
Wait until they see the DSM-5 ! While they are busy fussing and fuming about the DSM-5 for their kids’ diagnoses of ASDs, their particular NPDs will be eliminated…
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/health/views/30mind.html
Hmmm, where did I misplace the telephone number for “Dial-A-bot”? We could certainly use a Marg-bot right now.
@Narad
Salted dicks is a new one for me, but I must say it’s quite creative. I can see why you are so incensed. I get just as incensed when I hear of the 38-year-old daughter of someone dying of aggressive breast cancer after puking her gut-lining out due to chemo, sustaining 3rd-degree radiation burns that did not heal, and finding out two days after her treatment ended that she had grown bone metastases while she was receiving chemo.
Regarding Burzynski, how do you explain that after something like 15 years of aggressive prosecution by the Texas Medical Board and the FDA the man is still free and still in business? How do you explain that charge after charge is dropped, that juries find him not guilty, that his patients come out to support him? How do you explain that while prosecuting him the US government is patenting his active ingredients (which he alleges and for which he seems to have documentation). You would think that the Texas Medical Board and the FDA have sufficient funds and legal firepower to put a fraudster in jail. So maybe if they have not, it’s because he is not one, and the judges had the the sense to see it.
Blow it out your koot hoomi, Marg. You’re morally, ethically, and intellectually bankrupt, and I have had it with your passive-aggressive sh*t rain.
@Narad
It’s not passive aggressive in the least. Those are the facts, ma’am. He is still a free man. He is still practicing. The PTB have spent millions trying to shut him down. Why hasn’t it worked? They managed to get Al Capone, so why not Burzynski?
“Koot hoomi” is a new one on me too. I see it’s not a body part. That’s a relief.
Marg,
In pancreatic cancer the enlarged pancreas often pushes on the liver, blocking the bile duct. This causes grossly elevated bilirubin and alkaline phosphatase, and other liver enzymes are moderately elevated. Serum amylase is also grossly elevated in pancreatic cancer. I have seen these blood tests become more normal towards the end of a patient’s life, whether because the pancreas completely fails, or ruptures, relieving pressure on the bile duct, I’m not sure. I think there’s a technical term for this phenomenon but I don’t recall what it is. Statistically, about 5% of pancreatic cancer patients will live for 5 years or longer.
Why would that incense you? It saddens me that the best treatments we have don’t always work. Would you prefer her to have been left for her tumor to burst through her skin, ulcerate and rot, and for her to die even more horribly? If not, what do you think the doctors should have done differently?
I’ll leave your gross misrepresentation of Burzynski’s case to others.
I’ll hazard an answer. Those more knowledgeable than me please correct me if I’m mistaken on something. (and there are bound to be stuff I missed).
He’s good at taking advantage of loopholes and influential friends.
FDA and medical boards are large bureaucracies, where everything takes time, everything can be appealed and there are several earlier steps like warnings and requirements for extra paperwork, (which both have been made) before they can/will strip away his license.
He’s not allowed to offer the antineoplaston treatment AS a treatment, only as part of a trial. So he keeps continuing/starting trials and having willing test subjects pay to get in (60 such trials so far, according to wikipedia) Charging for phase II trials seems, to put it mildly, a controversial issue. Also, no results of any of these studies have ever been published.
Legal issues also take time, and can be delayed, postponed and appealed ad nauseam. According to wikipedia, he had been found guilty once, and it mentions two open lawsuits. No dismissed ones.
I also seem to recall he or his supporters dismissing failed treatments (dead patients), because the patients either did not stick to the regime, or the treatment was started too late. Both explanations, of course, apply to standard medicine as well, but in the case of recommended* chemo drugs, would be called death by medicine?
* Burzynski uses chemo as part of his treatments as well.
Alternately, the Big Parma NWO conspiracy can’t yet again get their Sh!t together.
Burzynski hasn’t cheated on his taxes?
@Marg – Dr. B has been discussed at length here. Particularly, we find it galling that after 30 years of “trials” he has not published any of his results – none.
A group of researchers that attempted to replicate his treatment were forced to terminate their experiments very early in the process because the treatments themselves were so toxic as to be incredibly dangerous to the patients.
Please explain again why Dr. B refuses to publish or better yet, why he charges hundreds of thousands of dollars for clinical trials, while all other legitimate clinical trials are “free.”
Since you know so much, perhaps you can enlighten us?
Q.E.D.
“Koot hoomi” is a new one on me too.
That’s because you’re too goddamned stupid to have figured out, despite repeated clues, that the entire stinking pile of garbage that you proudly wave a flag for is no different from any other such steaming heap of rot that has graced the annals of occultism. Was “Blavatsky” too subtle for your keen sensing abilities?
@Krebiozen
I cannot comment on the particular details of the blood tests, but I have heard that his doctor referred to him as “our little miracle on the ward” and that one of the oncology nurses said that in 25 years she has not seen anything like the recovery he staged. If you read Judith’s blog, you will see that the man’s oncologist then invited her to speak at the hospital, so from that I would judge that they considered the case to be unusual.
@Narad
When your reason fails you, you resort to insults.
No, Marg, this is my reason having made finally a compelling case with respect to your character.
@Narad
I am being forced to making conclusions about yours — and you would not be flattered.
Remember Marg, “it’s all an illusion.” This is your creation. Don’t like the perceived world? Don’t blame me, because I’m your very own doing. It’s like magic.
Marg,
Changes, some apparently positive, in blood results are not unusual at the end-stage of many diseases. For example, if your liver completely fails, it won’t be producing any enzymes, so an elevated AST may return to normal. BTW, I did find a discussion by hospice nurses one of whom said they see a temporary improvement in cancer patients in 97% of patients before they die, though I think they were talking of hours rather than days.
Could that have been sarcasm from someone who regarded energy healing as nonsense?
He had a remission for ten weeks and died of an infection, didn’t he? That doesn’t seem that impressive to me. Remember that about 2% of stage 4 pancreatic cancer patients will live for over 5 years. Judith seems to take the average survival as being maximum survival, but it isn’t.
Maybe, maybe not. She says:
I don’t think a ten week temporary improvement is that extraordinary. I have had friends and relatives who seemed to be at death’s door, then rallied for a few months before dying of cancer. I don’t think it’s unusual. Also, we have only Judith’s word for what happened, and the patient died. If you had a dozen similar tales backed up with hard evidence, you might have my attention.
In this case we have no idea if the same thing might have happened without energy healing. He might even have done better without a bunch of energy healers breathing pathogens all over him…
@Narad, I was gonna take a stab at the nascent Buddhist Brainfartisms, but no need now
Glad Marg brought up Burchinski who charges his human lab rats $200,000 or thereabouts to be in his endless studies.
The first Big Pharma study I was in cost $1800 a month and was to last 18, but failed after 12. There was a charge because it was an observational study based on anecdotal evidence using drugs that are already approved and work for many people, but not me.
The second cost nada cause, quelle surprise, experimental drugs and Big Pharma ain’t allowed to charge for them.
So, for 1/10th the cost Big Pharma does what alties often deny and I dinna take anything more either, all done.
Although alt med supporters and providers paint a rosey picture about the possibility of cure through their own methods, they simultaneously narrate grim tales about SBM : witness some of Marg’s quotes.
It might make you nauseous but I suggest you leaf through Natural News’ or PRN’s/ Null’s articles about cancer: brave mavericks are lauded and applauded whilst SBM is irrevocably condemned. Cut, burn, poison.
Now the alt media often speaks about its spirituality and morality which I find rather startling:
what is so spiritual about leading trusting people astray?
Is it that they shouldn’t value things of this earth because they may not be here very much longer?
I ask supporters of alt med, like Marg, don’t you feel the slightest tinge of guilt or responsibility in that you might be leading people astray? Isn’t that a problem?
Suppose a person who believes she has cancer – and is terrified- reads your arguments and puts off reasonable actions- like seeing a doctor- don’t you feel a tiny bit responsible? Words have power. Frightened people are often searching for a reason to PUT OFF medical intervention- do you want to enable them to behave so irrationally? Even a small amount?
The alt media I surveille makes a business out of getting people to whistle past the graveyard as visions of cancer cures dance in their heads and, though their words may have a profound influence on their enraptured followers, I’ve yet to hear that their survivors have brought a law suit citing ‘alienation of rationality’ against woo-meisters after their relatives died – even in the case of hiv/ aids denialists where there is a clearer path to destruction.
Even if their grandiosity allows them to think themselves unimpeachably correct at all times, doesn’t that bother YOU in the least, Marg?
@Marg
Feel free to post the peer-reviewed study when it’s published. Time to stop running the Gish gallop and put up or shut up. If you had any sense you’d go and get some evidence to lord over us.
And when you see that you’re not gaining traction, you refuse to answer questions and reply with meaningless banter.
@Lilady
I forgot I said that. But Marg doesn’t seem to have the same fascination with starvation as Pegamily did.
Besides, wouldn’t Orac ban the sock puppet? (If I recall rightly Pegamily got banned for it too…)
@Gaist
If I recall correctly though, he may be doing funny things with his business funds. Try Left Brain Right Brain for info.
@Krebiozen
I repeat: his oncologist thought it was unusual. But have it your way. In fact, you can all have it your way.
I have to comment on Marg’s ‘assessments’ of her patients. Pain is a notoriously difficult thing to quantify. Subjective feelings of pain cannot be objectively measured, yet. The scale is only a guide and a poor one at that. But then Marg states that these folks she is treating have improved mobility, now that is something that can be measured. Please tell us Marg, which standard test you are using to measure improvement in mobility? Unfortunately for us, they are easily found on internet searches, so she can tell us what she it using, but I for one will not believe she actually uses them or ever did in the past because so far, she has not gained any credibility with me. Waving hands, baahh!!!
He also lost in a case of insurance fraud to the tune of $90,000 in 1994, Trustees of the Northwest Laundry v. Burzynski. And included a citation from Gary Null in a supplemental memorandum. And tried to appeal from the 5th Circuit to the Supreme Court.
Yeah, and the purported records are for some reason hermetically sealed in a mayonnaise jar on Judith’s porch.
Sure thing, Underoos.
Marg – they got Al Capone for tax evasion, not murder, bootlegging, racketeering etc. The fact that someone has not been convicted does not mean they are not guilty of unethical conduct. How many people have been convicted with respect to the subprime mortgage fraud? None of the perpetrators of the biggest mining fraud in history (Bre-X) was ever convicted. Does this mean the gold was actually there in spite of all the expert evidence that the cores had been salted and the lack of gold in Bre-Xs prospective partner’s test holes? Apparently Marg considers science to be a matter to be decided in the courts.
Marg, it’s not Narad’s reason that has failed him, it’s his patience, and it’s no wonder, because you have been posting stupid, useless crap on this thread for a month and a half. No, let me amend that: stupid, useless, CONTEMPTIBLE crap. In my mind, Marg, I do not think of you as “Marg” but as “Marg, the contemptible purse-snatcher of science.”
Will you whine that that is an insult? I’m sure you will, but you know, you are the one who has degraded this conversation to the point where such insults do not lower its tone. Every time you have been challenged to provide some sort of evidence for energy healing, and instead have tried to change the subject to “oh look, here’s a paper I can misinterpret as ‘chemotherapy makes cancer spread faster than no chemo!'” or “oh, look at how awful reimbursement practices are in mainstream medical practice!” or “read ’em and weep, here’s someone from the world of science-based medicine who cheated!” you insult our intelligence. None of these things do a g-dd-mn thing to support the premise that energy healing exists. You treat us as if we’re idiots who can’t spot that you’re changing the subject, as if you think that all you have to do is repeat weak anecdotes and assertions that we’re blind/biased/etc., and sooner or later you’ll win. We’re not idiots, Marg. We’re never going to say “Gosh, Marg, you’ve kept this b-llsh-t up for two months; that absolutely substitutes for any sort of evidence!!” The only reason we give the time of your day to your red herrings is because we’re so bloody bored saying the same things to you over and over again. How many times do we need to say “An experiment where the experimental group and the control group have the same outcomes does not imply any effectiveness to the intervention” before it sinks in?
I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I’m done with you, Marg. You’ve had a month and a half to try and put together some sort of non-stupid argument for energy healing and half the time, you can’t even get the ‘argument for energy healing’ right; you just launch some scurrilous attack on mainstream medicine as if demeaning SBM somehow elevated CAM. Would your mother be proud of you doing that, Marg? When you were a little girl, did she smooth your bangs away from your forehead and say “Now, listen, Marg, if you ever feel bad because someone else is having success that you aren’t, don’t put in the hard work needed to earn your own successes, just tear down the others until you feel you look better by comparison to them”? I hope not, because that behavior is contemptible, and you should be ashamed of it. The shocking thing is not that Narad lost his temper with you but that we’ve all managed to keep them so long.
Actually, I think Marg considers science a matter to be decided on a person to person basis. Because you know, reality is perception.
@Antaeus Feldspar
˄ This!!
Now why would I believe a cancer patient when he says his pain level has gone from 10 to 2? Why would I believe an injury patient who couldn’t lift or turn her arm before and now can? Why not believe you instead, who never saw any of these people and are prejudiced beyond belief against anything that’s not within the purview of your philosophies, arrogant as hell, RUDE as hell (with some exceptions), and not able or willing to use your brains to look beyond the confines of your conformist education. Science progresses in part by the old guard that resists new knowledge dying out. There are now doctors out there who do reiki as part of their practice. There is at least one oncologist I know of who has retired from oncology and is doing energy healing instead because she feels it is of greater use. There are doctors out there questioning the pharmaceutical approach and beginning to mistrust pharmaceutical companies. The public is voting for alternative therapies with its pocketbook, not only out of naivete, but because they feel they benefit from it. So you can splutter and fulminate all you want, the future is coming all the same, and alternative medicine is a part of it.
So, I took it into my head to go looking for an anecdote that I had read about kids in the late ’60s or early ’70s whose only understanding of Buddhism came by way of D.T. Suzuki and would wander into actual religious enclaves and start throwing teacups at the wall and so forth in response to perfectly normal questions.
One place I was looking was at the beginning of Robert Buswell’s The Zen Monastic Experience (which I hearily recommend for fans of the simultaneously dry and engaging). I had forgotten that he was a fan of Renato Rosaldo[*], and I was struck by the similarity between Marg’s approach and that ascribed to the “objectivist ethnographer”: “a classic illustration of the problems of emotional distancing, cultural marginalization, and usurpation of authority.” In short, the fake-Indian trip of the Age of Aquarius with a different target, once again embodying exactly that which it supposes itself to be rebelling against.
[*] And didn’t expect Culture and Truth to have a Facebook fan page.
Marg,
Say you treated a patient for a some chronic ilness for which he had been taking medication for years, with some noticeable side effects (lets say drowsiness, some difficulty concentrating, making food taste bland). It’s a ailment you feel usually cures, rather than returns later, with energy healing. Your treatment cures him. A week later he calls you and tells you he’s quit taking medication as he’s now symptom free. What is your responce?
What would your answer be, if you knew that should the ailment return and be left untreted, it would eventually cause permanent damage to the body and possibly serious complications later on?
Would the answer be different if there was some other medical issue you hadn’t cured, for which the patient was continuing taking different medication? For example heart medication and insulin?
So there are no delayed effects with energy healing? How likely do you think the pain relief i “merely” psychosomatic, rather than a sign of actual healing (reduction in inflammation, correction of tears in ligaments etc.)
Is it possible conventional medicine e.g. psych meds, chemo) somehow also affects the energy fields, and remissions and whatnot are “the body returning to what it’s accustomed to”?
Would you think regulation and licencing of healers would…
a) help conventional scientists be more willing to take healers seriously?
b) be of benefit to energy healing discipline?
If you think it would benefit the field, do you think there is enough internal momentum to generate such a regulationary system, or would it have to be brought in from the outside? How would this differ from (the current practice) of demanding double blind studies, sufficient numbers and replicability?
If you think such regulation wouldn’t benefit energy healing, why do you think that is? Do you feel regular medicine would be better if any doctor would be free to experiment and offer cures and treatments he/she wanted, withouth FDA to demand clinical trials and a large investment of money and time?
How different do you feel your techniques are, and do you think you could improve your healing rate or accuracy or range? If no, why? If yes, why don’t you?
Well, at least I didn’t italicize the Internet.
Marg, I would like to heartily suggest that you take a job as a safety officer in a patchouli factory.
@Marg
Because you’re not willing to discount all other possibilities first? Because you’re seeing confirmation bias? Because a billion other reasons that once again have nothing to do with proving anything scientifically.
Because you [expletive removed], we don’t accept ANECDOTES as data. Because instead we prefer to have data to look at so that we can confirm for ourselves that something exists instead of just taking your word for it. Because we prefer to rule out confounders, variables and confirmation bias, amongst other things. Because BELIEF has nothing to do with EVIDENCE.
How many times does it have to be explained to you?
Science progresses mostly due to people adding new knowledge by actually using the scientific method, including collecting good data, basing predictions and hypotheses on available data (not belief), vigorous debate, replication and more data.
The old guard changes their mind when enough data is put forward to support a position. Until then they tentatively accept Occam’s razor and the null hypothesis.
Blah blah anecdote, blah blah appeal to authority, blah blah appeal to popularity, blah blah
Feel free to post the peer-reviewed study when it’s published. Time to stop running the Gish gallop and put up or shut up. If you had any sense you’d go and get some evidence to lord over us.
Marg
Don’t you think it is a more than a bit arrogant to think that you know more about physics because you attended some lectures than people who have taken post secondary courses in physics and thermodynamics know.
I find it utterly hilarious that you object to the Big Bang theory on the basis of thermodynamics while believing that someone can evaporate tons of water by pointing at a cumulus cloud. I find it despicable that you criticize us for being too trusting of Big Pharma while you credulously accept the claims of cancer cure con artists like Burzinski and Peterson as well as a host of other implausible claims like cloud busting etc. You are one of the most extreme example of the Dunning Kruger effect I have ever encountered. You are just like the Rush Limbaughs, Inhofe’s, Michelle Bachman’s Wall Street Journal scumbags etc who think they know more about climate science / biology / astronomy than scientists who have been working in these fields for a lifetime. Your kind are trying to drag us back into the middle ages while claiming the mantle of being progressive and “new age”. You disgust me with your smug arrogance that refuses to admit the possibility that you might be wrong while you sneer at those who work in an endeavor that requires them to always consider the possibility that they might be wrong and have to present their claims in an arena where others will try to prove them wrong.
Doctor’s use reiki – Dr. Oz adds it to his already astronomical bill for open heart surgery
He also promotes psychics talking to the dead as emotional therapy
None of which is evidence for how you shamelessly rip people off
Marg,
You don’t appear to have understood or taken on board a single thing anyone has written here.
The point is that you can do the same thing by injecting saline and telling the patient it’s a new highly effective painkiller, or with hypnosis or even by simply distracting them. Pain, even severe pain, is highly responsive to suggestion, there is copious evidence for this. You don’t seem to understand that attributing these results to magic when there is an obvious alternative explanation is simply dumb, there isn’t really a more polite way to put it. Nothing you have presented challenges our current scientific understanding in the slightest.
Marg, you have been extraordinarily arrogant and rude in this thread. You have claimed that the whole basis of medical science is fraudulent, that illness in the elderly is mostly caused by doctors, and that conventional therapy for cancer kills. Don’t you think that those of us who have studied and worked in this area find it a bit offensive to be accused of being fraudulent, murderous monsters who are too narrow-minded and blinkered to realize we are killing our patients? To add even greater insult, the only alternative you offer is magic, pure and simple. You seem to think the Harry Potter books are biographies.
You also claimed that energy healing works on the basis of some gobbledygook about quantum physics you read on the internet and swallowed uncritically because it supports your prejudices, and that a religious fanatic like Sheldrake understands the origins of the universe better than astrophysicists, and you present the unsupported claims of an obvious con artist who charges $7500 to take credit for the successes of real doctors as evidence that handwaving does anything more than act as a placebo.
I could go on but if that alone is not extraordinary, narrow-minded, blinkered arrogance, I don’t know what is. Yet you are blissfully unaware of this.
It’s ironic that you make this claim when you seem to be incapable of looking at any evidence that challenges your beliefs, which is the very definition of narrow-mindedness. I’m quite confident that all of us that have engaged with you here have asked ourselves if it is possible that there is something to your claims. The difference is that we have taken the time to look at the quality and quantity of the evidence that supports and contradicts your claims and their prior plausibility, and come to a conclusion based on that.
You seem to have fooled yourself into some erroneous beliefs through confirmation bias and wishful thinking, as thousands of people have before you and thousands will after you, and simply dismiss or fail to even register anything that doesn’t fit with those beliefs. All humans are prone to this kind of bias, which is why we need science, and why elevating anecdotes over careful studies is so foolish and so dangerous.
[Groans inwardly at yet another abuse of Kuhn] Let’s hope the next generation will abandon the medieval belief in New Age magic that has infested the developed world over the past few decades. Anyway, what “new knowledge”? I have been looking for this new knowledge for years and I have found nothing of any substance. Energy healing has been tested over and over, along with prayer, homeopathy, acupuncture and other therapies based on supernatural claims, and has not shown any benefits greater than placebo. Even those studies that do seem to show some benefits show such a tiny effect that it is clinically insignificant, and are outnumbered by far more that do not (according to The American Cancer Society, “An article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported that only 1 study out of 83 confirmed positive results for TT”).
Regrettably, even doctors are not immune to idiocy.
Which is another issue entirely. Those doctors want better, safer and more effective drugs. This is not evidence for the efficacy of handwaving, as has been repeatedly pointed out to you.
You argumentum ad populum is noted, but fails even on its own terms, as interest in energy healing has been declining.
Since you seem to accept popularity as meaningful, haven’t you noticed that medical science is accepted all over the world by thousands and thousands of scientists and billions of people? You don’t find Indians in remote villages calling out for energy healers or acupuncturists; they want vaccines and antibiotics because they know they work. You are the one in a tiny minority here Marg.
Most educated people understand that alternative medicine is at best a little bit of TLC used in addition to real medicine which does the real work. Only the desperate and the foolish resort to alternative medicine when faced with a serious medical condition. Energy medicine of the sort you practice is never, ever going to replace real medicine, not in a million years.
You know, I only just noticed those last three words. I wonder if Marg is admitting something here…
And even Marg admits she calls for an ambulance when it gets serious.
@gaist
I would never tell a patient to stop taking medication even if they told me their condition improved or that all their symptoms disappeared. I would tell them to go their doctor before stopping taking any medication.
One of the reasons I would like to see doctors work with energy healers is that we could then monitor the effects.
You misunderstood what I meant by the body returning back to what it’s accustomed. I’m sorry if I wasn’t entirely clear about what I meant. I have found that with recent injury is easier to treat than a chronic one because the body still remembers “normal”. With a chronic injury the condition has become the normal. So it might take several treatments to nudge the body out of its “new groove” and back to what it considered normal before. If medication could be taken temporarily to resolve a condition such as, e.g., high blood pressure, I would say it does the same thing.
At some point in the future energy practitioners will be formally trained, licensed and regulated. Right now it’s a bit like the Wild West. But again, before it can be licensed and regulated, it has to be recognized as a real phenomenon.
I was surprised to read in Rupert Sheldrake’s book that only a relatively small percentage (ca 30%) of medical studies are double-blinded. I would have expected 100%. Sheldrake advocates effectiveness studies. He suggests that we take a condition such as back pain (presumably caused by the same problem), recruit a large number of patients, divide them up among multiple practitioners and see how they fare. Some could be getting drugs, others surgery, others acupuncture, still others energy healing. This is the kind of study that makes eminent sense to me.
The reason I don’t think the pain relief is psychosomatic is that the effect usually lasts over the long term. Even if the pain returns, it is less intense. Further treatment decreases it further. Sometimes it plateaus, a lot of times it goes away altogether. By “psychosomatic” here I take that you mean the person’s brain is temporarily tricking them into believing that they are not in pain even though the physical parameters of their condition haven’t changed.
I am continuously upgrading my skills by learning new techniques.
@Militant Agnostic
I have nothing against the Big Bang. I was merely asking whether anyone knew what led up to it and suggesting that there was debate on the matter. No one can say for certain what there was before the Big Bang or how came to be. The Vatican was delighted with it because it accorded with the biblical story of God saying “and let there light, and lo, there was light”. All the laws of physics, including thermodynamics, apparently came into the world with the Big Bang.
@Krebiozen
I don’t think it will take a million years.
BTW how long is chemotherapy effective? If a patient has been on chemo and it has been declared ineffective, and their condition continues to deteriorate, and say six months later they see Kurt Peterson and another three months later go into remission, was it the chemotherapy that cured them? This is a serious question. I don’t know answer, so I am asking.
The desperate usually resort to alternative medicine after allopathic medicine failed them for their serious medical condition.
“the answer”
@Marg
You mean you don’t monitor them anyway?
Of course it does. (I literally eye-rolled at this) Do you know what a confounder is?
And that’s why science is done. To separate the chaff from the wheat, so to speak. Relying on anecdotes is always useless because you can’t test or examine any/all of the variables in a reliable way.
Which of course doesn’t prove that the alt med actually works.
Marg, feel free to post your peer-reviewed study when it’s published. Of course, judging by your inability to understand even the most basic concepts – most of which I learned in high school – I doubt you’ll do it. Of course I doubt you’ll do it for other reasons, but hey, let’s stick with this one for the time being.
A few months ago, I took a trip: after flying thousands of miles and then being active all day, I find myself in a spectacularly well-appointed hotel with large, luxurious beds.
Upon waking, my companion and I are both absolutely miserable: he’s moaning about his back and my neck hurts-
we’re thousands of miles from home and it’s a weekend- so what do you do? We only have a few days and this excursion has already cost us real money; we decide to grin and bear it, going ahead with my plans.
We drive over to hipsterville: within 15 minutes A spots “Mr Lee’s Tui Na Therapy Shop”: a lovely, little place with incense, a babbling fountain, a statue of Kwan Yin and several cots, dimmed lighting. So Mr Lee has a new customer but I decline his ministrations..
Instead I go walking around hipsterville, looking at antiques, spiffy clothes, drinking over-priced, fashionable tea, talking with vendors; then I spot “Treasures of Indochine” – or suchlike- I converse with the proprietor who travels and imports crafts and artwork. I buy myself pearl earrings that each dangle upon a fine chain. I put them on. These things were made for me, I swear.
I feel fine and A, now lying down at Mr Lee’s, is also fine- actually he feels ‘transformed’, he says and wants to eat. Later, we drive off and go exploring lakes and mountains in the area- totally recovered and we stay as such throughout the remainder of the trip and long flight back. No drugs involved, some alcohol though.
So what fixed us? Mr Lee adjusted A’s unruly Qi. According to Ayurvedic philosophy, you can heal with gems- the earrings brush my neck. Probably were some herbs in the tea also .
A more parsimonious explanation would be that relaxation and distraction saved the day. A did get a real massage and I did walk around and talk to several people. Neither of us has serious problems – although his is worse; neither is anything new.
It doesn’t matter what explanation you use for minor issues like ours BUT putting off care by distracting yourself away from important warnings like pain or palpable lumps is another thing. Alt med advocates often encourage people away from real help when there is a real problem.
But again, before it can be licensed and regulated, it has to be
recognized asshown to be a real phenomenon.u are skipping this step
and like vultures there’s a culture circling to profit from this sad reality
I work with a Serbian woman who has a weird thing going on with one of her feet, a bone seems to protrude from the side
She went to an energy healer who used this device – Lahovsky Multiwave Healing Machine
The “healer” played to her roots by playing up the Tesla angle and, of course, claiming to have successfully cured this condition many times, often within 24hrs.
After $everal vi$it$, no difference.
Now, when she told us of her malady/treatment, a couple of us were skeptical.
I guess all the negative waves prevented the energy healing properties of the device, even though the patient was convinced it would work.
Marg, as others have said, and I agree, you are an extremely arrogant and rude person. Here’s a hint: If you can’t handle rude responses, don’t start with rude comments. If there’s no polite or charitable way to say something, then act like an adult and learn to deal with the tone.
We’re skeptics. We’re used to crude hatemongers pissing over science and humanity’s intricate, constructive efforts like it’s no big deal. We’re used to being treated as subhuman and over-sensitive for caring about the health and well being of others. (And I’m sure female skeptics are tired of being called “hysterical” for the same.) We’re used to being called “hateful” and “cynical” for advocating a cautiously optimistic approach to discovery instead of blind trust in authoritarian dictates or for questioning the invincibility of alleged brick walls. We’re used to being vilified for daring to ask honest questions instead of being all blissful, harmonious and agreeable. We’ve developed thick skin. We’ve gotten so used to being treated badly, we’re rarely motivated to complain about it. Of course, it wouldn’t do any good, since woos generally don’t care about how we feel. When we do talk about how we feel, they call us liars for asserting emotions other than the ones their gurus assigned to us. It’s infuriating.
There. I said it.
Marg,
In many cases you can’t use double-blinding. How do you double-blind a coronary bypass, breast cancer lumpectomy or CPR? With hard endpoints, such as death, placebo effects are extremely unlikely, so blinding is not as much of an issue as it is in studies with softer endpoints. Here’s how I have responded to similar points in the past:
It’s not a veterinary article, anticipating that immediate criticism, it’s just that site hosts a full text version of the article.
It can be effective as long as the patient is taking it, but it’s not always immediately clear if it has been effective or not. Anyway, having perused a large number of testimonials for CAM having had an allegedly beneficial effect on cancer, this isn’t what I have usually seen. More often the patient will have had surgery to remove the tumor, or sometimes chemo and radiotherapy to shrink the tumor to a size amenable to surgery. Often a patient misunderstands when their oncologist tells them there is nothing further they can do, and assumes they are being sent home to die. After surgery, chemo and radiation a patient may be feeling pretty miserable for some time, and if their improvement coincides with some alternative treatment…
A surprising number of patients claim they had no conventional treatment yet wave around a histopathology report on the lump that was removed, perhaps not realizing that this is the mainstay of conventional treatment for solid tumors; chemo and radiation are really icing on the cake. There are several of these on YouTube – freeze-framing these reports is often very interesting. Also, some CAM practitioners are not averse to faking biopsy and scan reports. Jli, a pathologist, does a great job of debunking some of these on the Anaximperator blog.
Some cancers do go into remission for no apparent reason much more often than you might expect so relying on the kind of anecdotal data you are referring to can be very misleading. For example, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with breast cancer, refused all treatment apart from estrogen blockers (it was an estrogen sensitive tumor) and self-medicated with whiskey and cigarettes. She is still alive and relatively well over two years later, and the tumor has apparently disappeared (she has refused any more scans or biopsies). If she had been treated by an energy healer it would no doubt have been chalked up as a success.
I may be out of line here.
I am going to ask Marg directly to stop posting on this thread for the rest of this week, and allow folks to comment on more current threads – please.
I am also asking Marg directly to show respect for the commenters on yesterday’s (Oct 10) post and refrain from posting there at all.
Please, Marg. Please stop making this blog “the Marg show.”
What does “see how they fare” translate to, in concrete terms? Having the patients report how they’re feeling using something like the Oswestry index, or are you going to objectively measure some actual physical parameter indicative of healing? If energy healing actually heals</i–if it causes actual physiologic changes to occur resulting in improved health or function–why not choose a disease that can provide hard number readouts rather than relying on subjects' self-reporting?
Which would require at least four matched control groups: a group receiving sugar pills, one receiving faux surgery (how exactly would you do that?), one recieving faux acupuncture (either those retractable needles or actual needles inserted at the ‘wrong’ meridian points) and of course one receiving faux energy healing.
Why so complicated? Why include arms looking at surgery, drugs and accupuncture when the question we’re asking is whether energy healing is effective? We know surgery can be effective already, we know drugs can be effective already, and there’s already plenty of evidence indicaiting any efficacy seen with acupuncture is due to placebo effects.
@Krebiozen
My point was that if a patient has conventional treatment and his or her condition continues to deteriorate and conventional treatment is abandoned, and then six months later they see someone like Kurt Peterson and go into remission, you cannot claim that it was the conventional treatment that put them there. I agree with your point on people who have surgery and then attribute their remission to alternative treatments.
You mean a predatory scumbag? I’m sure one can be found cheaper.
@ Chemmomo: “Marg” is an ignorant thread-derailing troll. As long as people keep responding to the Marg Troll…(s)he won’t stop.
@JGC
As @Krebiozen pointed out, not everything is amenable to double blinding. Acupuncture would probably not be a good candidate. And as I pointed out, only 30-odd per cent of medical studies are double-blinded. So from your point of view does that make rest useless?
@Chemmomo
It seems to me people are having rather a good time abusing me and that we have had some interesting discussion. I will not post on Orac’s latest because I see no point in re-hashing this argument.
“the rest”
Marg,
I have never seen a well-documented case like that, and I have scoured the literature quite thoroughly. Even if such a case was well-documented you still have the problem of spontaneous remission which does happen, though very rarely, even in those expected to die imminently. Only a RCT could conclusively prove there was something to energy healing. Since Peterson has no problem with his patients getting conventional treatment as well as his energy healing, I see no reason he could not participate in one, but I very much doubt he would, for obvious reasons.
BTW, Peterson claims to have treated thousands of cancer patients. If that is true, a handful of them will be statistical fliers whose survival far exceeded their prognosis, like Stephen Jay Gould, that’s about the same number as Peterson has testimonials on his website.
Out of respect to Chemmomo, and because I think she’s right, this will be my last comment on this thread, unless I get the opportunity to add something new, which seems unlikely the way this has been going.
How about the healing effect of a Whore with a Heart of Gold?[*] Because that would be way cheaper.
[*] Has Buddhist credibility, as well.
Yes I did. Thanks for clarifying.
I think a study like that would have to address a few major difficulties.
First off, a study like that would probably have to have a control group which received no treatment, which seems unethical. Or you would use current standard medical approach or similar treatment with plenty of published literature to back it up as your control. This would also have some problems, with what published studies (or the average/median of which) to use as the control, and the differences in location and background and habits of the patients.
It would also be unethical to randomly assign participants into treatment groups, if one felt that the treatments might not be equally promising. (Not a statistician, by the way, so I might be off and my terminology is likely off too).
That latter unethical bit could perhaps be sidestepped by letting the participants choose their preferred treatment, but that would bring on the confounding factor al kimeea mentioned in full – namely that a certain type of person with certain type of values and background and habits is more likely to select a particular treatment, making it harder to compare the actual efficacies because the control groups are less likely to be similar. (say you had two treatment options, and 80% of those who chose treatment A were under 35 years old, while 80% of those who chose B were over 50 years old. Add to that all the genetic backgrounds, financial status, travelling habits, diets, alcohol consumption and so on, and accurately comparing the efficacy of the treatments becomes hard).
You would also agree on what the study measured? For back pain, pain relief obviously (hard to measure), probably mobility issues, but would it follow general health (like someone said way upthread, there are no studies about 5-year incidence of heart attack with energy healing…), which would increase the confounding factor, or adverse side effects from surgery or medication (or unsterilised needles)…
And then there would be selecting the actual doctors and healers and acupuncturists, and either tracking their individual track record, or then averaging their scores, both of which present more chances for errors.
Also, I’m not claiming these are only problems for this kind of study, but they would need to be addressed before the study would be of any/much merit.
Would those four be the most likely to produce useful comparative data, or do you think a study such as this should include other treatment options, or multiple variants of these four* basic types?
* = I don’t think that there are too many significantly different ways of acupuncture, but for the other three there ought to be.
Is there considerable differences, or is it a slow gradual progress? Meaning, do you feel there are actual “rites” (not meant derogatively, what I mean are specific techniques/movements/mental exercises that work noticeably better than similar but not identical ones) or is it more a gradual refinement of energy manipulation talent?
I believe that this thread represents an excavation of the thinking processes of a woo-supporter in great detail- we can survey the various artefacts we find there- I’ll look at characteristics *other* than logical fallacies,
We are told that we think we know everything, are close-minded, materialistic and mechanistic, follow our leaders in lock-step fashion amongst many other endearing traits.
We find great persistence and stamina on Marg’s part because these ideas represent core beliefs/ issues that form part of her identity: they’re emotionally charged, not cold and dry products of a classroom . Our way is on the way out.
The arguments our web woo-meisters present similarly engender emotion and fervent belief- often betraying a church meeting, revival feel. Like any religion worth its salt, enemies of the righteous must be identified and excoriated. And we are that. Devils all, some nicer than others.
To repeat myself: if you scratch alt med, you’ll find religion. As the Christians say, faith is belief in things unseen. In other words, without DATA Like followers of AJW, thousands upon thousands of words, hundreds of proofs and dozens of rulings will not convince the faithful because opposition is truly the work of the devil.
As I pointed out, I’ve been in one of each. Both valid in their approach. Why think otherwise?
The SBM Doctor overseeing the study had bitter words over the regulatory hoops he must jump. I think it was because the earlier human trial of this new drug was obviously effective.
Ewe aren’t required to navigate those same hoops and wish to rely on anecdote, antiquity and authority to lead us back to the future.
Marg, please do me a favour and read this short essay – The Argument Clinic and tell me what you think of it. For some background, the article is in regards to a conversation about psychics, homeopathy, acupuncture and naturopathy.
As a bonus, you’ll be treated to a viddy of some classic Monty Python.
Seriously.
@gaist
I would imagine conditions could be chosen that are not lethal. In Canada, for instance, people wait for aeons for knee replacement surgery. While they are waiting, pain control needs to be exercised. So many opt for pain killers, others go for acupuncture, a few might have some kind of energy healing. So that could be a good group for a study. I see what you mean by it being complicated, however. I see what you mean also by variants. For the “energy healing” component I would pick one that claims a good track record with the condition, and a practitioner or practitioners that likewise claim a good track record.
By improvement I mean more consistent results. When I first began about half the time nothing much happened. Or the person would report that the pain went away and then later report that it came back in an hour. I was initially very skeptical and expected nothing to happen. I was also quite surprised when something did.
Over time as I studied more I began to see some kind effect more often than not. People would report that the pain did not come back until the next day or until three days later.
There were interesting effects. Poison oak disappearing as we watched. A wasp sting not swelling at all but remaining as a flat gray & white blotchy spot, about one inch in diameter (in someone who normally reacted to wasp stings with a huge swelling). The next day it was the size of a mosquito bite (I suspect what the “healing” did was to stop the histamine reaction). A man whose knee was frozen after being immobilized in a cast watching as his leg straightened without pain, without manipulation, apparently on its own. If this is all the power of the mind, then bring on the mind!
The purpose of multiple techniques (“rites” if you will) is to have a toolkit. Out of curiosity, or out of necessity, one can try different things. The one thing all techniques require is non-attachment to the outcome. Some teachers of techniques (e.g., Bengston, Bartlett) emphasise “being playful”. Over time one learns to be less involved with the outcome, and that supposedly produces better results. Also, as Malcolm Gladwell says in Outliers, practice makes a huge difference. By the time you put 10,000 hours into doing something, you get pretty good at it. The 10,000 hours is Gladwell’s number.
@Denice Walter
It’s pretty funny. I say you all have a dogmatic attachment to science as a religion and you say “scratch alt med, you’ll find religion”. It’s like people pointing fingers at each other saying “you are religious”, “no I’m not, you are”. “I said it first!” “No, I did!”
@Al Kimeea
Very funny sketch. Thank you. The abuse department sounds just like @Narad.
I drift back and forth between “a” and “b”. As you see from my discussion with @gaist, I can be quite reasonable, and part of my intent was to provide information that people on the board may not have. I see them as being quite knee-jerk in their reaction against alt-med and I foolishly believed that information might make a difference. But apparently double-blind studies is the only information they are interested in.
@Krebiozen
I found a number of testimonials for Peterson on the web. Nothing thrashing him. He says he has treated 1200 people. You say about 8 per cent of cancers spontaneously go into remission. What percentage of stage IV cancers do? Out of 1200, 8 per cent is 96 people. Peterson says he mostly works with stage IV cancers, so 8 per cent would probably be quite high. If he can present documentation for several hundred, as he ought to be able to do based on what he says, would that not be significant?
“I say you all have a dogmatic attachment to science as a religion”
It never ceases to amaze how believers in the illogical think that accusing opponents of being religious is a stinging insult.
Why do you hate religion?
@Dangerous Bacon
I don’t hate religion. As you saw above, @Denice Walter said all alt-med is religion. Science becomes a religion too if its precepts are accepted on faith.
You couldn’t reason your way out a wet paper bag, so no. The word is not some sort of substitute for a form of tone.
I.e., you completely refuse to acknowledge just how much rope you’ve been given, or your own evasiveness, or the general pattern of failure leading inexorably to attempted change of subject. Finish the job, Marg, and slink back to you partners in fraud and burble about how you really showed everybody, but they couldn’t stand to behold the blinding light revealed when you thrust back the curtain to the multiverse. It’s what sad sacks do.
@ Marg:
You get us wrong!
Very little of my life has to do with science; I choose and behave as I desire, based purely on my rather mercurial feelings- as ephemeral and frivolous as they may be… I do what I please and what feels good to me.
HOWEVER when I have to counsel someone concerning their education, career or future OR advise a relative about their investments ( the former is paid/ the latter gratis), you can bet your a– I’m not going to rely upon my feelings and whims because someone else’s life and well-being are at stake and I want DATA and research because I am not the last word. I don’t presume to ‘see into’ the deeper nature of human endeavors to enlighten others towards their true pathway to their own true self and heart ‘s delight. I look at the NUMBERS. And TRENDS.
The world is a vast intertwined mingle of variables that work together invisibly- our usual place within this matrix of possiblities is hemmed in with fear and doubt: data provides a little light in the seeming darkness of uncertainty that we flail around in.
I define faith as belief in the unseen and unknown; my belief in research concerns belief in what I can SEE and what is knowable now. Following rules about research is no more dogmatic than using correct spellings or patterns of arithmatic: it’s how it’s done and what works.
What I feel and what I like are of little consequence in the wide world BUT if I want to help people I need the opinions and consensus of experts which is what research eventually boils down to-
if I am “right” ( whatever that means) it comes from others’ work and study, not from ‘on high’, or from my opinion alone.
And…
I am reminded of this recent comment at SBM. How promptly did this wasp victim present to you, Marg? You do understand that not all local reactions are mediated by histamine, right? By all means, sketch the steps in your colonial “reasoning.”
“Science becomes a religion too if its precepts are accepted on faith.”
Well I accept that we are fallible and easily fooled by our own prejudices and so must strive to mitigate their influence to understand the nature of our home and ourselves.
But it is more a trust.
@Narad
Immediately after being stung.
Yeah, Monty is great at insightful absurdity.
Marg, did that article make any reference at all to the subject matter?
Did it in any way provide support or undermine the subject at hand?
Was there any reference to arguments or evidence that may have been offered?
@al kimeea
Are you speaking of the article which contained the Monty Python skit? It only spoke of debating styles. I saw no reference to homeopathy or alt-med.
@Narad
http://www.healthguidance.org/entry/14832/1/What-Is-a-Histamine-Reaction.html
http://www.medhelp.org/posts/Allergy/wasp-sting/show/1590500
Whatever, “energy healing” (and related alt woo – and cancer quackery – and homeopathy) remains a humbug.
A wonderful 19th century term – Mark Twain, quick to recognize that sort of pompous nonsense reminds us:
“All you need is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.”
By the way, DW, I’m also enjoying your comments on another concurrent RI thread.
Argument from authority, but this is some authority:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/glaxo-chief-our-drugs-do-not-work-on-most-patients-575942.html
“A senior executive with Britain’s biggest drugs company has admitted that most prescription medicines do not work on most people who take them.
Allen Roses, worldwide vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), said fewer than half of the patients prescribed some of the most expensive drugs actually derived any benefit from them.
It is an open secret within the drugs industry that most of its products are ineffective in most patients but this is the first time that such a senior drugs boss has gone public. His comments come days after it emerged that the NHS drugs bill has soared by nearly 50 per cent in three years, rising by £2.3bn a year to an annual cost to the taxpayer of £7.2bn. GSK announced last week that it had 20 or more new drugs under development that could each earn the company up to $1bn (£600m) a year.
Dr Roses, an academic geneticist from Duke University in North Carolina, spoke at a recent scientific meeting in London where he cited figures on how well different classes of drugs work in real patients.
Drugs for Alzheimer’s disease work in fewer than one in three patients, whereas those for cancer are only effective in a quarter of patients. Drugs for migraines, for osteoporosis, and arthritis work in about half the patients, Dr Roses said. Most drugs work in fewer than one in two patients mainly because the recipients carry genes that interfere in some way with the medicine, he said.
“The vast majority of drugs – more than 90 per cent – only work in 30 or 50 per cent of the people,” Dr Roses said. “I wouldn’t say that most drugs don’t work. I would say that most drugs work in 30 to 50 per cent of people. Drugs out there on the market work, but they don’t work in everybody.””
More fail, Marg. At least you’re consistent. You’ve already had your only hint.
So what you’re saying, Marg, is you believe that evidence provided for energy healing should be questioned even more stringently than mainstream medicine?
@Gray Falcon
I am not sure where that question comes from. What I am saying, or rather what Dr. Roses of GSK above appears to be saying, is that all those stringently tested drugs in mainstream medicine work, just not for most people. Nice percentages, wouldn’t you say? I don’t know where he gets those numbers, but you would think he would know whereof he speaks.
Not if the percentages involve your reading comprehension scales, Fakey McFakerson.
(I duly note that this particular item, once instantiated into its published Ecologist form, appears juxtaposed with the “75% of physicians refuse chemotherapy” trope at… the David Icke forums. I would recommend these happy fields of clover to Marg; in particular, user “princessofwands” is probably a BFF just waiting to happen, aside from the part where Marg wouldn’t be quite so special any more.)
I’ve been thinking about this in the past couple of days actually. Is it me or is Marg just attempting to have the last word and pronounce ‘winner’ based on the fact that she’s tired us all out? She really is a run-of-the-mill crank troll.
Of course, she’s dealing with the wrong people. Most I guess would have SIWOTI, but my personal hobby for a while was spamming the spammers on forums. It’s funny that they actually get tired after a few hours of being spammed themselves.
As for me, I agree with the idea of stopping the replies. Marg’s comments have clearly been flattened, there’s no point in doing it ad naseum.
My last words to Marg, not that she reads them:
Feel free to post your peer-reviewed study when it’s published. Until then…
Shouldn’t this thread be almost at the point of the automatic closure? Did Orac say it was 60 or 90 days?
That is aboot a mode of energy healing I’d not heard before – Body Talk
This involves tapping to manipulate the HEF. I wonder if this is the same energy field for all these $CAMs or are there cultural differences?
DW said – “The arguments our web woo-meisters present similarly engender emotion and fervent belief- often betraying a church meeting, revival feel. Like any religion worth its salt, enemies of the righteous must be identified and excoriated. And we are that. Devils all, some nicer than others.”
Not just the meisters, their acolytes behave in a similar manner. That link I provided for Marg is indeed about homeoquackery etc. between a poet – ‘I thought of a friend and was phoned, I’m a psychic’; a lawyer – ‘Einstein is open minded & evidence free’ and me.
They have no monetary or professional stake in it, yet behave just as Marg but with a much thinner skin.
The surprise was the lawyer, hopefully not criminal, and his idea of what constitutes evidence – after admitting we need to use the scientific method to separate the wheat from the chaff.
It’s 90, unfortunately.
Nice going, everyone. What, not even an attempt at refutation? He was misquoted, taken out of context, etc.? No, it’s “oops, she made a point we can’t refute, so let’s just shut down the thread, eh?”
Marg, it’s a simple point. If you demand we hold high standards for mainstream medicine, then expect alternative medicine to be held to the exact same standards. The fact that you refuse to do so suggests that you came into this discussion without any sense of honesty.
You made no point. You may as well have written “I had green curry with fish today for lunch. It was good.” and you would have said just as much to prove energy healing as you did before.
Marg, you’ve been actively avoiding making a point. Whenever someone tries to get you to prove one of your claims, you change the subject in hopes that no one will notice or care.
Your behavior is that of an internet troll arguing not to convince, but for the lulz. That’s how you look. That is the image you have gone through great effort to project. I have absolutely no reason to believe you are sincere about anything. You get your jollies teasing complete strangers and trampling over their emotions.
So prove me wrong. Where are the high quality trials of energy medicine where there is a statistically significant difference between the treatment group and the control group?
@ Lawrence, Krebiozen:
Worse – I think I recall there being a second condition, like 90 days old AND no replies in the past week (or something like that).
@Beamup – damn.
Marg,
I don’t think this particular canard has come up on this thread before, just a million times elsewhere on this blog, so:
It’s not a point we can’t refute, it’s true, but it’s a great deal better than CAM which doesn’t work in anyone. At the moment a doctor will prescribe a drug for, say, high blood pressure and monitor the patient for a while. If the patient’s blood pressure falls, and the side-effects are tolerable, the doctor will continue to prescribe that drug. If the patient doesn’t respond or cannot tolerate the drug, the doctor will prescribe a different drug, and continue this process until they find a drug that suits that patient.
Everyone is different and different people respond to different drugs differently. Medical scientists are currently working on identifying which drugs will work on which patients, using genetic and other markers, so the trial and error aspect can be eliminated. Some drugs are already targeted in this way, breast cancer treatments spring to mind. What’s wrong with that?
If for the sake of argument we accept ths assertion at face value we then do know they work in that 30 or 50 or whatever percent. of people. How do we know? We know because there’s actual evidence demonstrating they work: pre-clinical testing, experiments demonstrating proof-of-concept, Phase I, II and III clinical trials demonstrating efficacy and assessing safety, idnetifying possible adverse events and establishing risk-vs.-benefit, and of course after-marketing surveillance further monitoring efficacy and safety. For most of these drugs we know how they work as well (ibuprofen, for example, through inhibition of the enzyme cyclooxygenase).
With energy healing, not only do we not know how it works we don’t know if it works on anyone at all.
Certainly you’ve offered no credible evidence that it does.
Nice going everyone, not even an attempt at refuation?
Nice going, Marg, from someone who has never made any attempt at addressing the topic under discussion. Where is your proof that energy healing works? You’ve never provided any — wWhen asked for it, you make a mad dash to find a squirrel.
I look at meds this way:
even without genetic testing, doctors know plenty about their patients because of observation, testing and interview.
A guy has an arrhythmia: let’s suppose we know all of his symptoms, test results and intervening factors about him.
We can create a matrix with rows being- perhaps- symptoms and columns being severity- thus he’ll wind up in a particular cell or locale – which the doctor can match up to results of research he or she has studied and then *choose* the best drug of many possibilities- so what if drug a helps only 30% of people with arrhythmias if it helps YOU! Then, the patient is started on the med and OBSERVED- ( including tests) does it help? does he feel better? can he do more? does he have any disturbing side effects? they can change the med. 30 or 50 % means something different if you have a choice of many meds.
Alt media likes to present doctors’ choices/ thought as being a simple, cut and dry, one variable deal that doesn’t involve input or choice by the patient and is entirely dictated by pharma decision making.
@ THS:
I truly appreciate your kind words- and yes, flattery will get you everywhere : it’s like ambrosia to me.
@ al kimeea:
Followers mimic and posture in emulation of their leaders in response , some even become preachers themselves. I see their progress along these lines at AoA and TMR- they in turn have followers.
@ Shay…OMG, is Marg looking for the squirrel?
Marg: woof woof, grrrrr…
@JCG goes to the doctor. The doctor says “you have appendicitis; you need an appendectomy.”
JCG: “where is your proof an appendectomies work? Have there been any controlled double-blinded studies done on appendectomies?”
Dr.: “no, but our clinical observation is that they cure appendicitis.”
JCG: “clinical observation! why, that is just anecdotal evidence! how can you trust your observation? or your colleagues’ observation? you need trials, man, trials!
I will not go under your scalpel unless you provide me with adequate proof! I want to see successful stage I, stage II, and stage III trials! Double blinded! Controlled!
Dr.: “It has also been our observation that a significant number of people with appendicitis who don’t have appendectomies then go on to have a perforated bowel and peritonitis, and subsequently they die.”
JCG: “your observation! piffle! blah blah blah! you can’t trust your observation! people thought for centuries based on observation that the sun revolved around the earth! you scroundrel, you’ll say anything to distract me from the fact that you have no proof that appendectomies work! None!”
Indeed. What would JCG do?
Marg, have you ever considered engaging in honest discussion? Or applying the slightest bit of thought to what you write?
It’s stiff competition, but that may actually rank as the most moronic comment Marg has made yet.
One thing, Marg: Every single penny you’ve ever taken as a “donation” is ill gotten. Each red cent.
@Marg:
What would JCG do? Ignore another pathetic attempt on your part to change the subject and ask you — again — for proof that energy healing works.
I posted a link to an article that discussed why double blind studies are sometimes impractical or unethical and why other kinds of compelling evidence are acceptable, just a little way upthread. I’m not sure why I bothered.
Marg once again demonstrates that she has no concept of “evidence” or “proof.”
@Krebiozen
I am perfectly awareof why double-blind studies would sometimes be impractical or unethical. JCG, however, does not seem to be. I was just illustrating the absurdity of his position taken to the extremes.
BTW this thread began with me pointing out the shortcomings of Science and allopathic medicine. It was your lot that then changed it to “oh yeah, prove that energy healing works then!”
With the Roses quotation I returned to where I began, and where I will now rest. Your precious gold-plated studies produce medicine that works in less than half the population. They are expensive, cumbersome, and time-consuming, in addition to being ineffective when those “proven” drugs are taken out into real populations. It’s time to dump the method and come up with something better — such as the comparative efficacy studies I suggested earlier.
No, your first comment was this mind-numbingly stupid remark:
And “energy healing” would be “allopathic” if not for the problem of simply being a dumb-ass scam, f*ckwit.
Yeah, Narad’s right. A bit rude at this point due to thoroughly justified impatience, is all.
I reckon this will continue until Orac closes the thread. Please don’t dominate the rap, Marg, when you’ve got nothing new to say. Worse, what you have said has no basis in reality.
Marg,
Having reread the last few of JGC’s comments, I don’t see any evidence at all that he takes that position. He pointed out that there is copious evidence that the pharmaceutical drugs referred to by Dr. Roses work in a substantial minority of people, and no equivalent evidence that energy healing works any better than a placebo for anything at all in anyone. There is also copious evidence that appendectomy is an effective treatment for appendicitis and we know that the longer appendectomy is delayed, the greater the risk of perforation and nasty sequelae so your reductio ad absurdum falls flat on its face.
The rest of your comment betrays a gross ignorance of how clinical trials and other studies actually work, and why they are carried out the way they are.
” Your precious gold-plated studies produce medicine that works in less than half the population.”
And your methods work on none.
The essence of what Marg is doing: She doesn’t care about the truth or which treatments work best. She’s doing the Gish Gallop, shotgunning pseudo-points in hopes we don’t refute them all, so that she can “win.”
She ignores our points and refuses to acknowledge our actual positions because she just wants to play the script in her head and distorts everything we say to try to make it conform to her prejudices.
She also wants to put every comparatively tiny problem with SBM on trial because she has no defense for energy medicine and is completely blind to its much greater shortcomings. What the gullible marks in the world don’t know won’t hurt her, and acknowledging the Ayn Randian caveat emptor anarchy of the altie market would only direct attention where we want it to be, not where she wants it to be.
The only thing Marg has done is show that she is impervious to thinking about the responses people have given. She doesn’t care about the answers, or making an informed reply back; she cares about being right (even if she’s wrong) and making emotional pleas that have nothing to do with science.
In fact, she may think she’ll convert a lurker or something, show them that science is just full of blowhards… instead she’ll make herself appear as though she’s an ignorant person who prefers wishful thinking to reality.
I’m certainly still entertaining the notion that, in some mental nook, perhaps cranny, she thinks this exhibitiion may be a springboard to the Big Time.
@Narad
Interesting hypothesis. She could be posting this thread to some alt-med forum, and saying “see, see, I’m so much smarter than they are” and having her acolytes be so darned impressed with her reasoning abilities.
Luckily for us, that doesn’t make her any more right than she’s ever been on anything.
If you allow for a whimsical allegory, let’s think of drugs as clothes. Most clothes only fit a small percentage of people, but if there is enough different sizes on sale everybody can find something suitable.
Then there are some clothes, that albeit they fit, the colours clash, they chafe or feel uncomfortable enough not to be bought. These would be the side effects. Luckily, in most cases, there is something else the shopper can choose instead.
Now, if we stick with the allegory a little further, most alt-med marketers want you to think that regular medicine means ugly one-size fit military uniforms that chafe and squeeze and are made from dead bady hairs for everybody. And instead of offering similar but better clothes, they have all-encompasing cures for everybody (or rather, everybody who gets better, because if you didn’t YOU didn’t want it or believe in it hard enough)
Continuing with the allegory, none of these alt-med clothes have been through the same rigorous manufacturing standards as traditional med clothes, and if yours falls apart while you’re wearing it, it was your own fault. Also, there are no quarantees or any statistics showing they keep you warm, or dry like clothes should. At worst, these would be like the fabled emperors new clothes. You can’t see them, you can’t feel them, they offer no help or protection, but at least you “KNOW” you’re wearing something.
This doesn’t mean that over 70% of all Alzheimer’s patients are left untreted, with only the side effects to keep them company. What it means, that (best case scenario), three different drugs would treat practically everybody with Alzheimer’s. Best case scenarios like this rarely happen, but luckily we have more than 3 drugs for Alzheimer’s. This multi-prong approach is also better because some drugs are better and treating certain symptoms, so depending on the stage of the disease, and particular manifestations, the doctor can choose the one that best fits the symptoms.
Very well put Gaist.
Building on Gaist’s excellent post about various classifications/various combinations of drugs to treat hypertension…
http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/hbp/treat/bpd_type.htm
Wow, is Marg not the dumbest troll that we’ve seen here in a (very) long time?
Marg, as Gaist very eloquently pointed out, we’re all aware of the limitations of Newtonian medicine and what is required for new medicines to be marketed. We’re also aware of the same for the $CAM industry.
The eebil allopathists promised me nothing and told me upfront it was 50/50 for me because of genetic variation in the bug. For others with another variant, the odds are much better. They also warned of all known side effects with the caveat of possibly experiencing any combo or none of them.
And, because we aren’t all exactly the same, please let us know of anything you experience not on the list, such as my ‘stache going all silky soft and growing straight out of my upper lip, almost like a Shih Tzu flower face.
It wasn’t pleasant Marg, but I understand why. All the things living on this rock, “grew up” on it and so are related which means if you’re going to mess with a protein of a bug to hinder reproduction, there’s a good chance we have that protein – but doing something else.
Allopathists aren’t allowed to just market new techniques even with already approved drugs – hence the first study I was in. For the second, all I was told is that it was promising.
$CAM artists can and do say whatever the fuck they want. It is no wonder they want to dump the scientific method and lead us into the bright future of Galenopathy.
Marg it is obvious that you don’t have any idea that you are shamelessly lying to people as you reach into their wallets.
The sad part is your
patientsmarks have no idea either as the lawyer, poet and the bloke who wrote that entertaining ad hom aboot me made clear – “science has it’s place”.As DW nicely pointed out, that place is snuggled or smothered by a belief system where mystery is compelling and knowledge is arrogant.
I’ll add my thumbs up for gaist’s last comment. It also touches on how I see things in terms of individualization of treatment.
Real doctors and researchers go through the trouble of finding out what can vary in a patient and how that would vary the response to different treatments. People vary based on genetics, background, patient history, and so forth, so you can’t expect a drug to work under every circumstance. All the various specialties interact on things like this and it’s why doctors need you to permit them to share your medical information so they won’t be operating in the dark when it comes to your individual quirks.
I doubt many quacks show that level of attention, aside from the fraudulent or sincere but less confident quacks looking out for signs that their patient needs real serious care from useful doctors. If one quack treatment doesn’t work out, they’ve got the far more extreme version of individualization as an excuse: You can’t know anything about what will work because no one has anything in common (in such a case, how can anyone assert that any treatment works on anything?). This encourages the patient to keep seeking out new treatments until there’s an apparent success, whether from the self-limiting nature of some illnesses, regression to the mean, spontaneous remission, or whatever, so long as they keep trying stuff that conforms with altie identity politics.
@ al kimeea:
I really appreciate your comments.
I find that alt med *coddles* its followers by first flattering them – they’re part of a ‘paradigm shift’, a *nouvelle vague*, if you will: they’re riding the crest of a great tsunamic, over-washing of science – a cleansing of its soiled linens .
Secondly, it insulates them from dire prognoses and realistic consequences of illness as well as un-attractive, uncomfortable – but necessary- treatments. Instead it provides *easier* options that work without fail: uncertainty and fear are eliminated by panacaea. promises and spiritual assurances.
Obviously, comfort is important, especially when people are hurt, physically or emotionally: however it’s important that the coddling not interfere with the REAL treatment. Alt media may RIGHT NOW be interfering with people getting care because it frightens them away from SBM and wastes time and money. So much of their MO is fearmongering.
-btw- there’s nothing wrong with coddling: when I had a minor eye injury a few months ago, I was rather pleased that someone brought me a very overpriced, cashmere scarf that probably accomplished more than OTC pain pills and ice. I think I’ll wear it later today.
You know, there are two possible things you can believe:
1) That what works for most people must work for all people and individualized treatment is therefore not necessary.
2) Individualized treatment is necessary because people vary.
Why is it, exactly, that Marg can condemn Big Pharma for saying “these pills are not what will work for all people” but lionize Burzynski, who tells his marks “Oh, sure, I gave that guy a different cocktail of chemo drugs than I’m going to give you, but the really important thing is that you’re buying them through my pharmacy at my markup”?
@ Bronze Dog
I was told of another patient whose markers were waaay outta whack which alarmed our minders. Turns out the person was taking some traditional Chinese herb and failed to mention it – even though we were regularly quizzed on supplements.
These minders, BTW, were shruggies regarding the $CAM industry, “science doesn’t know everything.”.
@ DW
I too have found this endless discussion useful for it’s insights into Altieville. That this one has carried on so long is very interesting as they usually dissolve by now.
The poet et al are a lefty political site, so I was interested in how they would argue $CAM-wise, seeing as that end of the spectrum are supposed to be Friends of Science.
Marg redux, religion rebooted. Not too happy to be told Einstein wasn’t so open minded his brain fell out.
When you believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer”
@al kimeea
Also endless insights into “Alloville”….
Can you tell us what particularly valuable insights you’ve taken away from the dialogue with regard to ‘Alloville’?
I knew it.
Flounce off, only to return a few weeks later hoping nobody would notice that she’s trying to resurrect an argument she lost five times over already.
If she thinks she’s going to have the last word, she’s wrong.
“Alloville” is presumably some fictional late 18th century town where allopathy is still used. Perhaps Marg has a secret time machine that runs on qi.
@JCG
Unbelievable narrowmindedness. Total lack of curiosity about what else might be out there beyond narrow materialism.
@Flip
Boo.
It has already been explained to you that monist materialism is entirely unnecessary to the observation that your assertion of magical powers is a load of crap.
@Marg
Well played. After being asked numerous times for evidence for your claims, support for your assertions and definitions of your ideas, the best retort you can come up with is…
I shall now tell my doctor to shove his prescriptions, find myself an energy healer and devote my life to postmodernism. Quite clearly “boo” is just so convincing I could do nothing else but change my mind.
— On a non-sarcastic point, the whole reason I’m here is because I’m curious. Why are you here again?
A number of us have taken the time and trouble to read Bengston’s articles and paper, and to look at various other bits and pieces you have linked to; I certainly have. Just because we are unconvinced by the poor quality of evidence you have presented doesn’t mean we are narrow-minded.
As I have told you I personally experimented with ‘energy healing’ on and off over a period of several years, though I never charged anyone money or made any promises. I came to the conclusion that it can all be explained by suggestion and expectation, especially when I found that very similar results can be obtained using ‘hypnosis’. What’s narrow-minded or incurious about that?
On the other hand you don’t appear to have taken the trouble to read anything any of us have suggested, or even seriously considered the possibility that you have been fooling yourself. To quote Richard Feynman:
I know who I think has been narrow-minded in this exchange.
Gentlemen:
I believe that Mercola has a cartoon or video on his woo-drenched website ( that I’ve never clicked on) titled “Welcome to Allopathville” or suchlike.
But at any rate, we are living in a material world etc.
Of course it does. Marg wants to have her cake and eat it too: she wants us to simply take her assertions on her word alone, without evidence. But she also wants to provide evidence that proves that she’s right and we’re wrong. We’re not taking her experiences as true, so we’re narrow minded. We’re not taking her evidence as true, so we’re narrow minded.
Unfortunately for her, the former doesn’t work and the latter is unconvincing. The fact that her debate style is like that of a high school girl doesn’t help either.
Has someone previously mentioned the Dunning-Kruger effect on this thread? If not – or even if it has – it should be.
It’s Aliiiive
Marg, I’ll wager you market your vapor wares as holistic or at least consider them so
Yet you fail to understand that your merch renders this universe entirely non-holistic. How so?
On the one hand we have the thing that appears to quite accurately, if incompletely, describe the cosmos. From the smallest particle to the largest galaxy this thing has given us a means to understand our home and ourselves far better than ever before.
Did you know the Chinese had naval cruise missiles in the 1300s? They left drawings. And multi-stage rockets, land mines and hand grenades too. Christian Europe had the plague although they may have had relearned siege engines by then IIRC.
Everything around you can be described by combinations of things on the periodic table, unless you think there are only five elements? Add physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics and what have you got – science. And it works despite the fallibility of the talking monkeys that employ it.
And on the other hand… waving hands.
Not only for “healing”, but at the scads of evidence provided by that other thing, science, that shows energy healing to be snake oil.
You seem to think because we don’t know some things we don’t know anything as fact and that it is of no major consequence that what you sell runs completely against these facts as established by science. Not complementary or adjunctive, diametrically opposed to the point of exclusivity.
Like religion, there is no reconciling these ideas no matter how Orwell or Sumfisticated Theological you get. This is not holism.
I started watching The Secret. A guy with a PhD says “Do you know how electricity works? I don’t. But it does. And so The Secret works.”
I turned it off laughing at a guy who went so far without paying attention to middle school science class.
Convenient that I happened to have recently written up Doggerel #9 in the new series, about how “open-minded” is abused and misunderstood. Embedded one of Qualia Soup’s videos, since he does it better.
Of course, I think we have plenty of reason to believe that Marg is here to rehearse her prejudices, rather than honestly have a conversation. The earlier invocation of Sheldrake doesn’t do her any favors, either. Yakaru’s working on that.
Marg, no one here is being narrow-minded, and I’m quite curious about what else is out there–it’s why I became a scientist in the first place. So I’ll quite happily consider any evidence you care to present supporting your claim that energy healing is a real phenomenon and can actually treat illness and/or injury.
The problem is simply that you haven’t provided any such evidence to be either open-or close-minded about–in fact, it appears lately that you’ve given up trying altogether and your most recent posts are simply an attempt to distract attention from your failure to do so.
yep, other than the Divine Miss M (apopologies to Bette), and I’ve been interested in quackery since I saw “Little Big Man” when it was released and intro’d me to Allardyce -> Barnum -> Randi
More Ben Goldacre on Gold Standard pharmaceutical medicine.
http://www.badscience.net/2012/09/heres-the-intro-to-my-new-book/
“Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don’t like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug’s true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in its life, and even then they don’t give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works through ad hoc oral traditions, from sales reps, colleagues or journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are even owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it’s not in anyone’s financial interest to conduct any trials at all. These are ongoing problems, and although people have claimed to fix many of them, for the most part, they have failed; so all these problems persist, but worse than ever, because now people can pretend that everything is fine after all.
That’s a lot to stand up, and the details are much more horrific than this paragraph makes it sound. There are some individual stories that will make you seriously question the integrity of the individuals involved; some that will make you angry; and some, I suspect, that might make you very sad. But I hope you will come to see that this is not just a book[2] about bad people. In fact, it’s possible for good people, in perversely designed systems, to casually perpetrate acts of great harm on strangers, sometimes without ever realising it. The current regulations – for companies, doctors and researchers – create perverse incentives; and we’ll have better luck fixing those broken systems than we will ever have trying to rid the world of avarice.”
The issue is one of bias: pharmaceuticals are tested with a bias towards success; alternative medicines are tested with a bias towards failure.
Everybody who is a regular reader of this blog and contributor to the RI-returned is aware of serious issues around documented questionable practices of pharma.
This is not sufficient reason to accept the fanciful nonsense of the “alternative medicines” you have touted here.
This also does no invalidate the clear efficacy of pharma products and the life-saving contributions of pharma R & D. Gertrude B. Elion comes to mind.
Marg, if alternative medicine is tested with a bias towards failure, how precisely is that bias enacted? Intention isn’t magic. You can’t simply will a test result into failure, you have to actually do something that biases it.
Of course, that’s the opposite of what I see: Altie gurus use sloppy, bias-inducing test protocols. Scientists retest with higher quality protocols to eliminate known causes of bias, and only then does the benefit vanish.
@Marg – care to explain why such huge numbers of drugs and treatments never make it through the testing process? If the problem was as large as you claim, drug companies wouldn’t have to worry about having any of their drugs rejected….but the fact is for every treatment that does make it to market, almost 100 do not….care to explain?
Marg,
We discussed Ben Goldacre and his work to improve the way drug trials are done and reported above. I have been following this for years, and I have even corresponded with Dr. Goldacre about it in the past. I fully support what he is trying to do, and I’m sure most people commenting here do too. What Dr. Goldacre has written does not in any way support your claims. He is concerned about the pharmaceutical industry exaggerating the benefits of their products, he isn’t claiming that drugs don’t work at all. I am quite sure that he doesn’t believe in energy medicine, or acupuncture, and I know he doesn’t believe in homeopathy, or even in the ability of fish oil to improve children’s school performance. Here he talks about ‘detox’ (on a boat apparently). Much of what he says about the “childish magic rituals” surrounding detox apply just as well to energy healing.
By the way, I can cherry-pick from what he wrote too:
You will find systematic reviews mentioned a lot on this blog, and in the comments, because most of us here understand these issues quite well.
There’s a small amount of bad language on the Goldacre video I linked to so perhaps not safe for work on speakers.
Marg’s more interested in tearing down the competition than demonstrating a safer, more effective product. She’s essentially trying to get our vote by slinging mud instead of proposing good policy.
From what I’ve seen of Goldacre, he’s one of us. Of course there’s bias in the pharmaceutical industry, and we want to do something about that. They provide some good products, so it’s worth the effort to clear out the corruption. Marg is so confused about our position on the issue, she doesn’t recognize she’s using one of us to beat down her straw man.
Quacks, on the other hand, provide no benefit and demand we be tolerant of even greater corruption. What the pharmaceutical companies do is peanuts compared to that.
@marg
Thank you for that blatant example of Dunning-Kreuger.
Honestly, do you purposely make yourself look that ignorant and idiotic?
Yes Marg – saying one thing it bad does not make something else automatically good……
I just want to reiterate one thing Dr. Goldacre wrote:
Whereas energy healing, acupuncture, homeopathy and wishful thinking have produced what?
oh crap, I hope I didn’t italicize the blog again!
nope, just blockquote fail. (whew!) I was answering Krebiozen’s question above.
And so your suggestion is to do the opposite of what Goldacre is talking about and lower the bar for whatever random occultist jetsam you happen to disgorge? “If only my shooting of magic energy beams out of my hands channeled from the multiverse through my cosmic pineal gland were held to the same standard as drug trials, it would be skies of blooo! Skies of blooo! It’s so unfair!”
What’s often hilarious to me is that quacks present themselves as the reformers- they will take what Goldacre says and extract anything he says that is positive about pharmaceuticals so that he sounds like one of THEM. I’ve heard BG’s new book discussed @ PRN.
They assume that they are their audiences’ only source of information so they lie.
Marg, if there’s such a bias towards success why do so few drugs which enter clinical testing successfully pass Phase I, II and III clinical trials and receive FDA/EMEA approval? Overall the failure rate is about 9%, while for some indications it’s even higher (for oncology, for example, only 5% of drugs entering Phase I trials achieve approval). (per centage as of 2006). Why, in the absence of that ‘bias towards success’ it’s hard to belevie we’d be approving any drugs at all…
In any event, since we’re not proposing energy healing to be held to a different standard than science based drugs and therapies—only that energy healing, etc., be held to the exact same standard of proof of efficacy and safety science based medicine has been—energy healing would benefit from whatever ‘bias toward success’ might exist as well.
I wonder if Marg knows what an RSS reader is. She seems to think no one will notice if she just waits long enough for the conversation to die and then *pounce*.
In fact she has so little to offer that her tactics have now been reduced to hit and run…
Whereas energy healing, acupuncture, homeopathy and wishful thinking have produced what?
Successful efforts to have this scheisse re-branded healthcare and covered by Alberta @ $500/yr per family. Allowed a chiroquackupuncturist to become the mandarin over science/technology in $nottawa…
Marg seems to think reforming healthcare by ditching the scientific method will ameliorate the valid concerns Goldacre raises when it would be legislation requiring pharma to be more transparent etc in their application of it.
The refutation of The Rosa Protocol is also very homeopathic. The professional energy healers decided before being tested which of her hands was easier to almost feel which trumps the weak sauce presented as counter by being perfectly representative of the claimed ability to feel and manipulate the HEF.
This test of alleged psychics in London published yesterday reminded me of Emily Rosa’s experiment. Both psychics were confident they could easily pass the test. Both failed. Both came up with excuses for their failure afterwards.
http://chrisbeatcancer.com/are-cancer-patients-hopes-for-chemo-too-high/#comment-12831
Study shows that most people with advanced cancer believe that chemo is going to cure them. Oncologists ARE peddling false hope.
Marg, where are the doctors telling them these unrealistic hopes? Patient belief isn’t directly a result of what the doctors promise. Humans have amazing capacity for denial built right in.
Example of the opposite: the people who think they were sent home to die when the doctors gave them a good prognosis and told them there wasn’t anything else left to do.
@marg
Thank you again for proving your utter stupidity and ignorance.
My favorite mother-in-law has lung cancer. Based on what I’ve been told, nobody is telling her that conventional treatment will cure her.
Yes, anecdote.
Marg, do you believe that energy healing can cure cancer, as the commenter you linked to does?
What do you believe a reasonable price would be for an energy-based cancer treatment regimen? Or would you just ‘accept donations’ instead?
Talk about peddling false hope.
Ergo, telling people that magic beams of “healing rays” from the hands (one item that Marg has never managed to address in any way, shape, or form) is curative of cancer is fine. Your new gambit is just as crappy as all the rest, Marg.
Marg, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you lecturing about the weaknesses of the modern medical system is like Idi Amin preaching about human rights. As long as you’re backing the ridiculous modality of “energy healing” you are in no position to throw stones at modalities that, unlike yours, can actually show efficacy better than placebo.
Why the hell do you keep humiliating yourself with this, Marg? When are you going to realize that those magic beans you bought are simply not worth what you paid for them? When are you going to stop throwing throwing good time and energy after bad – not to mention trying to throw our time and energy down the same craphole?
Yep, definitely just doing the hit and run now.
Surely this thread can die already?
I’d recommend stopping posting every time she does, but quite clearly she just wants the last word.
The only reasonable* conclusion to draw from the hit-and-run subject changes is that we (mostly you) explain the issue so well she can’t think of any refutation or question on the issue.
So think of it as educating and reforming Marg one mistaken CAM-blog induced statement at a time.
* Unless you believe there are people out there more stubborn than rational.
gaist – yes, yes there are people more stubborn
Marg – never have I been sold a bill of goods by a real healthcare professional and having a positive attitude is now a bad thing?
Anecdotes
– father died primarily of lung cancer in Feb 88 after being given a dire prognosis the prev Oct and sent home to die because there was nothing left to do
– buddy died Aug 90 of ALS roughly two years after being given the dire prognosis that he might have two years because there’s nothing left to do
that’s when the woomeisters, circling always circling, swooped in with their “science doesn’t know everything” this and “holistic” that and did nothing but drain their wallets with the hope of a cure.
Marg sees nothing wrong with charging $7500 for this while at the same time decrying the grandiose of her “profession”.
reprehensible
not to be such an anecdotal downer, a niece was diagnosed with cancer at 18 and told she had a good chance and was warned of side effects (as was I).
10 years later, still cancer free and side effects? She was hardly affected at all and missed very little university other than appointments with the holistic shaman who cared for her.
The study comes from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. But, hey, don’t believe your own people either when the news doesn’t fit your worldview.
Marg, did you even read the article you linked to?
If so it’s hard to understand how you completely missed the following, to falsely claim it argues oncologists are selling false hope:
Marg, did you even read our responses?
Marg,
You are championing treatments that don’t work, and con artists who who despicably prey on the dying, charging exorbitant amounts of money for these utterly useless treatments. Yet you have the gall to criticize those who offer treatments that do extend life and increase its quality, because patients hope they will do more? Have you the faintest idea how sick that makes you sound?
I notice that someone called Judith claims in the comments on that story that there are “alternatives that could actually do them far more good than the chemo they are being given”. I wonder what alternatives she has in mind that work better than chemo, because I have searched high and low for them and I can’t find any.
We know that in practice those who pursue alternative cancer treatments have a poorer life expectancy and in many cases a poorer quality of life, not least because they often reject (or can’t afford) palliative care. The Gonzalez study is a good example of this. I’m sure the likes of Judith have good intentions, but the damage they do with this delusional magical thinking is very real. Maybe she doesn’t understand what dying of cancer with nothing but woo is really like?
For the record, Marg, I wasn’t challenging the article, I was challenging your interpretation of it.
Or, rather, the way you introduced it seemed to beg me to point out the big leap between your description of the article’s thesis and the apparently unjustified conclusion you drew from it. The fact that you apparently made that leap suggests to me that you think cancer patients are electric monks, not human beings.
@Krebiozen
FYI, you are also championing treatments that don’t work.
Which treatments that don’t work, for what illnesses, is Krebiozen championing? Be specific.
Also, if you read Judith’s blog, you’ll see she says that in her experience people do better with palliative energy treatments than palliative chemo.
Yup, Marg’s still playing the game of “I know what you are, but what am I?” She can’t provide any evidence that energy medicine works, so she continues to grasp at straws in the form of chemotherapy’s imperfect nature.
I also notice she’s chosen to get vaguer about the topic, so I doubt she’d elaborate by responding to my earlier critical thinking question or posited alternate explanation. If she read that article she cited, it’d be a simple matter of quoting a relevant bit instead of hurling vague implications and straw men.
Can she offer something other than personal anecdote to support her claim that palliative energy treatments outperform palliative chemotherapy? If not you’re wasting your (and our) time mentioning it.
The hand-waving business must be slow right now.
Marg,
I suggested that chemotherapy for the conditions (metastatic lung or colorectal cancer) mentioned in the paper referred to in that article does “extend life and increase its quality”. Let’s see if that”s true.
For non small cell metastatic lung cancer a number of chemotherapeutic agents are used in combination, see this systematic review (remember what Ben Goldacre wrote?) and meta-analysis which concludes:
It also mentions that:
How about metastatic colorectal cancer? Here’s another systematic review that concludes that treatment can increase life expectancy from 8 months to as much as 24 months.
FYI you’re wrong.
Although business may be slow , there is always a market for telling people what they want to hear – words of comfort news that the situation isn’t that bad, ‘breaking it to them gently’…as a certain gentleman I know says, ” I give them the mild version FIRST… so they get used to the idea” – however his business doesn’t involve health or lying..
SBM has to consider people’s emotional reactions to bad news – imagine what it feels like to be given a poor prognosis: there must be a sort of roaring going on inside of your head as adrenalin surges and your field of vision narrows to a tunnel; imagine that you would feel like in the days following, as your pulse pounds and your attention narrows to one or two words that you don’t want to hear.
Woo-meisters take advantage of people at their most vulnerable. Telling people the ‘mild version’ and not continuing on to the entire truth and promising what you can’t deliver are actually cruelties.
I’m reminded of a Fark meme my brother mentioned to me, and Marg seems to be doing the equivalent. When a Republican politician was criticized for doing something, a Republican would typically show up in the thread and instead of defending the politician, try to claim an equivalent shortcoming in a Democrat. The Farker response was often, “Both sides are bad, so vote Republican?” The possibility never enters the troll’s mind that some people might be independent, third party, dissenters within the Democratic party, or anything other than a blindly loyal partisans.
That’s why I think this is a political issue with Marg. She can only see things in terms of a two-party system, painting us as pharma absolutists when we’re not. The two-party system of alties and conventional medication is a marketing invention she’s fallen for. If it weren’t for that forced politicization, she might be able to measure individual treatments on their scientifically demonstrated merits and drawbacks on a case-by-case basis instead of playing identity politics.
I have a comment in moderation about a couple of systematic reviews of chemotherapy for metastatic lung cancer and colorectal cancer (the subject of the study and article Marg referred to) that show they dowork, in terms of extending life and/or improving quality of life.
I’ve noted this recently: a typical crank manoeuvre is to deflect attention from themselves and their claims to the ‘other side’. Pick an enemy, any enemy and attack them in the hopes we don’t notice that they haven’t proven themselves right.
Glad to see you are all still paying attention.
Yet another tour of distractions away from the fact that MARG, the contemptible purse-snatcher of science, HAS NO EVIDENCE THAT ENERGY HEALING WORKS
Marg, on 28th August I asked you a question. You didn’t answer. I’m very polite, so didn’t persist, but it’s late at night (where I am) and I have drink taken – so I’ll repost:
”Marg: ”Leigh Fortson`s book “Embrace, Release, Heal“, which came out last year, is quite a resource. She has collected the stories of a dozen cancer survivors, including herself, who beat the odds with alternative medicine after conventional treatment failed”
And there we have it, really. ALL those cancer survivors had had conventional cancer treatment. Suzanne Somers-style, they have chosen to credit whatever ‘alternative medicine’ they also took.
I’ve read scores – perhaps hundreds – of ‘I healed my own cancer’ stories. I’ve never seen one that stood up to the mildest scrutiny. Without exception the person has either had conventional treatment too, OR was never actually diagnosed with cancer in the first place (many of the latter had self-diagnosed, some were flat out lying).
And believe me, I wanted to see reliable testimonials. I’ve ‘fessed up on RI before to being a reformed altie. It took my own cancer to shake me out of that. Books, websites, email exchanges… all the ‘healed myself’ testimonials I read led me to one conclusion – no alternative treatment had ever been effective against a single case of cancer. Anywhere. Ever.
The person who argued most persuasively had refused chemo and radiotherapy for her breast cancer, and was adamant that Gerson therapy had saved her life. But… before undertaking that gruelling regime, she had had surgery.
Me? Stage 3 breast cancer; surgery, chemo, radiotherapy. Fit and well almost 9 years after diagnosis.
Oh, that reminds me.
‘Most cancer patients in this country [which country, btw?] die of chemotherapy.’
Evidence, please.”
Marg,
I will never tire of combating lies that are spread about conventional cancer treatments, such as claims that they are “treatments that don’t work” (for evidence this is a lie see my comment when it finally emerges from moderation). Regrettably some people believe these lies and make bad decisions that can have devastating effects on them and their families.
Here’s another systematic review of chemotherapy for non-small-cell lung cancer, one of the two types of cancer referred to in that article you linked to. Remember that a systematic review is, to quote Ben Goldacre, “an unbiased survey of all the evidence on a given question. It is the best-quality evidence that can be used”. It concludes that:
If you had metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer, would you really choose energy healing or any other alternative treatment over chemotherapy? Without conventional treatment, average life expectancy is 8 months. Conventional treatment can add several months to that, in some cases much longer. That’s not a cure, and we all wish there were better treatments, but every day of additional time spent with loved ones is precious to these patients and their families.
There isn’t a shred of evidence that energy healing or any other alternative treatment can offer even a single extra day of life to a patient with terminal cancer. Not a shred.
By the way, that’s life expectancy once the cancer has metastasized. When caught earlier, which is unfortunately rare, treatment is much more effective.
Ah, not just a sad sack, but one with nowhere else to go.
Sister and brother sceptics:
FYI- the new blog platform shuts down threads after 90 days…time minus 17 days and counting.
It’s sad that this is all it takes for you to believe that a claim is true. It’s even sadder that you don’t understand why that’s wrong.
Even sadder, Marg’s magic powers and associated anecdotes don’t even rival those of Veet for Men.
Denice – I was wondering earlier today when this one is shut. Thanks. Is that midnight 18th/19? I had been pondering making the font invisible…
Also I saw reference to a $ 7500 fee but didn’t scroll to find exactly where it was declared. What, was that for energy healing??? No way! Anyhow, I have a setup that does the same stuff for free for everybody, all the time.
Marg, I’m curious. A few days ago (October 31, 2012), after quoting from Ben Goldacre’s book, you complained
Now, on November 2, 2012, you state:
Do you not see the irony here?
In any case, Judith’s (lack of ) understanding of control groups is even worse than your own, and we covered all that ground with both of you back in June (https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2012/06/05/reiki-versus-dogs-just-being-dogs/ and sorry I have no clue how to link specific comments out of those almost 600; see June 16th about 40% down).
Seriously, Marg: you are in no position to criticize anyone else about bias.
@lo_mcg
Since you are still alive, they must not have given you enough chemotherapy. After all, according to Marg the objective of Oncologists must be to kill their patients.
Bengston goes cloudbusting surely he can do the same to our quarks and effect a cure of anything. It was in The Toronto Star, and, and he did it ten times.
I guess, now that he has a lurnin DVD for $$$$$ale, he’s decided you can lurn others the magic. He was unsure in the article but didn’t see an issue with charging people to hear him talk.
Yes, it was $7500 or thereaboots and you could put the 2 large down payment via PayPal. It is a ways upstream.
Even further up she mentioned something aboot having little trust in those in her “profession” for reasons almost Protestant like. But this $7500 man, he’s good. What?
Sadly, the lawyer I sparred with displays a similar train of thought to Marg and was quite ready to spout abject falsehoods either through ignorance or guile. My drachmas are on the former. He couldn’t keep track of what he was saying either as he, the poet and another editor circled the wagons.
The poet used the ‘I’m too humble to know anything” gambit and just expected his sciencey things, like his coffee machine, to work.
Marg, you remind of two people I worked with. IT pros all. They are convinced reading Harold Pothead would lurn yur chilluns witchcraft. Seriously, and one believes mental illness is demonic possession. Do you find these ideas ridiculous? Fictional even?
But not a cloudbusting hornswoggler?
Marg,
I couldn’t find this claim on Judith’s blog. I didn’t look for very long as I found myself getting increasingly angry at the ignorant and dangerous misinformation I found there. For example, she claims that:
Following at the link on WebMD, what do I find (my emphasis)?
So Judith’s claim about this study is completely wrong. The study found that palliative care in addition to cancer treatment improved outcomes. This kind of ignorant and misleading nonsense really annoys me.
I also noticed that Judith’s blog is based in the UK where it is a crime under the Cancer Act for any unqualified person to, “offer to treat any person for cancer, or to prescribe any remedy therefor, or to give any advice in connection with the treatment thereof”. She should be careful what she writes.
Anyway, getting back to what Marg wrote, that Judith claims that “people do better with palliative energy treatments than palliative chemo”. How could Judith possibly have enough experience with different types of cancer to tell her this? The systematic review of the treatment of metastatic non small cell lung cancer, still the cancer most people die from, I linked to in my comment above (still in moderation) found that survival ranged from 1 week to 2 years. They had to look at 1,315 patients on supportive care alone and 1,399 patients on supportive care and chemo to be able to say with any confidence that chemo doubled life expectancy.
I have to repeat, it is simply not possible for a single person to make any judgment on this from simple clinical observations. If Judith is making this claim she is either deluding herself or deliberately lying to her patients. If her patients reject palliative chemotherapy on the basis of her claims she is robbing them of months or years of life, and causing them unnecessary pain and suffering. I find it hard to express just how despicable I think this is without lapsing into profanity.
Ah, Krebiozen, your conclusion is valid anywhere but in Marg and Judith’s PermanentOppositesDayWorld, where clinical trials are hopelessly biased and only anecdotes are reliable.
Then again, Marg doesn’t realize that the full-time lurkers (and the odd rare poster such as your humble servant here) are all laughing at her persistance in returning to the debate stage when her podium has been reduced to smoldering ruins by wave after wave of facts and reason.
Scottynuke,
Yet this study is apparently reliable because Judith (mistakenly) thinks it supports her position. She even links to a WebMD article about it that accurately describes what was done.
Did she deliberately lie about what it said, hoping that people wouldn’t follow her link and read the article for themselves? Did she read the article but misunderstand it through her perceptual filter of prejudice against conventional cancer treatments? That seems difficult to believe since the study design was described in plain English, as in the quote I gave above. What part of, “along with cancer treatments” did she not understand?
The study itself says, “We randomly assigned patients with newly diagnosed metastatic non–small-cell lung cancer to receive either early palliative care integrated with standard oncologic care or standard oncologic care alone.” There isn’t any technical jargon there that could confuse a layperson, is there? I’m sure that if and when she understands that it doesn’t support her claims it will suddenly become a biased and unreliable study.
If you are going to warn people off conventional cancer treatment, claiming that a scientific study supports this, you had damned well better get your facts right. Grrr.
Narad,
Have hurt myself laughing at the Veet For Men reviews. Thanks, despite the pain, I needed that.
http://www.naturalnews.com/037766_cancer_center_Texas_profiteering.html
More news from the trenches of cancer research:
CPRIT leadership obstructed peer review process to play favorites, claim scientists
The straw that broke the camel’s back was an $18 million grant recently awarded to the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, which was to be used for commercializing and rushing to market new cancer drugs. According to now-departed scientists from CPRIT, which include Nobel laureates Alfred G. Gilman, the group’s chief scientific officer, and Philip A. Sharp, along with many others, key leadership at CPRIT flagrantly sidestepped the scientific peer review process in awarding the grant, as well as several others, while putting various peer-reviewed grants on the back burner.
CPRIT leadership has also been steering the organization towards a “new, politically driven, commercialization-based mission,” according to one now-resigned scientist, which implies that more public money is now being given to drug companies to develop cancer drugs rather than to groups trying to prevent and cure cancer. This same scientist warned in his resignation letter that, if left unchecked, this hijacking of CPRIT by those with ill motives and shady intent has the potential to “subvert the entire scientific enterprise.”
@ THS:
I’m not sure if it’s inclusive or exclusive.
At any rate, this thread causes my computer to balk and refuse to load and let me type. I wonder why ( rhetorical ?).
The woo I survey similarly speaks of the failings of science without having any successes of its own except in its fevered imaginings.
Marg,
Earlier in the discussion, you mentioned that “There must be frauds in the energy healing business just as there are in other fields of human endeavor. I would say it would be difficult to expose them.”
Take this Judith person. I briefly perused her blog, but not in any great detail as others seem to have done so already.
Do you agree misrepresenting a study like Krebiozen pointed out, (either by accident or deliberately) would reduce Judith’s standing and the trustworthiness of any information and advice she is giving?
While this is not as such a reflection on any healing abilities she may or may not have, it does seem a major overlapse in research. Mistakes do sometimes happen and we all do them, so giving her the benefit of the doubt now that the mistake is discovered, we should soon expect to see the text changed/withdrawn and possibly a corrigendum stating that the previous information was incorrect. Right?
Unless it wasn’t a mistake, in which case, why would the information she provides for her energy healing be any more trustworthy than her information on medical studies (that she presents as validating her views, among other things, on energy healing)?
@Gaist
I don’t see Judith misrepresenting the study in her blog.
Obviously, instead of overlapse I meant oversight.
Quoted from Krebiozen, 7 posts up from your last one:
“Also, if you read Judith’s blog, you’ll see she says that in her experience people do better with palliative energy treatments than palliative chemo.
I couldn’t find this claim on Judith’s blog. I didn’t look for very long as I found myself getting increasingly angry at the ignorant and dangerous misinformation I found there. For example, she claims that:
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010 showed that advanced lung cancer patients in palliative care lived longer and had better quality of life than patients who continued to receive cancer treatment.
Following at the link on WebMD, what do I find (my emphasis)?
In the new three-year study, people diagnosed with spreading non-small-cell lung cancer who received palliative care early on, along with cancer treatments, showed marked improvement in their overall quality of life and lived more than two months longer than those who received cancer treatment without palliative services.
So Judith’s claim about this study is completely wrong. “
Marg,
The paragraph in question is the 9th one on this page.
I’m getting the same feeling I get when I watch Potholer54’s videos about AGW denialist Mockton. Mockton makes an assertion and cites a source. Potholer looks up the source and it says the opposite. Makes me wonder if Marg is going to start showing creatively edited graphs.
Also, I could take similar exception to numerous other bits of misinformation on Judith’s blog. It was just the most blatant misrepresentation of the facts I noticed after a brief perusal.
So, Marg, to report on this story, which does absolutely nothing to advance your own moronic desires, you cite Droolin’ Mike Adams’s sidekick Huff? Couldn’t even be troubled to present the WSJ item referred to? Pop over to the months of coverage by Nature?
With the greatest sincerity, Marg, FOADIAF. HTH. HAND.
And…. every fence-sitter and lurker has just been pointed out that Marg has no ethics, sees what she wants to see, lacks reading comprehension, or is just plain lying. Or all of the above.
In the dictionary, where the phrase “be open minded but not so much your brain falls out”, Marg is pictured as the person whose brain has fallen out. She would rather believe in people who agree with her than admit they might be wrong in certain instances. Like when they misrepresent a paper.
By the way Marg:
Yet another tour of distractions away from the fact that MARG, the contemptible purse-snatcher of science, HAS NO EVIDENCE THAT ENERGY HEALING WORKS.
Cause if you think the Gish gallop is going to make us forget that, you’d be wrong.
Krebiozen, you don’t have to go to Judith’s blog to find her claim that “in her experience people do better with palliative energy treatments than palliative chemo” – you can find it here on this blog, in her anecdotes on the June Reiki thread I linked earlier.
Thanks to your instructions on the Burzinsky thread, I can now link to Judith’s comment with that claim:
https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2012/06/05/reiki-versus-dogs-just-being-dogs/#comment-187653
I also recall challenging her to do an actual study on her patients, with follow-up conducted by an impartial observer, but I don’t have the time to locate that exchange with her (which was a few days later). Somehow, I doubt she’s followed through any of our suggestions in that regard.
Chemmomo,
I’m glad my comment-linking instructions were useful. I remember that comment – the energy healing worked but the patient died. Incidentally I wonder what the autopsy, if there was one, found. Had the pancreatic tumor shrunk or disappeared? Then there was the other patient whose “naturopath marvelled at his condition”.
Really, looking at individual cases or small numbers of cases and trying to determine if they lived longer or had a better quality of life than they would have without treatment, whether conventional or otherwise, by comparing them with median values, or other individual cases is futile. The variance in both these measures is just too great.
As I mentioned above, life expectancy for metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer with conventional treatment may be a median of 5-8 months, but it can vary from 1 week to 2 years. There is no reliable way of knowing in advance where on this curve an individual patient falls. The quality of life of a terminal cancer patients can vary dramatically. The only way of making any sense out of this is looking at large numbers of patients to pull some statistical power out of all the noise. Otherwise it’s all about seeing patterns in noise, and confirmation bias, as we see all too often.
Chemmomo, I suggested doing a study of her own as well, further upthread. She apparently doesn’t seem to think she needs to do one. And/or doesn’t seem to think she needs proper placebo-controlled, double blind, random testing.
Let’s not forget that for her anecdotes and ‘perception is reality’ is enough.
@Krebiozen
What do you say to 20 months for stage-4 pancreatic cancer — originally diagnosed as stage 4, not as stage 1 — 12 months with energy healing alone, at the end of which time the patient was able to go salmon fishing and white-water rafting? What do you say to 44 months of survival with stage-4 small-cell lung cancer — also originally diagnosed as stage 4 — during most of which time the patient was able to run his business and mount an exhibition which was his life-long dream. Don’t tell me these numbers are not way out of the ordinary. I would like to see ordinary patients with stage-4 pancreatic cancer who are receiving palliative chemo go white water rafting. Do you know any who do?
You’re a scam artist, Marg. Deal with it.
As far as I can figure it out her latest argument reduces to “Because scientists quit the Texas Cancer institute over the proper funding balance for commercialization vs. pure research projects, magical handwaving cures cancer.”
As ever, @JGC, the message is “science has big clay feet, don’t trust it”.
@Narad
You are severely blinkered by what you consider reality. Deal with that.
We know science is imperfectly practiced, Marg. We’ve been over this. How do you intend to provide us with something better?
@al kimeea
Are you suggesting that Bengston is charging $7500 to treat people? That’s news to me.
RE: white water rafting cancer survivors, I’d say “If true that’s a really unexpected outcome: what makes you think energy healing contributed to it in any way?”
As I sorely doubt you’ve even managed to assess this in the first place, please do explain it to me, you rotting pumpkin.
Marg, is your issue, whatever it is, with scientific methodology itself?
@Narad
Believing me to be a rotting pumpkin just goes to show your skewed view of reality, oh wise one.
Yeah, it’s looking like Marg’s upped the trolling to the point where she doesn’t even pretend to have anything meaningful or constructive to say, just expressing her contempt for everything.
But, for the sake of any lurkers who skip ahead this far, I’d like to show Marg’s continued unreasonableness:
1. What’s your problem with science, Marg? Be specific.
2. What superior replacement do you propose, Marg?
Orac should seriously just close this thread. Too bad he can’t do so retroactively, but I don’t think even tarial cells allow that.
Still waiting for you to comment on Judith’s obvious lie, Marg.
So you can’t tell me what that is, even though I’ve already told you right here, but nonetheless you’re willing to posture about it? Like I said, you’re a fraud to your core.
How does a dispute regarding funding priority–whether resources should be directed to purely academic projects or to projects which have the potential to be commercialized and provide a return on investment which could support additional projects–translate to ‘science having big clay feet’? Explain your reasoning.
My suspicion: Marg can’t think about science in terms of philosophy and epistemology, only as a political and cultural weapon. It’s not about whether or not a scientific result is true, it’s about whose tribe the results favor.
So, if science discovers something a greedy corporation can use, it’s because science has been sleeping with the corporation and is evil for doing so. How dare science do favors for anyone but me and my tribe!
Marg,
Have you no shame? Don’t you have anything to say about Judith’s claims that patients on palliative treatment alone did better than patients on chemotherapy when the evidence says nothing of the sort?
Which case is this? On Judith’s blog she mentions one patient:
This would appear to be the same patient, but which did he have, pancreatic cancer or bile duct cancer? You would expect 2% of stage 4 bile duct cancer patients to survive 5 years, so I don’t see 20 months as particularly remarkable, certainly not remarkable enough for us to throw up our hands and conclude that magic is real after all.
Although the median survival for extensive stage small cell lung carcinoma is only 8–13 months, 1–5% of patients treated with chemotherapy live 5 years or longer.
But they are not that unusual! Go and have a look through the SEER cancer database, using Fast Stats, and see for yourself. These patients may be unusual, but not they are not that unusual. They certainly fall well within the expected survival stats.
No, but since you seem to be unsure what type of cancer this patient had, I’m not at all convinced you do either. This doesn’t not fill me with confidence in the accuracy of these anecdotes.
Some terminal cancer patients live much longer than the average. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, was diagnosed with malignant peritoneal mesothelioma in 1982. Like metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer, this type of cancer is (or was back then) considered incurable with an average survival of around 8 months.
Despite this he was looking extremely healthy when I saw him lecture in London some 8 years later. He had made a full recovery and died in 2002, 20 years after his mesothelioma diagnosis, of an unrelated cancer of the brain.
@Krebiozen
Nah, marg has no shame. Heck, she can say all that crap while cheating sick and ill people out of their hard earned money by her version of woo, I doubt she feels any component of shame.
Which makes her a complete monster.
1600 posts and still nothing to prove anything except Marg is an idiot.
Yawn….. And the Gish gallop continues….
Hmmm, also, it looks like you know the thread will be closed soon and are trying to get in as much rubbish as possible before then.
no not Bengston, some other hornswoggler you’re marketing as offering reality based therapy
he or you could charge $5, still a $CAM
I was just looking at this, from Marg, more closely:
And comparing it to this from Judith’s blog, again:
There are a lot of unknowns in this case, for instance we don’t know if the patients had surgery, but it is possible to make some informed guesses from the information we have been given.
Bile duct cancer that has spread to the liver is not stage 4, it’s stage 2A, which is regional (stages 2 and 3), not distant as I had assumed from Marg telling us it was stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Intrahepatic bile duct cancer would not be described as having metastases to the liver since it is inside the liver, so it was presumably extrahepatic bile duct cancer. Five year survival for stage 2A extrahepatic bile duct cancer is 24%, so it seems this man was in no way even unusual, much less exceptional, having survived less than 2 years. It seems very likely he would have done much better had he been “persuaded to try chemo and radiation” much earlier. With treatment, 10% of patients are still alive 10 years later.
Remember, this case has been presented to us as presumably one of the best available examples of the miracles that energy healing is capable of performing. When we look more closely it looks very much like a sad example of a patient who was persuaded against his better judgement to reject conventional treatment in favor of energy healing. It doesn’t seem at all surprising to me that a person given a terminal cancer diagnosis would “travel to a national park to go salmon fishing and white water rafting”, especially if was aware that his condition was worsening and this might be his last chance – ever heard of a bucket list? It was also just after this, 12 months after diagnosis that it seems he realized that he was getting worse, not better, and decided belatedly to get radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
In my opinion this is not a case of miraculous energy healing, but a case of a man with cancer delaying conventional treatment for a year while he tried a useless alternative therapy, and paying for his foolishness with months or even years of his life.
– Marg yet again diarrhetically displaying zero evidence that her craft is anything other than fiction
tried to find it, but further up she mentions some other snake-oil salesman she does trust who charges over 7 large and uses PayPal for the $2G down payment
but $60 for a lurnin DVD, that is supicious
Gentlemen:
this thread shall be mercifully put to rest in about 2 weeks, perhaps we should start thinking about our summation. My own will probably appear elsewhere because my computer is not happy at this locus and if the computer ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.
I believe Bengston on the subject of mice also, marg, and that as he reported the mice which received energy healing treatments fared exactly the same as mice who received no treatment whatsoever.
What I still fail to understand is how you can possibly interpret this to be evidence energy healing works, especially when you’ve made it clear you wouldn’t consider similar studies finding patients receiving chemotherapy do just as well as patients receiving no treatment at all to represent evidence chemotherapy works.
@Krebiozen
I imagine his doctors who told him he had 7 months to live and that all they could offer him was palliative chemotherapy did not know what they were talking about. You are of course in a much better position to know about his condition than the oncologists who were treating him..
I’m afraid that Judith’s reliance on her mystery stash of documents in the pancreatic tale renders her reportage prima facie suspect. That fact that her story in this one doesn’t quite add up helps matters not a whit.
The median isn’t the message.
Not that I expect you to understand the concept of a non-absolutist perspective, probability, or population thinking.
^ “the original pancreatic tale”
I’ve noticed that alt-med defenders often resort to sarcasm when the alternative would be to state their claims directly and make their flaws visible.
In this case, Marg, the contemptible purse-snatcher of science, sneers “Oh, of course you mainstream science defenders know more than the oncologists who actually examined the patient,” because what she actually believes is “we advocates of energy healing know better than the oncologists who actually examined the patient.” But she knows that if she says that straight out, it’s going to sound as arrogant and foolish as … well, as it very much is. So she resorts to sarcasm.
I think it’s time to put another ultimatum question to Marg. Standard rules: if she does not answer the question within her next three comments, on this or any other thread, the answer will be assumed for her. Marg, the question is: why do you accept the Bengston experiments as supportive of “energy healing” when you would never view experiments where a chemotherapy agent failed to outperform placebo as supportive of chemotherapy? If you do your standard routine of trying to change the subject, we’ll have to conclude that your answer is “because I want energy healing to be popular even if there’s no reality to it.”
Marg,
Have you read and actually understood anything I have written recently?
You still don’t seem to understand that when an oncologist tells a patient that they can expect to live for, on average, seven months, that doesn’t mean that every single patient will die on schedule. Half of all patients will survive for less than that time, and half will live for longer by definition. Some will live much longer; no magic, no miracles, just natural variation in the course of the disease. As I wrote above, a quarter of stage 2A extrahepatic bile duct cancer patients will still be alive five years after diagnosis. Would a graph help? Incidentally, as an example of how conventional treatment has improved, in 1975 five year survival was around 5%.
You also still don’t seem to understand that palliative chemotherapy will often extend patients’ lives, as well as improving their quality of life.
Neither do you appear to understand that those oncologists would have used the same sources of information I have used to estimate their patient’s life expectancy.
You have misrepresented this patient’s condition and the likelihood of him surviving as long as he did. I still think the most likely scenario is that this man lost months or years of his life because he believed the same sort of misinformation you and Judith have been spreading, such as, “people do better with palliative energy treatments than palliative chemo”.
@Krebiozen
I repeat, the patient’s doctors told him 7 months. They did not say that he could with live longer with chemotherapy. Strangely enough, after he stopped the energy treatments, he lived exactly as long as his doctors said he would.
@Krebiozen
Unresectable distal bile duct cancer
In patients with advanced distal bile duct cancer that is not surgically removable the goal of treatment is palliation. The most important palliative measure is the relief of jaundice. We do not recommend surgical treatment to relieve the jaundice. A wall stent placed by a gastroenterologist provides adequate biliary drainage to relieve the obstruction and relieve jaundice. Surgically unresectable distal bile duct cancers do not usually respond very well to chemotherapy and radiation therapy therefore treatment options are limited.
(http://www.surgery.usc.edu/divisions/tumor/pancreasdiseases/web%20pages/BILIARY%20SYSTEM/cholangiocarcinoma.html)
http://www.cancer.org/cancer/bileductcancer/detailedguide/bile-duct-cancer-staging
Resectable versus unresectable bile duct cancers
The TNM system divides bile duct cancers into several groups that help give doctors an idea about a person’s prognosis (outlook). But for treatment purposes, doctors often use a simpler system based on whether these cancers are likely to be resectable (able to be completely removed by surgery) or unresectable. In general terms, most stage III and IV tumors are unresectable, but there may be exceptions. Resectability is based on the size and location of the tumor, how far it has spread, and whether or not a person is healthy enough to have surgery.
Well, that’s the three. Shall we give her one more chance, just to show that we’re bending over backwards and she still can’t face up to simple questions?
You have zero documentation for this claim, so saying “I repeat” as some sort of intensifier is aimless. I note again that Judith’s failure to submit a case report on the case for which she claims to have medical documentation renders everything that she emits suspect. The fact that you happen to be as dumb as a sack of hammers does not alter this.
And you have conceded Antaeus’s question.
Marg,
You claim to know this but earlier you claimed he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer. This makes a big difference to expected survival. If you can”t get the type or stage of cancer right why should we believe you about precisely what his doctors told him? Were you there?
Every oncologist knows that estimating how long a patient will live is by no means an exact science. I have never heard of an oncologist telling a patient they will live for a precise length of time as you claim in this case. They explain the average survival, that they might live for a longer or shorter time and discuss treatment options.
How do you know this? If this is true why did Judith write:
This strongly implies that his doctors has wanted him to have chemotherapy and radiotherapy earlier, which makes some sense as they may improve life expectancy in bile duct cancer, if only by a few (precious) months. Why would they suddenly become appropriate if they weren’t when he was diagnosed? That makes no sense at all.
If the energy treatments were working, why did he stop them? Are you seriously suggesting that the energy treatments somehow suspended the progression of his cancer, but he decided to stop them and have conventional treatment instead? And then the cancer progressed as originally expected and he died right on time? That’s ridiculous. He lived well within the expected range for this type of cancer. There was no energy healing miracle.
I take it you are suggesting this was a case of unresectable distal bile duct cancer for which chemotherapy and radiotherapy were not suitable. So why would his oncologists persuade him to undergo these?
I’m not sure why you posted this. Did the patient have surgery? If so the chemotherapy and radiotherapy would make more sense. I was assuming he didn’t have surgery and that his cancer was unresectable, otherwise there would be nothing remotely unusual about how long he survived. Judith only mentioned liver metastases and I’m sure she would have mentioned distant metastases if they were present. This makes this stage 2A with, as I wrote above, a 5 year survival rate of 24%, so surviving for less than 2 years is not miraculous. Did you notice what it says on the page you linked to?
What you write simply does not ring true and even if everything you have claimed is true, which I doubt, there is nothing remarkable about any of these cases. Their survival fell well within the expected range for the stage of the cancers they had. Why can’t you see that?
Yet another tour of distractions away from the fact that MARG, the contemptible purse-snatcher of science, HAS NO EVIDENCE THAT ENERGY HEALING WORKS.
And resorts to creationism tactics of attacking X in the hope that it proves Y. And is a classic crank.
That is my summation.
A summation? When you explain to someone how they have fooled themselves into believing something that is not true through a combination of suggestion, expectation, confirmation bias, seeing patterns in noise, misunderstanding survival estimates in cancer, misinterpreting the variable course of illnesses, misreading scientific literature and accepting other people’s claims uncritically, they often still won’t believe you.
People have been deluding themselves in this way for millennia, and even though we now have reliable tools to elucidate the truth, there are still some who stubbornly refuse to use them, and insist their personal perceptions are more reliable.
When the alternative is having to give up perhaps their only source of income, and having to accept that they have given seriously ill people false information that may have led to serious injury and even shortened their lives, I suppose going into denial is understandable but not, by any means, forgivable.
” just to show that we’re bending over backwards and she still can’t face up to simple questions?”
questions? u want to ask questions, how wude.
If The Rosa Protocol had definitively shown going all wavy gravy on your
patientsmarks to be a real thing, JAMA would have been quite happy to publish it and as Marg said the medical establishment would take over.Because it is then medicine and not the quackery shystery thing it is now known to be.
Yes, classic crankery in most every sense and very much like religion where if all the people only believed like this, doG would be pleased and the world would be a better place. Sub ‘cancer eliminated’ for a pleased deity. Like religion, cherry picking and distraction is the order of the day – Evolution? Hilter!! Energy healing? Thalidomide!!
Which should I consider more likely, Marg?
A) A science-based doctor says something utterly counter to an underlying rationale of science-based medicine by stating a patient’s remaining time in an absolute number instead of a probabilistic estimate.
Humans are complex entities and as such, variation is the default expectation in science. That’s why we do clinical trials with large numbers of people and controls to sort out real patterns from the noise of complexity. We don’t want to be mislead by other factors or dumb luck. We also know that human perception is subjective and can be easily biased by various subconscious cognitive failings, which is the other reason we invented scientific methodology: To eliminate or at least reduce those sources of bias. Blinding the experimenter to treatment and control groups, for example, doesn’t let the experimenter’s subconscious know which measurements to fudge to affirm his bias. He only finds out afterward.
OR
B) The message was misunderstood and the misunderstanding was relayed to you.
Altie culture, in my experience, treats humans as simple entities, so they speak and think in absolutes by default. That’s why they’re uncritical of anecdotes and loudly complain when we point out the mere possibility of confounding factors (including human cognitive biases) involved in learning about an uncertain world. They deny the complexity of humanity and assume their perception is objective and unbiased.
@Krebiozen
In the staging of unresectable bile duct cancer the TMN classicification seems to be used. I don’t know where you get “IIA”.
Marg,
Did you locate the (I’m still willing to give her the benefit of the doubt) mistake in Judith’s blog yet? The one Krebiozen pointed out (“The paragraph in question is the 9th one on this page“*)
Do you think it’s an honest mistake, or do you have another explanation for the discrepancy?
Does the presence of such seemingly obvious fumble in research make her other claims about energy healing less trustworthy? Given that she is earning income from energy healing, and seems to use the error as supportive of her views on energy healing.
Also, as our chances for discussion on this thread seem to be nearing it’s end, I’d like to make sure you have no more questions concerning the Dr. Roses quote about drug efficacy (earlier), or the fact that Burzynski is still operating his clinic (way earlier) that I (amongst others much more knowledgeable than me) tried to help you with.
You never referred to the issues again so I’m inclined to assume they were explained satisfactorily, but it’s always good to make sure.
———
* = quoted from Krebiozen
Marg,
Your strategy of focusing on an insignificant detail in the hope this will distract us from the massive fail that has been pointed out is getting a little tiring.
I gave a link to the page with information about staging above and explained my reasoning. In any case it isn’t really important. What is important is that survival for 20 months is not as remarkable as you and Judith are claiming. Even if this man’s cancer was at stage 4 when he was diagnosedfive year survival is still 2%, but he lived for less than 2 years.
You are asking us to believe that the occurrence of something with a probability of greater than 1 in 50 is a miracle. It isn’t.
@Krebiozen
That is not an insignificant detail. Nor is his doctors’ prognosis.
@Gaist
I have written Judith and she has responded. You can read the comments.
@Krebiozen
How odd that the Brits stage bile-duct cancer differently from the Americans and give different rates of survival. Maybe patients with bile duct cancer should move to Britain.
Marg, you are a pouty, whining, irritatingly evasive, and thieving blight on the very fabric of mankind.
@Narad
And that adds to the discussion how?
Mirrors, O Pouty One. Give them a try.
Ultimatum question, Marg: Why won’t you respond to the point that has been made several times now, that doctors’ prognoses are not given in the form of upper limits?
If I go into a casino and play a particular slot machine with $100 in quarters, playing only the coins I brought with me, someone who knows the odds on that machine may predict that the most likely result is that I’ll wind up with around $80 in winnings. But if I exceed that, if I come out with $200 instead, have I proven myself right and that person who predicted $80 wrong? Have I proven that my strategy of using “energy winning,” sending invisible energy into the machine to affect its willingness to pay off for me, is so successful that probabilty theory must be discarded as useless or at least rewritten to accomodate my incredible success? No.
The idea that the doctors who saw this patient said “You have at least seven months to live and certainly no more than eight and 20 is just utterly outlandish” does not match how actual medical practitioners give their prognoses. Why do you refuse to address this point, Marg? If you don’t answer in your next three comments, the answer will be taken as “because I prefer an impressive-sounding interpretation of the anecdote to a realistic interpretation.”
Marg,
They don’t. You appear to have a comprehension problem. Take a look at what SEER at the US National Cancer Institute has to say about bile duct cancer survival (PDF)(. Which diagnosis best fits this case you claim is evidence of a miracle? What is the median survival, and what percentage of patients survive 2 years?
Just to add to my previous comment, let’s work backwards and look for a scenario in the SEER PDF in which median survival is 7 months as this man’s reportedly was. This should give us an idea of what range of survival patients who are expected to survive 7 months actually have.
The closest I can find that fits with the information given about this patient is in Table 6.6, ‘Other Biliary Cancer (excluding ampulla & carcinoids)’ for patients graded as ‘Poor’ with median survival of 7.8 months. But 20.8% of these patients survive 2 years, 8.7% survive 5 years and 4.3% are still alive ten years after diagnosis.
Yet surviving less than 2 years is evidence of something so unusual it can only be explained by a mysterious energy unknown to science? I don’t think so.
@Gaist
You’re wasting your time. Marg doesn’t accept things, she merely moves on from them. I doubt she’s understood anything at all that’s been said to her. It’s best to give up on her – that goes for everyone.
Nothing would give me greater pleasure, @Flip, than for all of you to give up on me.
A sad self-commentary, but at least a bit of honest insight.
Sad indeed. She’s not interested in finding the truth through open, honest discussion, only causing frustration for gits and shiggles.
@flip
Well, remember, marg is a confessed swindler, quack, and monster, preying on the innocent, sick, and, all just for their hard earned money, without giving a single damn about treating them effectively.
The more she posts here, proving it to the entire world, and the less she posts someplace else, where she can find more vulnerable marks, the better I say. Just to prove to the world how much of a monster she really is.
Marg, another thing:
I read the comments, in which Judith says:
Perhaps being an energy healer has a detrimental effect on English comprehension, since Judith appears to have completely missed the point, or perhaps she hasn’t bothered to read the study itself.
Judith quite clearly stated that patients having palliative care alone survived longer than those than those “who continued to receive cancer treatment”, yet the study itself states:
So Judith’s statement is simply wrong. What is there to consider? It’s wrong, and misleading, and could potentially give patients with metastatic non–small-cell lung cancer (and other cancer patients), the impression that chemotherapy will shorten their lives, instead of the truth which is that chemotherapy can significantly lengthen their lives.
It is true that the study found that, “Early introduction of palliative care also led to less aggressive end-of-life care, including reduced chemotherapy and longer hospice care”. Judith, seeing this through her anti-chemo lens, takes this to mean that it is the reduced chemotherapy associated with less aggressive end-of-life care that leads to the increase in life expectancy, of course, because she believes that chemotherapy is evil and dangerous . However, the study itself states that:
How could chemotherapy during the last 14 days of a person’s life possibly have shortened their lives by 2.7 months? This was a prospective, randomized 12 week study so the only difference between the groups was the early palliative care.
Judith’s assumption that less chemotherapy at end-of-life was responsible for a two month increase in survival is clearly nonsense.
@Marg honey
You’re the one who keeps posting. You don’t want us to reply, shut the f up and finally stick the flounce. Or you know, come up with something better than logical fallacies, creationist tactics and lack of evidence.
@Novalox
True, I hadn’t thought of it that way.
@Krebiozen
How could chemotherapy during the last 14 days of a person’s life possibly have shortened their lives by 2.7 months?
Are you seriously asking this? If the person died from the chemo, as PEOPLE DO, it would definitely shorten their lives.
Yet another tour of distractions away from the fact that MARG, the contemptible purse-snatcher of science, HAS NO EVIDENCE THAT ENERGY HEALING WORKS.
Are we done yet?
@Marg: What evidence do you have that the person died from chemo? Did you even consider the possibility that the death was due to, you know, cancer?
flip,
Not quite.
I asked:
Marg replied:
Yes I’m seriously asking how chemotherapy during the last 14 days of a persons life can shorten it by 2.7 months, because that is impossible!
The only difference between the two groups in terms of chemotherapy was that the group that got early palliative care had more aggressive treatment including chemotherapy during the last 14 days of their lives. Of the 105 patients that died during the study, 54% (30 of 56 patients) of the standard care group had aggressive end-of-life care vs. 33% (16 of 49 patients) of the early palliative care group. The only way this could have affected their survival by 2.7 months is for the chemotherapy to have had an effect backwards in time, which even you must surely accept is not possible.
By far the most likely explanation for the longer survival seen in patients who got earlier palliative care is that they were in less pain, and suffered less stress and depression, all of which are associated with poorer outcomes. The message from this study is that earlier palliative care enable a patient to die more comfortably, which I think is very important. Trying to twist it into evidence that chemotherapy causes more harm than good is just sick.
Sigh. I only intended to make “during the last 14 days of their lives” bold.
You’ll notice that Marg relies upon emotion laden fear mongering that plays on horror stories about chemotherapy that have circulated around alt media and are based on mis-information or tales about the earlier forms of this therapy.
Perhaps you’ve forgotten that you’re dealing with an adherent of an occult system that happily accepts sending “healing energy” back through time.
You know, I think Marg’s accusation ties into another enthymeme in altie culture. They assume health is a default, natural state that will persist until something artificial interferes, hence if someone has a natural, terminal disease, it’s going to be the artificial medical intervention that outright kills the perfectly healthy patient, never the natural progression of the disease or a tiny slip in the grip doctors have on a patient who’s just barely clinging to life.
It’s like alties think in terms of videogames. Videogame characters can often perform at full capacity so long as they have at least one hit point. The game thinks in black-and-white binary, so it only recognizes “alive” and “dead” states with a boolean flag. If the patient is at 1 HP and the healer accidentally fumbles and causes a point of damage in a desperate attempt to cast a healing spell, they log that the healer murdered the patient because that one point of damage from the healer triggered the change in the alive/dead flag. It doesn’t matter to them if the action was likely to produce a net gain of HP under better circumstances. It doesn’t matter that it was the cancer that put the patient in critical condition or that it would have continued dealing damage if the healer did nothing. Practicing medicine means taking calculated risks and accepting that there is no perfect intervention.
I suspect that’s one way energy healers and other “harmless” quacks can rationalize their inaction. Their “healing” never does any HP damage (but it does cause GP damage), so they’re never at risk of being logged into the system as the killer, and in the cases where patients do recover through other known means, including natural healing and spontaneous remission, they can take the credit despite essentially doing nothing. If the patient dies as a result of inaction, no foul on their part because they didn’t do a single point of damage themselves.
Narad,
You’re right, I had. Maybe chemotherapy sent back in time has a negative effect on cancer, unlike the normal kind that improves survival. I wonder how Marg explains that systematic review and meta-analysis of chemotherapy in non-small-cell lung cancer, the type of study that Ben Goldacre says “is the best-quality evidence that can be used”, which compared 1,399 patients assigned supportive care and chemotherapy and 1,315 patients assigned supportive care alone, that concluded:
Marg, why do you persist in claiming that chemotherapy kills when the evidence clearly demonstrates that it prolongs life? Don’t you care that you are spreading lies?
Marg, and any other readers who doubt that chemotherapy is effective, please educate yourself by reading this article.
So you’re arguing that instead of living less than 14 days, the patients would have lived for approximately 81 days longer without chemo? Even assuming that with chemo, they survived the 14 days, are you really arguing chemotherapy shortened their survival by over 85%?
If the patient survived for less than the full 14 days with chemotherapy, the 2,7 month reduction would become even more drastic?
Surely such drastic effect would be have been noticed in great number of studies.
chemo is effective and it isn’t anything like it used to be, alties appear to cling to the past not only for their ideas but also for those of medicine/science.
As mentioned, a niece is extant a decade after being diagnosed with the same cancer Mario Lemieux had and he went back to playing hockey as well as also breathing still.
I too have fully recovered from my malady after suffering something akin to chemo. I was warned it might kill me too. A very small chance, but I could say no if I felt that was too great a risk. The obverse was a certain slow death that was already evident physiologically.
No more, thanks to the knowledge gained by the holistic application of science.
Tell me Marg, is homeopathy a real thing and what is your fave potent potable?
Oh I forgot to add, if I was one of the lucky ones and the regimen I was on proves to be equally or less effective than the current version. I would hope it doesn’t make it to market as it would introduce needless suffering.
Like energy healing, rimshot.
@Krebiozen
Sorry, that “are we done yet?” was directed at Marg.
Marg’s scammy rambling sounds very much like some frequent posters on the breast cancer support forum I go to, and it really hits a nerve with me there and here. I *so* appreciate all of you here with the expertise and skills to combat the bull$hittery with facts, evidence, and citations.
I’m convinced that many of the alties at the breast cancer forum (pretending to be patients) are actually scammers who are financially vested in promoting quackery. It’s truly despicable that they pretend to be “just one of us” cancer patients in order to sneakily promote their scams and trawl for easy marks.
As infuriating and maddening as this thread has been to read through, I want to thank all of you who have been so articulate and informative in your responses! The discussions Marg has provoked here are more valuable than you know, to real cancer patients like me. Thanks again!
flip.
No need to apologize, deciding when to disengage with cranks is a common problem here, and we all have different opinions. It does work both ways; I wonder what makes them keep coming back and continuing to make comments here, when they are shot down in flames every time. I suspect it’s either the hope that they may convert a few lurkers, the chance to point out to their supporters how they are bravely doing battle with the evil allopaths or, perhaps, they have a nagging feeling that they may be wrong.
In this case I suspect someone is JAQing off to the repeated flurry of replies whenever she posts. I don’t think she cares about converting lurkers at all; maybe she might take this back to her followers and point out how marvelous she is, but personally I think at this point she’s just trolling for giggles.
Hence my tendency to repeat the same phrase over and over again and remark on how this thread needs to die.
For me, I’m happy to keep responding no matter how long a thread gets IF the person on the other end is willing to participate in a discussion. But there’s very little you can do if the person only wants to canter in circles.
All of you who have benefited from chemotherapy, God bless, and may you have many more years of health.
Those who have not benefited are clearly not going to be able to post on this forum.
but if they had let you wave your hands around them they would be able to post?!
you are vile
Ooh. Marg just admitted that people benefit from chemotherapy.
Marg, they won’t be censored, if that’s an alternative interpretation that you’re implying. They might face criticism of the logic and evidence behind their arguments, but our ability to criticize using our freedom of speech does not constitute censorship.
Of course, in real medicine, dead patients do tell tales. Doctors have to record their patients’ medical histories, including the bad outcomes. Both failures and successes are used in studies to look for problems in treatments after they find widespread use because you can’t always catch everything in the clinical trials. Real doctors don’t get to forget about their patients once they walk out the door like you probably do. Real doctors don’t get to cherry pick testimonials because of this.
What your accusation amounts to is the assertion that science-based medicine does things the way you do because you can’t imagine any other way of doing it. You’re falsely projecting your own untrustworthy and deceitful methods onto science based medicine to try to distract us from criticizing your methods.
You know, it’s now getting worse. You’ve moved from black-and-white thinking into black-and-black thinking.
@Bronze Dog
I am not implying that they will be censored. I am saying that they are physically unable to comment, being either too debilitated to comment or no longer with us.
I sincerely doubt that “real doctors”, or in this case oncologists, remember every failure they had. They see hundreds of deaths in their career — or rather, they don’t see, because they are usually not present when a patient dies. If they remembered every oncology patient who died, and took personal responsibility, they’d likely go insane. In order to be able to continue practicing they are trained to step back from failure. You can see them as heroes or as victims of the system. I prefer to see them as the latter.
A lot of people who’ve embraced energy healing or other forms of woo (Antineoplastions anyone? Coffee enemas, maybe?) are just as unavailable for comment, The sad truth is that none of us are getting out of here alive.
But it’s a fact that chemo is efficacious: evidence shows it can cure some cancers and as an adjuvant therapy following surgery for other cancers can often reduce the likelihood of recurrence and extend survival time post-diagnosis while maintaining or improving quality of life.
Magical handwaving, on the other hand, has never been shown to buy anyone any additional survival time, or to improve their quality of life to a greater extent than do placebo treatments.
Bottom line after 1600 plus comments? We can point to actual evidence demonstrating SBM treatments currently standard of care for illnesses actually work, while you’ve been completely unable to identify similar evidence demonstrating energy healing works any better than no treatment at all.
Assuming your black-and-white fatalism for the sake of argument, your statement would be true for any form of treatment, energy healing included. If it helps with a fatal disease, the patients are free to post here. If the treatment doesn’t work for the fatal disease, however…
Assumptions for the sake of argument abandoned, things aren’t that black-and-white. There are fatal cancers that don’t reduce you too incapacitated or deceased to type on a keyboard. I know because I’ve seen two relatives succumb to such – no treatment stopped the progression of the cancer, but modern drugs (and in the case of an aunt, pot) helped them be mobile and active until the very last days of their lives. Anecdotal evidence but that seems acceptable to you.
Coming late to the discussion, noticing a number of links to my blog from this site, I would like to comment @Krebiozen that the patient Marg refers to came to us with a stated diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Both he and his family told us that’s what it was. The cancer was discovered when it affected his bile duct and he developed jaundice. He went under the knife for a Whipple procedure, which was aborted when lesions were found on his liver. He also had two cancerous lymph nodes in his lower abdomen.
@ Marg: I think that’s the first time you’ve acknowledged anything I’ve said, even if you completely missed the point. Yes, doctors usually have to maintain some psychological distance because they’re human beings who regularly deal with human mortality and the feeling of loss it causes in others.
I’m reminded of an episode of Scrubs where JD is caught off guard by one of his elderly patients deciding that she’s ready to die, and he has trouble being that aware of human mortality. Dr. Cox points out the obvious: Everything they do is a delay. Life has a 100% mortality rate. Even if doctors successfully prevent a person from dying of one thing, something else will get them, and there’s a pretty good chance they’ll be in their care when it does. Not because they made it happen, but because it’s pretty much their job to delay death to the best of their limited human abilities.
Death is the fire and they’re the fire department, so of course they’re likely going to be involved in some way when a place burns down. I’m not sure you really understand that.
That’s the world we live in, but that’s not what I was talking about in my previous comment.
I’m talking about accountability and record keeping. The deaths are acknowledged in the system. Medical records survive, so if someone dies while on drug X, that death gets recorded so we can see where that failure fits in the big picture. There are successes and there are failures, and statistics is how we make sense in an uncertain world. The reason we trust science-based doctors is because they’re willing to do the record keeping and do the statistical analyses to make sense of them. Scientifically minded people want to know about failures because they want to improve on flaws. Acknowledging imperfections, failures, and mistakes is not a sign of weakness. To us, that is a strength because it means they likely won’t ignore problems.
In my experience, people like you seem to favor the politician’s Etch-a-Sketch approach to medicine. Politicians want to look like spotless, infallible paragons, so they either whitewash failures or they make sure no one records them. If you don’t look for problems, you won’t find any, therefore your record is clean.
It’s a rhetorically convenient double-standard between quackery and science-based medicine. Science-based medicine plays with its cards face up and is limited by the hand reality dealt us. Quackery wants to play its cards under the table and protests when we ask to see its whole hand. Your argument that we have a bad hand is meaningless until we get to see yours and compare the two. We think you’ve got nothing, so we’re calling energy medicine’s bluff. Put energy medicine’s cards on the table.
@Bronze Dog
The point I have been making is that SBM does NOT play with its cards face up, as the recent indictments of the pharmaceutical companies show.
I’d be quite surprised if Marg actually accepted this. She plainly considers herself to have advanced “powers” and to be able to perceive “unblinkered” “reality.” She is a Transcendent Being who can Channel the Healing Energy of the Multiverse. Reiki penetrates the Illusion of Time.
“Speaking on Esoteric lines, every irrevocable materialistic person is a dead Man, a living automaton, in spite of his being endowed with great brain power. Listen to what Aryasangha says, stating the same fact: ‘That which is neither Spirit nor Matter, neither Light nor Darkness, but is verily the container and root of these, that thou art. The Root projects at every Dawn its shadow on ITSELF, and that shadow thou callest Light and Life, O poor dead Form. (This) Life-Light streameth downward through the stair of the seven worlds, the stair, of which each step becomes denser and darker. It is of this seven-times-seven scale that thou art the faithful climber and mirror, O Little Man! Thou art this, but thou knowest it not. This is the first lesson to learn. The second is to study well and know the Principles of both Kosmos and ourselves, dividing the group into the permanent and impermanent, the higher and immortal and the lower and mortal, for thus only can we master and guide first the lower cosmic and personal, then the higher cosmic and impersonal.
“Once we can do that we have secured our immortality.”
How was it preoperatively imaged, Judith?
1. SBM, doctors, regulatory agencies, insurance companies, governments, and pharmaceutical companies are all different entities. SBM is a practice, not an entity, for one thing. In this metaphor, SBM is essentially defined as the practice playing face up, hence part of being an SBM doctor means reporting all results, good and bad.
2. The pharmaceutical companies play face up far more often than alties do, hence their claims are, on average, are more science-based than those of alties. I know they’re not perfect angels, but I see no better alternative at this time, and I my trust is proportional to their good behavior and the power of regulatory agencies to keep an eye on them. I want to keep my friends close but my enemies closer.
3. How does this help your case? I haven’t seen your energy medicine cards, and your reluctance to show them keeps suggesting to me that you don’t have anything. Whining vaguely about pharmaceutical corruption doesn’t change the cards in your hand. Even if you provided reliable information that turned me against pharmaceutical companies, what motivation do I have to side with you and energy healing?
Which indictments? Be specific, and explain how those indictments argue that science based medicine is neither safe nor effictive but energy healing is.
I think the fact that she jumped from me talking about SBM doctors to knee-jerk accusations towards pharmaceutical companies once again demonstrates that Marg doesn’t know who’s playing the game or where I stand on the field. She’s been indoctrinated into the childishly naive notion of a two-sided battle between the kingdoms of light and dark. I oppose her, therefore I must be in cahoots with the forces of Derse.
Judith,
I assume this is the same patient you described on your blog like this:
You do know that pancreatic cancer and bile duct cancer are not the same thing, don’t you?
That’s very often the case, as the pancreas presses on the bile duct obstructing it, it doesn’t mean the cancer has spread to the bile duct. Even if it had it would still be pancreatic cancer as it is the primary site that determines the cancer type.
Even if this was stage 4 unresectable pancreatic cancer you would expect about 2% of these patients to be alive 5 years after diagnosis and, extrapolating from SEER survival graphs, about 5% (about 1 in 20 patients) after 2 years so why do you think this patient’s 20 month survival is so unlikely?
Throwing two dice and getting two sixes is less likely (1 in 36) or being dealt three of a kind in 5 cards (1 in 46), to give some more mundane examples of similar odds.
By the way, I see you have amended the discussion of that paper about palliative care on your blog. I don’t really see why it is included in a blog post titled ‘”Iatrogenic disease”: the view from up close’, as it just shows that early palliative care is beneficial, and has nothing whatsoever to do with iatrogenic disease.
@Krebiozen
What passes for cancer treatment today in many cases definitely qualifies under “iatrogenic disease” in my books. People throwing up the lining of their intestines; sustaining burns that will not heal through radiation, kidney failure through chemo; dying of massive infections or internal bleeding because they have white blood cells or platelets left. What, pray tell, is your definition of “iatrogenic disease” but harm sustained through treatment? And it seems that a 6 per cent chance of someone living 3 or 4 months longer is sufficient for them to go through that hell.
How many patients would we have to treat who then turn out to be in the top five percentile for survival for their stage of cancer for you to accept that there is something viable going on? FYI what we do has no side effects except for improved quality of life.
Or rather, “they have NO white blood cells or platelets left”.
Start publishing case reports. You’ve already claimed that you have one with adequate medical documentation. If you can’t loosen your grip on the kosmic mains supply long enough to write that up, you’ve got nothing except Marg hanging around babbling pathetically.
Ah so we’ve moved entirely from not providing evidence for anything to “bringing on the big guns” because Marg needs all the help she can get.
Also, is it me, or does it seem strange that patient confidentiality isn’t upheld by these very ‘noble’, ‘caring’ healers?
@Bronze Dog
Well said, re: cards on the table. But she won’t ever see past proving X makes Y valid. Black and white is right…
Judith,
But the paper you referred to is about the benefits of palliative care, not cancer treatment. Did you actually read the study? It has nothing to do with iatrogenic disease, except that early palliative care may allow a patient to come to terms with their impending death so they don’t insist on continuing treatment past the point of diminishing returns. It is often the patient and their family that demand aggressive end-of-life care, by the way, though you seem to think this is always inflicted on unwilling patients by callous doctors who enjoy “torturing patients on their way out”.
You grossly exaggerate the side effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy; what you describe sounds more like cancer treatment 40 or 50 years ago, not “cancer treatment today”. Burns from radiotherapy may indeed be a problem in a minority of patients, but you have to balance benefits against risks, and I don’t want to get sidetracked. Since it currently seems the patient we have been discussing had pancreatic cancer, let’s take a look at the experience of some patients on chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer.
A few years ago there was a clinical trial of an alternative treatment for pancreatic cancer compared with conventional cancer treatment. The alternative treatment (Gonzalez’s enzymes, supplements, juices, organic diet and coffee enemas) was for all intents and purposes no treatment at all, so it offers us a useful way of comparing the outcome of treated and untreated patients.
The patients accepted into the trial “had to have a histologically confirmed adenocarcinoma of the pancreas that was inoperable because of advanced primary tumor or metastases (ie, stages II to IV)”, which I think you would agree would have included the patient we have been discussing.
The results are very interesting; here are the points that struck me as relevant to this discussion:
The chemotherapy patients survived longer than the untreated (enzyme) patients, 3 times longer on average:
So chemotherapy extended life by nearly ten months on average.
Out of 23 patients on chemotherapy, 2 survived twice as long as the patient given energy healing. About 25% of the treated patients and 5% of the untreated patients were still alive after 20 months.
The side effects of the chemotherapy did not remotely resemble those you describe above; adverse events appeared in both groups, because cancer makes people very sick:
Quality of life was better in the chemotherapy group than in the no treatment group:
So over the first 6 months pain increased in the untreated patients, as you might expect, but it decreased in the chemotherapy patients. Perhaps this is due to different use of palliative care, but that does seem remarkable, the opposite of iatrogenesis you might say. Quality of life decreased in both groups, of course, but the difference between the groups is remarkable – see Fig. 3 in the study.
That seems a reasonable definition, but medicine is always about juggling risks against benefits. We can see from that study that chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer extends life and improves its quality. Where’s the iatrogenic disease in that?
Citation? What cancer, what stage, what treatment?
Stage 2 to 4 pancreatic cancer has one of the worst outcomes of all cancers, and chemotherapy is less helpful than in many other cancers, so we are looking at the very worst case scenarios here. Yet half of these patients’ lives were extended by nearly 10 months with chemotherapy. In non-small-cell lung cancer, another cancer with poor outcomes that responds poorly to chemotherapy, the systematic review I have repeatedly linked to above concluded:
It seems your alternative to conventional cancer treatment is to wave your hands over them while they die in agony. Do you actually understand what happens in untreated cancer? Has it even occurred to you to wonder what would have happened to the patients in the horror stories you relate if they had been left untreated?
Your claims about the efficacy and side effects of chemotherapy are demonstrably untrue for most patients, even in cancers for which it is least effective. By spreading these horror stories about chemotherapy and radiotherapy, you are deliberately trying to frighten sick and vulnerable people into making decisions that will have seriously detrimental effects on their lives. Not only that but you are doing so, it seems, with the intent of drumming up customers for your delusional energy healing business. I don’t know if you are well-meaning but deluded, or cynical, uncaring and manipulative but the end result is the same. You and your ilk are the main reason for oncologists increasingly seeing the results of untreated cancers that they had previously only seen in old text books. As UK cancer surgeon Michale Baum wrote on a UK medical professional site:
Judith, and Marg, please take a long hard look at what you are doing, and the consequences. By frightening people away from life-saving treatment you are doing far more harm than good.
But you can. The Bengster sells DVDs.
There ya go Judith, the germ of a proper study, assuming you agree with what Marg claimed as quoted above.
It needs a wee tweaking to include people without injury and no verbal interaction so that you meet these two criteria as drawn from Marg’s claim:
– you’ve been told the patient has an injury, nothing more
– you find it “just with your hands by feeling his or her energy”.
If you’d like help, JREF will AND hand you a million bucks if you get better results than Emily Rosa provided using more than willing subjects.
That is until they were shown the results and also wondered who put a curious and scientifically literate 9 year old “up to it”.
She tried for a bigger sample size by appealing to the woman who runs the National Hand-Waving Assoc. but of course was dismissed with a wave of the hand for being 9.
@flip, Bronze Dog
frustrating ain’t it, they can’t separate SBM from the players or understand our arguments are based on that premise – all we are asking is follow the same guidelines as SBM AND don’t act like the dicks they keep harping on.
SBM, properly applied will keep you honest. Ironally, alties often argue “the baby & the bathwater” which is what these two are exactly proposing.
@Krebiozen:
“Burns from radiotherapy may indeed be a problem in a minority of patients, but you have to balance benefits against risks, and I don’t want to get sidetracked.”
If only there were some regulatory body that required the reporting of improper nuclear medicine treatments so we would understand the causes and work to prevent their occurence.
Oh, wait —
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/event/en.html#en48465
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/event/en.html#en48469
Another checkmark for SBM putting ALL of its cards on the table.
Those of us who live in countries with nationalized health care remain bamboozled by those who think that any treatment that was effective and cost so little would NOT be pushed by our governments as a cost saving measure…..no instead we have the UK government getting out of the homeopathic business and the Canadian government NOT paying for all manner of quackery. Serioulsy, you alternative medicine ‘advocates’ should try and peddle your woo to these governments, because believe me, if there any chance that our health care system could save millions or billions of dollars by hand waving, they would pay for all the studies needed to prove this works……..I wait with baited breath. *snark*
@Agashem: Thank you for bringing up nationalized health care in other countries. It’s irritating that a lot of alties seem to think the world ends in an eternal waterfall just outside US borders.
Judith,
That depends on how many other patients you have treated who haven’t done as well. You have only told us about the cases you consider successes, which I strongly suspect makes you as guilty of publication bias as the drug companies Marg complains about. How many terminal cancer patients have you treated in total? If you treat enough cancer patients you will find some that survive much longer than expected, and some that don’t survive as long. It’s how probability works.
The evidence you have presented so far doesn’t even offer a ghost of a hint that energy healing has any effect compared to no treatment, much less over chemotherapy. In the study I mentioned in my last comment, 1 in 20 untreated patients and 1 in 4 chemotherapy-treated patients lived for 20 months, as long as your energy treated patient survived. If you treated 10 pancreatic cancer patients and they all lived 20 months, that would start to look interesting.
No one has ever been able to demonstrate even the existence of the ‘healing energy’ you claim to use, so the possibility that energy healing could work on anything, much less cancer, is vanishingly implausible. This means the quality of the evidence you need to provide has to be very high indeed for any serious researchers to concede that it might be worth looking at. That’s what SBM is all about, convincing evidence and prior plausibility, and you have neither.
Marg tells us that in your experience palliative energy healing is more effective than palliative chemotherapy. Is that true, and if so on what do you base that conclusion? How many terminal cancer patients who rejected chemotherapy have you treated with energy healing, and how many chemotherapy patients did you compare them with? Where did you find these control patients? Or if you are comparing with published stats, what are your success rates? Do you have an anonymized list of all the cancer patients you have treated, their expected survival and how long they actually survived? How did you assess their quality of life and how did you compare that with those on chemotherapy?
If you can’t answer these questions then you have no business making these claims.
If it offers false hope and dissuades patients from getting effective treatment then it does have side effects. What evidence do you have for improved quality of life? Compared to what? I would expect your patients to have a seriously reduced quality of life if they reject conventional treatment, however much you wave your hands over them.
The “no side effects” meme really irritates me because it’s often tied into the denial of human complexity. Our bodies house a lot of interacting systems. A change in one thing is quite likely to affect several others, producing unintended effects. It only seems natural to me that medical treatments would have side effects, generally in proportion to the change being made. Weak treatments tend to have weak side effects and strong treatments tend to have strong side effects.
If something has no side effects, that’s going to make me more skeptical of the main effect, especially since we know a lot about the human capacity for self-deception, confirmation bias, and the like. That capacity for self-deception is the reason we use science to prevent bias.
Oh look, I came across a systematic review of Biofield therapies (such as Reiki, therapeutic touch, and healing touch). Need I remind anyone that systematic reviews are, as Ben Goldacre pointed out, the best kind of evidence we have? Thought not.
So what did this systematic review find? Does energy healing extend the lives of cancer patients? Work better than chemotherapy? Improve their quality of lives?
Nope. These therapies are essentially no better than other therapies like massage or relaxation that are beneficial for pain and other symptoms with a large psychological component – the obvious conclusion is that ‘biofield therapies’ are just placebos. The review concludes:
Level 4 evidence is the lowest quality of evidence on their scale, by the way, so it’s not even a very good placebo.
@Agashem
Here in Oz some things aren’t covered (although there are clauses), like acupuncture and chiro.
http://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/enablers/medicare/medicare/what-medicare-covers
Sadly, the private insurance version does cover most woo:
http://www.medibank.com.au/healthcover/insurance/ultra-cover/
*For non-Australians, the private insurance is government-run, but separate to the public UHC insurance provided by Medicare. Medibank, the private one, is Australia’s largest health insurer. So it’s worth noting that the government offers two stances on non-SBM, one that clearly backs up Agashem’s point. And it’s good to point out that the woo stuff is also listed as extras, not under the basics plan. So not only would you have to pay to cover alt med, but you’d have to pay more than you would for SBM.
Fortunately this situation has one benefit: it proves alt-medders wrong when they complain about UHC cutting out other options. Health freedom is pretty much the standard here.
“So not only would you have to pay to cover alt med, but you’d have to pay more than you would for SBM.”
Er, scratch that to say “some SBM”.
Oh, dear, I just glanced at Judith’s site and noticed the embedded video she has on “the science behind energy healing.” I had not previously met one Claude Swanson, brave herald of the New Force Known As “Torsion.” (As the saying goes, “that’s not ‘new’, I’ve had red things for years.”)
This no doubt dandy entry in the annals of scientific communication is brought to this plane courtesy of “JustEnergyRadio.com” (who knew?), which brave media outlet is still revealing the Moon landing hoax.
So I’m thinking that this is precisely the group of thinkers that I would like to entrust my health care to.
Agashem is slightly off aboot Canukistan. Healthcare is a provincial matter and Alberta is covering quackery @ 500 loonies/family/year
I may have mentioned that waaay back upstream,
If you
thinkhave been led down a certain path to believe the notions, potions and lotions sold by alternative medicine men will cure all that ails, go ahead and keeping buying the products.They should not be covered by any public/private insurance, just like Ontario shouldn’t have public schools of woo. On your own dime. Ramen.
@Krebiozen
You have two pancreatic cancer patients, One of them gets up from his deathbed to go home, stops needing morphine within five days of the start of the treatment, reverses his jaundice, goes back to having near normal blood test results, and his treatment team enthusiastically tell you they’ve never seen anything like it in decades of practice. The other outlives his prognosis by a year, lives an active life while you are treating him, and is, as you say, in the top five percentile for survival. A colleague’s stage-4 small cell lung cancer patient outlives HIS prognosis by 34 months. A breast cancer patient’s documented tumour disappears. Another breast cancer patient is downgraded from a a mastectomy to a lumpectomy because of a change in the tumour. We don’t treat that many people with cancer. It’s not like one, or two, or five in a hundred see anomalous results — most do. After the first few you sit up and take notice. I would love to give you 20 pancreatic cancer patients in the top five percentile for survival — but we don’t get that many pancreatic cancer patients.
Judith, anyone can SAY they’ve had such amazing results. The difference is that people who HAVE such amazing results document them, and people who are only SAYING they have such impressive results make excuses like “we know the hegemonic medical establishment will never let the truth get out so we’ve never written up even one of these amazing cases we see on a regular basis.”
@Antaeus
But even the ones who document them are not believed.
@Krebiozen
The chemo/radiation side-effects I described above, which you say were the norm 40 or 50 years ago but not now, all happened to people I know in the last couple of years. My antipathy to these treatments is not philosophical. Yes, I also know people who take one little chemo pill a day and have little more than tiredness to report. But I know more people who have experienced horrors. My own mother died after her first radiation treatment, which was meant to be “prophylactic” as at the time she had no detectable cancer. It was certainly prophylactic; she never had a chance to develop cancer again because she was dead within hours. When I asked her if the radiation was necessary, she told me “I trust this doctor with my life”. The doctor saw her twice; once to order the tests and once to prescribe the radiation. I have good personal reasons to rail at the medical establishment.
Don’t forget the meteorologists. Those clouds aren’t going to dissolve on their own, after all.
Cards. Table. Face up.
Judith,
This patient? I have edited out the bits that are not relevant to his diagnosis and prognosis and, for those concerned, I note you have stated on your blog that details have been changed to preserve patient confidentiality:
I’m a bit confused by this, it doesn’t seem to make sense. The patient suddenly becomes ill, is told he has days to live, but there is somehow time for chemotherapy to be tried but “quickly abandoned as hopeless”. How long was chemotherapy tried for, before it was abandoned? Why did his doctors conclude it was hopeless? What were the ultrasound scan and biopsy results? When was energy healing started in relation to his diagnosis and the abandonment of chemotherapy?
You also wrote:
It sounds to me as if the cause of his jaundice was the head of the pancreas pressing on the bile duct, causing obstruction. That’s one of the ways pancreatic cancer can be caught relatively early. I expect his alkaline phosphatase was grossly elevated with only minor elevation in his liver enzymes, which is what I have seen in many cases of cancer of the head of the pancreas, consistent with obstruction. I suspect the chemotherapy he was given shrank the pancreatic tumors enough to relieve the obstruction to his bile duct. This would remove the cause of his jaundice and weight loss, and might well allow him a few weeks of better health before he died That is the purpose of chemotherapy in pancreatic cancer, after all, and it is far more plausible than energy healing being effective.
A single case of a patient surviving stage 4 pancreatic cancer for ten weeks when untreated median life expectancy is 3-5 months isn’t at all extraordinary. I don’t know why his doctors told you and him that something unusual had happened, but on the face of it this doesn’t seem at all unusual and certainly isn’t good evidence for something as utterly implausible as energy healing.
Outliving his prognosis by a year is not unusual, neither is living an active life with a terminal cancer diagnosis, and being in the top 5% for survival is not at all unusual by definition – 1 in 20 patients will survive this long. I really don’t understand why you think the energy healing had any effect on either of these patients. If they had gone into complete remission, perhaps, as that truly is unusual, but living within the expected range of survival? It’s what you expect!
This is the patient who lived for 44 months after diagnosis? Although the median survival for extensive stage small cell lung carcinoma is only 8–13 months, 1–5% of patients treated with chemotherapy live 5 years (60 months) or longer. Another case within the expected range. Not remarkable, not evidence of magic.
Documented by biopsy I assume? This often happens naturally. It’s one of the problems with mammography that overdiagnosis occurs when tumors that would have gone away on their own are detected. Not remarkable unless you can demonstrate this repeatedly.
Did they have chemotherapy which would have shrunk the tumor by any chance? If not and you have documented evidence, such as biopsy results and scans showing that the tumor shrank so much without chemotherapy that a mastectomy was no longer required, you should publish that case history.
An anomaly is “something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected”. The results you have presented here, which I assume are the best evidence you have, are not anomalous, they are well within the expected range of results. I think you have fooled yourself with wishful thinking and confirmation bias.
How many cancer patients have you treated and what were the results? I see that you have plenty of excuses for your treatment not working – either they had resigned themselves to death, or they had conventional treatment, or they left it too late. Do you ignore these cases because you figure you know why they failed? If you include these cases, what does your success rate look like then?
@Krebiozen
What’s conventional medicine’s excuse?
Judith,
Excuse for what? For improving life expectancy and quality of life in the majority of patients who would otherwise die horribly?
Conventional medicine accepts that not all patients will benefit from chemotherapy, and uses scientific evidence to decide who gets what treatment, who is suitable for surgery etc. It does not exclude patients from the results of trials even if they have to drop out because they cannot tolerate a treatment or if the treatment fails, whatever the reason.
The way I’d say it: The “excuses” that do come up are generally documented and specific factors instead of generalized, inconsistently applied ad hoc hypotheses.
The rest of the time, the uncertain nature of reality covers it. We use scientific methodology to play the best odds we can find. But you can make all the best decisions and still lose through no fault of your own when probability and the unknown side against you.
So, on the experimental front you pooh-pooh the very notion by some sort of proxy asshurt, and on the theoretical front, you’ve got the “torsion” guy?
In another Feynman quotable,
You, Marg, and your fellow travelers have no such imagination, just a desperate attachment to the long-desiccated turd stick of animal magnetism. There is not a whit of novelty in any of this dismal rerun.
Documentation is the start of what you have to do to be believable. It’s not the end.
What you are proposing is that you can revolutionize the world of medicine by proving to be true a modality of healing that has never had scientific validation before. Did you seriously expect that would be easy? That there wouldn’t be systems in place to weed out the countless people who would claim to have such revolutionary proof but would be either fooling themselves or trying to fool everyone else?
It’s like you’re saying “I’m the fastest person on the planet! But no one will accept that I am!” And the response you get is, “Well, prove it! Go run a marathon or somethng!” And you say “That won’t work; even when I run a marathon, I never get a prize!” Well, guess what – if you run marathons and you don’t get the prize, maybe it’s because you are not the fastest person on the planet after all?? Ya think?
I did it, I looked at Judith’s Twitter feed. Note to Judith: That aphorism is from Bodhisattva Greetingcard (famously depicted in the “Cornflower Thangka”), not Gautama.
@Krebiozen
So if conventional medicine gives a pancreatic cancer patient 20 months of life and a small-cell lung cancer patient 44, with weeks of puking, weakness, skin eruptions and whatnot, that’s peachy keen and laudable. If we do the same with no side effects, that’s failure? Nicely spun, sir.
I think Marg is actually better at this than Judith, whose aura is beaming into my Third Eye with just the dishwater gray of venality.
When “we have the same rates of success as conventional medicine only with fewer side effects” is something you can back with actual solid data, it won’t be called a failure. As long as it’s something you’re insisting the data would show if carefully collected and at the same time refusing to collect the data and instead merely waving around the most favorable anecdotes, most people will conclude that the success of your method exists solely in your mind.
I’m facepalming so hard right now. That’s a lot of compacted wrongness and/or deceit in such a nice little package, including ignorance/denial of a point I made not too long ago about side effects and human complexity.
Judith,
Having personally been through double mastectomies and multiple associated surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation, I can tell you one thing for certain. You’re full of crap. You have absolutely no business “treating” any patient for ANY medical condition, and I hope the other readers here will join me in reporting your fradulent scammery to the FTC. Not that it’ll likely do any good at all, but I’m always eager to speak out in any way I can against harmful fraudulent woo.
Have any of your “patients” ever taken legal action against you, Judith? Do you have a license to practice medicine? Malpractice insurance?
44 weeks, I meant
Nope, 44 months was right. Sorry.
Judith:
Thank you for admitting as much.
Judith,you are biased. I think I understand now why you are so unwilling to give up your bias.
However, knowing that you have this bias, you should be going out of your way to make sure that your assessments of your patients are not affected by your bias – you should be taking extra care to demonstrate that you have an objective point of view.
But you’re not. You continue to surround yourself with only those cases which you consider successes.
If you truly believe that your treatments benefit your patients, you owe it to the rest of the world to demonstrate that what you do goes beyond the placebo effect.
Judith, if you want to be taken seriously, you have to show the world that you can overcome your bias.
@Chemmomo
That’s fair.
So, same s#it in a different bag. Judith, you tell me why the Canadian government doesn’t make all cancer patient see energy healers? Simple question that demands a simple answer and if you try to tell me the entire Canadian government is in the pocket of big pharma, you lose.
@Judith
You may find this interesting. I got to link from another one of Orac’s rants:
http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Drugs/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/EnforcementActivitiesbyFDA/WarningLettersandNoticeofViolationLetterstoPharmaceuticalCompanies/UCM323628.pdf
I’m more inclined to call it an excuse than bias.
Jesus Christ. How stupid do you think your audience is, Marg? You go running to Judith, you try to interpose her site in sitcom-level parental-argument fashion, clam up for a while, and now you’re going to pretend that you are exchanging novelties in this venue?
@Narad
Actually, it’s the rest of you I wanted to read the contents of that particular little letter from the FDA on the subject of a pharmaceutical company misrepresenting a cancer drug in its advertising. I suppose I could have put it as a comment on Judith’s blog, but then you wouldn’t have seen it.
Sure thing, Marg. You’ll have to pardon me if I continue to consider you as the wrong, yet more vividly entertaining, end of the pantomime horse.
@Narad
Of course you wouldn’t dream of reading the thing itself. It might actually shake up your prejudices.
Marg, what’s newsworthy about the FDA letter? It’s hardly some big indictment or proof that “big pharma is bad.”
They busted a manufacturer for making exaggerated claims about a drug. Isn’t that exactly what the FDA is supposed to do?
@Narad, I usually completely agree with your posts, but not this time. I don’t find Marg even marginally entertaining.
It’s typical Marg, thenewme.
He/She thinks the FDA is ‘useless’ – except of course, when it’s doing its job – and then they’re being big meanieheads!
Is this the FDA warning letter that was posted on the blog the other day? If so, I read it then. Don’t need to re-read it now in order to see Marg has nothing up her sleeves, nothing in her top hat, and no fancy evidence to pull out like a rabbit.
Ah Marg, you really are out of tricks aren’t you?
Judith,
I’m not sure if you are joking, truly miss the point or are deliberately trying to distort the facts. Yes of course it’s laudable to use the best treatment available, treatment that is supported by robust evidence. No it’s not “peachy keen” that the best treatments we have for these cancers are not as effective as we would like and have some unpleasant side effects for some people*. I very much wish that we had better treatments for these cancers, with fewer side-effects, but we haven’t yet. This is the best we currently have, though better treatments will eventually be found through real scientific research.
Firstly, you haven’t the slightest bit of evidence that energy healing can do any better than no treatment at all, much less “do the same” as chemotherapy. A few of the untreated (enzyme) patients in the Gonzalez trial lived longer than your two miracle pancreatic cancer patients who, let’s not forget, both had chemotherapy as well as energy healing. Can we conclude from this that no treatment (or enzyme treatment) is better than energy healing?
Secondly, the only information about this small-cell lung cancer patient I can find is from you and Marg on this comment thread. Is there any more information on this patient anywhere? Did he have chemotherapy for example? Some patients with small-cell lung cancer live for more than 18 years, do you really think less than 4 years is a miracle?
Thirdly, you are reported to have claimed that your patients do better with energy healing than with chemotherapy, not “the same” as chemotherapy, a claim for which you have so far presented no remotely convincing or even intriguing evidence at all.
I have spun nothing. I have stated the facts as I see them. It is you who are spinning, desperately, trying to distract from the fact that you have no evidence.
It’s worth mentioning again that these are the two cancers with the worst prognosis, against which chemotherapy is least effective. There are several other cancers for which conventional treatment in general and chemotherapy in particular are very much more effective.
* You keep ignoring the study I linked to that found no difference in “side effects” between untreated pancreatic cancer patients and those on chemotherapy. Some of the terrible side effects you ascribe to chemotherapy are the effects of the cancer itself.
Judith,
Exploring your blog has taken me on a weird journey through anger, disbelief and hilarity.
Anger at a plethora of blatantly inaccurate and misleading passages like this:
Yet as we have seen this is not true. Palliative care is by definition aimed at relieving and preventing the suffering of patients, not at extending life. When a tumor starts to interfere with the body’s functioning this can cause a great deal of pain and suffering; preventing or at least minimizing this is the whole point of palliative chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Sometimes palliative treatment has the unplanned additional benefit of extending life, but its purpose is to make the patient more comfortable. Clinical trials of palliative care specificially look at reduction of pain and suffering, and treatments are only used if they do so. As you wrote yourself patients having palliative care, “lived longer and had better quality of life than patients who received conventional cancer treatment alone”.
Again I find myself struggling to express myself without lapsing into profanity. You are actually trying to discourage cancer patients from having treatment that reduces their pain and suffering. Is this just ignorance? If not why?
There’s also this which has been debunked many times before:
You have quoted this from a book called “The Mythology of Science-Based Medicine”. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that it didn’t occur to you to check the source. Would it surprise you to find out that these common medical treatments include “many treatments that come under the description of complementary medicine (e.g., acupuncture for low back pain and echinacea for the common cold)”?
As for disbelief and hilarity, I had to laugh at this:
I don’t need to explain to regular readers here just how ridiculous that is, though not too surprising coming from a science fiction writer. For icing on the cake you added:
I can hear poor Bohr turning in his grave, or perhaps laughing, I’m not sure which.
you’ve got to be kidding
Here’s an interesting link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-20270400 . Basically, they’re experimenting with making chemotherapy less arduous for the patient by isolating the organ being treated from the rest of the body, and treating just that organ (in this case, the liver) with the chemotherapy drugs.
OT for this thread? Perhaps. OTOH, it does highlight the fact that SBM keeps asking “how can we do this better? How can we be more effective? How can we reduce side effects?” while HWBM (Hand-Waving-Based Medicine) simply refuses to collect the data that might suggest the modality is less than perfect.
Marg, Judith, when are you going to stop trying to tear down the pharmaceutical companies? They’re irrelevant. Of course, that’s been pointed out repeatedly, so don’t feign ignorance. You’re using lies and innuendo about them and our devotion to truth to distract from the fact that you don’t have good evidence for energy healing.
You only have anecdotes that fall well within our realm of expectation, yet you attempt to lie to our virtual faces about what we expect.
Stop trying to tear everything down in the name of your intolerant ideology and try to do something constructive.
@Bronze Dog
My intolerant ideology? LOL. Pot, meet kettle.
Intolerant ideology is a very good description. You think you shake our world view, Marg, when it seems quite clear reading through this thread that it is yours that is threatened.
@Agashem
Et tu. Pot, meet kettle.
Really? That’s your defence? After all these days and days? Come on, I have heard better arguments among school children. You have shaken nothing in me, so if you think you have, you should think again. And hard. Oh, and I asked a while back why nationally funded health care systems wouldn’t jump all over this ‘cheap’ treatment. Don’t use the pharmashill gambit because there are many many countries with nationalized health care and they can’t all possibly be in the pocket of the pharmaceuticals…….
Marg, do you listen to yourself? Or is this the old “it’s bigotry to hate bigots” thing?
You’ve been spouting all sorts of propaganda memes that seem designed to demonize us because we don’t subscribe to your ideology. You engage in black and white thinking. You keep trying to associate everything you don’t like with pharmaceutical companies the way I’ve seen wingnuts try to associate everyone they don’t like with the Muslim Brotherhood.
As for tolerance, I’m willing to entertain new ideas if they have good evidence to support them, which is what we’ve been asking for all this time. Instead of providing evidence, you continue your verbal rampage against every real or imagined flaw in the pharma companies even though we’ve made it clear that it doesn’t help the case of energy medicine. I want my disbelief challenged, and you deliberately avoid giving me anything challenging or unexpected.
I doubt you can even articulate what my ideology is or my positions are, despite all the stuff I’ve written here.
Marg – pointing out the flaws in others does nothing to support your own claims, especially when we are aware of these flaws
in fact, this tactic shows you to be a delusional ignoramus
do a proper study and shut us up because you’ve offered nothing more than what any good snake-oil salesman would say, and we’ve heard it all – now at least, Andromeda is in the palm of my hand, whiskey tango foxtrot
Antaeus Feldspar: Wow! That’s really cool!
My grandmother lived through most of the 20th century (she died in AD2000 at 94). She witnessed a world transformed by scientific advances including human beings achieving flight, complex calculations given to machines not subject to human error, and several revolutions in how we record data.
I have often wondered what’s next. In the 90s, the advances didn’t seem to be coming as fast as they had in the earlier part of the century.
It seems to me that we were laying the infrastructure that allows leaps and bounds that may be coming up, and your link shows one of them.
Thank you.
@Krebiozen
Thank you for articulating that palliative chemotherapy is only meant to lessen pain and suffering and not intended to extend life. So in essence your objection to energy healing for cancer patients for whom curative chemotherapy is no longer an option is that it would deprive them of the salutary and enjoyable effects of palliative chemo.
To clarify, in the scenario which I propose (and which we have already seen in practice) patients we treat are under the care of an oncologist. The oncologist has told them palliative chemo is their only option and will be deployed at some point in the future when it becomes necessary. The patient continues to see the oncologist regularly to monitor his or her progress (or decline). So long as the patient is functioning well and not in pain, the oncologist keeps telling him to carry on with what he is doing as it seems to be working. Only when the patient’s condition worsens to a certain point is palliative chemo put into use. I see no downside to putting off that time; neither do most doctors I know.
As to you making a value judgment that “energy healing doesn’t work”, I would say allow the patient to make that judgment. Trust me, if a patient doesn’t feel better after their treatment, they don’t come back for more. They see no more point in wasting money than you would.
Oh, Judith. If you don’t publish specific clinical information about the rate of patients who don’t ‘feel better’ after your care, how can you expect patients to make an initial informed judgement on whether or not to accept your treatment??
It’s utter nonsense. What you’re basically saying is ‘patients must pay me for an initial treatment, without knowing a baseline rate of success, before they find out if the treatment will be successful.’
You only operate under the guise of ‘patient choice,’ but in reality what you do is anything but. You don’t want patients to ‘waste money,’ but you don’t give them the option of deciding for themselves, based on actual data, whether or not the initial appointment would be a waste of money too.
Judith,
You’re welcome, but let’s be clear, it is provento lessen pain and suffering.
My objection is to you telling desperate cancer patients lies. You wrote, of palliative treatment (not just chemotherapy):
I suppose you would prefer cancer patients to “enjoy” untreated cancer without any palliation at all. Yet you also write:
That’s not the point. If energy healing really did extend the time until palliative treatment is required I would be in favor of it, of course. In fact I have no objection at all to you waving your hands over whoever you want, with their permission. What I find despicable is that you find it necessary to be dishonest in your efforts to persuade people to reject conventional treatment that has been proven to be beneficial. You don’t even have the decency to admit that’s what you are doing, even when it is obvious to everyone.
Value judgment or not, of course it doesn’t work, because this isn’t Narnia. Tell the patient the truth, show them the evidence, not cherry-picked, biased anecdotes and testimonials and then let them make that decision.
That’s obviously untrue. What about people who come back to chemotherapy even though it has side effects? And what about your pancreatic cancer patient who quit energy treatment when he realized it wasn’t working? Oh I forgot, he was persuaded to have chemotherapy even though the energy treatment was working.
Maybe they believed you when you told them it would help them and that palliative chemotherapy has severe side effects and involves “significant suffering”, whereas dying of untreated, unpalliated cancer is just peachy.
You’re living down to one of my stereotypes formed from years of experience with altie trolls: The Ayn Rand Altie. Let the buyer beware, let non-experts fall prey to self-deception, misinformation, and marketing spin. Somehow the invisible hand of the market will magically pick out the best treatments out of the noise because good products never fail in the market and scams never work.
One criticism I’ve had about Ayn Rand is that she pretty much advocates a society founded on Mary Sueism, where everyone is capable of absolute objectivity and is an expert in every subject. Result: if they make a bad purchasing decision, it’s their fault for not having the time and resources to do the clinical trials themselves.
“Feeling better” isn’t a reliable means of telling if a treatment is working because it’s subjective and can be triggered for reasons other than improvement in their medical condition. The contrary assumption reeks of denial of human complexity. We are not toasters.
It’s self-serving to recommend prospective customers buy the product to evaluate its effectiveness, especially when it’s a medical treatment. It should be up to the producers to prove their product works through objective scientific tests before they’re allowed to market it. That’s what consumer protection is about. Let the seller beware.
Naturally, it’s this sort of thing that convinces me that alties are one of the best things to happen to the pharmaceutical companies: If alties don’t have to jump through the consumer protection hoops we demand, that’s going to set a precedent for the pharma companies to skip them, too. If that nightmare were to happen worldwide, that’d severely limit my options for medical help, since there’d be no one interested in earning my trust.
Which is exactly what Big Pharma did in my case. Anecdotal, sure but the ladies love ’em. I was made fully aware of the possible dangers and unpleasantness of it all.
Also, not the first talking monkey to be a lab rat after the mice and dogs. I might have passed if that were the case.
Alt-Randians, spot on Bronze Dog. Yes, feeling better isn’t being better. They aren’t the same thing. I mentioned an ALS death and a cancer death some time ago. They both had periods of feeling better – even though Da lasted only 5 months – but in the end…
The usual time for ALS is two years. Who’s waving their hands over Hawking? Whoever did it over my friend sucked.
Caveat emptor applies to cat food not healthcare
@Bronze Dog @Krebiozen
To a terminal cancer patient “feeling better” means a heck of a lot. Many of them have such pain that morphine can’t manage it and they are counting the minutes to the next shot; if you can take that pain and make it negligible or even manageable they won’t care one whit whether you have any studies behind what you do, they just care that they are not in pain.
@Bronze Dog
The people who died from Vioxx, whose children were born without arms because of Thalidomide, who became addicted to the Oxycontin they were taking for back pain, etc., found out the hard way that caveat emptor indeed does apply to healthcare.
The last bit was meant for @al kimeea, not @Bronze Dog.
Judith re: Vioxx, thalidomide, and oxycontin vs caveat emptor.
Your criticism is hollow: all those people taking those drugs “felt better.”
@Al Kimeea
I’ve suggested that numerous times. I don’t think I ever got a reason why she hasn’t done it. Or why she hasn’t left to do it.
Except of course the subtext that science is a bad paradigm and is therefore not something she wants to be a part of. Up until it’s science that she thinks proves her point.
It’s quite clear that we’re the open-minded ones: we ask for things that would convince us they’re right, but all they do is ignore it.
@Judith
Now I see why Marg uses you as an advocate. You both share a common fallacy that anecdotes = data.
And if they get better, they have no need to come back either.
That’s always the way it seems. “Science has it’s place” which appears to be as far away from insert fantasy item here even as they market their potions, notions & lotions, books, optical discs, yaps etc. in sciencey ways.
Science isn’t the problem, Big Pharma and the economic model of medicine for profit uber alles is the issue – Dr. Oz has his wife wave her hands as an additional profit stream while he cuts chests open.
And the things mentioned by JudithMarg happen. The real medical industry needs to be more open among other things for gov’t to more easily keep them honest. But then, regulation and Big Gov’t are bad for business.
Yes, the ladies could easily show their work using a tool known to be reliable even if others using it aren’t, and instead choose to denigrate the opposition – Big Pharma and science by extension.
I was on oxycontin for less than a month. I stopped taking it because I thought it was gonna kill me. Before it got that bad, it helped with the pain but I didn’t enjoy the feeling of it even when ameliorated by herb. Oxycodone was much better and herb varies by variant as pain relief. Eating it would be a better option – brownies anyone – but you’d also be incapacitated. And it cures/prevents cancer, I read it on the internet.
Interesting: to us, science is the theme and we open up and place new things in that spectrum. To them, fantasy is the theme where anything is possible because well, accepting everything is more important. And science is just one of those things that kind of, somewhat gets slotted in like a book on an overstuffed shelf, partly falling off it.
I disagree that an economic model is the main issue. As long as government entities, insurance companies, and medical-related businesses fall for the argument from popularity it will continue. The issue is education. Then policies will be written that are far more stringent because fewer people will have tolerance for “other ways of knowing”.
Incidentally, my first and only time watching Dr Oz on TV here – he gets an afternoon slot on weekdays – was him saying you can tell what’s wrong with your body just by… sniffing your own pee. I was always wary of his show due to the comments about him on this blog and elsewhere but as soon as I saw that I had enough evidence to go “what an idiot”.
@flip – the economic model was meant in the context of the nasty bits about medicine – Oxy, etc – haphazardly going to market to satisfy the rush to profit. And to show it can incorporate wu.
Hard to argue with what you say aboot education, but I think it is undermined by the idea that faith is a virtue.
Oz recently had psychics speaking to the dead as therapy. I’ve only taken Psychology 101, but I think the technical term for that treatment is batshit
Judith,
The effect of energy healing on pain is not what we have been discussing. The issue is whether energy healing can have any objective effects on a cancer patient’s outcomes. Also, your unethical habit of making up lies about chemotherapy to try to dissuade cancer patients from having it.
However, since you have brought it up, I don’t care one whit how much you wave your hands over a cancer patient with their consent, as long as they are getting adequate medical care, or have made an informed decision not to get it. If they experience pain relief that’s great, as long as it doesn’t mask an underlying problem or discourage them from getting medical attention. Placebos can be dangerous in that way, making an asthma patient feel better, for example, but having no effect on their airways at all.
But is energy healing really as effective a painkiller as opiates, as you imply?
Let’s compare the analgesic efficacy of therapeutic touch, and methadone for cancer pain. Here’s a Cochrane review of touch therapies for pain including Healing Touch, Therapeutic Touch and Reiki,. that looked at acute and chronic pain including cancer pain. Here’s a Cochrane review of methadone for cancer pain.
The Cochrane review of touch therapies found that:
That’s about a 10% reduction in pain, more or less. Cochrane called for further studies as it almost inevitably does (though not so much more recently).
The methadone effects were reported differently, in one study “a clinically relevant pain response was considered to be a 20% reduction in baseline pain score on a zero to ten patient-reported Numerical Rating Scale”, with about 75% of patients achieving this with methadone or morphine after 8 days, though this declined to about 50% over time. In another study all patients reported at least a 50% reduction in pain with methadone.
It would seem from this that touch therapies are considerably less effective at reducing pain than opiates, and do not produce a clinically relevant pain response.
Still, if you are in pain even a small reduction may be welcome, but there are lots of other non-medical interventions that may help to reduce pain to a similar degree; massage, relaxation and guided imagery for example. I haven’t seen any evidence that therapeutic touch (or any other energy healing techniques) can do better than them, and they have the advantage of not pretending to work by magic.
@Krebiozen
I removed the sentence that you object to from the blog post. It was unnecessary and indeed you are right that I don’t want to discourage people from having treatment that could help them.
The people we treated were already on morphine derivatives and still in considerable pain. After treatment they reported considerable pain relief and told us that the pain relief lasted into the next day. Our first pancreatic cancer patient, who was expected to die in a few days, was on a morphine pump. After we started treating him, he gradually decreased his use of morphine until he stopped needing it altogether after five days. He had weeks of pain relief. That’s some placebo effect. And if you could have it with massage, relaxation, and guided imagery, why aren’t these things being used?
Judith,
Thank you, and kudos to you for admitting you were wrong. I respect that.
Your anecdote, while impressive, is just an anecdote. As I have mentioned before I suspect his previous chemotherapy may have been responsible for the results you reported, including a reduction in pain, from shrinking his tumors.
They should be, and are being introduced in many hospitals. Pain management in medicine is still quite primitive in many respects and there is enormous room for improvement. Things are getting better, but slowly. Here’s a summary of what nurses are taught about pain control in cancer – you can see how things should be done, though I know that isn’t always the case in practice.
Judith, you very nearly made my point for me, and I don’t think you noticed. We need regulatory oversight in order to catch bad things like the problems with Vioxx and issue recalls. We also need regulatory oversight and peer review so that we can have confidence that treatments will be tested before they’re marketed.
I’m not willing to give the pharmaceutical companies a free pass. You presented one of the reasons why I consider it a bad idea to give them a free pass.
Now, here’s the hard part: If I don’t want to give pharmaceutical companies a free pass from testing and oversight by regulatory agencies and the scientific community, why should I give you a free pass? What makes you so special?
What makes you think they’er not being used where appropriate?
Pharmaceutical compounds are poisons that can cause serious harm. Energy therapies at worst are ineffective.
[blockquote]Pharmaceutical compounds are poisons that can cause serious harm. Energy therapies at worst are ineffective.[/blockquote]
Firstly, are all pharmaceutical compounds poisons? Citations needed.
Secondly, How can you tell energy therapies cannot harm? I asked the same thing from Marg waaaaay upthread, and received no answer. Treating hypertension, could it be possible to accidentally lower it too much, or to push it even higher? Relieving inflammation, what stops you from releasing clots into circulation? Removing pain, could you be masking a serious, acute life threatening emergency? A patient comes to you complaining of recurring stabbing pain on his side. How can you tell during routine session it’s not lung cancer?
If treating people with energy treatments involves manipulating their energy fields, why couldn’t you accidentally manipulate the fields further from “healthy” state?
If you do no record keeping and follow ups, how can you be certain energy healing doesn’t make a patient more susceptible to heart attacks in 5 years time?
Dang. Using formatting from a different forum.
Casting spell Summon Review button.
……
Casting unsuccessful.
@Judith – ever heard the term “quantity makes the poison?” Water is poison at high enough doses…..
Nice that you can at least admit that energy therapies can be “ineffective.” Care to bring any evidence to the table to show that they are “effective” in any way?
Judith – pharmaceutical compounds can be poisonous at certain dosages, but are shown to be of benefit for specific conditions when taken at appropriate dosages.
Energy therapies at BEST are ineffective. At worst they drain the patient’s bank account, cause them to delay or avoid effective treatments, and still be ineffective.
If you have high quality data that shows that energy treatments statistically provide better outcomes than a suitable placebo, please share.
And Judith regurgitates an absolutist decree. Surprise, surprise. Black and white thinking at its finest. Doesn’t even pay lip service to the complexities of circumstances, human variability, dose-response, relative risks and benefits, or anything. Statements like that are what convince me your philosophy is inherently intolerant.
Assuming we’re talking about chemotherapy, only if by ‘serious harm’ one means extending survival time post diagnosis, reducing risk of cancer recurring following surgery, improving quality of life, and for some types of cancers (e.g., testicular cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, etc.), actually acheiving a cure
Actually, at worst they do serious harm: they’ve been seen to result in patients delaying or completely failing to seek getting effective treatment for their disease, abandoning SBM treatments (i.e. treatments which although they may cause side effects have been shown to work) to pursue alternative treatments which while they don’t produce side effects have never been shown to be of benefit.,
And at best, energy healing has been shown to be no more effective than are placebo’s, meditation or massage at making the patient feel better, and even then they’ve never been shown to do anything to address the underlying pathophysiology of disease.
Just ask your buddy Marg–after all, she’s the one who keeps telling us the single best evidene for energy healing’s effectiveness she’s aware of are the studies by Bengston which showed energy healing was exactly as effective at curing cancer in mice as no treatment of any kind whatsoever.
Fresh meat for y’all to chew on; I’m certain we’ll be hearing about this from the Latest Suspects who accept it at face value soon: http://news.msu.edu/story/ancient-foot-massage-technique-may-ease-cancer-symptoms/
Um, this is the evidence for the ancient Egyptian roots of reflexology? That’s embarrassing even for a university press-release factory.
It’s a wonder any of you ever manage to make it out the door.
You can’t even get the marks to come to the seance at your
PortalHouse of Multiversal Energy, Marg? You’re not doing it right.Not even trying anymore, Marg? I have no idea what you’re even trying to get at with this. I think it may be an insult of some kind?
I think she’s implying that being sensibly cautious about medical claims is akin to being afraid of everything. Because, you know, it’s unreasonable to ask her to live up to the same standards we want for other medical claims.
Pretty typical Randroid meme about “nanny states” in my experience. We’re not Mary Sue enough to have infinite time and resources to research every product we might buy, so we’re scum dragging down the “free” market with our concerns about safety, efficacy, and implied warranties. We’re just supposed to surrender our ability to have informed choice, blindly trust them, and give them our money with no reasonable expectations of anything. We’re just lowly consumers who exist to buy their product and nothing more.
@Al Kimeea
Ok, sorry I misunderstood you.
And I agree with you about faith: but again, if you educate people, then hopefully ‘faith’ will be more about hoping for things but being aware of the limitations of the universe and the problems of human biases. We need to replace the word ‘faith’ with ‘trust’, perhaps.
Also, agreement for the batshit psychic stuff. The sad part is that if it’s promoted by Oprah, it *must* be right for you. People honestly need to stop falling for the argument from (daytime TV) authority. And also the “but she’s done so much good” fallacy. Oz and the many other shows out there are an example of the media needing more conscience on what they present and less looking at the bottom line.
@Judith
Funny how many of these compounds exist in nature and the human body itself. I thought you were all for natural remedies?
@Marg
It’s a wonder you ever manage to figure out how to use a computer. Science made it: surely you could just channel your thoughts to us instead?
Test, please ignore – I’ve written a standalone RI comment previewer and want to check it works OK.
Simple HTML that works on RI (you can copy and paste this text):
bold
italics
strikethroughunderline
(adds new line without CR)
link text
I got fed up with only noticing my typos once I had posted my comments on RI, so I have written a very simple standalone Windows-based program to preview them first. If anyone’s interested you can download it here – it’s free.
Here’s a better place to download the previewer that doesn’t requires signing up to download the file, which is free, but irritating.
@Flip
Funny how many of these compounds are adulterated from nature because natural compounds can’t be patented & therefore the pharmaceutical companies can’t make money from them.
You fail basic economics, Marg.
Patents aren’t necessary to make a profit. All they need is the ability to produce and market it for less than the price they can sell it for. That’s what it means to make a profit.
A patent just means that one company gets first dibs on selling the product or using a method of production. Then when the patent expires, other companies get to make generic substitutes that are functionally identical.
If pharmaceutical companies can’t make a profit off of herbal treatments, how do the herbal supplement producers?
Marg, you have turned into the reiki version of Yosemite Sam. I invite you to investigate the history of marketing exclusivity and patents involving taxol. Or figure out
why pharmaceuticals that are out of patent mysteriously continue to be manufactured. Or be swallowed by a sinkhole or something. None of this affects in the slightest the fact that you are willing to take money for occultist horseshit and are no better than Madame Zelda and Her Crystal Ball above the convenience store.
It’s funny how often that old canard about patents comes up. Boiron has a turnover of 313 million Euros (about $400 million) and they sell mostly sugar pills and water.
By the way, as this article points out, it’s not true that you cannot patent natural compounds.
@Krebiozen
Further to palliative chemotherapy and end of life care:
http://www.clinicaloncology.com/ViewArticle.aspx?d=Solid+Tumors&d_id=148&i=April+2011&i_id=720&a_id=16929
To wit:
[T]here comes a time when further chemotherapy not only is useless, it even may be counterproductive. “There’s a very predictable pattern of functional decline in cancer patients in the last two months of life, and when they hit that curve, chemotherapy is largely futile, assuming they’ve never been on it before, and this isn’t a brand-new cancer. If they’ve been through multiple treatments and on treatment they’re still declining, then it’s time to stop,” Dr. Weissman said.
The problem is recognizing when that time has come—when the “cure” has become worse than the disease. “Giving chemotherapy to people with poor ECOG [Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group] performance status [PS] is more likely harmful than beneficial,” Dr. Smith said. “That is, if you are ECOG PS 3—in a bed or chair more than half the time, and the cancer is really interfering with daily living—the NCCN [National Comprehensive Cancer Network] guidelines call for a switch to non–chemo-based palliative care.”
But that’s not what’s happening, said Alexi Wright, MD, a gynecologic oncologist and instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who is researching chemotherapy at the end of life as part of a grant from the National Palliative Care Research Center. “It’s clear that the use of chemotherapy within the last few weeks of life is increasing, even though it’s often painful, burdensome and expensive.”
In fact, research into end-of-life care in oncology has found that extensive use of chemotherapy in end-stage cancer can shorten life, rather than extend it. According to Dr. Smith, studies show that patients who use hospice for even a single day live longer than those who have never used hospice. “The best explanation is that—since in the U.S., hospice and chemotherapy are rarely used together—patients who keep getting chemotherapy may be dying earlier due to complications from treatment.”
A randomized controlled trial by Temel et al (N Engl J Med 2010;363:733-742, PMID: 20818875) among lung cancer patients at Massachusetts General Hospital supports this theory. Those who were randomized to early palliative care plus usual oncology care lived 2.7 months longer than those who got usual oncology care only (P=0.02). “The palliative care group also had better symptom management and less depression, and the caregivers fared better afterward—maybe because they were prepared, or their loved one died at home rather than in the ICU [intensive care unit], intubated,” Dr. Smith said. These results are consistent with the idea, he noted, that early palliative care and usual oncology care improve medical outcomes, and that continuous chemotherapy worsens them.
Chemotherapy usually is incompatible with hospice care, and patients often are forced to choose, Dr. Wright said. “Our research has found that patients who get chemotherapy at the end of life have lower rates of hospice use, and more aggressive care.”
@Judith – I wonder how many people will continue to pursue aggressive treatment because they want to – rather than accept the fact they are going to die.
Doctors aren’t holding patients down & treating them without consent (of either themselves or their families).
These decisions aren’t made in a vacuum and you shouldn’t act like they are.
@Lawrence
I merely quoted.
@Lawrence
FYI: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1204410
1800 here we come and still no credible evidence these scallywags have mystical healing energy powers beyond the science of us mere mortals
@Judith,
What’s your point with this article? That end-of-life chemotherapy isn’t always or necessarily the best option for a cancer patient? That palliative care can be a good thing?
How does this say anything at all about the efficacy of reiki?
@thenewme
@Krebiozen castigated me for providing false information in my blog when I said that end-of-life palliative chemotherapy caused suffering and shortened lives (or something to that effect). I obligingly removed the sentence he objected to. But then I found this article, which corroborated what I said, with quotes from MDs who interpreted the relevant study exactly as I did. So I posted the information for @Krebiozen.
“@Krebiozen” at the top meant that I was responding to Krebiozen.
not like it’s a private conversation Mme. Hornswoggler
@Judith,
I don’t think this article corroborates what you’re saying. And even if it did say that end-of-life palliate chemotherapy causes suffering and shortens lives, how do you jump from that to “….so therefore, my magic energy Reiki woo eliminates suffering and lengthens lives?”
You’re a fraud, plain and simple, no matter how you try to spin it.
@thenewme
I don’t recall throwing personal insults your way.
@Judith,
Your scammy and fraudulent promotion of woo to cancer patients IS an insult, to me personally and to other cancer patients who deserve real treatment and intellectually honest providers.
It’s not about personal insults. It’s about facts.
*****************************************************
Definition of FRAUD: fraud/frôd/
Noun:
Wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.
A person or thing intended to deceive others, typically by unjustifiably claiming or being credited with accomplishments or qualities.
Synonyms:
cheat – deceit – deception – swindle – humbug – fake
**************************************************************
might you if claims he made like you
And so now @you’re #appending a snabel-a (you know who you are) to every #mention of a #name? This isn’t @Twitter.
Re: “might you if claims he made like you…”
Huh?
@Narad – OT, but thanks! I had to look up “snabel.” Ahhh, the things I learn here at RI!
@ The new me
what is a snabel?
Alain
Alain,
It’s the name of the “at” symbol. Who knew?
Judith,
You are still confusing chemotherapy that is intended to extend life with palliative chemotherapy that is intended to make the process of dying more comfortable.
@Krebiozen
I am not. Read the article. It’s doctors that are saying that there is a time to stop palliative chemotherapy because it is no longer helpful and may do more harm than good.
To wit:
“Giving chemotherapy to people with poor ECOG [Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group] performance status [PS] is more likely harmful than beneficial,” Dr. Smith said. “That is, if you are ECOG PS 3—in a bed or chair more than half the time, and the cancer is really interfering with daily living—the NCCN [National Comprehensive Cancer Network] guidelines call for a switch to non–chemo-based palliative care.”
And yet:
“It’s clear that the use of chemotherapy within the last few weeks of life is increasing, even though it’s often painful, burdensome and expensive.”
“… patients who keep getting chemotherapy may be dying earlier due to complications from treatment.”
This is not making dying more comfortable. I am beginning to wonder just what kind of experience you have with this. The notion of palliative chemotherapy making dying more comfortable is simply absurd. Sure, let’s take a cancer ravaged body that is on its last few breaths and throw in some poison for good measure so the patient can feel better. Why not?
Parsomony requires me to conclude that Judith’s current, repetitive, line of complaint reduces to nothing other than wanting a “piece of the action.”
I’d still like to hear Judith’s explanation for why energy therapies can’t do no harm?
I asked the same thing from Marg waaaaay upthread, and received no answer (apart from “they can’t because Marg assumes they can’t”).
Imagine treating someone for hypertension. Do you think it could be possible to accidentally lower it too much, or to push it even higher? If not, what mechanisms are in place to prevent it?
Relieving inflammation, what do you think stops your energy healing from releasing clots into circulation?
While removing pain, could you be masking a serious, acute life threatening emergency? A patient comes to you complaining of recurring stabbing pain on his side. How can you tell during routine session it’s not lung cancer?
Assume you treat a patient and believe you cured his pain and discomfort. A few weeks later s/he runs into you and happens to mention s/he stopped his medication becaue you cured her/him. What would you respond?
If treating people with energy treatments involves manipulating their energy fields, why couldn’t you accidentally manipulate the fields further from “healthy” state? What’s there to stop it?
If you do no record keeping and follow ups, how can you be certain energy healing doesn’t make a patient more susceptible to heart attacks in 5 years time?
@thenewme
say it like Yoda, it”l make more sense
snabel, learned something new off this thread
@gaist
they are in tune with the universe, silly, and so with their
patientsmarks’ bodies and the bodies just know how much lovin they needs and takes no moreJudith,
I couldn’t access your link, but I think I found the same article here. I think you have misunderstood that article, which is about the appropriate time to stop palliative chemotherapy. It doesn’t say that palliative chemotherapy is bad per se as you suggested when you wrote:
On the contrary, it says that:
It even points out that there are clear NCCN guidelines for when it is time to “switch to non–chemo-based palliative care”. It doesn’t say that palliative chemotherapy should never be given at all, which is what you appear to be suggesting. I have been looking at the NCCN guidelines for palliative care, and they are clearly based on the best evidence available. I think they should be followed.
It has nothing to do with my experience of this and everything to do with what the best evidence tells us. Look at the Gonzalez trial of stage 4 pancreatic cancer in which the chemotherapy group reported a greatly improved quality of life over the group who were only treated with juices and supplements.
The bottom line is that patients should be able to make an informed decision about what treatment they receive. You are still trying to scare people away from palliative chemotherapy altogether with inaccurate statements like:
That’s not true. There are times when palliative chemotherapy has clear benefits. It is these blatantly untrue statements you persist in making that I object to.
@Marg
Way to miss the point, yet again.
If you can’t make any money from natural compounds, how do the alt-med companies work? Half of my pharmacy is full of these natural ‘remedies’ and funnily enough I don’t see any of the manufacturers going bankrupt.
Secondly, you are once more proving to be full of fallacies: the periodic table is the periodic table, whether it’s in the body, pristine plants picked from the ground, or in little white pills. The only difference between the pills and downing a herbal ‘remedy’ is that you know exactly how much the dosage is *every single time* – oh, and it’s been studied for both efficacy and safety.
If pharmaceuticals are poison, as Judith puts it, then so are bananas, your own body, and dihydrogen monoxide.
But you know, that’s been explained a billion times already, so I’m not sure you or any other woo peddler has been paying attention. This is once more, basic high school science here, which you managed to forget/not learn.
Also, what everyone else said.
And hey, what’s this?
Yet another tour of distractions away from the fact that MARG, the contemptible purse-snatcher of science, HAS NO EVIDENCE THAT ENERGY HEALING WORKS. Cause you know, complaining about pharma conspiracies is exactly the same as providing evidence.
It’s like Marg has picked up the handback for fallacies and canards and is trying all of them out to see which one sticks…
Handback = handbook…. I’m now officially downloading the preview file! Thanks Krebiozen!
@Krebiozen
Clearly you have NO experience with cancer patients at the end of their life. By the time they get to the very final stages they no longer have the kidney and liver function needed to process the poisons in chemotherapy through their bodies. At that point they would be far better off with a Reiki practitioner waving his or her hands over them, even for the placebo effect. There is no placebo effect from poisons your body can no longer process, only misery.
Yes, the bottom line is that patients should be able to make an informed decision about what treatment they receive, but their options should also include energy treatments.
The point the article makes is that even though there are clear guidelines for chemotherapy should no longer be used, it is being used, ever more frequently.
Did you notice this bit in the article?
“The forces pushing people to receive treatments are overwhelming. They include everything from the societal view that you can’t ever give up, which is a very big reason people continue on treatments, to family pressure, to the increasing availability of drugs,” Dr. Weissman said. “If there are more drugs available, people feel like there are more options. And then there are financial incentives for oncologists who make more money based on the chemotherapy they [provide]. You have a whole gamut of forces pushing people toward treatment, and there’s very little push in the opposite direction. It’s hard for patients and families to say that it’s time to stop. Oncologists have been very poor at having these discussions.” (emphasis mine)
“for when chemotherapy should no longer be used, it is being used beyond that point, ever more frequently.”
@Judith – how exactly does the fact that “end of life” decisions can be improved upon mean that “energy healing” actually works?
“Yes, the bottom line is that patients should be able to make an informed decision about what treatment they receive, but their options should also include other scientifically proven treatments and advice about both the benefits and the risks.”
FTFY Judith.
.
Citation’s needed, judith.
How can they make an informed decision about energy healing, with poeple like you and marg spreading mis-information regarding its efficacy? Or do you tell your clients up front, so that they’re properly informed, “Just so you know, there’s absolutely no evidence that the magical energy I’m claiming to manipulate exists, or that what I’m going to do next works other than by placebo effect”?
The fact that chemotheapy is sometimes or even often continued past the point guidelines suggest it be curtailed does not argue that there’s ever a point where energy healing has proven to be safe or effective.
At late stages of cancer chemotherapy is no longer recommended as palliative care, but too often it’s continued anyway. That is a problem that needs to be addressed.
But it doesn’t mean that at any stage energy healing is either safe or effective, or should be recommended for palliative care.
I have been looking more closely at the article Judith referred to, and I think I detect some serious bias from the journalist who wrote it. For example she wrote:
This cannot possibly be true as the graph further down the page shows that only 9% of patients receive chemotherapy in the last month of their lives.
That is not supported by what the experts in the article actually say. Palliative chemotherapy is not only given at the very end of life as the author seems to imply. Some of the other conclusions she comes to seem similarly unsupported by the evidence she presents.
On the subject of the efficacy of palliative chemotherapy, this article from JAMA (PDF), ‘The Role of Chemotherapy at the End of Life “When Is Enough, Enough?”’ is well worth reading for anyone interested in this subject. It states, with citations, that:
Compare this with what Judith wrote that I took exception to:
I don’t think I need to add any more.
Its funny and sad that Marg and Judith are so fixated on badmouthing a competing treatment. They aren’t thinking about potential consumers like me who want proof that their treatment works. They aren’t arguing to help the sick, they’re in here to try and increase their market penetration.
The way I see it, they’re trying to win brand loyalty through (dishonest) negative ad campaigns while we’re demanding they present the positive aspects of their brand before we buy. It never occurs to them that some of us see no point in remaining loyal to any brand: We use what works best, and we’re used to seeing identity politics being used as a surrogate for performance. We want to buy treatments that work a la carte. We do not want to buy package deals based in corporate ideological culture.
Judith,
Unfortunately that’s not true.
Leaving aside the fact that little of this is true, where have I or anyone else advocated giving cancer patients in the very final stage chemotherapy? I have stated that I think doctors should stick to the guidelines, such as the NCCN guidelines I referred to earlier which state that:
That seems like a good approach to me.
Judith:
I am doubtful of your experience with cancer patients at the end of life, if you think reiki makes much of a difference to them. I watched my grandfather approach death a while back, of cancer. He would’ve had any reiki practitioner thrown out of his house, even though he’d consciously rejected chemo. (Not because he doesn’t believe in it. Because he was in his 90s, in failing health, and honestly didn’t think there was any point. He was a general surgeon with an exceptionally pragmatic approach to life.) What did he select at the end of life? Hospice, liquid morphine, highballs, and Dos Equis. And, of course, plenty of conversation with the people he’d known and loved through his life.
I respect the decisions made by people at the end of life. I do not respect people attempting to make a buck by offering to handwave over them with the implication that this will do something beneficial, especially if it delays them at all from doing the things that will actually get them what they want — effective pain relief, especially.
I think Judith has little concept of the range of responses that exist with most forms of therapy, or why single anecdotes can never form the basis for consistent management of any disease.
@Krebiozen
You are still confusing chemotherapy that is intended to extend life with palliative chemotherapy that is intended to make the process of dying more comfortable.
This is you suggesting the use of chemotherapy to make the process of dying more comfortable. That would be you advocating giving final stage cancer patients chemotherapy.
@Calli Arkale
1) We have done it for free.
2) We have seen significant pain relief.
You are speaking out of ignorance.
why all this talk now of relieving cancer pain when earlier it was curing cancer (and gangrene, diabeetus…) via waving hands?
You have a talent for understatement, dyson. I think those things are rooted in the inability to think in terms of populations, rather than ideals, as well as a lack of self-awareness of their humanity and what that means.
Judith:
1. Price and efficacy are not related.
2. Are you talking of your anecdotes, biased by your natural human cognition shortcomings that everyone has? Or are you talking about a study of energy medicine versus sham energy medicine as placebo?
Judith, how have you excluded the possibility that you’re observing a placebo effect, and that the magical hand waving/forming mystical symbols integral to reiki, ‘performed for free’ or otherwise, is the proximate cause of the significant pain relief you observe?
Your claim, after all, is that you’re channeling energy which relieves pain–surely you can other some credible reason to believe you are in fact channeling energy and that energy is in fact causing the observed pain relief.
Judith,
That would be you demonstrating, not for the first time, that you seem to have a serious problem with English comprehension. The word “dying” has shades of meaning. Palliative chemotherapy is given to patients with terminal cancer, who are by definition dying. The process of dying may take months or even years, and chemotherapy given during that period is palliative chemotherapy, which is intended to make the process of dying more comfortable, as I put it earlier. It is very effective for that purpose, as you can see from the JAMA article I cited and quoted from above. The final stages of cancer are the final weeks or days, a time when chemotherapy is probably not useful as I also stated above.
@Krebiozen
Bit by bit, we are dying all the time. It’s not dying that palliative chemotherapy is meant make more comfortable but the decline leading up to it. I do know what effect “palliative chemotherapy” had on our second pancreatic cancer patient — I was later told he wished he had never tried it, and in hindsight he thought it would have been better if he had continued his treatment with us.
This is what is known as an anecdote. What Krebiozen presented is data.
Why should we weight the experience of a single individual more than results from a cohort of many individuals?
Which would you rather drive: a car that was driven by one person, who thought it seemed safe, or a car driven by hundreds of individuals, the majority of which thought it seemed safe?
And another anecdote. Judith once again refuses to acknowledge her humanity.
Judith,
No you don’t. What you know is:
I refer you back to the Gonzalez study comparing chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer with no treatment (actually enzymes, juices and coffee enemas) cited somewhere above, which found:
I’m told it is quite common for cancer patients to attribute the effects of their cancer to their treatment. Based on the evidence, I suggest that what your second pancreatic cancer patient experienced was largely “the morbidity of progressive pancreatic cancer”, and he would probably have been considerably worse off in terms of survival and quality of life if he had continued with your “treatment”.
@Krebiozen
How long did Gonzalez’ cancer patients in the study live?
Thinking about branching out into something more ghoulish?
OK, Judith, for a while there you were actually a bit of a relief compared to Marg, the contemptible purse-snatcher of science, but when you decided to tell people that ‘clearly’ they had ‘NO experience’ (your emphasis) with cancer patients at the ends of their lives, you crossed a line. It makes clear how self-centered and selfish you are. You view your personal experience as sufficient to hang an entire pseudoscience on, but if anyone else’s personal experience does not match yours, you declare it not to exist. Do you even comprehend the arrogance that speaks of? No one else’s experience can exist if it doesn’t support the conclusions you’ve come to from your own experience??
Let’s cut to the chase.
You keep trying to argue towards the conclusion “What we do is so much better than chemotherapy.”
Nothing you have to say about chemotherapy is going to be of interest until you manage to support the premise that your offering actually produces measurable results. And by “support the premise,” we mean supporting it with rigorously collected data, not with anecdotes and especially not with anecdotes that aren’t even what happened but what someone thinks would have happened, e.g. “our second pancreatic patient thought he would have done better with energy healing than with chemo.” If that’s the closest you have to convincing evidence, then you have none. And all you’re doing – besides grossly insulting the people who have seen end-stage cancer first-hand and didn’t convert to Handwaveology, by telling them they don’t exist – is wasting your time and ours.
Judith,
I did mention that somewhere in the mass of comments above, but I’m happy to quote from the paper itself:
Out of 23 patients on chemotherapy, 2 survived twice as long as the patient given energy healing who survived 20 months. About 25% of the treated and 5% of the untreated patients were still alive after 20 months.
Antaeus,
I agree. The only reason I’m engaging with the subject is that it mightily pisses me off to see chemotherapy misrepresented and portrayed as an ineffective bogeyman. Cancer patients are frightened quite enough without being told that the treatment their doctor recommends will do nothing but “torture them on the way out” and that they would be better off relying on pixie dust.
Thank you, everyone, for this interesting and informative discussion.
what, Judith – no comment on the data comparing Gonzales’ “protocol” with chemo that Krebiozen provided just above?
I presume that “discussion” has novel semantics once one is wired into the Ancient Masters.
@Bronze Dog
It’s kind of like how political parties work, trying to get voters from their base, but ignoring the swing votes and independents.
@Judith
AKA I’m not winning this argument and I don’t have any data, so I think I’ll duck out now…
There is a type of pancreatic cancer with very good 5-year survival rates, which is the one Steve Jobs had. He lived 8 years.
Apparently Gonzalez has now written a book denouncing the way the trials for his regimen were conducted, with particular emphasis on how patients were recruited for the trials. I haven’t read the book, so I cannot comment.
Yet you just did comment, Judith, while not bothering to mention that Jobs had quite a bit of “conventional” treatment in living 8 years (not to mention Orac had several posts about how Jobs’ flirtation with woo might have cost him additional time among us).
Not that you can be bothered collecting data, but count me among the semi-lurkers who both laughs at your complete inability to grasp science and who laments the possibility that anyone in need actually listens to you.
Judith,
That’s true, but it’s not the type of pancreatic cancer we have been discussing, and is not the type of cancer studied in the Gonzalez trial. We are talking about inoperable pancreatic exocrine adenocarcinomas, Jobs had an endocrine tumor, an insulinoma.
I have read quite a lot of Gonzalez’s comments on this trial, which amount to nothing but special pleading, or as Orac put it, “disingenuous nonsense”. It has also been discussed at great length at the science based medicine blog.
Even if Gonzalez was correct (he wasn’t) and the trial was unfair (unethical? probably, a shambles? perhaps, unfair? I don’t think so), it doesn’t help your case at all. Several patients in both arms lived longer than the patients whose lives you claim were extended by energy treatment.
Veering even further off topic, but I think it’s interesting to note the results Gonzalez was claiming for his regimen in pancreatic cancer patients before the clinical trial I have mentioned. Such as:
The results of this “2-year, unblinded, 1-treatment arm, 10-patient, pilot prospective case study”* were interesting enough to prompt the NCI to sponsor a trial. If energy treatment practitioners carry out a case study with results like this, perhaps the NCI might fund a further investigation. As I understand it the Domancic Method is supposed to work with conventional treatment, so there would be no ethical barriers to randomizing two groups of cancer patients: conventional treatment alone and conventional treatment plus energy treatment. I won’t hold my breath.
*It now seems likely that this case study suffered from selection bias – you have to be in pretty good shape to endure 2 years of constantly juicing, drinking juices, cleaning the juicer, swallowing handfuls of supplements and somehow fitting in coffee enemas as well. It makes white water rafting look like a walk in the park.
That’s one thing that strikes me about some alties. They’ve got a segment of pill poppers who seem to think they can get healthy without modifying their diet or exercising so long as they take the right metabolism boosting supplements or whatever they’re advertising.
It certainly gets thrown in with all the radical diets and such, which sets up a bit of a conflict: If the diet’s so healthy and natural, why do you need supplements on top of it? Naturally, I suspect the answer is, “To boost the guru’s profits.”
Thank you, Anteaus F for your comment above regarding Judith, especially this bit, copied, below:
“And all you’re doing – besides grossly insulting the people who have seen end-stage cancer first-hand and didn’t convert to Handwaveology, by telling them they don’t exist – is wasting your time and ours.”
Exactly. There was something grotesque about Judith’s proclamation: “…you have NO experience with cancer patients…”. I was astonished at the arrogance and willful ignorance of her comment. (J.’s woo & pseudo-science crap was bad enough).
I’m impressed by the restraint and good manners of the medical people who contribute to this comment thread.
@THS
Anyone who has seen end-stage cancer patients and the ravages of both cancer and chemo, who does not want to see a better solution, has no heart.
anyone who
thinksbelieves mindless handwaving is a better solution is not only heartless…You still don’t get it do you? Anyone who deludes themselves into thinking they have a better solution without any reliable evidence and with zero plausibility, has no brain. When you try to persuade patients to abandon the best hope they have it makes things even worse. There’s no excuse for that in the 21st century.
We want a better solution, Judith. It’s rather cynical of you to pretend we don’t. Demonizing us or the pharmaceutical companies isn’t going to accomplish anything outside of providing you with an excuse to feel superior.
The real problem we have with you is that you aren’t willing to do what it takes to prove you have a better solution.
I actually don’t believe Judith has seen people at end stage. I have and it is not pretty and if she thinks we are heartless enough not to want better then there is no reasoning with her AT ALL
And you no doubt are accusing others of being heartless money-grabbing poisoners because you have so big a heart?
Agashem,
I suspect she has, but has assumed that the unpleasant symptoms were all due to the chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and not the cancer. Orac wrote an interesting blog post on this a few years ago.BTW on the anecdotal front, I have seen a few friends and relatives at end stage – for example my father died of leukemia*, my uncle of stomach cancer. I have also seen more than a few children die of cancer. My son spent most of the first two years of his life in the same hospital I worked at. That meant I got to know a succession of parents and their sick children. As parents who have been in a similar situation know, you can get to know people surprisingly well in such circumstances, spending hours together in emotional torment, waiting while your child is in the OR etc. I was also often doing lab work on the same children, which was interesting but often heartbreaking, finding out bad (sometimes good) news before the parents and having to pretend I knew nothing. One child who sticks in my mind, a boy of about three years old, went through chemotherapy, losing all his hair, vomiting etc., to shrink a brain tumor sufficiently for surgery to remove it. I sat with his parents discussing the decision they faced – consent to the surgery which would probably blind him, as the surgeon would have to go though his visual cortex, but possibly save him, or rely on chemotherapy which meant he would almost certainly die. His parents opted for the surgery and bravely took their blind son home but he was back within weeks and rapidly deteriorated. I was there when he had his final cardiac arrest, saw the faces of the doctors after their unsuccessful attempts at resuscitation, and also saw his parents who were understandably devastated. You don’t forget something like that.So I agree with Judith, “Anyone who has seen end-stage cancer patients and the ravages of both cancer and chemo, who does not want to see a better solution, has no heart”. However, I have never encountered nor even heard of anyone who does not want a better solution.*He was a doctor and went for chemotherapy, not surprisingly.
Yikes, wall of text! Sorry about that. There are paragraphs in there but [p] tags clearly don’t work how I thought. The latest version of my preview program needs a tweak.Test – this should be a separate paragraph.
Let’s see if <br /> works.This should be a new graf.
Yah, so it’s digested like any other WP-ignored tag. What’d you write the previewer in? It seems like you’ll just have to output a CR or CR/LF.
Narad,
I think something has changed in the way Scienceblogs process html.
I’m sure [p] and [/p] worked yesterday, but today it strips them out and puts in its own instead of LF/CR, your <br /> was stripped out too. That or I’m more confused than I thought.
(Gets out stick… …and… …starts…poking.)
I used Visual Basic’s inbuilt WebBrowser which is basically a version of IE, which I thought would process simple HTML tags the same. I’ll have another play at getting it right.
@ Krebiozen,
That’s a really tough story to read; Thanks for commenting.
Alain
The thing about finding better solutions:
Doctors and pharmaceutical companies are continuously researching new drugs and treatments. They experience failures, dump them, and move onto the next one that looks promising. They’ve made steady progress against a lot of cancers over the decades.
Energy medicine has been stuck in stasis, and it’s an uphill battle to get any proponent to merely cite the source of their claims. More often, they whine that they should be given special treatment and offer transparent excuses instead of doing the work.
Last… …tries at… …tinkering……with the…
The problem you have is that there’s no telling what the $allowed_tags are going to be. WP “thinks” in XHTML (which, if there is any justice in the world, will be obsoleted by HTML5), so you need to output a plain CR (the stylesheet will handle the LF) rather than a tag.
Hey guys, I wondered if it’s possible to customize the $allowed_tags? if it’s possible, you may be looking at an uphill battle.
Alain
All I have to do is arrange to have the previewer mimic what the WP does to the text, so the user can tinker with it until it looks right.[LF/CR]
I think I have it working about right now. [LF/CR LF/CR]
The single and double line breaks have me a little confused though.
Sure. Hell, it’s possible to have the courtesy to tell people what they are in the first place. It’s possible to implement a preview. It’s possible to set the damn fool server clocks correctly rather than deleting the time stamps. I’m not holding my breath on competence in this quarter.
Using an html editor is new to me, but I find this one particularly helpful and easy for beginners (like me). http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_basic
Heart, brain, whatever. There are self-appointed “healers” who do see end-stage cancer. That does not qualify them to insult the medical profession.
I’m not holding my breath on competence in this quarter.
neither do I 🙂
See ya later (after listening to Fast Five).
Alain
@THS
Pointing out that the medical profession does not do particularly well with end stage cancer is not an insult but a statement of fact. My, we are thin-skinned.
@Judith – your statement was
The clear implication is that you believe that someone fits this category. To whom do you refer?
In your follow up, you say “Pointing out that the medical profession does not do particularly well with end stage cancer is not an insult but a statement of fact.” What are your criteria? Well compared to what? Is there someone who does better? Who? If not, how do you know it’s possible to do better?
@Mephistopheles
No comparison needed. It does not do well, period.
FTFY
Of course a comparison is needed. People can only do as well as it is currently humanly possible to do. Claiming that people don’t do a good job when there is no known way to do it better is merely being spiteful.
If there’s a currently known better way, then point to it. If there’s not, then encourage people to research it.
@Mephistopheles
No, that’s an opinion.
So, wait, to declare the the medical profession doesn’t do well with end stage cancer (whatever you mean by that) is merely a statement of fact, but a similar statement about energy healers (backed by a complete lack of data about the efficacy of energy healing) is opinion?
@judith
Apparently, since all you have posted is opinions (and apparently ones that can kill innocents), I can assume then that you are nothing more than a charlatan and a debased murderer, wiling to cheat innocents out of their money and time just for some voodoo treatment.
But please, keep posting along with marg your incompetent minion. The more you post here, the less time you have to prey on innocents and to spew your venomous lies to other vulnerable people.
I await your incompetent reply, just to see how much of the stupid your comment contains.
Spiteful is the right word. It’s also cheap, transparent rhetoric once again intended to make Judith feel superior despite doing nothing. We go on an on about consumer protection by wanting clinical trials to test efficacy of all proposed medical treatments (or as close as we can ethically get to such trials) and Judith turns a deaf ear because such things are beneath her, and because it can’t be compacted into a partisan slogan.
The only time she feigns concern about the patients is when she thinks it’ll be an effective way to badmouth the lead competitors. It’s like she’s actively doing everything to convince us of her insincerity and heartlessness. She’s a ruthless businesswoman at her core and can’t understand why we don’t see absolutely everything in terms of market share.
Judith has the secret files, man. The ones that are so amazing that nobody would dare publish a write-up. This wellbore into the Mysterium Tremendum pulsates with such amplitude (yet discreetly low frequency) that it would be completely unreasonable to suggest that she, you know, give it a whirl.
Judith seems to fall for the nirvana fallacy…
@Flip – I never cared much for Nirvana. I prefer Utopia.
Judith is wrong, of course. Untreated cancer is a terrible way to die. There are ways to alleviate pain and suffering, but Judith will have none of that. Unconscienable quackery.
A friend of mine told me this morning that he just just found out he has throat cancer. He’s waiting for some results to find out exactly what type so he can get properly targeted treatment. I won’t be suggesting energy healing, but I will offer to accompany him to his next appointment. A bit of friendly moral support is worth more than any hand waving I reckon.
I find your close-mindedness terribly sad.
Since we are sharing opinions, I think you are a walking text book example of confirmation bias, and a danger to yourself and others.
You’re projecting, Judith. You’re the closed-minded one. We’re willing to change our mind if you provide good evidence that was obtained in ways that counteract human biases. Instead of trying to meet us on those terms, you spout anecdotes while in denial of your very humanity, thinking you have a godlike immunity to perceptual bias.
Here’s a big question, Judith: What would it take to convince you you’re wrong?
@judith
As predicted, a childish, stupid little answer form someone so small-minded like you.
But then again, what would we expect form a quack like you.
@Krebiozen
Exactly what I was thinking. They really do lack originality, don’t they?
And yet another post void of evidence that energy healing does anything at all.
Judith, you’re the one who has said there’s no point in doing research because it wouldn’t get published, WITHOUT EVEN TRYING.
Others have repeatedly asked you and Marg to come up with the sources OR do your own research, so they’re not stonewalling you quite like you insist.
You’re the one who raises objections and accuses the medical establishment, but changes the subject when presented with a scientific explanation/refutation.
You’re the one who makes broad generalised statemets about how bad “allopathic” medicine is, but either 1) don’t acknowleedge the contrary evidence when presented, 2) change the subject, OR 3) attack the messenger with vague ad hominems.
You even agreed you have a bias when called out on it. Others have agreed they have biases too, which is precicely why they’re calling for valid evidence for your statements about energy healing before believing it. You haven’t provided any such evidence. Others are dealing with their biases in their research. You aren’t.
One side is constantly doing research, keeping score (of both hits AND misses, so to speak) and experimenting to find new or improved treatments. The other side (as you’re so fond of black-and-white thinking) doesn’t.
You don’t even bother apologising for you ad hominem statemets when shown to be erroneous.
Which side sounds more close minded?
A perfect description of Judith and Marge, who don’t want to do *anything* to find a better solution, don’t want anyone else to find a better solution, and just want to scoop up the bucks with their handwaving while their victims suffer and die horribly.
@LW
You just described, perfectly, what the pharmaceutical companies are doing.
Uhuh. If you were the opposite then, you would be sharing your better solution with the world by posting evidence and not anecdotes. Oh wait, that’s what Big Pharma have been doing and you haven’t been doing it… so LW is right.
If you have the better solution, nothing would make Big Pharma cringe more than you lording it over them by submitting yourself and your ‘data’ for everyone to see.
I won’t hold my breath.
Then why have they been finding better solutions all this time? Why have cancer survival times gone up in general with new treatments? Why are pharmaceutical companies spending money researching these new treatments?
Once again, you’re projecting, Judith.
No, I have not. Pharmaceutical companies, for all their faults, have over a period of decades improved their products. There is a good reason why one of my best friends survived lymphoma, and it wasn’t because of charlatans like you.
Also, as has been pointed out repeatedly on this thread, tu quoque is not a valid argument. If Big Pharma doesn’t care whether its patients suffer and die in agony, that does not change or excuse the fact that *you* don’t care if your victims suffer and die in agony.
Judith, why do you intentionally go out of your way to use arguments we’ve said won’t work? If anyone’s stonewalling, it’s you. You’re self-censoring by choosing the least effective arguments.
That’s possibly the dumbest thing that either of you have said here, and it has stiff competition. Drug company executives, like the rest of us, have relatives and friends with cancer and are just as likely to get cancer themselves, so of course they want to find a better solution. Also, when drug companies find safer and more effective treatments for any type of cancer they make billions, which is why they invest billions of dollars every year in cancer research, along with governments and charities.
As just one of many examples of this, picked more or less at random, look at rituximab, a drug produced by IDEC Pharmaceuticals and approved by the FDA in 1997. It’s used to treat to treat chemotherapy-resistant B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphomas and is a monoclonal antibody against a protein called CD20 found on the surface of B cells. It was developed in mice but has been cleverly genetically engineered to have human characteristics (i.e.it is chimeral) to reduce the immune reactions injecting a foreign protein normally provokes. It’s an effective drug which has spurred the development of other chimeral monoclonal antibodies and made IDEC $3 billion last year alone.
You might also look at other targeted drugs like trastuzumab (Herceptin), gefitinib (Iressa), panitumumab (Vectibix) and cetuximab (Erbitux) all of which are significantly effective and make at least half a billion dollars a year for their developers.
As others have pointed out, the inaccuracy of your statements is easily proven by looking at the increase in survival we have seen over the past few decades. For example, picking a cancer that isn’t picked up by improved screening, here’s a graph of 5-year-survival of leukemia in those under 20. From 40% 5-year-survival in 1975 to better than 80% today, and all of it due to better treatment, mostly chemotherapy. None of that improvement is due to any kind of alternative treatments, certainly not energy healing.
Another way to summarize Judith and Marg’s style:
They think this is a zero-sum, two-party election, so they run a negative campaign against the biggest competitor, stupidly thinking people will vote for energy medicine solely as a means of voting against pharmaceuticals.
The first problem is that they doesn’t realize that even if we believed the mudslinging, we would more likely opt to stay home or to vote for a third party. Negative ad campaigns tend to lower voter turnout for this reason. Some of us recognize our candidate as flawed but see positives that outweigh all the real negatives. The addition of lies in a negative campaign also acts as a giant red flag that the mudslinger has nothing in his favor. Hypocritical attacks make it even worse for the mudslinger.
The other problem is that this isn’t an either/or election. We can vote for any number of people, and there are several seats available. If we were convinced of energy medicine’s effectiveness, we could use both pharmaceuticals and energy medicine.
Because Judith and Marg don’t understand our utilitarian perspective and trapped themselves in a closed-minded partisan perspective, they don’t realize that they’re effectively arguing for non-voting, rather than voting for energy medicine. They’re more interested in hurting the “competition” than they are in presenting someone worthy of holding office.
Ooh, somebody’s biofield seems to have taken on a greenish tinge. Maybe one of your partners in pseudoo at “Toronto Bioenergy Associates” could adjust that for you, Judith. (Then again, maybe not, as only you seem to merit testimonials on the Web site.) Indeed, as time is short, perhaps it would be appropriate to wind up by assisting you in this effort to manifest The Sort Of Advertising That You Just Can’t Buy with, say, a slogan.
How about “Puting the Zero Back in Zero-Point!™”? “When It Comes to Mesmerism, We Don’t ‘Mes’ Around!™”?
I’ve often wondered if newage types like Marg and Judith have ever *met* anyone who works in real health care. Somehow their descriptions of doctors and the entire pharmaceutical industry remind me of the scene in Woody Allen’s Love and Death when the Russians are discussing whether Russian Jews have horns like German Jews.
I *have* met a lot of doctors, and just among the ones I’ve known, two died of cancer, two lost their wives to cancer, one lost his mother and a cousin to cancer.
If, as the newage types claim, oncologists know The Cure For Cancer, or don’t know and are just pretending to research with no intention of ever finding a cure, or of admitting it if they do find a cure — well, all I can say is they’d better hope their fellow doctors never find out.
Of course, any oncologist who knew The Cure, and broke ranks to tell the world, would be immediately world famous and incredibly rich, whereas if he kept quiet he’d be just another doctor paying off his student loans. I guess oncologists don’t study game theory.
Funny how Marg and Judith don’t want to tell the world their “cure” — or at least don’t want to prove it to the world.
I hope I’m not commenting too much, but the recent sneering by Judith has really offended me.
That’s an awesomely stupid thing to say on a blog run by a surgeon/ scientist specializing in breast cancer. You think he hasn’t seen cancer patients at the end of life? Oncologists *don’t* just tell patients to go home and die, and just wash their hands of the matter, Marg and Judith’s fantasies to the contrary not withstanding. Oncologists remain involved to at least provide palliation if they can.
And furthermore some of us laymen have experience with cancer patients too. Like *me* for instance. I was in the room when my stepmother died. I was the last person my grandmother responded to the day before she died (I wasn’t in the room when she died because her children didn’t feel the grandchildren needed to see that). And both of them had extremely bad prognoses but survived for years (six and ten respectively) thanks to modern medicine.
And then Judith comes in here sneering about how much better and more knowledgeable and more caring she is than people who have devoted their lives to saving others from the ravages of cancer and other diseases. What a horrible person.
Well no – then they’d also have to share profits and stop being special little snowflakes. As Pixar put it: when everyone is special, no one is.
I’m not sure what high church scepticism orders for the dead and dying, but this thread shall soon breathe its last…
gentlemen, make your statements or give last rites or do whatever is apropo…
Totally off topic but this new blog set up is driving me up the wall.
I liked to comment and, due to my working hours did it on my mobile (cellphone for the Septics).
It’s now near on impossible to scroll down and actually loading this site takes longer than to convince Ms McCarthy that she may be misinformed.
@LW
You do realize that that comment was not meant for Orac but for someone who I thought was suggesting chemotherapy to make dying cancer patients feel better? We sorted it out, as it turned out that he did not mean cancer patients who were actually at the very end stage of their disease but cancer patients in earlier stages.
I realize there is a lot to read here, but I do wish people would read back a little before it before they jump to comment on something.
omit “before it”
Your insult was addressed to Krebiozen, one of the regulars here who has real medical knowledge which you do not. Whether or not Krebiozen meant “cancer patients in earlier stages” is irrelevant to your completely unwarranted insult. You have no way of knowing whether Krebiozen or anyone else on this thread has experience with cancer patients at the end stage, but you feel free to flaunt your ignorance and insult people like Krebiozen, Orac, and medical personnel in general.
And yes, I have read this whole thread, and every time I look at your comments I loathe you more.
@Denice Walter
In any good brawl or argument you eventually realize that the epithets the other party is throwing at you apply equally to them.
@LW
And you are just plain rude.
Thanks for that revealing look into your psyche, Judith. In your mind, an argument that devolves into “I know you are but what am I?” is a good argument? Explains a lot about you.
In the meantime, present us with rigorously collected data that demonstrates the safety and effectiveness you keep claiming for energy medicine. Oh, what’s that? You don’t collect data in any sort of a rigorous fashion? You in fact refuse to do so? Then you have no grounds on which to criticize those who actually do that hard work which you won’t do because it might ruin your fantasies.
@judith
And you are a certified snake-oil scammer, willing to cheat and kill innocents for money.
And please, relying on childish insults? You really have to get out more, judith, your insults are pathetic beyond belief.
But keep posting, the more you post here, the less time you have to scam innocents of their time and money.
I’m saddened that Judith thinks I’m plain rude. I was going for “deeply offended and quite contemptuous”. Perhaps there’s an emoticon I should have used.
But I’ll just agree with novalox.
Beats a mind-numbingly stupid, recycled fraud any day.
@LW
Thanks for the compliment.
And I really do mean for judith and her incompetent minion marg to keep posting here. At the very least, these two scientific illiterates provide some entertainment value with there inane postings.
More importantly, it keeps them away from posting their dangerous superstitions to other individuals who are vulnerable and may not know the fraud that these two hucksters are putting on them.
I’d rather that the rats judith and marg post here where the posters can dismantle their flawed arguments rather than another forum that they can push their fraud onto others. Limits the damage they can do.
Wait, Judith, are you saying that everyone who criticizes anything is a hypocrite? It sounds like a convenient (and misanthropic) psychological defense mechanism that prevents a person like you from being open-minded about criticism. In the real world, some people criticize bad behaviors and refuse to tolerate such behavior in themselves. Some people actually have principles, not that you’d know anything about that.
Ever considered growing up? Ever considered taking responsibility for your actions and how they continually reinforce the bad image we have of you?
My parting gift to you all, since this thread is probably about to shut down.
Shame on you all for this little exercise in trying to shut down dissent and innovative thinking.
Judith, wrong again. Certainly not innovative thinking. Nothing new and no particular thinking in J.’s fanciful nonsense and egregious insults.
And I do hope “parting gift” is a final flounce.
Holy f*ck. Seventeen hundred comments is “shutting down dissent”? Warmed-over Theosophy is “innovative thinking”? Again, perhaps you should look into the correct frequency to hum away asshurt. The Ancient Masters must have this filed away somewhere.
Entirely appropriate to depart on the equivalent of a 404, though. Did you make up that hash yourself, or did it mysteriously fall from the ceiling in an envelope, Koot Hoomi–style?
@judith
Thanks for the evidence of your complete idiocy and stupidity.
Please keep posting, entertaining idiots like you and your minion marg don’t come by often, and we all do need a laugh from someone so incompetent like you.
@Peebs
It could just be this thread. With almost 2k comments, it takes my speedy computer several minutes to load properly.
@Judith
Oh wah – poor little baby is forced to have her freedom of speech trampled on. Because it’s not like you don’t have your own site where you can babble to your heart’s content. Or a million other avenues for speech.
@Judith
You are still allowed to comment here, while sceptics often are not allowed to comment on sites, which are in favor of all kinds of quackery.
b.t.w. Will we reach the 2,000 mark, before this is closed?
There is nothing innovative in saying “Hey, I have this fantasy where I’m an ultra-special miracle worker who knows The Truth and can heal people with my Sooper Sekrit Knowledge! You should believe it despite my failure to provide or even collect evidence!”
Shame on you for inventing a “shut down the dissent” boogeyman rather than face the fact that you came peddling bull**** and everyone recognized it as such. If it’s not bull**** then show us the rigorously collected data which demonstrates it to be more than a figment of your wishful thinking – OH WAIT, that’s right, you already admitted that YOU DON’T COLLECT DATA. That’s why no one’s buying the hooey you want to sell, not because you’re oppressed.
It looks like some cancer patients will soon have to rely on handwaving …
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2235183/Cancer-treatment-crisis-drug-companies-stop-producing-chemotherapy-drug-profitable-enough.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
@Marg – yes, so rather than work to get more companies involved (perhaps generics) to fill the gaps providing a treatment THAT IS PROVEN TO WORK – you hope that people will have to rely on “hand-waving?”
You’re funny….and not in a “ha-ha” way either.
@Lawrence
I’m sure cancer patients are not finding it funny either that big pharma is cutting back on making these drugs because they are not profitable. But who knows, they might find out that they do better with handwaving.
@Marg – any proof of that? Oh yeah, we’ve been asking for proof for about 1800 posts now, and you have offered nothing……
@Lawrence
Or I should say, maybe they will have to rely on handwaving as their drugs become unavailable and new drugs that replace them will probably be prohibitively expensive.
Big Pharma has to keep generating money to pay all those multibillion dollar fines.
Judith lies about who’s shutting down discussion: Judith and Marg are. They are actively censoring themselves by refusing to cite good evidence in favor of energy healing. They’re drowning out the most important talking point by constantly whining about pharmaceutical companies being imperfect, by citing anecdotes in a manner that denies their human capacity for self-deception, and by framing everything in their closed-minded, intolerant black-and-white perspective. They aren’t even listening to our ideas, just knee-jerking at buzzwords. They don’t want the conversation to move forward, they just want a forum for their bigotry.
They aren’t serious about discussing this matter. They’re patting themselves on the back for emulating their echo chambers.
Thought: Maybe Marg and Judith aren’t really energy healers. Maybe they’re just a couple trolls who simply hate pharmaceuticals and only pretend to be energy healers in order to make it look like they have a stake in medicine. Because surely, a real energy healer would have good scientific evidence for its utility right on hand and bookmarked for just such an occasion. I’d expect a fake energy healer to be evasive when we point out that we have no basis for trusting their claims of expertise.
Sorry, couldn’t keep a straight face. XD
Energy healers are pretty much like psychics. They probably also lack any sort of method for telling the real ones apart from the fake ones, which leads one to wonder how a psychic can know they’re really psychic instead of fooling themselves.
@Bronze Dog
Above I provided multiple links. You all dismissed them. Only the pharmaceutical companies get a free pass.
Marg, what were the reasons given for the dismissals? Would you like to specify a particular link you provided?
Oh, and newspaper articles aren’t scientific, if you’re referring to that Daily Mail link. Newspapers are notorious for misrepresenting science in the name of sensationalism and “balance” at the cost of fairness and accuracy.
No, I provided links to studies.
Dare you to watch this to the end:
Have you considered the possibility that what’s coming out of your hands is actually your neurons desperately attempting to flee?
So, name one study you cited, and block quote the reason given by the people here for dismissing it.
I don’t like to click YouTube links without at least a general idea what kind of video it links to.
I’ll tell you what it is – it’s 50 minutes of the same thing Marge has been posting here. Testimonies and claims of scientific validation, but not actually showing any actual science.
I admit I didn’t watch the whole thing, but I did take about 10 good 1 minute samples out of it, and that’s what I saw.
However, I may have missed the good bits, so I’ll ask –
Marge, please tell me where to find what you think is the most important part of the video you linked to.
@Johnny
The scientists who speak about their findings? The doctors who say that their patients have been helped? The patients and caregivers who speak about their results waving their medical records?
50 minute video. Yeah, that’d leave me wondering about how much is padding or Gish Galloping. If I was using such a long video to make a point, I’d probably add a link to a transcript, since that’d make it easier to critique, either on a point-by-point basis or to pick out points of emphasis. Failing a transcript, I’d at least give timestamps for the most relevant points. Netiquette matters.
This isn’t a Tupperware party or any other sort of MLM “event,” Marg. In return, I double-dog-dare you to attempt to present the Lagrangian of your “system.”
Anecdotes don’t have scientific safeguards against human cognitive failings. Anecdotes are generally only useful for generating new hypotheses, not for confirming them. Even if we’re talking medical records of individuals, that moves it up to case studies, but that won’t let us know if their apparent results are typical for the treatment, if other factors might have been involved, or if they were cherry-picked after the fact.
So, on the first point of scientists showing their findings, how were those findings acquired? What was their methodology?
Please point us to where these findings have been published in a peer-reviewed journal. No proper scientist would speak about ‘findings’ that weren’t published or in prep, right?
Again, show us the published clinical results.
All anecdotes. I think you’re the only one doing any ‘waving’ around here.
The truth is that the lot of you are so uncomfortable with the notion of something you don’t understand that nothing will change your minds.
I believe that the trailer will suffice. Slovenian hand gestures now will cure gangrene in but four days.
@Narad
You are waving around your prejudices and closed mind like a flag.
I remember watching some of that video when it was posted in the “reiki for animals” thread. Within the first minute the healer claims he can “cure” cancer and AIDS in three to four days. I switched right over to the Sci-Fi channel for some fantasy fiction done well.
Hunnybunny, I think the truth is that you are uncomfortable with the fact that not only are you understood very, very well, you’re not even particularly novel.
The truth is that the lot of you are so uncomfortable with the notion of something you don’t understand that nothing will change your minds.
The truth is you are so uncomfortable with the idea that you could be wrong that you believe in magical curing powers with no evidence to support it.
I’m perfectly aware that there are thing’s I don’t understand. I’m happy to be wrong, it means I learn. These are the first things you learn when you embark on a career in science. I suspect you don’t know many scientists…our thought process is not like yours. Every day things that I believe to be true are challenged by actual evidence, and I adapt my models to fit this evidence. If you had presented any actual evidence for your model, I would certainly change my mind.
The problem is, you assume that our minds work like yours. That our minds are committed to a truth despite evidence to the contrary. It’s pure projection.
@Narad
More evidence of your fear?
@ Marg,
Judith did not answer my question. Would you answer it please: Do you have any evidence that reiki can relieve depression?
Alain
I think that’s the video of which Orac wrote:
You are waving around your prejudices and closed mind like a flag.
I have asked you repeatedly for the teleology of the hands, Marg, and you have never failed to… well, fail. I assure you that if I’m going to be waving something in your general direction, it’s not going to be a flag.
Where’s the Lagrangian, Pancakes?
I’ve only been browsing these comments but did either Marge or Judith ever answer when asked point blank if there was any evidence or anything that would ever change their minds?
@Narad
With the Broddingnagians, natch, Snuggles.
“Brobdingnagians”
Hell of a word to type.
So, we point out the inherent flaws in testimonials, how they can lead to self-deception, and thus why they aren’t acceptable as scientific evidence. Then Marg goes back to the panicked knee-jerk response of calling us closed-minded because we dared to point out the mere possibility of an alternative explanation for the results.
The accusation of us being uncomfortable is quite amusing because quite frankly, testimonials for quackery are well within our range of expectation because we know that humans are varied, there are a lot of humans, and thus some are going to have lucky beneficial outcomes despite ineffective treatment that are then favored by selection bias when quacks fish for testimonials. Confirmation bias is also common. These good outcomes are only unexpected if you assume humans and cases of illness are homogenous. We do not subscribe to those assumptions. We’re population thinkers, and statistical outliers aren’t extraordinary, and they aren’t proof of anything when isolated from the larger context.
Marg, it’s the unexpected that’s supposed to be uncomfortable, not the mundane. But then again, like Judith, you seem uncomfortable with the very idea of your mundane humanity.
Ultimately, i think this is what it boils down to. The 2 ideas ‘I can heal people with mystical energy, and have accepted money for this service’ and ‘there is no such thing as mystical healing energy, and no study has even shown that mystical energy can heal people’ are incompatible. But because Marg’s self-worth is so intimately tied to the second idea, her own cognitive dissonance prevents her from seeing the bigger picture and drawing rational conclusions.
What i don’t understand is why Marg feels her thought process is any different from the other denialists featured on this site…chelation therapists, acupuncturists, AIDS / germ theory denialists, antivaxxers all engage in exactly the same tactics and thought processes as Marg. Does she believe in all these too? After all, if she’s willing to accept anecdotes as evidence for energy healing, why not for ‘vaccine injury’ too?
Do you believe vaccines cause autism, Marg? If not, how can you discount the anecdotes of the parents who claim vaccines injured their children?
…that should read “intimately tied to the first idea”
There’s no point in being an HIV denialist if you suspect there might be a buck to be leeched off the gig.
Marg,
I’m saddened to see that you’ve so completely misunderstood what’s happened here.
I, for one, would be perfectly happy to be shown that by
wishingmanipulating energy fields with my mind and hands alone I could improve health, cure disease, turn water into Scotch, or what have you. So far the evidence I’ve been shown boils down to:– failed experiments (results indistinguishable from no action)
– possibly interesting single cases of recovery that are well within the normal range of the progression of disease
– testimonials, anecdotes, and other takes not backed by good solid data.
As you no doubt know, it’s quite easy to find patterns in randomness. Gamblers have winning streaks which they often attribute to skill or some lucky charm. Sports fans act as though, somehow, what they wear on game day can affect the team’s performance. People see faces in clouds, mountains, pancakes, toast, and patterns of lichen that they attribute to spirits. deities, or demons. That’s why science relies on techniques as statistics, repeatable controlled experiments, and calculation.
Yes, it’s hard to do the work needed to get real evidence that something works. You can’t just say “I willed the coin to come up heads 10 times in a row and it did – that’s so mindbogglingly unlikely to have happened by accident that there must be a connection.” You need to be able to show that chance alone did not cause the results you’re seeing – and that you’re not using a trick coin.
So, Marg, Judith, whoever – get some real data. Do it with suitable controls. Come up with just one thing that you can show repeatably that energy healing will cure better than placebo energy healing. Do it so that you can show that the people involved didn’t just imagine it and treat noise as signal.
Please.
Thank you for reading this message.
Quote MO’B
Please.
Dream on…Hell’s gonna freeze over before they consider the scientific method.
Alain
Marg, my mind is ready and willing to be changed–I’d love to be convinced that there’s a cheap, non-invasive, cure for cancer that’s without side effects. The problem isn’t that we have minds incapable of change but that you’ve offered nothing in the way of evidence indicating a need they be changed.
You want to change our minds? Provide actual evidence that energy healing does heal people. That’s hardly asking for much, if energy healing really does work as you claim.
Actually, AdamG, I was mostly talking about their mundane humanity in the sense of viewing themselves as error-prone. Humans are subject to confirmation bias, post hoc fallacies, faulty memories, motivated thinking, regressive fallacies, tribalism, and so on and so on and so on. Scientific methodology is necessary because we know that we’re subject to those problems. We acknowledge our human limitations, which is why we demand the scientific approach.
Marg and Judith, however, don’t see themselves as mere humans. They see themselves as godlike beings who only see things as they are because they’re inherently objective and infallible as well as possessing a supernatural sense of causation, able to pick out the real cause of a change from the many, many possible factors, both known and unknown. They think they can see a handful of cherry-picked cases and draw conclusions from them because they don’t acknowledge their humanity.
Dear Marg,
Since you view me as a closed-minded scientist, I’ll provide that piece of evidence for you: I have tried reiki not too long ago and the reiki practicioner tested me to see if I had an open mind before going further (which I had).
Now as an exercise (exercice? I’m a French speaking guy), I’d like you to tell me if reiki relieve depression. Okay? In the mean time, I’ll go wash the dish while enjoying two IPA classic from the Simple Malt brewery or even better, you tell me how much time do you need to answer my question and I’ll patiently wait for you 🙂
In exchange, I’ll give you my conclusion on the reiki session.
Deal?
Alain
Watching even the first few minutes of this video makes me feel like a witness to attempted manslaughter.
One of the comments on this YouTube video is as follows. It is the typical excuse (blame) given to patients.
When the energy and other treatments don’t work, the patient is faulted for their holding on to their bad energy. Apparently, one patient’s bad energy can trump the doctor’s and universe’s good energy.
@Alain, my understanding is that the practitioner is asking your energetic being for permission to enter your energy field, prior to their beginning the session. This is the similar to the NAET and other energy treatments. It is not the same as their testing you to see if you have an open mind.
The patient is prepped with a statement explaining that even if the patient perceives that their mind is open to the treatments, their energy and karma may not be ready to receive the healing. This way, when the treatments inevitably fail, the Healer can blame the patient for the failure, instead of the treatment.
@ S,
What about spirit eating energy out of me?
Alain
p.s. you can guess where the reiki session went.
Of course Judith/Marg isn’t going to provide any real evidence of her “healing” abilities. Why would she bother when she can continue scamming patients just fine without any evidence?
In the absence of a conscience or successful lawsuit, there’s absolutely nothing stopping her murderous fraud.
Remind me again, which specific business is Marg/Judith affiliated with? Is it BioEnergy com or Toronto BioEnergy Associates or…?
The big problem is that they don’t know what constitutes good evidence, otherwise they’d stop trying to pass testimonials off as such.
Hmmm. I think they actually *do* know what constitutes good evidence. They just don’t give a damn.
Why voluntarily subject your woo-business to needless and bothersome restrictions? It’s so much easier and financially beneficial to just market your crap directly to your target audience.
I’ll bet Marg/Judith actively promote their woo via online patient support groups.
I’m sliding between the idea that they’re Ayn Randian cronies who want to undermine consumer protection measures for the sake of profit, or they’ve been indoctrinated into spouting those sorts of memes reflexively.
@alain
Straight to the first/base Chakra?
From what I’ve seen from their type on the breast cancer support forum I visit, I think unfettered profit is absolutely their motive. If it were simply an indoctrination reflex, then surely (?!) they’d show signs of “coming around,” given that they’re often apparently relatively intelligent people.
I think of it as the Judge Judy test. Is it more likely that they’re intelligent and reasonable people who legitimately believe in magic despite all evidence to the contrary, or that they’re simply con artists out to make a buck? Ayn Rand, indeed.
thenewme,
I think the former is more likely, but then again I have been accused of having an unrealistically optimistic view of human nature. I like to look at Benjamin Rush who was convinced, from his own personal experience, that bloodletting was beneficial, even though we now know that it actually weakened and killed his patients. I think that confirmation bias, and a belief that all the unpleasant symptoms they have observed in cancer patients are caused by the treatment, not the cancer, is enough to explain where Marg and Judith are coming from.
If an intelligent man like Rush could believe an actively damaging treatment was doing his patients good, I think it is entirely possible for energy healers (homeopaths et al.) to believe they are curing patients when the truth is they are at best offering a few minutes of human companionship and attention.
That said, I do still find it weird that in the 21st century we still have literate people in the developed world insisting that magic is real.
Many “psychics” really don’t know. Randi mentioned in one of his books that many people who tried to win his prize were not charlatans but genuinely believed they could do it. It was quite a crushing blow when they learned that they could not and had simply been fooling themselves.
I’ve refrained from the inclination to SEO the gig, but Judith is Toronto Bioenergy Associates. Marg appears to be a nobody of the first water, and I suspect that her fellow travelers share the sentiment.
Interestingly, i think we’ve got one of each here. I think Marg is True Believer, based on her staunch defenses of Bengston and willingness to at least discuss some specifics of the ‘experiments’ and ‘evidence’ behind energy healing earlier in the thread.
I think Judith, however, is a classic con artist. Notice how she doesn’t even bother to respond to or defend claims that relaxation from reiki is not due to the actual energy, instead choosing to go on about the purported failings of chemotherapy instead.
It’s a classic con artist maneuver: instead of trying to defend what you know is a lie, cast doubt on the opposing side. Poor Marg, however, has bought the story hook, line, and sinker, and spins around in circles of dissonance trying to avoid the truth.
@Krebiozen,
You’ve no doubt had a much broader exposure to it than I have, but I also think you give them more credit than they deserve. IMO, the willful ignorance in favor of financial gain is the key thing that separates “quacks” from misguided consumers.
My experience is from a cancer patient perspective and participation in several online patient forums over the past few years. In nearly every instance on those forums, it has turned out that they just *happen* to have a business selling supplements, treatments, therapies, or other woo-services. Seriously, on BCO for example, every cancer treatment quack I’ve encountered turns out to be a woo peddler of some sort.
Of course I’m not talking about patients or interested people who ask questions or investigate or even fall for woo and quackery. And I’m sure there must be a few woo believers who aren’t financially vested, but here I’m only referring to the really loud, persistent, arrogant, and EVIL monsters like these we’re discussing, who claim to have The Cure and market directly to the desperate and gullible.
I’d love to believe that your vision of human nature is closer to reality than mine. Maybe I’m hopelessly jaded.
@Narad, I dunno. Is this type of SEO necessarily a bad thing?
@AdamG, as I mentioned, I may be hopelessly jaded, but I’d wager that if we looked further, we’d find that Marg is indeed just as much of a con artist as Judith, with financial stakes involved.
You know, this all started with Bengston, who can heal mice of cancer — the tumors disappear — without seeing them or being within miles of them.
It seems to me that one ought to be able to set up a completely ethical clinical trial of this. That is, a busy oncology practice makes this proposal to its sadly terminal patients: we want to test whether Bengston can cure you by waving his hands and thinking happy thoughts, so, if you consent to this … procedure … we’ll make an appointment for you next week. When you come in the waiting room, our receptionist will call Bengston and alert him to your presence without identifying you in any way, just that you’re a patient and present. If your tumor has disappeared in one month — complete remission — we’ll count that as success, otherwise failure. And we’ll consider Bengston to have succeeded in this trial if over half the patients “treated” are successes. We’ll have an agreed third party oncologist do the exam in one month, so there won’t be a question of prejudice.
It seems to me that we have informed consent, privacy protection, no possible harm to the patient, and a clear endpoint not very susceptible to various forms of bias, placebo effects, or whatever, so lack of blinding doesn’t seem like a big problem. We don’t have a control group, but those don’t work with Bengston anyway, and in this case success is extremely unlikely to occur by chance. Also, it would be difficult to cherry-pick patients to prejudice the trial either way. And such a trial would be very inexpensive, as such things go.
I wonder why Bengston and his ilk haven’t proposed such a trial.
Straight to the first/base Chakra?
If that mean nowhere, yup.
Alain
I’m guessing the answer involves Geomagnetic Probes.
LW,
There are some interesting videos on YouTube of dowsing being subjected to a double blind test, for example here. When, inevitably, the dowsers fail, they are surprised but it doesn’t dent their confidence in their abilities in the slightest.
Also,
Bengston claims that conventional treatment interferes with his energy healing treatment, so it is impossible to test his claims with a randomized trial ethically. You could have a self-selected group that was willing to reject conventional treatment, but that would introduce biases and would also be unethical.
Ah, the inevitable out. You must choose either handwaving or real medicine, but not both.
On the other hand, if the patient is near death, they’re not getting any more conventional treatment, except of course the pain relief that alt-meddlers would deny, so Bengston should be able to heal them at that point. But he won’t accept that challenge, of course.
Because it involves record-keeping? This is not purely in jest; Bengston also claims that the Ponderomotive Energization, while functioning with terrifying power against cancer, cannot be expected to and does not in fact cure warts, so the explanations for these distinctions are of interest.
True, failure wasn’t always a crushing blow. But it was for some. I wonder if dowsers are particularly resilient since they have had so many successes (if you drill deep enough, you’ll probably hit some kind of water, though it may not be potable).
@LW – If Bengston were to remain true to form, the treated patients and the control patients would become entangled, with equal results in both groups.
Note this is not necessarily the same entanglement one sees when playing Twister.
I would note that dowsing, in the form of pendulums, is also used as a diagnostic method in homeopathic practice. The results are about what one would expect.
@LW
Bengston would have to know who he is treating and have a photograph of the person. The scenario of the anonymous patient in the physician’s waiting room would not work. Also, by the time the physician consented to such a scenario, the patient would have to have been riddled with chemo and radiation, and be more or less beyond help, and Bengston says his method doesn’t work with patients who have received chemo or radiation.
Back to the drawing board.
Why? Seriously, what could possibly be the explanation for the Cosmic Healing Vibrator being mediated by photographic emulsion? The blind cannot Hum The Distance Electric?
Formerly known as the Bonanza Speed Shop
@LW
Not probably – certainly. The is an ironic saying in the oil patch that all “dry holes” are actually wet (because all the permeable formations were full of water).
@LW
I would be more impressed if he could turn his cloud busting energies to power generation. I did a quick calculation for a cumulus cloud at the top of thermal from a quarter section summer fallow field (a half mile by a half mile.
Assuming the thermal results from a cube of air the size of the field (approximately 800m a side = 512 10^6 m3) and the cloud forms at 10 C (Water vapor pressure = 1.20 kPa), the ideal gas law gives us 261000 kg mol of water (4700 tonnes). The heat of vaporization of water is about 44.5 MJ/kg mol. This means the Bengston is expending 11,600 GJ to vaporize the cloud. This equivalent to burning 430 tonnes of anthracite coal. If he can do this every 15 minutes his power output is 12.9 Gigawatts. Even allowing for 25% efficiency and much smaller clouds, he should give up on healing and get to work on solving AGW.
@narad
I wonder if a digital photograph would work?
I have seen William Lee Rand send a Reiki Treatment through his eyes via a DVD. I think there is no claim so preposterous that a Reiki Master hasn’t made it.
And everything looks worse in black and white
And from William Lee Rand’s website, this waiver (bolding mine).
Would Bengston’s method work on an individual if Bengston only had a photo of his or her identical twin?
What’s the ED vernacular for opiate overdoses? “Pulmonary indifference,” or some such nod to thorough relaxation, as I recall.
What would happen if the photo was printed from a flipped negative? Would the healing energy go to the wrong side of the body? How recent does the photograph have to be?
new blog post (in French):
http://www.securivm.ca/2012/11/qui-veut-dun-autiste-au-travail.html
Alain
@Renate
Yes.
Because this evidently needs to be repeated ad naseum (thanks Antaeus)
@Judith
In other words it doesn’t work without cold reading involved. Hmm, wonder if Emily Rosa would be relevant here… oh yes, you guys love to ignore her study, don’t you?
@Marg
and
Someone’s logic is in a knot: first it’s “Big Pharma profits” and then it’s “cancer treatments aren’t profitable”. Make up your mind.
Sheesh, it’s a wonder anyone falls for the crap Marg spouts at all, a five year old could see through the holes in her arguments.
Which were resoundingly shown to be full of problems. Instead of providing rebuttals or better evidence, you resorted to logical fallacies. It’s not our fault if we have higher standards for evidence than you do – your standard is apparently postmodernistic “I believe, therefore it is” crap. Also, pharma hasn’t gotten a free pass, it’s just you keep inventing strawmen whereas pretty much everyone has said something akin to “SBM isn’t perfect, but it improves over time”. If it’s not black and white, you refuse to see it.
AKA anecdotes.
If you posted actual evidence I might be inclined to change my mind. If you posted lots of evidence I’d change my mind. But that doesn’t fit your worldview, so you continue to ignore it and pretend we’re the ones with issues. The only thing I’m uncomfortable with is the fact that you expect that we’re supposed to just take your word for it. (Or: what MOB said) I’ll remind you that I previously posted I’d tried qi gong, and it’s only in looking for evidence that I changed my mind about it – ie, the lack of evidence (and effects) turned me away from it.
But my FSM, this has all been said a billionty times before on this thread. Why we expect it to be hammered home this time around is beyond me. You really need a universe-sized clue bat to the head, don’t you?
I repeat:
You know @ Flip, neighter will answer my question because they have no clue why reiki didn’t work on me.
Alain
Similarly, half of all cancer patients will live longer than predicted, and if you treat enough you will come across some that live a lot longer than predicted.
How can anyone be “riddled with chemo and radiation”? Anyway, it’s not a physician who has to approve such a trial, it’s an institutional review board, or in the UK an ethics committee. Leaving a terminal cancer patient untreated, or treated only with handwaving, is considered unethical and contravenes several articles of the Declaration of Helsinki. For example it is essential that, “the physician has good reason to believe that participation in the research study will not adversely affect the health of the patients who serve as research subjects”. That’s why the Gonzalez trial, as instructive as the results are, should never have been carried out.
I wonder if Narad is on to something. It is far too easy to prove that Bengston’s treatment doesn’t work for warts, but when he treats cancer patients who have had surgery but no chemotherapy or radiotherapy he can take the credit for the effects of the surgery, which is responsible for the great majority of the efficacy of cancer treatments of solid tumors. He can then point out that the (surgery-cured) patient had no chemotherapy or radiotherapy, so his treatment must have been responsible for any improvements. I’m sure that impresses the ignorant.