“Healers” who wave their hands over the patient and claim to transmit some kind of undefined energy – want to find out whether their efforts increase the number of white blood cells in cancer sufferers.
The trial is the brainchild of hospital departmental manager Angela Buxton whose son died of leukemia. She is on record as saying, “Science has not caught up with how it [healing] works. Anecdotal evidence shows it works but we need hard evidence.”
Advocates of the trial believe that “healing” might somehow boost the number of immune system white blood cells in the body. Others have dismissed the efforts as pseudoscientific claptrap and a waste of money.
You decide. Healing: Benefit or Bollocks?
Why this sort of rubbish gets any support is beyond me. I have one question for those who think that ‘faith healing” has any efficacy; if it’s so powerful a method of making people well, how is it that it was replaced by modern medicine? After all you had the field to yourselves for millennia, yet somehow purely secular techniques pushed you out.
Yes, exactly, if it worked, it would be part of mainstream medicine, rather than a part of crank quackery and pseudoscience.
Doctors renew drive to ban NHS homeopathy
In which I am delighted to read:
“In April, Peter Fisher, personal homeopath to the Queen and clinical director of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, wrote an open letter to the monarch, its patron, asking for her support to save the hospital. The Queen reportedly takes 60 vials of homeopathic remedies with her when she goes abroad in case she falls ill.”
(I’m her subject too, so I get to bitch)
Yes, certain members of the British monarchy have a truly distorted perception of the benefits of alternative medicine. Mind you some of them do seem to live an awful long time…
How exactly is this sort of rubbish different from that sort of rubbish (modern medicine)?
Recommended reading: John Horgan: The Undiscovered Mind, Chapter 4: Prozac and Other Placebos.
I do take your point Ulrich, but a lot of those most cited papers were small-sample epidemiological studies, I believe. It is apparent, however, that the likes of Prozac do indeed fail to stack up to close scrutiny against placebo and herbal medicine. Nevertheless, there is definite validity in much of “modern” medicine, when compared to Reiki and healing therapies involving nothing but moving hands “near” a person’s body (they don’t even have to be naked for it not to work). This is true even when the placebo effect is taken into account.
db
£80,000 is nothing compared to the money pharmaceutical companies spend on producing drugs that work as long as they are new and the publicity causes people to have faith in them. When later the reports of the side-effects come out, people lose faith, and the drug works no better than a placebo, proving that it has always been a placebo. Meanwhile, however, the drug company has made a fortune. If the same amount of money were spend on researching alternative placebos, we might have much more effective placebos by now.
Touche’
There are hundreds of drugs that work way beyond the placebo though, we can see them working in the petri dish, we can see them working in the recovery of patients from infectious tropical diseases for instance. Okay, there are too many diseases developing resistance to even the previously effective drugs, but that is a different issue to the placebo.
To paraphrase the apocryphal chaplain at Pearl Harbor: Praise the Lord and pass the aspirin
I don’t doubt that a lot of homeopathy is a pile of junk, along with a lot of old wives’ tales. But I am similarly ready to believe that there may be some kernels of truth hiding out in both. For instance, chewing willow bark (aspirin) when in pain, or rubbing bread mold (penicillin) on wounds.
I also believe that the pharmaceutical industry is clearly geared toward patented, expensive medications. This so much so that I further suspect that cheap effective remedies would either be ignored or deliberately suppressed, due to non-profitability.
So take something that’s either sufficiently interesting/possible, or something that has distracting amounts of attention, and perform real, genuine, scientifically-acceptable testing. Double-blind, full documentation, etc.
Facts are to be found, not believed without evidence.
…”perform real, genuine, scientifically-acceptable testing. Double-blind, full documentation, etc.”
Hear! Hear!
Some 4 out of every 10 patented pharmaceuticals has its roots in herbal medicine. Certainly willow bark is tightly connected to aspirin, as to is ephedra and the earliest bronchodilators for asthma. The herbal products are natural but that does not make them intrinsically safe. Ephedra extracts and the ephedrine product that emerged in mod medicine cause heart problems. Consequently, the industry looked for an alternative, salbutamol, which did not appear to have the same cardiovascular impact. As use of this drug became widespread, epidemiological studies subsequently revealed potential problems with it.
The research moves on, using at least some of the profits from previous drugs to bolster work on the next. Hopefully, at some point medicine will find targeted drugs that work effectively, quickly and without the side effects all have currently. Pharmacogenomics might go part of the way towards that although we won’t reap the rewards for several years yet.
db