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It’s a part of my paleo fantasy, it’s a part of my paleo dream

sciencebasedmedicine.org

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Re: It’s a part of my paleo fantasy, it’s a part of my paleo dream

#31

Post by darxius »

Udo wrote: post #22

I'm getting kind of an asshole reputation for always arguing with friends who are deeply into C/AM. But I'm also starting to realize it's exactly like arguing with a religious person - there is absolutely nothing you can say to make them realize their faith is based on fallacies. There is absolutely no correlation between the general intelligence of a person and the ridiculousness of their belief claims. You could be…

> I'm at a total loss as to where this gender disparity comes

> from, but there has to be a vector somewhere. If anyone has

> any ideas, I'm looking forward to hearing them. If there is

> anything to be done about this, I'd like to volunteer my

> time for it.

I'm not sure, but I think a lot of it is marketing. I'm not sure about the numbers but I have a feeling there are more stay at home moms then there are dads. Commercials during the day are highly targeted at this demographic and its possible that this is where most of the misinformation comes from.

Also, I know women are proven more emotional than men. Does this also encompass the "spiritual" side of things (a trait which a lot of alternative medicines have)?

Re: It’s a part of my paleo fantasy, it’s a part of my paleo dream

#33

Post by robbiep »

api wrote: post #12

I have a friend who's into homeopathy and such, and I normally keep my mouth shut. But I have done some thinking about why. This friend is very smart, very intellectual, very curious, and not overly credulous. She's really a bit of a nerd. From my few conversations on the matter, the thing that's jumped out at me is this: She's drawn to alternative medicine because it's open source. Like many nerds, she hates closed…

There was an interesting study done - and written up on SBM - that suggests that the theraputic effect of Alt-med, at least with acupuncture, is entirely due to patient-practitioner interaction.

As someone on the cusp of becoming a Doctor, I understand this. I even understand why traditional medicine fails at it (and it is many of the reasons you mention). And I understand why Alt-med succeeds here.

I think it's great that alt-med can deliver a measurable placebo through the clinical effect.

HOWEVER

this does not excuse the intellectual dishonesty of alternative medicine practitioners.

Please anyone who replies to this suggesting that 'We don't know enough about alt med, bla bla bla, big pharma won't study it because it can't be milked for the elixir of life, money/human blood, etc' - Stop now. There's 3 types of treatments. Medicine proper, Stuff that has been tested and found wanting, and stuff that hasn't been tested. The second category is almost exclusively the whole of alternative medicine.

please excuse my divergence as I return to the train of thought:

We should continue to deny alternative medicine practitioners legitimacy. As I argue in the SMH article (3rd contribution in the article) referenced at the bottom of this post, it causes an economic misallocation of resources away from real, practical science towards, for want of a better word, magic.

What we should also do, I now believe, is actively encourage these people to become 'Lifestyle practitioners'. They don't practice a form of medicine, or at least drop the pretence that what they are doing has any scientific backbone, and instead do what they are doing now - that is, interacting with patients, talking with them about their lives, encouraging positive lifestyle interventions (cutting out smoking, drinking, increasing exercise, etc) in an environment that it seems they are more responsive to these interventions.

You can't have both. It is false and misleading for Alt-med practitioners to continue to pretend and/or believe that what they are doing has a real scientific basis in the same way as taking a drug that has been through a RCT does.

But you allude to the root of the problem when you talk about the shabby operation of many hospitals etc.

The difference is, they are built for really sick (or in your example, pregnant) people. Lots of them. Because there are lots of them. And alt-med practitioners will kill them by the bucketload if we were to get rid of hospitals and doctors tomorrow. and then society would go through the process of re-inventing something similar

Maybe one day hey?

* - http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/legislative-al...

* - http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/the-question/should--universit...

Re: It’s a part of my paleo fantasy, it’s a part of my paleo dream

#34

Post by up_and_up »

The problem with "Evidence Based Medicine" vs CAM are two-fold, according to my friend who is an MD in internal medicine at the local VA.

1. 'Evidenced based' medicine is not really 'Evidenced based' because (again this is according to an MD) 50% of what they practice has not been subjected to scientific study.

2. Also there is not the time nor funding to test every aspect and modality of CAM. So some CAM practice might really be working for patients but there is not time nor funding to discover why.

This seems like yet another rant by some Physician whose 'religion' is actually evidence-based medicine.

Re: It’s a part of my paleo fantasy, it’s a part of my paleo dream

#35

Post by kyllo »

JPKab wrote: post #20

I agree with a lot of what this article says regarding the "naturalistic fallacy",etc. However, this quote is an example of shallow thinking that drives me nuts: "Of course, it’s hard not to note that cancer and heart disease are primarily diseases of aging, and life expectancy was so much lower back in the day that a much smaller percentage of the population lived to advanced ages" Life expectancy FROM BIRTH has ris…

I came here to post the same thing. This is its own fallacy.

It was used to market estrogen supplementation, among other spurious remedies, to post-menopausal women. "Women didn't used to live very long after menopause--the life expectancy was only about 50. You need to take estrogen pills to keep you healthy into old age."

This of course was people using statistics to lie. The average life expectancy was lower primarily due to high infant mortality. Life expectancy is NOT the average age at death.

But then they found out that the estrogen pills were causing breast cancer, so that put a stop to that.

Re: It’s a part of my paleo fantasy, it’s a part of my paleo dream

#36

Post by tcskeptic »

I'm not a Paleo dieter, but I am familiar with the gist of their claims. I do not understand how this study is a response to those claims. The 137 mummies studied are from "Individuals from ancient Egypt, ancient Peru, the Ancestral Puebloans of southwest America, and the Unangan of the Aleutian Islands were imaged." Of those we have 3 agricultural civilizations (Egytp, Peru, Pueblo) and one hunter gatherer (Aleutian). So 3/4 of the studied civilizations don't argue agains the basic Paleo claim at all. I can't see from looking the the links what the results from the Aleutian cohort were.

Re: It’s a part of my paleo fantasy, it’s a part of my paleo dream

#37

Post by tcskeptic »

I'm not a Paleo dieter, but I am familiar with the gist of their claims. I do not understand how this study is a response to those claims. The 137 mummies studied are from "Individuals from ancient Egypt, ancient Peru, the Ancestral Puebloans of southwest America, and the Unangan of the Aleutian Islands were imaged." Of those we have 3 agricultural civilizations (Egytp, Peru, Pueblo) and one hunter gatherer (Aleutian). So 3/4 of the studied civilizations don't argue agains the basic Paleo claim at all. I can't see from looking the the links what the results from the Aleutian cohort were.

Re: It’s a part of my paleo fantasy, it’s a part of my paleo dream

#38

Post by Nursie »

JPKab wrote: post #20

I agree with a lot of what this article says regarding the "naturalistic fallacy",etc. However, this quote is an example of shallow thinking that drives me nuts: "Of course, it’s hard not to note that cancer and heart disease are primarily diseases of aging, and life expectancy was so much lower back in the day that a much smaller percentage of the population lived to advanced ages" Life expectancy FROM BIRTH has ris…

I'm pretty sure that life expectancy figures generally discount infant mortality as a separate issue.

People did not live all that long in prehistory. Infections and diseases were more fatal more often. It's not like if you made it to ten you'd be as likely to live to 70 as someone is today, no sir.

Re: It’s a part of my paleo fantasy, it’s a part of my paleo dream

#39

Post by Udo »

JPKab wrote: post #27
Udo wrote: post #22

I'm getting kind of an asshole reputation for always arguing with friends who are deeply into C/AM. But I'm also starting to realize it's exactly like arguing with a religious person - there is absolutely nothing you can say to make them realize their faith is based on fallacies. There is absolutely no correlation between the general intelligence of a person and the ridiculousness of their belief claims. You could be…

I've found that, at least amongst 20 and 30 something age groups, women tend to be more religious too. Now that is my crappy anecdotal observation. It would be interesting to see some real data on that. I'm convinced that the whole C/AM thing taps into an instinctive love of purity. We are wired to care about cleanliness and purity in our food sources. Perhaps women are wired even more this way (the fact that they ha…

I really refuse to accept that women are just "wired for faith", it sounds too similar to the Victorian notion that somehow women are naturally wired for irrationality. There has to be a social reason why this spreads among women, there is a gap somewhere in science education that leaves women more vulnerable to this.

And I actually watched it spread. The transmission seems to be helped by exploiting trusted relationships among network nodes, so to speak. But that still doesn't explain why someone is susceptible to the attack in the first place.

I'm also skeptical about the purity idea, because it's an arbitrary (and wrong) definition of purity to begin with and there is really no reason why women should be hard-wired to fall for these things. This is traditionally the moment where completely made-up cavemen analogies are introduced, but those are exactly as unscientific as C/AM itself.

Re: It’s a part of my paleo fantasy, it’s a part of my paleo dream

#40

Post by stiff »

saalweachter wrote: post #19
stiff wrote: post #9

Calling the "naturalistic fallacy" a fallacy is a bit of an overstretch IMO, sure natural=better is not a rule true 100% of the time, but nevertheless until sufficient evidence has not been accumulated that some of the adjustments we make to our lifestyle are not harmful to us health-wise avoiding them is not an unreasonable heuristic to follow. One example is how it became clear in the last years in nutritional scie…

The problem with herbalism is that it's the first place science-based medicine went looking for drugs. For basically any herb and effect someone ascribes to it, there have already been twenty rigorous studies, and either no statistical effect was found or the responsible chemicals were extracted, purified, concentrated, and synthesized and are now marketed under two brand names and three generics. Going to herbs dire…

Yours is a very common response I get to this - I wonder why, since there is absolutely no evidence for it. You vastly underestimate the number of plants in existence and vastly overestimate the fraction we have been able to study rigorously. You also hugely simplify the chemistry of it all, the main advantage of plants over modern medicine in its typical form is that they contain complex compounds of chemical substances which show a synergy in a certain direction e.g. they interact with the body in a different way when they are administered together than if they would be ingested separately. Analyzing such compounds and the interactions between them is still often beyond the current state of science and is also not as well funded as traditional drug research, simply because traditional drugs are easier to sell.

Please don't have the impression that I am somehow advocating herbs over traditional medicine, I don't, and there are surely problems with using herbs, but those are different problems that the one most often mentioned. The material you use has to be rather fresh because the concentration of active substances degenerates with time very quickly, the concentration also varies a lot from one area of growth to another so it might be difficult to come up with dosages, they can have serious side effects just like traditional medicine, they are inconvenient to store and use etc.

You can find scientific references for most of what I said and anyway it would come to no surprise to a second-year biology undergraduate. Just reading the wikipedia page about herbalism would clarify a lot of misunderstanding on the topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbalism

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