Re: putting quackery to the test
On Aug 8, 2006, at 1:06 PM, joanna wrote:
Why? The real comparison should be to the efficacy of “mainstream”
medicine (henceforth referred to as professional-racket-medicine),
especially as a ratio of public and individual dollars spent.
Setting aside the silly anecdotes (man I would love to take the
guy who introduced this style of writing — Jane Ficklebottom of
Wasatch knows the other side. Her family of five, including
newborn Jason, have led the archetypal exurban life for four
years…. yadda, yadda…. — to a parking lot), there is (in the
above article) a bit of attention (in the manner of Fox News “Fair
and Balanced”) to the excesses and accuracy of professional-racket- medicine medicine. Nor is the promiscuous nature of professional- racket-medicine made obvious, as remedies stolen from
“alternative” medicine are quickly incorporated into professional- racket medicine, and even claimed as one of its successes. Right on ravi!
Except that what Ravi writes isn’t true.
These are quotes from the article that started this - by a prof at
the Harvard Medical School - it doesn’t get more establishment than
that:
But it is not a matter of geography or culture. Until the 19th
century, Western practitioners were badly wrong, attributing
diseases to an imbalance in humors, bleeding patients and
prescribing poultices and purgatives. Modern Western medicine has
also embraced therapies that were later disproven. In the 1960s,
surgeons tied off an artery under the breastbone in patients with
angina, believing this increased circulation to the diseased heart.
Many patients swore by the surgery, but when the procedure was
subjected to a clinical trial, it turned out that the sham
operation was equally beneficial.On the other hand, one of the most important new therapies for
leukemia is an arsenic derivative identified in western China as
part of traditional practice that resulted in well-documented
remissions; its effects on key molecules in the malignant cells
have been elegantly mapped by scientists. And qualified researchers
are testing components of tumeric and other spices than can inhibit
melanoma and breast cancer cell growth. Science is enthusiastic
when it meets reality.
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