Sequel Thread To Holistic Doctors, and medicine

Unfortunately MBG isn't getting the hint. The science people in this discussion don't understand why the layperson doesn't see what is obvious to them (science people). I'm trying to show, as you finally commented on, what the layperson sees and how they view what's thrown at them. Obviously I can't speak for every single layperson, but I think I can give a general idea.As far as homeopathy, the idea behind it hasn't impressed me enough to look deeper; so it should be easy to show me that it is "all bunk". But I haven't seen anything so far that would enable me to say without a shadow of a doubt that it is "all bunk".

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Well, judging quality takes familiarity with both the subject area and with the proper protocols for conducting double-blind placebo-based trials.

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Which is true of any profession. What's obvious to me in my profession or hobby isn't obvious to those outside of them.I've already made it clear I'm not a scientist, although I have worked with scientists. Scientists with opposing opinions are not uncommon. So how does the layperson discern between the two consistently? We don't know the capability of the people on this board any more than those in the studies. Just because someone is a scientist doesn't mean they are a good one. That goes for any profession.While MBG is not concerned about how she measures up in my eyes, she missed the point I was trying to make. How can I tell if someone is a good scientist or not? On this board, all we have is how one presents their information and arguments.Telling me to use a specific source, but when I find support for the opposite side; the report is still not acceptable and only then is it revealed that the source makes no guarantees. In my mind this means it makes no guarantee for the other side either. Again, I'm at ground zero.It would make more sense to me to actually address the opposition's studies. Show how to read it, if there is somewhere else to look for more specifics, show it. Give us the tools to function if that is even realistically possible in this issue.One thing I enjoy about being a secretary is that I have worked with a wide variety of people. (preacher, mechanics, engineers, chemists, coaches, doctors, generals, admirals, senators) I love asking questions. I consider a good job experience as someplace I can learn something. Since I work with coaches now, they aren't a good source of information for this issue. I'm trying to help the scientists understand why their arguments don't seem to be making a dent, why we aren't jumping on your bandwagon.When my daughter was in high school, she had a math teacher who was unable to help her understand when she had problems. His problem was that he just kept repeating his answers to her questions the same way he stated them originally, which is what she didn't understand.Sometimes we have to change our approach to help others understand.

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I looked at those 3 studies myself. Have you read them?

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Since you won't provide links to what you are reading or quoting, I have no idea if I'm reading the same thing you are.Provide the flippin links!!!!!

Pauling wrote a whole book about this. It isn't the one I own; I've got How to Live Longer and Feel Better. I've been looking through the chapter on cancer and it sheds some more light on the background and the details of the Pauling-Cameron study. It would be helpful if you could just read the chapter; but as that's presumably not possible, I'll give some of the relevant points.Before Cameron collaborated with Pauling, he carried out operations on hundreds of patients with cancer in his surgery in Scotland. He was looking for a fresh approach, particularly one that strengthened the natural defense mechanisms of the human body. He and Pauling were independently researching the application of the property of vitamin C of increasing the rate of synthesis of collagen, to strengthen the intercellular cement in large doses by the increased synthesis of collagen fibrils. Cameron started to cautiously prescribe vitamin C to dying cancer patients under his care. When he became aware of Pauling's work, the two began a long association in 1971.During the next 10 years, Cameron gave vitamin C in large doses to several hundred patients with advanced cancer, almost all of them being patients for whom the conventional methods of treatment had been tried and found to be of no further benefit. He published several papers on the results of vitamin C on various aspects of these patients' care, including one about a patient who seemed to recover completely from cancer when treated with vitamin C, in whom, however, the cancer returned when the intake of vitamin C was stopped, and who again recovered completely when the treatment with vitamin C was resumed. (Cameron, Campbell, and Jack, 1975.) In 1986 (the time when this book was published), the patient was continuing to take 12.5g of vitamin C per day, and after 12 years was in excellent health.By 1973, Cameron and Pauling were wanting to carry out a controlled trial. Cameron refused to do the trial with his own patients because by then he was so convinced of the value of vitamin C to them that he was unwilling for ethical reasons to withhold it from any patient to whom he had the power to give it. Pauling asked the National Cancer Institute to carry out such a trial, while he and Cameron carried out a controlled trial at Cameron's hospital, the Vale of Leven. The patients were all receiving the same treatment apart from vitamin C, which was only given in large doses to Cameron's patients. Another study was done in 1978, again at the Vale of Leven, with 100 vitamin C treated patients and 1000 controls. The 100 vitamin C treated patients and their matched controls were divided into 9 groups, based on the primary type of tumor; e.g. 17 vitamin C treated patients and 170 controls with cancer of the colon. Survival times were measured from the date when the patient was determined to be "untreatable"; that is, when the conventional therapies were deemed to be no longer effective -- at this date or a few days later vitamin C treatment was begun. In 1978 the mean survival times for the 9 groups were between 114 and 435 days greater for the vitamin C groups than for the corresponding control groups, an average of 255 days for all groups, and were continuing to increase because 8% of the vitamin C patients were still alive, and none of the controls were.A similar study was carried out in the Fukuoka Torikai Hospital in Japan during the five years beginning 1 January 1973 (Morishige and Murata, 1979), with results similar to those obtained in the Vale of Leven Hospital.Pauling then mentions the Mayo studies, and explains that they did not follow the protocols of the other studies. He explains: We spoke here about the fact that Pauling and Cameron gave the vitamin intravenously, while the Mayo Clinic studies gave it orally. None of us were aware of these other factors though, were we? The facts were here in my book, which I read about a year and a half ago, at a time when I was not too interested in specifics of clinical studies. Can you also see, though, that Stephen Barrett was not interested in this information either? You are not getting all the facts at Quackwatch. He does not mention the facts that don't help his case.I believe Pauling and Cameron were humanitarians who were genuinely interested in helping people. As I said before, the Mayo Clinic studies were wrongfully devastating to Pauling's reputation in vitamin C research. I believe these ideas are being picked up again however; or at least, I hope they are. I saw at least one study of vitamin C and cancer on PubMed which is ongoing.

As I said, I'm not an expert in Vitamins. My training is more in Chemistry than in Biochemistry. But the Vitamin pages on Wikipedia are quite detailed - you should be able to find out quite a bit from there.What surprises me is that, generally, a Vitamin isn't a particular chemical structure, but a group of related compounds. Only Vitamin C and some of the B vitamins refer to a particular molecular structure.Vitamin A can be any one of a group of related compounds
Vitamin D can be either of two related compounds (but could be one of several other related compounds)
Vitamin E can be one of eight different compounds
Vitamin K, like Vitamin A, can be any one of a group of related compoundsSo it's a bit complicated .

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

This reads like a rebuttal of someone who argued that St. John's wort doesn't work, which is weird given that I said, "Its efficacy has been demonstrated."My criticism concerned not its efficacy but its safety, since it is not FDA approved, and so issues of safety, long-term effects, drug interaction, dosage, and so on, have not been established to anywhere near the degree of drugs that *are* FDA approved, plus sources of St. John's wort are highly variable since there are no standards that must be followed. When you take the pill of a drug with FDA approval that says it contains 10 mg of diltiazem, then you can be very confident it contains 10 mg of diltiazem. The same is not true of many of the drugs of alternative medicine.What I was trying to explain is that both alternative and traditional medicine prescribes drugs, but the drugs of alternative medicine tend to derive from plants and animals rather than from chemical processes. But a drug is still a drug, it's a chemical or cocktail of chemicals that have some effect on the body, and the drugs of alternative medicine sorely lack the quality and safety of drugs with FDA approval.So I wasn't singling St. John's wort out for criticism. St. John's wort was just my example, and I chose it because I thought it was the best case alternative medicine can offer, since it actually works. But even this best example of alternative medicine has all the weaknesses and dangers I noted above. And people get in cars and trust that the airbags won't explode and take off their heads (still a risk for babies and small children, by the way). And people take the drugs of alternative medicine and trust that naturopaths know what they're talking about, but this is a misplaced trust. Fortunately naturopaths are mostly prescribing drugs whose effect cannot be differentiated from placebo, so the dangers are small, but as has often been pointed out in this thread, to the degree that alternative medicine delays effective medical care it can be very dangerous. You mean people who feel the same way you do? By doing what? I believe that what really happened was that you took an FDA approved drug that had been through clinical trials over a number of years and that included on the information sheet a long list of possible side-effects. It was not a poison. Your opinion of FDA approved drugs has a strong emotional component, as indicated by the fact that you don't consider St. John's wort a poison though you didn't tolerate it very well, either. Why do you keep citing self-diagnosed, self-selected people as evidence? Do you remember Dow Corning and silicon breast implants? Thousands of women claimed that these implants increased the risk of autoimmune diseases. Many of the women had horrific stories. The case went to trial before all the medical evidence was in, and Dow Corning was found culpable and assessed damages that forced it into bankruptcy. Many women felt the dangers justified having a second medical procedure to remove their implants.It took a long while for conclusive evidence from further studies to come in, but by that time Dow Corning was history and many women had already had their implants removed. The studies indicated that there was no relationship between silicon breast implants and autoimmune and other diseases. Silicon breast implants are now being used again, and indeed never stopped being used throughout the rest of the world.This is the danger of anecdotal evidence that we've been trying to explain to you. You don't have an identified medical danger. What you have is what you get when people start sharing anecdotal stories: nothing, at least from any scientific perspective that might tell us anything reliable about the real world. I think that working with a trained licensed medical professional is the best way to approach medical issues. I think that listening to those outside the scientific consensus is more risky than listening to those within that consensus, since the consensus view must be the one that is most compelling scientifically since it was able to convince the most scientists. I think that anecdotal evidence is an extremely poor way to develop the answer to any question about anything. Beyond that this is a false charge and the fallacy of overgeneralization, you've convinced yourself that naturopaths know more about the root causes of illness than mainstream medicine. These root causes you believe in are just a mumbo-jumbo of words about things like natural approaches and toxins and at the fringe even nut-case claims about vital forces, none of which have an ounce of scientific support.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Homeopathy believes that substances diluted to the point that there is literally nothing left but water can have a positive therapeutic effect upon the body. A common homeopathic preparation approach is to do a 10:1 dilution 30 times. That means that if the concentration of the original substance was 1 (in other words, it was 100% pure substance), then after 30 10:1 dilutions there is .000000000000000000000000000001 left. If exponential notation is familiar to you, that's 10^-30.You can create your own homeopathic remedies if you're so inclined. If there's a headache medication that works reliably for you (and I do mean reliably - Tylenol doesn't work for me, but aspirin cures my headaches every single time), then the next time you get a headache, take the medication and grind it up into a powder and mix it with 10 ml of pure water. That's the 1st dilution. Now take 1 ml of that mixture, add 10 ml of pure water to it, then mix it thoroughly. Repeat this process 28 more times. Now drink the mixture. Did your headache go away?Even more important, does it make sense to you that such a dilute mixture of headache medication could have any effect whatsoever on you? That's a rhetorical question, hopefully it seems as ridiculous to you as it does to everyone else.As to mechanism, the claim of homeopathy is that the water "remembers" the substance it was mixed with, even though the mixture is so dilute that none of the original substance is left. There is no evidence of this, and the claim originates with the originator of homeopathy, who since he died in 1843 could not possibly have had any way to know such a thing even if it were true. The layperson cannot do this. You'll often see it said here that a scientist operating outside his field is just another layperson, and so what scientists do, and what everyone else should also do, is rely upon the scientific consensus. For issues on the cutting edge of science where there is not yet a strong consensus, then "Not yet known" is a good conclusion. And of course, in science nothing is ever known for certain. *You* can't. Rely upon the consensus. That doesn't guarantee you won't go wrong, but it provides the least chance of going wrong. Right. Precisely. We agree about this. Still, many people enjoy learning, and this conundrum should not be construed as an argument that it is pointless to learn. Increasing one's understanding can be very rewarding, but one should keep in mind that understanding a little bit about a subject does not qualify you to draw independent conclusions outside the consensus. Yep! Now if we could only figure out what that other approach is...--Percy

OK, SJW. It's perhaps not studied as widely as other ADs, I don't honestly know. We don't know the long-term effects of prescription ADs because no studies have been done, and some people have been on them for a decade or longer. But yes, it would probably be beneficial to have this substance regulated so that the composition and dosage are standardized. I'm not against that for any herb. I think it's likely that you will do more harm to your body from taking a stronger drug like Prozac than you will from SJW, but I would not touch any of these things myself. What makes you so sure? When you discuss with me, let's assume we are talking about naturopaths who are MDs. I wouldn't trust anyone else with my health. Why should I not trust one of these? Like PD said, am I supposed to believe they had a brain fart somewhere along the line? A good MD is not going to withhold treatment that is helpful. They are going to explain the various forms of treatment available, the probable efficacy of each in the individual case, and discuss with the patient. An MD who has knowledge of nutritional and environmental medicine is actually going to be able to present more possibilities for treatment than a conventional GP with a drugs-based approach. Do you not accept that a person doesn't always need a drug to get better? I was referring to the editors of the prestigious journals who are calling for reform. At the time I was taking these things I did not want to, but I was hoping they would help and I did not think of them as poisons. Like I said, I know now that SJW is a mild antidepressant and I can assure you that I have the same opinion of it as I do of other antidepressants. I would not touch any of them. Thanks for the comforting thought, though, that I should have known what I was getting into because the side effects were clearly listed on the package insert. Shame they forgot to mention "indefinite adrenal and sexual dysfunction upon withdrawal." I suppose the people who were driven to suicide and homicide on these drugs should have read the package insert too.I don't know anything about silicon breast implants but I would suspect that it isn't a good thing to have in one's body over a long period of time. I would like to see studies done on the health of these women 10, 20, and 30 years after implantation. Fine, that's what my ND/MD is. Let me list again some of the possible causes of depression:Divorce. Stress at work. Poor diet. Food or environmental allergies. Heavy metal toxicity. Illness.A GP might pick up on some of these, like illness, emotional difficulties, or hopefully heavy metal toxicity -- if it is acute and obvious. They are still far more likely to prescribe an antidepressant than any other treatment, or possibly with another treatment. An ND should examine all of the above factors and address those without the need for drugs. Did you read the example I wrote here about the woman who had carbon monoxide poisoning at her workplace? The conventional doctors, the consultants, in the hospital eventually told her it was all in her head. Her ND led her to find the cause of her illness and get it rectified.Now who's proposing that helpful treatment is getting delayed by other treatments that don't work? If that woman had been put on an AD, she would still have been breathing in the carbon monoxide. But if her mood improved, she would have been declared well wouldn't she? You've got to look at both sides of this. Drugs are not always the answer, nor should they be, and people need to be aware of alternatives. There is an enormous bias here that says that it's drugs or nothing, and everything else is mumbo-jumbo. I guess all I can say to that is thank goodness I'm open-minded enough to believe otherwise.

As wiki amusingly points out:

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1ml of a solution which has gone through a 30C dilution would have been diluted into a volume of water equal to that of a cube of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 meters per side, or about 105 light years. Thus, homeopathic remedies of the standard dilutions contain, with overwhelming probability, only water.

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The guy that pioneered Homeopathy believed some kind of healing spirit force was kept in the water, even if there no molecules of the active substance in it. The chances that your bottle of water has a single molecule of active substance is incredibly low - you'd do better to spend the money on lottery tickets instead so that you can quit your job and try to discover what's causing those darned headaches.

Your links, PD.Would you like me to provide you with the links you posted?(PS -- I always include the cite if you have the strength to google.)

Only when industrially produced on the cheap, Java.Naturally occurring vitamins that are simply extracted and then packaged for sale are not "more than one structure (enantiomer)". It's the process used to synthesize vitamins that results in a racemic mixture.

All of your book info is irrelevant, Lindalou.Don't you get it?In the first paragraph of the Cameron/Pauling paper, it says: No formal randomization was used.That's it. Game over.I don't even need to mention that there was no standardization, no good matching of controls by age, stage, and performance status.The procedures that are in place to assure a high quality scientific study are there for a damn good reason.To make sure the results are not biased: Dr. Pauling's studies were biased.Period. End of sentence.

I thought you might say this. Did you read any of that post at all? Does Pauling not get a chance to posthumously explain anything -- like why the patients were chosen in that particular way? Guess not.I'm going to have to take a break for a while. It's getting rather frustrating here. I don't think anything I've come back to say has made an ounce of difference to this discussion. If the rules are set out thus: only the majority of double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trials published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals count for anything -- well then, we all know it's drugs. This discussion was pointless for anyone to begin, much less continue, in that case.

It is courteous to provide the links instead of making people google and hope they are at the same site.This is the link I provided in Message 130 concerning the knee surgery. Homeopathic arnica therapy in patients receiving knee surgery: results of three randomised double-blind trials.The quotes you provided are not found at that link.Now if there is something else I need to click on to get more information on this study, it would be nice to know.That's why providing links directly to the site of your quotes are very helpful at keeping everyone on the same page.I've already expressed that I haven't had chemistry 101, I'm not a scientist, and that laypeople aren't familiar with studies. Like I told Percy, I like to learn. Unfortunately, I don't feel that you are trying to help anyone learn.This issue isn't important enough for me to waste any more time in discussion with you.If you wish to crow winner, go for it.

Links aren't going to help you.Most papers require a subscription to the journal.I have access to the University library; therefore, I have access to all its journals online.You, on the other hand, don't. Bioactive mean bioavailable.Bioavailable: The ability of a drug or other substance to be absorbed and used by the body.Bioactive: Referring to a substance that can be acted upon (used) by a living organism. What on earth are you talking about?"Intentional malnutrition" is to withhold a nutrient (not ALL nutrients) in order to inhibit a disease process. First, drugs are safe and effective.Over 9 million scripts are written for penicillin each year. 400 people die from an adverse reaction to penicillin each year.That means that there's a .0000004 % chance of death.You take a much greater risk by climbing into your car.Second, BigPharma is looking into "natural alternatives". There's BigBucks to be made in "natural alternatives"!However, in order to bring a drug to market, BigPharma must first do extensive testing ... a process that takes (at minimum) 10 years.Unlike AlternaPharma, which can package anything and claim anything.Edited by molbiogirl, : sp

As long as you believe this blanket statement, we're not going to make any headway at all in this discussion. I think we'll have to agree to disagree. The only substances I use for my healing are food, vitamins, and a couple of herbs for the adrenaline dysfunction. I'm not in danger of side effects or death. These substances are safer than aspirin and penicillin. In other words, nyah-nyah-nyah to me with a raspberry on top?