Quote:
Originally Posted by jammies
That you don't understand how this bolded phrase doesn't apply to the study of alternative medicine shows you have only the most superficial understanding of statistics and science.
I don't *need* to detect a cause if doesn't have any effects. Healing is an effect, and medicine that doesn't do any healing isn't actually medicine, in the same way that vehicle that doesn't locomote isn't a vehicle, or a well that holds no water is just a hole.
All the holistic verbiage in the world amounts to nothing if the actual practice of the whatever therapy is at issue doesn't DO anything. To say, "Well it does something but you can't detect it" is utterly nonsensical, because the whole point of medicine is to do something you CAN detect, namely: heal the patient. If it doesn't do that, why exactly should it be called medicine, or need to be "explained"?
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That you assume from a blurb on a message board that I would only have a superficial understanding of anything indicates you place a wildly exaggerated amount of credence in the medium. I notice a few of you like to make thinly-veiled ad hominem attacks.
The intention of the statement was in regards to the measurement of why something produces healing effects rather than the fact that it does. Currently, alternative / holistic methods produce healing effects, whether attributed to the placebo effect or to actual results of the method. If I, individually and anecdotally, experience healing effects, I will continue to use these methods. There are millions of people that have experienced healing effects from these therapies. One could consider that this is all coincidence and a mass placebo effect of considerable proportions or that current experiments or studies are not easily constructed to account for all the variables involved in the healing processes in human bodies and that the results of the healing process is not what was initially set out to measure. Scientific studies attempt to control or adjust for variables beyond what they are attempting to measure, but, if that which they're attempting to measure is intended to operate on or among all the variables, the forest could be missed for the trees.
Not to bring up another contentious topic, but look at climate science. There is an astronomic number of variables involved in climate science and controls on all those variables is impossible and the most complex computer algorithms are enormously challenged. Yet we have very definitive statements being made publically about the exact causes of a degree this way or that in global temperature. It's not just about statistical counting of obvious expected results.
This is not a crack against science (like some of you would like to interpret it.) I'm merely pointing out that, like anything, science is not infallible or complete about its understanding about anything.