Isabel, a cute 10-year-old girl from Texas who loved riding horses, walked into my office a year and a half ago with one of the most severe cases of autoimmune disease I had ever seen. Her face was swollen, her skin was inflamed, her joints were swollen, her immune system was attacking her entire body–her muscles, her skin, her joints, her blood vessels, her liver, and her white and red blood cells. Isabel couldn’t squeeze her hand or make a fist. The tips of her fingers and toes were always cold from Raynaud’s disease that inflammed her blood vessels. She was tired and miserable and was losing her hair. Isabel was on elephant doses of intravenous steroids every three weeks just to keep her alive, and she was taking prednisone, aspirin, acid blockers, and methotrexate, a chemotherapy drug used to shut down the immune system daily.
Two months after I first saw Isabel and discovered and treated the underlying causes of her inflammation–after, as she says she, “stopped eating gluten, dairy, and sugar and took some supplements” she was symptom free. In less than a year, she was completely healthy, her blood tests were normal, and she was off all her medication.
I can't tell you what u/conception means specifically, but I can point out that the story cites exactly one individual and has no control group. If you don't have a statistically significant sample size and a control group, you are conducting bad science.
I'm afraid science is more complex than that. It's true that you don't have a proven theory, verified to the point that it can be considered settled, until you have a statistically significant sample, a control group, and several replications. But a lot happens before you get to that point. You can't test every hypothesis you come up with; there's no time. The hypotheses that are worth testing have to be sorted from those that aren't.
In fact, the medical literature is full of case studies. Do they prove anything? No. But they suggest things to try in subsequent cases that seem similar -- and if a technique finds enough success in practice, maybe it's worth doing a study on.
Okay, but the passage 'conception quoted said nothing about proving anything.
I don't know what source that was quoted from or what other claims that document might make. (The quoted passage doesn't even tell us what theory its anecdote is being presented in support of.) But to claim that this passage in itself establishes that the source is "pseudoscience" or "bad science" is, frankly, ridiculous.
You know, the scientific method has no special dispensations for orthodoxies -- if anything, the very notion of an orthodoxy should be repellent to a scientist. But scientists are human, and many people are attracted to orthodoxies.
Yet if there's anything we know, it's that all theories, orthodox or not, have their limitations. Given that, isn't it a good thing that there are people willing to explore unorthodox possibilities even if most of them are wrong?
I'm not suggesting credulity. I'm suggesting humility: a keen awareness of how much we still don't know.
Dr. Mark Hyman is a practicing physician, not a disconnected from patients (i.e. the real world) researcher. He's identified an intolerance and he's treating it, and he got positive results. What's unscientific in his centuries-old approach?
So, if I'm a physician, and if somebody comes to me with signs of a peanut allergy, I need to first do a control group before I treat by asking them to eliminate peanuts from their diet and see if they will get the symptoms? You're not being serious! Gluten intolerance is often asymptomatic and does harm that's not so obvious and directly correlated. In fact, it's probably better to have Celiac's and completely eliminate gluten with no doubts than have the asymptomatic form and keep living in denial!
Okay, I agree with you on the proof, but, again, he's a doctor and his focus and moral goal is healing patients, not doing research by the book. If he was purely a researcher, I'd agree with you, but, again, he's very actively practicing medicine, and his conclusions are not based solely on the cases he references, I'm sure.
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coeliac_disease), there's a growing asymptomatic Celic disease in the United States - about 1% of the population. So, is this rare or not, I don't know, but all this is about a pathological level of sensitivity. There many more who are sensitive yet not to the level of pathology and that's what's causing low-grade inflammation that's slowly and silently ruining your thyroid and other organs.
Well, in America, the placebo effect is more effective than many pharmaceuticals, so, yes, I'd recommended homeopathy as well, knowing that it can do well and for sure do no harm compared to drugs that just address symptoms, don't cure anything, and do certain damage especially in the long run. I'm not saying that plecebo could help anyone with PMS, I honestly doubt that, but he lists that as the last resort in that particular article and being a doctor who's seen a lot of patients, why would I doubt his recommendation? Maybe it really works for some, how can I know?
"in America, the placebo effect is more effective than many pharmaceuticals" - There's nothing particularly unique about Americans that would require different treatment than humans in the rest of the world (except for perhaps the incredible obesity problem).
"I'd recommended homeopathy as well, knowing that it can do well and for sure do no harm compared to drugs that just address symptoms" - Actually, there is harm is encouraging people to spend money and time on things that are demonstrably false, because it prevents that time and money from being applied towards worthwhile causes (like finding effective treatments for Alzheimer's).
"being a doctor who's seen a lot of patients, why would I doubt his recommendation?" - An MD degree does not bestow infallibility or scientific inscrutability on the people who have them. MDs disagree with each other pretty routinely, so if you're curious about a doctor's recommendation, 1. find another doctor who disagrees, and try to understand why they disagree, and 2. read some summaries of the actual scientific studies behind whatever the recommended treatment is. If you can't find any scientific studies supporting the treatment, that should be a warning sign.
1. Regarding the placebo/nocebo effect, cultural and other differences matter. I can't find where I read about Americans being generally more affected by it, but I won't be surprised if it's related to powerful marketing of pharmaceuticals on media. Trying to find this, I just read that Americans are the most hypochondriac - maybe it's related.
2. I agree with what you said on second opinions and doing your own due diligence, but my point was different - I'm not a doctor, so, I'd take his advice on PMS with a grain of salt although I personally doubt that the placebo can help with that. Hyman's main theme is reducing sugar intake and I honestly haven't found a doctor so far who argues with that. I've only found people living in denial, because they are so hooked up to that substance.
3. As I said, I personally don't believe that the placebo effect of homeopathy can help with PMS and many other conditions, but maybe it does work better for women who look alternative therapies.
That really depends on who prepared your homeopathic treatments. They aren't regulated or subject to reasonable quality control. A few years ago a couple of manufacturers had to pull a number of products - the FDA had discovered that they contained medicinal quantities of actual medicine (no wonder they worked for some people!) Worse, because of the lack of quality control, the dosage was wildly inconsistent from batch to batch, and of course with the active ingredients not listed anywhere people were having allergic reactions to medicines they didn't think they were taking.
The homeopathic medicine market is not in anyway trustworthy.
I think Boiron and Hyland are pretty trustworthy, but I agree that maybe there are questionable manufacturers out there. The same applies to supplement manufacturers, but that's a whole another chapter of this discussion! I recently found (thanks to my ConsumerLab subscription) that one of the leading vendors of organic raw cacao actually had pretty high levels of cadmium (way above the norm) and I've read in the news feeds that even strictly controlled pharmaceuticals have recalls, so, it's all a matter of luck.
Well, I asked for those as that's what I've been accused of not doing myself earlier. So, if I'm the one not providing any, do better! I'm sure you all can use Google, but, I guess, there are way many here who are too lazy to do their own search and research and just come here to click arrows, hyperlinks, and scroll!
The point of asking you to provide references is to give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you're reading well-conducted scientific research but making errors. Or maybe you have nothing at all to support what you say.
You've said a bunch of stuff in this thread that makes me think your cites are goig to be low quality, but may e I'm wrong and you have links to randomised controlled studies.
All I said is based on many years of following various carefully selected sources of information. I cannot provide exact studies as I don't really keep tract of things outside of the conclusions I accumulate in my mind and based on my own self-experimentation. I really can provide them, I need to invest a lot of time digging them out and, honestly, I won't do this for people who're being aggressive and not appreciative to me - I won't sugarcoat it, you're not worth the effort and my time given the attitude. I do a lot of legwork only to people who respect my effort. Anyway, health and nutrition is not my job, but I have a great interest in it, and a very good track record of being able to memorize facts, aggregate, and distill knowledge. Studies, when it comes to nutrition, are more often flawed than not, but the people who I follow are pretty trustworthy, have the credentials, and they weed out things for me and explain them in a accessible way to a person who's not a biochemist or any health professional. I will list some of my sources though: Robb Wolf, Chris Kresser, Mark Hyman, William Davis, David Perlmutter, Mercola (I know, I know), Andrew Weil (I know, again), Jack Kruse, Doug McGuff, Chris Masterjohn, Paul Jaminet, and some others. I listen and follow many others, but I don't trust them - it's only to find references and seeds for new knowledge, but even those who I trust - I still try to dig deeper, cross-reference, and so on. I also do my own research over at the Hacker News of biohacking and self-experimentation (Longecity), but, again, that's only to see what others are doing and find new seeds, I'm not trusting most of the people over there as they have no face. I follow a long number of blogs, listen to many podcasts, so, I see many angles, and I pick for myself the lifestyle that makes the most sense based on my accumulated knowledge and, so far, and, thank god, things are working outstandingly for me. Also, I do find a meaningful explanation of things - something that's very essential, yet, a luxury nowadays. So, low quality or not - it's really your problem, not mine. I have no goal to prove anything to anybody, I spare the seeds of knowledge I've acquired so dearly to those who could appreciate the gift, to the others - they don't deserve it anyway. I'm really not the humanist type. I'm more of the egoist, so, the less people know the truth as long I know it, the better it is for me and my family! This planet is getting too overcrowded anyway! Munch grains, slurp kale, binge on pizza, abstain from wine - I can only feel sorry for you! I am sorry for being cynical, but that's life.
Regarding which specific points I made all over this thread do you want me to back with a study? The whole modern CVD prevention is based on a hypothesis (Lipid hypothesis), which itself is based on scientific fraud committed by Ansel Keys (he ignored evidence that didn't suit him well), and most of America and the world today eats the semi-dwarf wheat, which was created with prehistoric genetic engineering means, has never been studied on humans, and is not even wheat as it's a mix of wheat and a weed, and has twice the chromosomes of the other wheat cultivars. In science, the simplest hypothesis wins and there are competing ones, and the winner should be the explanation that we're eating foods that we're not adapted to and due to the oversanitization and many infection diseases of the past being eradicated, our immune response needs time (generations) to tame itself down. So, our hypothesis should be the winning one, not the one made with fraud for political and geopolitical reasons!
"The simplest hypothesis" does not "win". The hypothesis that fits the evidence best is accepted until a better one is discovered.
Your spittle-flecked diatribes don't put forth anything remotely resembling the scientific process.
Cite your sources and their studies, not their blogs. But frankly, you're well through the rabbit hole and I don't think you realize how out to lunch your insistence on avoiding those in favor of crackpot pseudoscience is.
