5 ms·

How do you regulate Wu?

43 points by baha_man 17y ago

a-priori 17y ago
I think the best solution would be to say that 'alternative medicine' is still medicine and must follow existing regulations. So, treatments must be prescribed by a doctor, they must be approved for use in humans (and so must demonstrate utility and safety), and so on.
- KirinDave 17y ago
  But the practitioners will fight this. Many of them are canny enough to know that if you measure them by the same yardstick as real medicine they're going to fall short. That's why they dance around the FDA regulations with their disclaimers so often. And what for the more established practices, like chiropractic? They already have "doctors". How do you bootstrap this procedure when hundreds of "trained" professional practitioners already flood the market? Do you say, "Okay guys, put your careers on hold while we do 5-year trials!" And we've already done those trials for the most part, and they've come up negative. So do we just say, "Find a new business?" And you've got to do this all without giving your opponents an opportunity to rile up the public against your actions. Voters can be an irrational lot, but a lot of irrational people can outvote a few rational people. Unless you spin it just so, a narrative of big government crushing small business can be devastating. I think what you're proposing is what we'd like to have happen, but it's incredibly difficult to have it turn out that way.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
- gcheong 17y ago
  I feel quite the opposite. I think it's similar to the problem of separation of church and state. By that I mean you shouldn't be prohibited from trying out unproven treatments and you can believe whatever you want, but it should be kept separate from the medical system that has been shown by scientific inquiry to be effective.
  - KirinDave 17y ago
    Okay, man. I appreciate this "church and state" argument, but we're talking about medicine here. This isn't people's souls at stake, it's their immediate health and lives. It's one thing to limit what people put into their body, I'm nod advocating that. It's another entirely to limit what people claim. People can claim anything can cure anything, and then someone who isn't making a fully informed decision then puts their lives at risk, and in the process loses cash to someone who simply made a statement and offered a service. In many other industries, this is okay. The market tends to detect bullshitters and avoid them. Usually it's only a few over-eager suckers who lose some cash and warn everyone else. But in the case of medicine, transactions are done not only in people's money but also with their health as currency. Asking for the market to correct for this asks for an incredible amount of misery and death to occur before a treatment can be identified. Ethically, this seems like a very bad position to take.
leif 17y ago
I am disappointed that this article does not discuss chambers.
- dylanz 17y ago
  This blog assumes its readers are already at the 36th.
oliveoil 17y ago
Out of curiosity: how many of you guys here consider the traditional Chinese medicine valid? (by valid I mean "possibly having positive healing outcomes beyond the placebo effect")
- paul 17y ago
  What make you think that the placebo effect is not "valid"?
  - necubi 17y ago
    The placebo effect exists, but it exists independently of whatever expensive alt-medicine crap is being pushed at the moment. Therefore, if we're discussing the efficacy of the "medicine," you can't include placebo effects. This is also why medical trials nearly always include a placebo group.
    - est 17y ago
      OK, this is a dumb question, what makes 'western' medicine not a placebo?
  - yason 17y ago
    I've long known that in the end, it's the human itself who will heal himself from any illness; not medical doctors, alternative healers, or a particular kind of medicine. People who don't want to heal simply will not, or at least they'll create a suitable series of different subsequent illnesses. Those who want will heal, possibly through whatever particular enabler they might initially need or simply on their own. There are only few studies of healing miracles, possibly because we really haven't figured out yet why some terminally ill cancer patient with only months left suddenly rids himself of all cancer cells over a mere week. However, I've now come to the conclusion that it works both ways: the human being can also make himself very sick, up to the level of being dead. This has shifted my focus from healing and curing illnesses -- i.e. fixing the aftermath -- to looking for the answer from the question of why do we get ill in the first place? Why some people almost never get sick? Why some are chronically sick with several illnesses at any given moment? Why these tendencies sometimes change? Why is it that people's lives seem to change in sync with getting chronic illnesses and healing from them? The validity of the placebo effect kind of fits in logically if we first assume the foremost responsibility of one being healthy or sick to the person himself.
skybrian 17y ago
A reasonable compromise would be to require providers of alternative medicine to show that it's not harmful. Maybe it doesn't do anything, but that's for others to decide.
- ikitat 17y ago
  No. Water can poison and kill you at a large enough dosage. Oxygen too. Treating cancer with homeopathy is harmless until the cancer kills you. All medicine (supported by science or not) carries some risk, the poison is in the dosage. Woo practitioners are more than happy to bankrupt their victims, what's the harm? A Milwaukee girl died of diabetes recently, her parents were trying to cure her with prayer.
  - rsheridan6 17y ago
    yet the FDA manages to regulate drugs for safety, regardless of the fact that dropping 10 tons of even the safest drug on your head results in a really nasty headache.
  - jff 17y ago
    There's a difference between things that are generally harmless in their prescribed doses--water, aspirin, homeopathy BS--and the example given in the article, where the patient took the pills as specified and soon lost her kidneys, got cancer, and had a heart attack. If the Wu practitioners are giving out lethal doses of their medicine, they should be crushed by the FDA.
    - ikitat 17y ago
      The FDA has the power to prosecute for unproven claims. Regulating woo could give it more credibility.
    - MaysonL 17y ago
      The FDA doesn't have any jurisdiction in Britain.
CoreDumpling 17y ago
From what I've seen in the US, a lot of Chinese medicine is actually FDA-approved as "beverages" -- supposedly they are safe to drink, but it's up to the user to believe whether or not there's any medicinal effect. Placebo or not, I can say that 板蓝根 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isatis_tinctoria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isatis_tinctoria) has pretty consistently made me feel better when I had the flu or sore throat.

43 points by baha_man 17y ago

I think the best solution would be to say that 'alternative medicine' is still medicine and must follow existing regulations. So, treatments must be prescribed by a doctor, they must be approved for use in humans (and so must demonstrate utility and safety), and so on.

KirinDave 17y ago
But the practitioners will fight this. Many of them are canny enough to know that if you measure them by the same yardstick as real medicine they're going to fall short. That's why they dance around the FDA regulations with their disclaimers so often. And what for the more established practices, like chiropractic? They already have "doctors". How do you bootstrap this procedure when hundreds of "trained" professional practitioners already flood the market? Do you say, "Okay guys, put your careers on hold while we do 5-year trials!" And we've already done those trials for the most part, and they've come up negative. So do we just say, "Find a new business?" And you've got to do this all without giving your opponents an opportunity to rile up the public against your actions. Voters can be an irrational lot, but a lot of irrational people can outvote a few rational people. Unless you spin it just so, a narrative of big government crushing small business can be devastating. I think what you're proposing is what we'd like to have happen, but it's incredibly difficult to have it turn out that way.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
gcheong 17y ago
I feel quite the opposite. I think it's similar to the problem of separation of church and state. By that I mean you shouldn't be prohibited from trying out unproven treatments and you can believe whatever you want, but it should be kept separate from the medical system that has been shown by scientific inquiry to be effective.
- KirinDave 17y ago
  Okay, man. I appreciate this "church and state" argument, but we're talking about medicine here. This isn't people's souls at stake, it's their immediate health and lives. It's one thing to limit what people put into their body, I'm nod advocating that. It's another entirely to limit what people claim. People can claim anything can cure anything, and then someone who isn't making a fully informed decision then puts their lives at risk, and in the process loses cash to someone who simply made a statement and offered a service. In many other industries, this is okay. The market tends to detect bullshitters and avoid them. Usually it's only a few over-eager suckers who lose some cash and warn everyone else. But in the case of medicine, transactions are done not only in people's money but also with their health as currency. Asking for the market to correct for this asks for an incredible amount of misery and death to occur before a treatment can be identified. Ethically, this seems like a very bad position to take.

leif 17y ago

I am disappointed that this article does not discuss chambers.

dylanz 17y ago
This blog assumes its readers are already at the 36th.

oliveoil 17y ago

Out of curiosity: how many of you guys here consider the traditional Chinese medicine valid? (by valid I mean "possibly having positive healing outcomes beyond the placebo effect")

paul 17y ago
What make you think that the placebo effect is not "valid"?
- necubi 17y ago
  The placebo effect exists, but it exists independently of whatever expensive alt-medicine crap is being pushed at the moment. Therefore, if we're discussing the efficacy of the "medicine," you can't include placebo effects. This is also why medical trials nearly always include a placebo group.
  - est 17y ago
    OK, this is a dumb question, what makes 'western' medicine not a placebo?
- yason 17y ago
  I've long known that in the end, it's the human itself who will heal himself from any illness; not medical doctors, alternative healers, or a particular kind of medicine. People who don't want to heal simply will not, or at least they'll create a suitable series of different subsequent illnesses. Those who want will heal, possibly through whatever particular enabler they might initially need or simply on their own. There are only few studies of healing miracles, possibly because we really haven't figured out yet why some terminally ill cancer patient with only months left suddenly rids himself of all cancer cells over a mere week. However, I've now come to the conclusion that it works both ways: the human being can also make himself very sick, up to the level of being dead. This has shifted my focus from healing and curing illnesses -- i.e. fixing the aftermath -- to looking for the answer from the question of why do we get ill in the first place? Why some people almost never get sick? Why some are chronically sick with several illnesses at any given moment? Why these tendencies sometimes change? Why is it that people's lives seem to change in sync with getting chronic illnesses and healing from them? The validity of the placebo effect kind of fits in logically if we first assume the foremost responsibility of one being healthy or sick to the person himself.

skybrian 17y ago

A reasonable compromise would be to require providers of alternative medicine to show that it's not harmful. Maybe it doesn't do anything, but that's for others to decide.

ikitat 17y ago
No. Water can poison and kill you at a large enough dosage. Oxygen too. Treating cancer with homeopathy is harmless until the cancer kills you. All medicine (supported by science or not) carries some risk, the poison is in the dosage. Woo practitioners are more than happy to bankrupt their victims, what's the harm? A Milwaukee girl died of diabetes recently, her parents were trying to cure her with prayer.
- rsheridan6 17y ago
  yet the FDA manages to regulate drugs for safety, regardless of the fact that dropping 10 tons of even the safest drug on your head results in a really nasty headache.
- jff 17y ago
  There's a difference between things that are generally harmless in their prescribed doses--water, aspirin, homeopathy BS--and the example given in the article, where the patient took the pills as specified and soon lost her kidneys, got cancer, and had a heart attack. If the Wu practitioners are giving out lethal doses of their medicine, they should be crushed by the FDA.
  - ikitat 17y ago
    The FDA has the power to prosecute for unproven claims. Regulating woo could give it more credibility.
  - MaysonL 17y ago
    The FDA doesn't have any jurisdiction in Britain.

CoreDumpling 17y ago

From what I've seen in the US, a lot of Chinese medicine is actually FDA-approved as "beverages" -- supposedly they are safe to drink, but it's up to the user to believe whether or not there's any medicinal effect. Placebo or not, I can say that 板蓝根 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isatis_tinctoria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isatis_tinctoria) has pretty consistently made me feel better when I had the flu or sore throat.