4 ms·
Without a twin with the exact same injury and no intervention, to compare with, we don't know from this whether it was just the six extra weeks of healing that
by froobius 1y ago
Without a twin with the exact same injury and no intervention, to compare with, we don't know from this whether it was just the six extra weeks of healing that made the difference.
- fluoridation 1y agoI mean, GP did open up by saying it was an anecdote, not that it was evidence that electrotherapy works.
- froobius 1y agoYes but some anecdotes are closer to evidence than others. And people seem to be treating the above anecdote like it is evidence. Which we both agree it isn't. It isn't convincing given the time frame / lack of comparison.
- simmerup 1y agoPeople are adults and can be willing to take chances on anecdotes instead of waiting 30 years for science to maybe fund some studies that end up just as murky
- froobius 1y agoSure, I don't disagree with that. Although, in addition to labelling something as an anecdote, it's also useful to flag the confounding factors.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- benterix 1y agoMy friend had a kid with a bad eczema. She tried everything. Desperate, she took her to one of these charlatans. He asked the girl to stand on a copper plate. After a few days the eczema disappeared. Now my friend totally believes in all this stuff.
- simmerup 1y agoThe risk to reward ratio there is off the charts though.
- rogerrogerr 1y agoI mean, if I didn’t have anything else I was trying that could plausibly explain it, that’d be really hard to resist accepting as the cause. Totally understand it.
- Retric 1y agoIt’s hard to internalize we see permanent and seemingly arbitrary changes from things like hormone levels. The last teen pimple for example isn’t noticeable in the moment as the last teen pimple because you don’t know the future etc etc.
- cootsnuck 1y agoWe still don't understand the placebo effect. But definitely better to accept it's a thing and move on than believe grifters actually know what they're talking about.
- Retric 1y agoThe placebo effect is unlikely to be important here. Hormonal changes mean people have permanent differences in their skin at specific points in time. Eczema is known to respond more cyclically with menstrual cycles, which is a lot easier to correlate.
- stickfigure 1y ago"Biome recolonized by the bacteria of hundreds of other people who also put their dirty feet on the plate"
- msandford 1y agoIt's a wonderful theory, but alas. Copper is aggressively antimicrobial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_properties_of_copper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_properties_of_co...
- masfuerte 1y agoIt is evidence. It's not proof.
- deadbabe 1y agoThe GP told a good story and was very personable and relatable. But you can treat their data as garbage, pseudoscience, backed by nothing. Because it is. Any effects are likely to be placebo. Wait for real research. Science isn’t a popularity contest.
- fluoridation 1y agoMy point is that it's tone-deaf to complain about lack of rigor when the first thing the comment says is that it's not meant to be evidence. It's like reading a fictional novel and giving it a negative review for not containing sufficient citations for the events being related.
- nickff 1y agoEven with a twin, you still wouldn’t “know”, because there might have been a difference in either their injury, their ability to heal (people can heal at different rates for many non-genetic reasons), or other, even ‘random’ factors. There is a well-known case study where a man ‘cracked’ each joint in one hand every day, and never ‘cracked’ any joint in the other hand for many years, to see whether it caused arthritis. He didn’t get arthritis in either hand. The only thing you can take away from that is that cracking the joints doesn’t necessarily cause arthritis for him. The person posted an anecdote; you don’t have to rely on in, but your dismissal is shallow and unhelpful.
- im3w1l 1y agoImo that study puts an upper bound on how harmful cracking your joints can be.
- selcuka 1y agoThis is easier to test than arthritis. A doctor can make incisions on both arms of the same person at the exact same depth and length, then apply electricity to one of the wounds and monitor healing time.
- autoexec 1y ago> The only thing you can take away from that is that cracking the joints doesn’t necessarily cause arthritis for him. It also tells us that cracking the joints doesn't appear to cause arthritis for everybody. If you're a knuckle cracker there's hope.
- Arch-TK 1y agoIt tells you that with a sample size of 1. Maybe the person has a genetic mutation that protects against arthritis. Anecdotes aren't useless, but be very careful of _any_ conclusion you draw from them.
- froobius 1y agoSo if you say something is an anecdote, then that anecdote is immune to any discussion or analysis? How about the idea that some anecdotes are better than others. E.g. "Anecdotal, but I took paracetamol and found it wasn't helpful for my pain. So I don't think it works." There's an anecdote for you, maybe you should stop taking paracetamol now. By your logic no one can discuss, analyse, or point out it any potential issues with it. And btw my stance is that the electrotherapy is interesting and plausibly could help. But tendonitis issues can heal with 6 weeks of basically rest, and that should be acknowledged in the discussion. (12 weeks in total, including the 6 weeks with a PT.)
- b112 1y agoI do wonder if the first 6 weeks did the work, and the results appears in parallel with the alternate therapy. Of course, this sort of conversation is a prelude to "let's try alternate therapy first, for science!" with volunteers, so there is benefit.
- aklemm 1y agoIndeed, the takeaway I get from this is how we tend to underestimate how long healing takes. People expect major injuries to be healed in 6 weeks, but it often takes that long to simply turn the corner toward full healing.