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You're also attempting to Strawman me by presenting arguments as mine that I never stated. "Your argument though is that those dozen possible treatments justif

by analog 14y ago

You're also attempting to Strawman me by presenting arguments as mine that I never stated. "Your argument though is that those dozen possible treatments justify the entire alt.med industry?"

dalke 14y ago
That was rhetorical. You point out that there's perhaps a dozen herbs and nutritional supplements which might .. and I do stress the might .. be a useful treatment. Does that justify the entire herbal and diet supplement industry? Since your argument does seem to be that Nursie is wrong for saying that 100% of alt.med is useless as a treatment, when the actual number is 99.9+%. Do you really want to get that fraction of a mil? Because I'll grant you that <0.1%, and wonder why it's so important to you. Again I ask you the question, what puts the "alt." in "alt.med"? If a practice is common to both std.med and alt.med, when should we attribute its discovery or common use to alt.med? Obviously you shouldn't say that open heart surgery is part of natropathy, but why not? It works, so why doesn't alt.med claim it as its own? You can't, for example, say that food supplements are only part of alt.med because fluoride in (some) water systems, vitamin D in milk, and iodine in salt are three food supplements that medical researchers successfully insisted be part of the standard food supply, in order to improve public health. What makes 'alt.med' alt? But in some sense you're right. The old canard is that we have a name for alt. medicine that works - it's called "medicine." Because fundamentally, modern medicine is based on trying to find what works. The thing is, very little of alt.med "works", by almost any definition except palliative care, and even then, no more helpful than other forms of care. Take a look at any of the research papers on the subject, where the alt.med methods were put to a test, and you'll see that any signal that is there is about as strong as the noise. Compare that to the first people who were treated with penicillin. Compare that to the children who no longer got polio. Those are examples of clear, strong signals of effective treatments.

by analog 14y ago

You're also attempting to Strawman me by presenting arguments as mine that I never stated. "Your argument though is that those dozen possible treatments justify the entire alt.med industry?"

dalke 14y ago

That was rhetorical. You point out that there's perhaps a dozen herbs and nutritional supplements which might .. and I do stress the might .. be a useful treatment. Does that justify the entire herbal and diet supplement industry? Since your argument does seem to be that Nursie is wrong for saying that 100% of alt.med is useless as a treatment, when the actual number is 99.9+%. Do you really want to get that fraction of a mil? Because I'll grant you that <0.1%, and wonder why it's so important to you. Again I ask you the question, what puts the "alt." in "alt.med"? If a practice is common to both std.med and alt.med, when should we attribute its discovery or common use to alt.med? Obviously you shouldn't say that open heart surgery is part of natropathy, but why not? It works, so why doesn't alt.med claim it as its own? You can't, for example, say that food supplements are only part of alt.med because fluoride in (some) water systems, vitamin D in milk, and iodine in salt are three food supplements that medical researchers successfully insisted be part of the standard food supply, in order to improve public health. What makes 'alt.med' alt? But in some sense you're right. The old canard is that we have a name for alt. medicine that works - it's called "medicine." Because fundamentally, modern medicine is based on trying to find what works. The thing is, very little of alt.med "works", by almost any definition except palliative care, and even then, no more helpful than other forms of care. Take a look at any of the research papers on the subject, where the alt.med methods were put to a test, and you'll see that any signal that is there is about as strong as the noise. Compare that to the first people who were treated with penicillin. Compare that to the children who no longer got polio. Those are examples of clear, strong signals of effective treatments.