5 ms·

Pseudoscience, really? Can you provide a reference to anything specific?

by kolev 12y ago

conception 12y ago
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. ---- That is pseudoscience.
- kolev 12y ago
  So, eliminating allergens is pseudo science?
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    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.
    - kolev 12y ago
      You don't need to do a study when you're treating something as basic as gluten sensitivity.
    - jkimmel 12y ago
      >If you don't have a statistically significant sample size and a control group, you are conducting bad science. I would argue that a sample of 1 with no control is not worthy of being called science.
      - kolev 12y ago
        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?
        DanBC 12y ago
        You need a control group to protect yourself from bias. This is true even for people doing science who don't have an agenda.
        kolev 12y ago
        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!
        DanBC 12y ago
        Peanut allergy is real. You can tell when someone is allergic to peanuts because of anaphylactic shock. That other stuff? It's mostly bullshit spewed out by charlatans who are exploiting people.
        kolev 12y ago
        Celiac disease is also very real.
    - ScottBurson 12y ago
      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.
      - sliverstorm 12y ago
        I guess I could have been more exact: If you don't have a statistically significant sample size and a control group, and you think it proves something, you are conducting bad science.
        ScottBurson 12y ago
        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.
dllthomas 12y ago
In this article, he recommends homeopathy: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/pms-relief-how-to-elimina_b_617365.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/pms-relief-how-t...
- kolev 12y ago
  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?
  - NickNameNick 12y ago
    ||for sure do no harm compared to drugs 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.
    - kolev 12y ago
      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.
DanBC 12y ago
Asking for references while not providing any youref is curious.
- kolev 12y ago
  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!
  - DanBC 12y ago
    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.
    - kolev 12y ago
      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.

Pseudoscience, really? Can you provide a reference to anything specific?

by kolev 12y ago

Pseudoscience, really? Can you provide a reference to anything specific?

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. ---- That is pseudoscience.

kolev 12y ago
So, eliminating allergens is pseudo science?
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  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.
  - kolev 12y ago
    You don't need to do a study when you're treating something as basic as gluten sensitivity.
  - jkimmel 12y ago
    >If you don't have a statistically significant sample size and a control group, you are conducting bad science. I would argue that a sample of 1 with no control is not worthy of being called science.
    - kolev 12y ago
      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?
      - DanBC 12y ago
        You need a control group to protect yourself from bias. This is true even for people doing science who don't have an agenda.
        kolev 12y ago
        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!
        DanBC 12y ago
        Peanut allergy is real. You can tell when someone is allergic to peanuts because of anaphylactic shock. That other stuff? It's mostly bullshit spewed out by charlatans who are exploiting people.
        kolev 12y ago
        Celiac disease is also very real.
  - ScottBurson 12y ago
    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.
    - sliverstorm 12y ago
      I guess I could have been more exact: If you don't have a statistically significant sample size and a control group, and you think it proves something, you are conducting bad science.
      - ScottBurson 12y ago
        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.

dllthomas 12y ago

In this article, he recommends homeopathy: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/pms-relief-how-to-elimina_b_617365.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/pms-relief-how-t...

kolev 12y ago
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?
- NickNameNick 12y ago
  ||for sure do no harm compared to drugs 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.
  - kolev 12y ago
    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.

DanBC 12y ago

Asking for references while not providing any youref is curious.

kolev 12y ago
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!
- DanBC 12y ago
  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.
  - kolev 12y ago
    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.