Alternative medicine...

[elcher]

Terrible advice.

I have successfully used TCM to cure my chronic bronchitis and have seen multiple people fight Cancer for years when "modern" medicine considered them "dead within a month".

At this point of time in modern science we dont really understand the human body or how everything interacts with it. Chinese Medicine somehow does this through experience - and while some of it might (and probably does) not make any sense a lot of it has proven successful over millenia for Billions of people.

And this is coming from a native german that lived in china for a long time.

Dont always trust "modern" medicine.

I have two words in response to that; prove it.

Come on, prove it! You'd be the first person in the world to do it.

Until you actually do prove your claims, nobody should believe a single word of what you just said. And I'm not just saying that to be confrontational, I'm saying it because you just made a number of claims that require scientific evidence.

This is hilarious.
Why would i need to prove this to anyone? I dont get a bronchitis anymore everytime i get sick, thats enough proof to me and my whole family; i really dont care if you believe me or not since this is just some forum on some site - why do you people need a paper or "press proof" of what has happened and what "different" medicine is capable of when you often criticize other "press" (and i use quotation marks for a reason!) like "the sun" or "Fox news" for being liars/bad mouthers etc ?

Are you really so shallow to only believe what public education tells you? How about you go to china to a traditional chinese doctor and (bring a translator with you cause this might be tricky otherwise) ask the people in the PACKED waiting room if his treatment helps them or has helped anyone they know.

It has helped me and i am living proof - what more do you want?

PS: label me a troll if you like, gaming "discussion" boards are ridiculous nowadays anyway.

You seem kind of touchy. If someone doubts you, reason with them, don't blow up and go off on a bizarre rant about how the media is teh evulz. There's a difference between verified, scientifically proven medicine, and something Fox news says? I don't really understand that part.

You notice how most herbal medicine promises to cure things that go away anyway? There's a reason for that.

Except that i am not talking about "some flu" or something like that - i am talking about "my story" with chronic bronchitis and how Traditional Chinese Medicine helped me/my body to deal with it. I am touchy because people request irrational stuff like "sources" from me, when i am neither a known scientist, journalist or anything of the kind so that i can "prove it". My proof is that i am posting here about this topic, i cant give you more than that.

 

[Scrustle]

It's largely the placebo effect. The placebo effect is massively powerful but we are only starting to understand it. There may be some examples where ingredients which actually work, but most of it is nonsense.

 

[Loner Jo Jo]

Alternative medicine relies on placebo effects. Plain and simple. However, I wouldn't write this effect off so easily. The mind is a powerful thing and can actually cure you. If modern, researched medicine isn't working for someone, if alternative medicine allows them to believe they will get better to the point of triggering the placebo effect (provided the alternative medicine is something innocuous like herbal tea or sugar pills) then let them.

 

[Agayek]

Depends on how you define "alternative medicine". Faith healing and homeopathy and all that is complete bullshit and anyone who seriously uses it as a viable alternative to medical science needs to be shot.

That said, Ancient Chinese Wisdom(tm) and things like that can actually be viable. A lot of people in the West tend to forget that China was the world leader in technology and science for several centuries (Arabs took it from them around 1000 AD, then the West claimed it circa 1600). A lot of the traditional Chinese remedies (herbal teas, acupuncture, etc) have some basis in science and as such can actually work. It's nowhere near as effective as modern medical science, and anyone using it to treat serious illnesses should die in agony, but it's somewhat effective against colds and other similarly light sicknesses.

 

[Vykrel]

most of it is BS, but it could help with your average every day cold. then again, a lot of things can help with a cold. soup, rest, whatever.

 

[TehRandom1]

One thing which keep popping up seems to be the fact that alternative medicines do have some pharmacological effect due to some compound(s) contained within them. Of course, there are two major problems with natural products, so drug companies can't just sell them 'as-is'.

1. Variation. There is just too much variation between batches and within batches (i.e. between bottles and within bottles) in the active ingredient. One reason why we use tablets is because we can get an accurate dose to the patient. Natural products won't let us do that, leading to therapeutic failure due to underdose or toxicity due to overdose.

2. Composition. Do you know how many compounds can be contained within a plant? The answer is a lot. So sometimes for some herbal remedies, we just don't know what's causing the effects, as there may be some synergetic action between two or more compounds; or the compound could be a precursor (prodrug) to an active form of the compound. This is especially important for variation, as you can't measure variation if you don't know what's important to keep constant.

TL;DR: Some herbal medicines contain active ingredients, but in an unprocessed form, is not reliable enough to treat people.

 

[brownie212]

you want to use alternative medicine fine, just don't accept the fact that it's safe just because its "natural". arsenic, potassium cyanide, cobra venom, belladonna, these are all perfectly natural compounds. that doesn't mean they're safe to put in your body, so just think is it really worth the risk, to use something that has had no proven effect or even proven to have a negative effect just because a friend of a friend or someone on the internet said it helped them?

and yes science doesn't know everything, but as Dara O'Briain said that doesn't mean you can just make the rest up.

 

[Ham_authority95]

some of it is quackery and some of it might work.
just don,t use it when you have something live threatening (like cancer or AIDS).

Pretty much my answer right here.

I'm not a medical scientist, so I won't go saying that it doesn't work. Stranger things have happened...just be aware of it's ambiguity and marketing scams.

 

[BRex21]

Y'know a lot of the "alternative medicine" is pretty much medicine as it occurs in nature, we just haven't ground it up and put it in pill form.
Aspirin is white oak bark, morphine comes from poppies, Curare is a naturally occurring tranquilizer from a few south African plants. Often people call these things quackery because they came from plants as opposed to a lab.

 

[tthor]

Bull. Shit.

Well, i should clarify, I think HOMEOPATHIC medicine is bullshit. HOWEVER, I do think there are many other forms of less-conventional medicine that can be very effective.

For example, I've seen acupuncture do wonders for people; Every person I've ever heard try acupuncture have said fantastic things, and i watched acupuncture performed at my old world-religions class, on the parent of a student who suffered from a great deal of constant pain in his shoulder for years from taking a piece of shrapnel in Iraq. He was scheduled later that week to get another surgery to relieve the pain, tho none of the past surgeries had helped. He tried the acupuncture, and you could see his expression on his face ease significantly when he got the acupuncture, and claimed that it seriously helped. he then canceled his surgery for the pain, and scheduled a followup acupuncture session.
-Tho i must say, I don't think -all- of acupuncture is true, I'd bet that probably 30% of it doesn't work, but the rest is good

 

[RaffB]

This is hilarious.
Why would i need to prove this to anyone? I dont get a bronchitis anymore everytime i get sick, thats enough proof to me and my whole family

Why would it need to be proven? Well, to show it's not utter bullshit is one thought that occurs.

Also did you know you grow out of chronic bronchitis naturally? It doesn't need curing. Ouch, entire claim sunk...

Yeah no.

I had it since i was a child - to be honest i dont know the whole medical implications of it etc. but every time i woul get sick (and that means from the beginning of my kognitive awakening) i would get a bronchitis. It would not.go.away. Doctors in the west could treat the symptoms and make me "get healthy faster" but it would still mean me lying in my fucking bed for at least 3-5 days having trouble BREATHING (which is something absolutely retarded if you ever had to endure that).

After i drank some tea out of different stuff for around 1 year i was cured. I still get sick often, but i dont have trouble breathing and i sure as hell dont lie in my bed all day hoping for it to go away.

There is all the proof that i personally need - if thats placebo (wait what, how would that even work on my lungs??) then so be it.Like religion, i really dont care what or how you believe in things as long as you dont try to manically convince other people otherwise.

PS: I am not talking about vodoo or somesuch, personally i have no experience with any of that, but of an educated chinese medicine doctor that could and would consult you to a treatment of "drinking tea" (i am not going to explain as the whole claim would just get me torn up by this whole community of know-it-alls).

Really guys, start tolerating... heck everything more.

All of these "in my opinion (herp i dont have any proof either)XX YY is happening blergh a blergh" posts/users are making me sad and furious. Why add nothing of value to a discussion except your own opinion of stuff you know nothing about of?

Heres the thing, what you have isn't proof, its one case of one thing changing because you started drinking some special tea. However, it is impossible for that to be the only thing that changed during that year, there could be a hundred different things that were different in both you and your environment. So until you can come back with actual proof, i.e. other people , same cure, controlled environment, then what you have doesn't mean shit in the eyes of medicine or science. And advising people about stuff that isn't proven is not only dangerous as hell, but incredibly irresponsible.

 

[NinjaCatStudios]

I don't know about some of the shady stuff, but some chinese remedies are great for lessening symptoms of the cold, when I had a pulled muscle or something similar in my neck and shoulders and found it difficult to move, a certain chemical really helped to loosen out the muscles, although that is chemically proven anyway, they'd give you it at the doctors, just under it's medical name.


Excuse my poor writing, I'm a bit tired.

 

[Rednog]

Y'know a lot of the "alternative medicine" is pretty much medicine as it occurs in nature, we just haven't ground it up and put it in pill form.
Aspirin is white oak bark, morphine comes from poppies, Curare is a naturally occurring tranquilizer from a few south African plants. Often people call these things quackery because they came from plants as opposed to a lab.

And the kicker that you fail to acknowledge is that those drugs in their natural forms have pretty bad side effects, white oak bark has the lovely side effect of stomach ulcers and bleeding.
Curare was used back in the day, but now we have better and safer anesthetics.

 

[Para199x]

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Edit: well multiple quotes didn't turn out very well

To answer the original question:


Alternative medicines are a weird topic. Do they themselves actually do anything. No no they don't, however the placebo effect is extremely powerful and taking something you believe works or has some ritual to it makes it more effective. As a simple example if you give somebody 2 sugar pills while they think it's some real medicine it will work better than if you give them one.



Henritje:


Modern medicine whether you believe it is correct or not is by definition modern and putting it in quotation marks doesn't make any sense.

Crenelate:

See first paragraph on placebo effect being underestimated also here:

http://www.qi.com/talk/viewtopic.php?p=862690

 

[NightHawk21]

IMO, its just snake oil. Sure some of the medicines have some small effect, but if they do they've been tested by scientists, purified and in all likelyhood improved to be more efficient and act faster. Shit I once tried the plant that some pain killer was derived from (can't remember which, but it was one of the major over the counter 3). Did it work, I guess, it got rid of some small pain, but an advil would have taken care of the problem faster and wouldn't have tasted as bad. The vast majority of these "medicines" are really just placebos and you almost trick yourself into getting better. There's a reason the majority of these medicines are sold for stuff that will go away on its own like colds.

 

[Zorg Machine]

Homeopathy is pure and utter bullshit. It makes even less sense than the old middle age way of using red remedies against diseases with symptoms that make you red. admittedly they also put hot lead and feces in open wounds but it isn't that far of from the stupidities of some of the bullshit people talk about today.

Other than homeopathy, alternative medecine can sometimes help you through placebo effect, indirectly helping or in rare cases, actually cure your sickness. By definition, alternative medecine has not been proved to work or been proved not to work. Alternative medecine that has been proved to work is simply medecine. Alternative medecine is either pulled out of someones ass, "figured out" by idiots (the people in our study group in iceland had fewer cases of malaria than the people in africa who weren't given the drug GASP*) or in some cases, discovered by trial and error (and even most of these don't work or simply make you feel less sick).

As a thumb rule, alternative medecine is fake and practitioners are often evil manipulators or idiots. Now, I know people who tried alternative medecine and claim it helped but ffs, if you have a cold and slip into a pile of dog shit and just happen to get better the next day, will you plunge your face into dog feces every time you feel a bit under the weather?

 

[Batou667]

You find me recovering from a cold (I actually recovered a few days ago after a couple straight days of having herbal teas and manuka and just debased myself on a truckload of junk food) with a slight niggling cough and I've spent the last half hour alternately sipping and sniffing a hot concoction of nin jiom (I haven't the faintest idea either how it is anglicised from Cantonese or what it is in English).

Quackery? Or legitimate?

Ooh! Ooh! I know this one!

"Alternative" medicine is a mixture of ineffectual ritual and the placebo effect.

Let's use your cold as an example. The common cold is a virus, it can't be "cured" (if you ever find a vaccine, you'll be a billionaire), the best you can hope for is to alleviate the more uncomfortable effects until it runs its course. You're using a TCM infusion (by the sounds of it) and by all accounts you're making a recovery.

A supporter of TCM would use this as direct empirical evidence of the remedy's efficacy.

An actual physician would note that you using the TCM and the cold going are an example of correlation not proving causation. 1) Your cold would have gone anyway. 2) An infusion of ANYTHING would probably have provided a similar soothing effect - normal tea would have worked, or even just a cup of hot water.

TCM is popular because it offers hope to people who are frustrated by the limitations of accepted (real) medicine. Feeling a little fat? Well, you could watch your diet or exercise more. OR, you could pay some friendly little Chinese fellow a lot of money for some special "weight loss" tea. It has a reassuringly high price tag (because the good stuff has got to cost more, right?), it tastes suitably foul (so it must be really potent medicine, right?) and you know what, ever since I started taking it regularly, focusing more on my weight and appearance, and unconsciously eating less, I've started seeing real results! And my silly old doctor said it wouldn't work, ha!

If anybody wants to read more on the matter, I can't recommend highly enough the book Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, who unlike me (and 99.99% of The Escapist) is a qualified medical doctor and an engaging and persuasive writer to boot.

 

[RQshadowe]

"Alternative medicine has either been proved not to work, or not been proved to work.


You know what they call alternative medicine thats been proved to work?


Medicine."

Tim Minchin

 

[AngloDoom]

Well, my friend was given alternative Chinese medicine to help in curing his brittle asthma and multiple allergies when he was young. If I remember rightly, he woke up in hospital after vomiting blood and passing out.

If it works, it's stuck in tablet form and sold to hospitals because it keeps the population happy, working, and not-dead. We haven't stopped testing medicine recently, so all possibilities are being explored and I'd much rather wait for scientist to give me the go-ahead before I give my kid a garden-plant tea that could very well make my child much worse.

 

[Jegsimmons]

heres all the medicine i need, asprin, silence, tequila and rusty scaple, and orange juice.