The existence of God and the efficacy of prayer

[kyrani99]

I say yer a Chris Sci, & that's my personal experience. It's good enuff for ME!

It was good enough for Moses too.

Those regenerated newt limbs don't always include bones.

I am a theist (number one on Dawkin's scale) and I am a scientist but I reject the idea of Jesus as God. I think that is blasphemous.

Newts and salamanders regrow limbs, complete with bone and nerves and muscles and skin. Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byLDgtSMI0w

 

[kyrani99]

I see that you've got an excuse already prepared. If you can't put someone into spontaneous remission, it's their own fault. They're inhumane and toxic.

Insulting the patient who fails to be cured is a very common technique in quackery. Patients need to be manipulated into following the treatment and believing it will work by faith, not data. Insulting allows the believers to picture themselves as the ingroup and shun the nonbelievers who are the ridiculed outgroup.

The idea of "blaming the victim" as an attack is very common. I said nothing that could be construed as blaming the victim, either for getting sick nor for failing to get well. YOU are saying that. I only stated that toxic people were not treatable because they have no autonomy, for the sake of completeness.

You also use the idea of "patients being manipulated to follow treatment" and that they need to "believe it works by faith and not data". I have heard these before too.

NO ONE believes without evidence! The evidence is screaming from every clinical trial ever done, either in placebo or nocebo or both.

The DATA is the EVIDENCE and that is that the body is PURPOSE-DRIVEN and not a machine.

So how honorable are doctors and the medical industry.
1. There is a push to try and say that a placebo is all about how a patient is treated and the doctors support and blah, blah, blah, when they know full well that IF a person BELIEVES that whatever they are given, will make them well again, they will get well again. It is not hard. The person stops reacting and relaxes so they return to resting metabolism, which means the bodily reactivity is gone... i.e., health is restored.

I do not recommend placebo for cancer but there has been evidence of people recovering while ever they believed that a drug or dummy drug, given to them, will make them well. Once they began to believe it wouldn't work or heard that it wouldn't work from some authority figure, such as another doctor, the placebo failed.

The other case is the nocebo. Doctors know that in a clinical trial or even in clinical practice it is a very sensitive matter how a patient is told about side effects because they may develop those side effect EVEN ON A DUMMY DRUG. This is the well-known nocebo effect but no research is done. NONE! In fact it is been called unethical. And experiments done by Hitler's doctors are being cited as illustrations of such experiments. Why is that? Are they afraid that people will wake up to the true cause of disease and realize that they can treat themselves?

I have never run into in real medicine. Patients are never blamed for failing the treatment or having side effects. They're certainly never labelled with negative words or categorized as certain types of negative people. It's a respectful process, because there's no need to manipulate people emotionally. The data is plain for all to see.

Modern medicine is about MONEY. Why would they blame a patient for failing treatment or having side effects when in both cases they get to make more money out of the patient. It is a respectful process but for whom? The data is plain to see. "Survival" according to doctors is, in the vast number of cases, defined as "living another five years after diagnosis". Your obviously happy with that but I am not happy with that and I found a better way. I have every right to tell others and help those who want to try another way, those who are not happy with conventional medicine. I have never tried to talk anyone into considering an alternative treatment.. NEVER. And I have never blamed anyone if they fail to get well.

When I developed brain mets on one drug, the doctor never even hinted it was my fault. It's well known that the drug barely crosses the blood-brain barrier, so the fault was rightly placed on the drug and I was switched to another, which does cross the BBB, and the mets quickly went away.

That's how I want to be treated by doctors, as a respectable human being treated for a disease, not as less than human to protect their ego if their treatment fails. "Inhumane" is a horrible thing to call a dying person, whether you mean the usual definition of "cruel" or the rarer definition of "not human." Just, no. Don't do that to people.

If you don't want to be perceived as a quack, I'd strongly suggest not acting the way quacks do.

I don't understand your problem. You are treated by the method of your choice and that is how it should be. I have never said anything to the contrary.

An inhumane person, whether dying or not, is an evil person. I don't see any reason to stop calling a spade, a spade, just because it is dying. A cruel person has no mercy as far as I am concerned. They chose to do harm all their lives, they willfully harm other people and then they want forgiveness on top of it. They can burn in hell.

Quacks can be either doctors or alternative medical people. Quacks are those that either profess themselves knowledgeable when they are not or those that abuse their position as doctors, as for example the doctor, now jailed, for administering chemo to people who did not have cancer, having told them they did.

There are a lot of people wanting to call all alternative medical practitioner, quacks. This is both political and an attempt to try and prevent people from going to alternative medicine. This approach however is failing. More and more people are turning to alternative medicine and with good results. Not everyone that chooses alternative medicine gets well BUT that is also true of those that go to conventional medicine. In fact death by doctor in the USA is the third leading cause of death.

 

[IanS]

Personal experience is enough for the experiencer.
A simple experiment. A If you put your hand on a cold stove you don't get burnt. (This is the control experiment). If you put your hand on a hot stove you get burnt. So you can conclude that the hot stove burns your skin. This is conclusive evidence. You don't need to do a clinical trial with thousands of people to verify the evidence you have.

B None of our subjective experiences can be verified by science. There is NO evidence that anyone can give to another person to verify that they are conscious and have personal /subjective experience. But that does not mean that the person themselves doesn't have evidence that they are conscious and have subjective experience. Of course they do.

I have evidence, not only in what I was able to perceive BUT ALSO in being able to use the knowledge I gained to get myself well again, repeatedly. However that is not enough to show another person. As far as anyone else is concerned it is still anecdotal evidence.

I can guide another person to heal themselves and that becomes a bit more evidence but it needs many. I cannot afford to conduct a clinical trial and I know that I would never get the funding to conduct one either.

The best that I can do is show scientifically that cancer is about stem cells deliberately making changes. And to show that they can reverse those changes.

Re. your first highlight A - showing that a burning stove is hot by putting your hand on it and injuring yourself, is not remotely comparable with anyone claiming to have experienced God!

If, like the physical evidence of a seriously burnt hand, you have some clear physical evidence of having met God, then by all means present that evidence to everyone here.

Re. highlight B - all of your claims of different "experiences" can be very easily tested and checked by science. And science can very easily provide you with mountains of irrefutable evidence to show that humans are what is called "concious" and have all sorts of experiences (everything any human ever does in fact).

So both of your claims are in complete contradiction to everything ever studied and explained through science.

 

[Pup]

I said nothing that could be construed as blaming the victim, either for getting sick nor for failing to get well. YOU are saying that. I only stated that toxic people were not treatable because they have no autonomy, for the sake of completeness.

Can you test if a person is toxic, before treatment? If they test nontoxic, does treatment always work? If they're tested as nontoxic and the treatment fails, what would be the reason, in your opinion? Would that mean the toxic/nontoxic test was wrong about them?

Those are the things that separate out whether this is set up to blame the victim. It's unfortunate that you've chosen a value-judgment term like "toxic person," which sounds like the way quacks talk, rather than a more neutral medical term.

If my doctor says my pdl1 expression means immunotherapy won't help, I'll still respect him as a doctor and a person. If he says his treatment won't work because I'm a toxic inhumane person, and he was a real MD and not a faith healer, I'd wonder if he was okay and probably report him to whoever was over him, to make sure they knew what was going on. If he was a faith healer, well, some Christians already think I'm evil because I'm an atheist and that's just the weird mind games they play.

NO ONE believes without evidence!

Sure they do. Faith healing and religion in general is built on faith.

So how honorable are doctors and the medical industry.
1. There is a push to try and say that a placebo is all about how a patient is treated and the doctors support and blah, blah, blah, when they know full well that IF a person BELIEVES that whatever they are given, will make them well again, they will get well again.

I'd suggest telling the truth about the medical industry. Researchers don't use placebos in clinical trials on seriously ill patients, because they know they don't work, and it would be unethical to withhold treatment from the seriously ill. Those are the kinds of patients you're talking about treating, right?

I don't understand your problem. You are treated by the method of your choice and that is how it should be. I have never said anything to the contrary.

An inhumane person, whether dying or not, is an evil person. I don't see any reason to stop calling a spade, a spade, just because it is dying. A cruel person has no mercy as far as I am concerned. They chose to do harm all their lives, they willfully harm other people and then they want forgiveness on top of it. They can burn in hell.

Well, you can have a personal opinion about your patients. I'm sure most doctors do. But you're making it part of treatment, and personally insulting all those who wouldn't respond to your treatment. Not what I'd call either kind or professional.

It bothers me that there are people who would prey on the very ill, offering them unproven cures, calling them evil if they're in a category that doesn't respond to treatment.

I've run into stupid MDs and dishonest MDs, but there are some things that it seems medical school does at least eliminate.

Quacks are those that either profess themselves knowledgeable when they are not or those that abuse their position as doctors,

The problem is that quacks usually don't think they're quacks, unless they're true criminals like the doctor you mentioned. Most think they really are knowledgeable and are treating patients as the patients deserve.

There are a lot of people wanting to call all alternative medical practitioner, quacks. This is both political and an attempt to try and prevent people from going to alternative medicine. This approach however is failing. More and more people are turning to alternative medicine and with good results. Not everyone that chooses alternative medicine gets well BUT that is also true of those that go to conventional medicine. In fact death by doctor in the USA is the third leading cause of death.

There's an old joke: what do you call alternative medicine that works? Medicine.

Edited to add: Didn't recognize the user name at first, and toxic is such a common alt med buzzword, but... i just realized we went over all this here: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=11266880&highlight=Toxic#post11266880

Guess I don't need to go over it again.

 

[kyrani99]

If certain patients are eliminated from trials to make the data look better, they get on the internet and report it to friends with the same disease. That's how I learned that one drug, still in trials, had a higher risk of lung problems. I noticed the instructions on the new drug application say to titrate it up to prevent lung problems. That wasn't the original protocol, but I wasn't surprised. It's harder for drug companies to hide information nowadays, and risky if they do, thanks to lawsuits.

You should not have to go to the internet to find out from friends about a treatment. It should all be above board and it is not.

Don't kid yourself about drug companies. The American government has bowed to them.
Yes you can sue http://www4.dr-rath-foundation.org/The_Hague/uslawsuits.htm

But in the large number of cases you have no legal position.
https://www.sott.net/article/263713-Supreme-Court-rules-drug-companies-exempt-from-lawsuits
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/caroline-beaton/holding-big-pharma-accoun_b_8280952.html

The key is to train patients to be alert, educated, and not gullible. That's second nature for someone like me, but I do worry about, say, a little old lady with seizures who's been taught to trust her doctors implicitly and is naturally desperate for help. So much vulnerability.

If the system was good and trustworthy, then it should be able to protect everyone, not take advantage of those most vulnerable. Nearly everyone in their senior years ends up on drugs. And what is worse most of the drugs do more harm than any good and yet there have to be laws in place to try and stop this from happening.

That's a good example of the bad science you're talking about. If a person or a company decides a treatment works, but it doesn't pass the scientific tests, bad science suggests to blame the tests and forge ahead with the treatment anyway.

It is hardly a good example of bad science. I saw a video of Ben Goldacre arguing against homeopathy on the basis of bad trial data. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKEtHtl97D0 starts at around 30min and talks for about 22mins. and criticism abounds.

BUT what he wasn't saying however is the bad trial are:
1. being conducted by those with interests in crushing the alternative market, and
2. no different to the dirty tricks used in testing conventional drugs.

In a clinical trial all the patients with a particular condition are given the same homeopathic drug and the same dose. This is NOT what happens when a patient goes to a homeopathy practitioner. Each patient is investigated individually and a homeopathic drug that best suits is given. So no wonder the clinical trials fail. This is the same garbage they do when testing acupuncture and then call it a sham. I haven't used homeopathy (although I have known people who have been treated successful with it) but I have been treated by acupuncture and I know full well that it works and it is far superior for many health problems that ever is conventional medicine.

The first randomized controlled trial was done for streptomycin .in 1946
The founder of homeopathy was Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), a German physician. He first formulated the laws of similars (like treats like) in 1789 and it has stood the test of time. It was successful and treated people successfully for more than two centuries. People would not favor it, if they got no benefit.

And it is interesting that in 1798 Edward Jenner discovered that giving small doses of cowpox to people could immunize them against smallpox. This was treatment by a very similar principle. However Jenner's work was widely accepted as orthodox medicine, where as Hahnemann's work was and is still called quackery.

All that quackery is about is the struggle between conventional and alternative medicine for business.

This is obvious when despite all the slamming that Goldacre does, he fully admits during question time, when at 1 hr and 7mins an Iranian homeopath states that in the late nineteenth century in the epidemic of cholera, that a homeopathic hospitals was most effective in treating cholera whereas the conventional hospitals failed and in fact did a lot of harm and many died.

However he still insists that homeopathy is only good if conventional treatment fails or there is no other treatment. He would lose his license to say anything else because he his not free to state his opinion. He is bound by guidelines, which indirectly, are dictated by the drug companies.

No one understands fully how homeopathy works but that is also true of some conventional treatments. No one know how psychiatric drugs work and bear in mind they are dangerous and cause a lot of side effects, eg obesity and type2 diabetes, heart disease and stokes. Treatment like electro-convulsive therapy is a complete mystery but is still used.

 

[poblob14]

You dream up a world with two characters in it, characters A and B, in your mind.
You tell character A that it is your creation and that you have created it in your mind.

Now let character A say to character B, I believe that there is someone in a real world that is thinking us up, that is why we exist.

Then character B says to character A. If that is the case then let them come in here to our world and prove it! Or at least give me some evidence of what you are saying. It is not possible.

Of course it's possible. (Unless I'm misunderstanding what you are saying.)

A and B exist only in my mind. So I can prove my existence to B in any of a hundred ways: I can turn A into a lizard man, I can make B's penis grow to the size of Vermont, I can appear directly to B and introduce myself.

Also: Your remarks about the causes of cancer involving "people hassling them" are sickening to those of us with loved ones who are cancer survivors.

 

[kyrani99]

But we know that the perception of whether or not a medical treatment works does fall into this category; the placebo effect, regression to the mean and simple coincidence are known sources of error, and reliable ways to eliminate them are known and must be applied before any conclusions can be drawn.

You were trying to argue that any experiencer was not capable of discerning their own experience, that they needed others to confirm it. Now you are trying to twist it to something else.

Of course there is a placebo with ALL treatments given. This has NOTHING to do with errors. A person is given a treatment by someone they respect as an authority, be it a doctor or a healer, MAY form a belief that the treatment will make them well.

This is why the road to full scientific acceptance is a series of hurdles. When establishing the effectiveness of a medical treatment the first positive clinical trial is just the first one; then comes peer review, publication, and replication. At any point deficiencies and incompetence can be detected.

I remind you that your own hypothesis has yet to clear the first hurdle, indeed you do not even seem to have a plan for how to do so. This is why the fact that you are already convinced that your hypothesis is correct is so absurd, especially for someone who claims to be a scientist.

WRONG. My hypothesis has been repeatedly tested and I have arrived at a theory that I am going to set out in scientific terms.

I was attacked 8 times.
Frst time I only saw that moving away and cutting my ties with certain people I felt were bad influences, was beneficial.

The second time I saw that resolving an issue and taking away the means by which others were trying to harm me worked.

The third time I investigated. And when I applied my findings they worked.

THEN I was attacked another FIVE times, where I was able to again investigate more and again apply my findings and they worked.

And there were more times when I was attacked and could apply what I found right from the start and found I no longer developed cancer. Furthermore they became very obvious in what they were doing so even my perceptions as to what was going on were confirmed.

I also found that in a number of other people my findings held true.

I have conducted my investigations as a scientist, every step of the road.

Perhaps you should first ask yourself why the people who make the claims for these alternative therapies do not properly test them themselves; it is surely their responsibility to do so.

The answer to that is that the drug companies, together with bodies like the FDA, have price others out. They have made it excessively expensive so only they can do clinical trials. I don't have a billion or two to spare and neither does any other alternative practitioner, nor even any group of alternative practitioners.

In fact there has been ample testing of both homeopathy and acupuncture carried out in many cases by universities rather than drug companies, and with the full cooperation of the practitioners. There is some limited evidence for the effectiveness of acupuncture in pain control but for nothing else; homeopathy is totally ineffective.

There is a problem with the way scientists demand the tests must be done. They do not reflect how alternative treatments are done. For instance they look to apply the same acupuncture points to all patients with a particular ailment so that they can then say it is standardized.

An acupuncturist would NEVER do this because they know each person develops symptoms owing to DIFFERENT factors and they treat the cause. So each patient gets a different acupuncture point formula.

The scientific testing is faulty. That is why they see that the actual treatments are no better than placebo. The scientific testing is not done properly. It is not true to the treatment but tries to reflect the methods used in conventional medicine where everyone gets the same pills.

And there is an agenda to this apart from slamming alternative medicine. The methods alternative practitioners use show up the fact that a person is reacting to conditions in their lives, the reacting is somatic. This points strongly to the true causes of disease. And that is bad for business.

 

[Pup]

I know I said I wouldn't go over it again, but I'm still curious about this, because it seems critical to show you're not blaming the victim for your treatment not working:

Can you test if a person is toxic, before treatment? If they test nontoxic, does treatment always work? If they're tested as nontoxic and the treatment fails, what would be the reason, in your opinion? Would that mean the toxic/nontoxic test was wrong about them?


If it was answered previously, my apologies for missing it.

Even if the test is 100% in advance and isn't applied afterward to explain failures, it would still take a special sort of person, in my opinion, to sit me down with my wife in your office and say, the test results are back. Your cancer can't be put into remission because you're toxic, inhumane and evil.

The mind boggles. That's like a clinic run by the Westboro Baptists.

 

[Pixel42]

In a clinical trial all the patients with a particular condition are given the same homeopathic drug and the same dose. This is NOT what happens when a patient goes to a homeopathy practitioner.

No, but it's what happens when someone buys an over-the-counter remedy, so it's a valid way to test the efficacy of such remedies.

Each patient is investigated individually and a homeopathic drug that best suits is given. So no wonder the clinical trials fail.

Except this form of homeopathy has also been subjected to clinical trials, and the results were the same. The individualised remedies are also no more effective than placebo.

This is obvious when despite all the slamming that Goldacre does, he fully admits during question time, when at 1 hr and 7mins an Iranian homeopath states that in the late nineteenth century in the epidemic of cholera, that a homeopathic hospitals was most effective in treating cholera whereas the conventional hospitals failed and in fact did a lot of harm and many died.

When conventional medicine consisted of bloodletting and purging etc it did indeed do more harm than good. That's why homeopathy took off in the first place - it did no good, but it didn't do any harm, so it was in fact preferable. Then the scientific method was invented, and medicines identified and developed which not only did no harm but were genuinely beneficial.

However he still insists that homeopathy is only good if conventional treatment fails or there is no other treatment. He would lose his license to say anything else because he his not free to state his opinion. He is bound by guidelines, which indirectly, are dictated by the drug companies.

He says that because when there is no effective remedy then even the placebo effect is better than nothing. It doesn't mean he thinks homeopathy is effective, ie better than placebo. He doesn't.

No one understands fully how homeopathy works but that is also true of some conventional treatments. No one know how psychiatric drugs work and bear in mind they are dangerous and cause a lot of side effects, eg obesity and type2 diabetes, heart disease and stokes. Treatment like electro-convulsive therapy is a complete mystery but is still used.

If homeopathy worked and we didn't know how we would have to find out (and would use it in the meantime). If that meant throwing away everything we think we understand about chemistry and biology (which it would) then that's what we would have to do. But we don't have to do that, because it doesn't work. It's a placebo, which means it has psychological benefit only.

 

[Pixel42]

You were trying to argue that any experiencer was not capable of discerning their own experience, that they needed others to confirm it. Now you are trying to twist it to something else.

Not at all. The experiencer can carefully and methodically eliminate the effect of their cognitive biases using the scientific method, and thereby gain considerable confidence in the validity of their experience. That's hurdle number one, remember? Independent replication is still required for full acceptance, but that first hurdle is important and significant. But until the experiencer has accounted for their own biases and fallible perception they cannot be sure they aren't inadvertently fooling themselves, especially with something like the perception of the efficacy of a medical treatment, where cognitive biases and fallible perceptions are already known to be a source of error.

Of course there is a placebo with ALL treatments given. This has NOTHING to do with errors. A person is given a treatment by someone they respect as an authority, be it a doctor or a healer, MAY form a belief that the treatment will make them well.

The control not only eliminates the placebo effect, it also eliminates regression to the mean and simple coincidence as the causes of any apparent improvement. These are the main source of errors in seeing a cause and effect relationship which doesn't actually exist.

If I wake up in the morning with a headache, spend all day whistling The Star Spangled Banner, and wake up the next day without a headache, does that mean I can conclude that whistling The Star Spangled Banner cures headaches? There are many other reasons why my headache might have gone away - I could have consumed something that contained a painkiller, left the environment that was causing the headache, or it could simply have gone away on its own. The way we find out if a particular medical treatment is effective is we set up two groups and ensure that the only variable which is different between the two groups is one gets the medical treatment and the other gets the placebo.

WRONG. My hypothesis has been repeatedly tested and I have arrived at a theory that I am going to set out in scientific terms.

I was attacked 8 times.
Frst time I only saw that moving away and cutting my ties with certain people I felt were bad influences, was beneficial.

How do you know that the same thing wouldn't have happened if you hadn't moved away and cut your ties with those people?

The second time I saw that resolving an issue and taking away the means by which others were trying to harm me worked.

How do you know that the same thing wouldn't have happened if you hadn't taken away the means by which others were trying to harm you?

The third time I investigated. And when I applied my findings they worked.

THEN I was attacked another FIVE times, where I was able to again investigate more and again apply my findings and they worked.

How do you know that the same thing wouldn't have happened if you hadn't applied your findings?

And there were more times when I was attacked and could apply what I found right from the start and found I no longer developed cancer.

Furthermore they became very obvious in what they were doing so even my perceptions as to what was going on were confirmed.

I also found that in a number of other people my findings held true.

How do you know ....

you get the point, I hope.

The only reliable way to find out whether a medical intervention really works is with a large scale, double blinded clinical trial. This has been learned the hard way. Fail to eliminate even one possible source of error and there remains an alternative explanation for any apparent improvement.

I have conducted my investigations as a scientist, every step of the road.

If you haven't done a properly blinded test you haven't even taken the first step on that road.

The answer to that is that the drug companies, together with bodies like the FDA, have price others out. They have made it excessively expensive so only they can do clinical trials. I don't have a billion or two to spare and neither does any other alternative practitioner, nor even any group of alternative practitioners.

Rubbish. Anyone can do a small scale clinical trial. They just need to follow the rules.

There is a problem with the way scientists demand the tests must be done. They do not reflect how alternative treatments are done. For instance they look to apply the same acupuncture points to all patients with a particular ailment so that they can then say it is standardized.

I know individualised homeopathy has been tested, I'd be surprised if the same isn't true of acupuncture. The whole point of such testing is that the control group exactly duplicates the treatment, apart from the substitution of the placebo.

And there is an agenda to this apart from slamming alternative medicine. The methods alternative practitioners use show up the fact that a person is reacting to conditions in their lives, the reacting is somatic. This points strongly to the true causes of disease. And that is bad for business.

Environmental and psychological factors which affect how patients respond to treatment are certainly studied by conventional medicine. But they are investigated using the scientific method, not by collecting anecdotes.

 

[kyrani99]

Re. your first highlight A - showing that a burning stove is hot by putting your hand on it and injuring yourself, is not remotely comparable with anyone claiming to have experienced God!

Nor was it claimed to be. This had only to do with perceptions and whether the experiencer could validly do an experiment.

If, like the physical evidence of a seriously burnt hand, you have some clear physical evidence of having met God, then by all means present that evidence to everyone here.

One can have evidence as to be certain of God's existence beyond the shadow of doubt but still not be able to show that evidence to a third party.

Re. highlight B - all of your claims of different "experiences" can be very easily tested and checked by science. And science can very easily provide you with mountains of irrefutable evidence to show that humans are what is called "concious" and have all sorts of experiences (everything any human ever does in fact).

So both of your claims are in complete contradiction to everything ever studied and explained through science.

No subjective experience can be scientifically assessed.
For instance we can show the various neurons involved and surmise the sort of chemical reactions that take place in the brain in people who are in love but they do not say anything about the subjective experience of being in love. And the same is true of all other subjective experiences. We can show that everyone identifies a color by its name, eg red is identified as red but there is no experiment that we can do to show that what one person's subjective perception is the same or even similar to another's.

The same is true of consciousness. We can only look at brain brain activity. And anesthetist has a number scale that indicates different levels of consciousness and subconsciousness but he cannot equate that to the experience of being conscious.

You can see that various scientists have various theories and some of them based on the idea that we are mere machines, that the physical is all that there is AND some of them based on "we are more than just the physical".

Hameroff an anesthesiologist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBHss9g0pB0

Baroness Susan Greenfield CBE, is a British neuro- scientist,
In the beginning of here talk discuss how we don't have a definition of conscious and the difficulties of "what is it" in scientific terms?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_ZTNmkIiBc

Bruce Greyson: Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en-3Bz1RMig

Dr Pim van Lommel a cardiologist (part one) Consciousness Beyond Life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOeLJCdHojU

When there is are vastly different hypothesis about consciousness by scientists how on earth do you see that my claims are "complete contradiction to everything ever studied and explained through science."

 

[kyrani99]

I know I said I wouldn't go over it again, but I'm still curious about this, because it seems critical to show you're not blaming the victim for your treatment not working:

Can you test if a person is toxic, before treatment? If they test nontoxic, does treatment always work? If they're tested as nontoxic and the treatment fails, what would be the reason, in your opinion? Would that mean the toxic/nontoxic test was wrong about them?
.

It is hard to be accurate each time about a person's toxicity /psychopathy to use the medical term. The reason is that many are masters of deception. I have known some for 20 years or more and then realized they were toxic.

They are supposed to have a different brain scans but I have no access to these and I also have to wonder how accurate they are if the person really wants to cheat.

A person can be nontoxic and still fail and it is most definitely not their fault. I find it repulsive to blame someone for being maltreated because IMO/based on what I have seen, maltreatment by someone close or reasonably close or influential in the person's life is at the heart of most diseases.

A big problem lies with what relationships they trust and how those relationships affect them. If they are convinced that a person close to them or influential as for example a boss, is beneficial or trustworthy, when they are really underhandedly harmful, then it is very hard to treat that person because they are continually being adversely influenced.

The key that I saw, especially in cancer, is an ah ha experience. This means an awakening to the reality of how they are being maltreated, even if they don't fully appreciate by whom.

I tried to give an example with the idea of someone seeing a snake in the grass at their feet. While they see the snake they will react with fear. It is the normal reaction. However once they realize it is not really a snakeand that it is really a water hose with maybe some fancy pattern on it (an ah ha experience), then they stop reacting and relax. The fear goes away. This doesn't happen by any conscious will but because they realize that they are not in danger.

In cancer I found the same thing. Once I realized that:
1. the fear if it was conscious, or feeling hot, feeling even a lot of energy etc., was really due to a concealed threat and had nothing to do with any ideas that had come to mind,

2. that the ideas in mind were mere suggestions of someone wanting to do me harm and thus null and void, not real, false, and finally,

3. that the area in the body that seems to be sending sensory information to the brain was really due to emotion and some unrelated issue or some ideas that caused some sort of stimulation in the area,

then I was able to stop reacting. And when I stopped reacting my body reversed the cancer/ barrier.

All the things that I had associated, I suddenly saw were unrelated so I reacted differently and that caused my body to react differently.

Even if the test is 100% in advance and isn't applied afterward to explain failures, it would still take a special sort of person, in my opinion, to sit me down with my wife in your office and say, the test results are back. Your cancer can't be put into remission because you're toxic, inhumane and evil.

The mind boggles. That's like a clinic run by the Westboro Baptists.

Firstly, am I understanding you correctly that toxic, inhumane and evil is used as an excuse to justify failure? This is wrong thinking. You can't say that if the person has not had a remission then they must be toxic.

Also you are thinking along the lines of conventional medicine and I understand that. But this has nothing to do with tests and test results. It has everything to do with an awakening process an ah ha experience and the changes that brings.

While we believe that some harm is possible, whether it is conscious or subconscious, then the body will react in an attempt to either to:-

1. clear away perceived damage, which in this case results in inflammation and there is clear evidence in the original drug trial done on the first type of chemotherapy drugs.

People on the dummy pills (sugar or saline solution injections) lost their hair and had other symptoms as well. They did no lose their hair due to any toxicity of a drug because they had taken the dummy drug. Their body reacted to a belief that they were given the real drug and thus would have damaged fast growing cells at the root of their hair, then their hair fell out. Their hair roots were undamaged but their body reacted with an immune response, an inflammatory reaction based on a belief, and that inflammatory response damaged the healthy roots so their hair fell out.

(I suspect that all allergies and autoimmune disease are most likely to be the result of this)

or

2. what I discovered that the body will move to protect against some possible harm, in which case the body tries to build a protective barrier but that is a bad solution in this case because it results in amassing cells in an area and thus cancer or a benign mass, if there are no further points of perceived harm and hence metastasis.

 

[kyrani99]

No, but it's what happens when someone buys an over-the-counter remedy, so it's a valid way to test the efficacy of such remedies.

Buying over the counter medication is NOT the same as going to an alternative medical practitioner.

Except this form of homeopathy has also been subjected to clinical trials, and the results were the same. The individualised remedies are also no more effective than placebo.

They did not give each person a different medication.
Also there are plenty of conventional drug trials where the placebo is better than the drug but they trash those results.

When conventional medicine consisted of bloodletting and purging etc it did indeed do more harm than good. That's why homeopathy took off in the first place - it did no good, but it didn't do any harm, so it was in fact preferable. Then the scientific method was invented, and medicines identified and developed which not only did no harm but were genuinely beneficial.

No this not the case. Certainly the conventional medicine was more brutal at that time but the reality is that homeopathy DID WORK. There was no harm done but also people did got well. He fumbled and mumbled but he did admit to this.

He says that because when there is no effective remedy then even the placebo effect is better than nothing. It doesn't mean he thinks homeopathy is effective, ie better than placebo. He doesn't.

No matter what he thinks he cannot afford to say that homeopathy is effective. He'd lose his medical license.

And I also want to say something about the idea of "even placebo is better than nothing"

Placebo can be better than drugs in some cases. If the placebo brings about healing and there are no side effects then it is better than a drug that brings about healing but with side effects.

If homeopathy worked and we didn't know how we would have to find out (and would use it in the meantime). If that meant throwing away everything we think we understand about chemistry and biology (which it would) then that's what we would have to do. But we don't have to do that, because it doesn't work. It's a placebo, which means it has psychological benefit only.

You are keen to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Just because we might have a homeopathic remedy for something doesn't mean we have to throw out every thing else that we know.

A placebo does not have psychological effects. It has bodily effects, which arise from upholding a belief. If a doctor says to a patient here take these pills and you will get well AND the patient trusts and believes the doctor, then even though the pills are just sugar or flour, the patient will (in a large number of cases, not all) get well. It is the belief that is the key. And the reason why is that the body is purpose-driven and not a machine. Ideas, when we uphold them with confidence cause us to react in a different way than when we have no confidence in them. And that "react" is bodily reactivity.

 

[kyrani99]

Not at all. The experiencer can carefully and methodically eliminate the effect of their cognitive biases using the scientific method, and thereby gain considerable confidence in the validity of their experience. That's hurdle number one, remember? Independent replication is still required for full acceptance, but that first hurdle is important and significant. But until the experiencer has accounted for their own biases and fallible perception they cannot be sure they aren't inadvertently fooling themselves, especially with something like the perception of the efficacy of a medical treatment, where cognitive biases and fallible perceptions are already known to be a source of error.

A cognitive bias refers to a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias

The scientific method DOES NOT sort this out. You will find hundreds and thousands of papers in prestigious journals that are plain wrong because of cognitive bias and yet he science is done properly AND is repeatable. The papers I am referring to include many that associate an outcome with a cause, when it is all about correlation and not causation.

All that the scientific method does it to give one confidence in the results. So we do a control experiment along side our actual experiment. The control contains all the conditions in the actual experiment except for the test conditions. That way we can be confident that the results we get are not due to something else.

The scientific method does not eliminate cognitive bias.

The control not only eliminates the placebo effect, it also eliminates regression to the mean and simple coincidence as the causes of any apparent improvement. These are the main source of errors in seeing a cause and effect relationship which doesn't actually exist.

Sorry but the control in a drug trial IS the placebo.
Sometimes the placebo is a dummy drug but nowadays, when there are many drugs that are being improved on, the old drug is often used for the control, which they call the placebo.

Drugs are tested against placebo.
Everything that is given has a placebo effect. A patient given a drug will have some pharmaceutical effect from the drug but they will ALSO have a placebo effect. That is whey they talk about the drug needs to be "better than placebo"

Regression and coincidence etc., are all ironed out using statistical techniques in the analysis of results.

If I wake up in the morning with a headache, spend all day whistling The Star Spangled Banner, and wake up the next day without a headache, does that mean I can conclude that whistling The Star Spangled Banner cures headaches? There are many other reasons why my headache might have gone away - I could have consumed something that contained a painkiller, left the environment that was causing the headache, or it could simply have gone away on its own. The way we find out if a particular medical treatment is effective is we set up two groups and ensure that the only variable which is different between the two groups is one gets the medical treatment and the other gets the placebo.

This is the best method that we have but it doesn't work real well and for reasons that doctors and researchers don't want to admit to. The reason is that we cannot "ensure that the only variable which is different between the two groups is one gets the medical treatment and the other gets the placebo". The only variable, which is taken into account, is the physical variable, i.e., the drug or medical treatment, but that is not the only variable and they know it but won't admit it.

In reality every idea that is upheld with confidence, especially where there is an emotional response, creates heaps more variables, all of which affect the outcome. AND it is worse than that. Every patient will have a different set of variables, which will affect their particular outcome. So the same pills will have a good effect in some, a mediocre effect in other and a bad effect or no effect in still others. And the side effects are also different for each.

The moral of the story is that physical means are not the only variables. Ideas and beliefs can and do play a far more significant role than the drug or medical treatment. That is why it is not uncommon to see that the dummy drug, the placebo or control whatever you want to call it, can give better results than the real drug.

 

[Pixel42]

Buying over the counter medication is NOT the same as going to an alternative medical practitioner.

I didn't say it was. But homeopathic remedies are sold over the counter, therefore it is perfectly reasonable to test them in order to find out if the claims made for them are true. They aren't.

They did not give each person a different medication.

As I said, there have been clinical trials of individualised homeopathic remedies. They also performed no better than placebo.

Also there are plenty of conventional drug trials where the placebo is better than the drug but they trash those results.

If the results were trashed how can you know about them?

I have seen reports of conventional drug trials where attempts were made to hide the fact that the drug did no better (not worse) than placebo. It's regrettable, but the truth will out. That's the strength of science.

No this not the case. Certainly the conventional medicine was more brutal at that time but the reality is that homeopathy DID WORK. There was no harm done but also people did got well. He fumbled and mumbled but he did admit to this.

People got well because of the placebo effect, confirmation bias, regression to the mean and simple coincidence. When these factors are carefully and methodically eliminated using the scientific method no improvement is seen.

No matter what he thinks he cannot afford to say that homeopathy is effective. He'd lose his medical license.

Rubbish. There is nothing to prevent doctors prescribing homeopathic remedies in the UK. Plenty of doctors do, without being struck off.

And I also want to say something about the idea of "even placebo is better than nothing"

Placebo can be better than drugs in some cases. If the placebo brings about healing and there are no side effects then it is better than a drug that brings about healing but with side effects.

If symptoms are even partly psychosomatic then a placebo might well produce improvement. In order for a medical treatment to be considered effective it needs to produce results over and above placebo.

Put it this way: if in clinical trials of aspirin those patients who got the aspirin reported the same amount of pain and inflammation as those who received the placebo but both reported less than a third group who received no treatment, would you say that meant aspirin was an effective treatment for pain and inflammation? We go to the trouble and expense of manufacturing aspirin because it produces results over and above those resulting from a placebo. If we could just give someone a sugar pill and tell them it's an aspirin and get exactly the same positive results we would just do that. And that's the situation we're in with homeopathic remedies. You don't need to go through all the dilutions and successions etc, a simple sugar pill will be just as good.

You are keen to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Just because we might have a homeopathic remedy for something doesn't mean we have to throw out every thing else that we know.

According to our current understanding of chemistry and biology homeopathy cannot possibly work. If it did we'd have to go throw out our current understanding (the one that has produced so many truly effective medical treatments) and go back to the drawing board. So it's just as well we don't have to do that.

A placebo does not have psychological effects. It has bodily effects, which arise from upholding a belief. If a doctor says to a patient here take these pills and you will get well AND the patient trusts and believes the doctor, then even though the pills are just sugar or flour, the patient will (in a large number of cases, not all) get well. It is the belief that is the key. And the reason why is that the body is purpose-driven and not a machine. Ideas, when we uphold them with confidence cause us to react in a different way than when we have no confidence in them. And that "react" is bodily reactivity.

The placebo effect is fascinating and, last I heard, still not fully understood. The fact that it exists means that, for a medical treatment to be considered effective, it needs to produce more improvement than a placebo.

 

[Pixel42]

A cognitive bias refers to a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias

The scientific method DOES NOT sort this out. You will find hundreds and thousands of papers in prestigious journals that are plain wrong because of cognitive bias and yet he science is done properly AND is repeatable. The papers I am referring to include many that associate an outcome with a cause, when it is all about correlation and not causation.

All that the scientific method does it to give one confidence in the results. So we do a control experiment along side our actual experiment. The control contains all the conditions in the actual experiment except for the test conditions. That way we can be confident that the results we get are not due to something else.

The scientific method does not eliminate cognitive bias.

There are many examples of scientific methodologies which are designed to eliminate the effect of cognitive biases. The one we are currently discussing, double blind clinical trials, eliminates confirmation bias.

Sorry but the control in a drug trial IS the placebo.
Sometimes the placebo is a dummy drug but nowadays, when there are many drugs that are being improved on, the old drug is often used for the control, which they call the placebo.

Drugs are tested against placebo.
Everything that is given has a placebo effect. A patient given a drug will have some pharmaceutical effect from the drug but they will ALSO have a placebo effect. That is whey they talk about the drug needs to be "better than placebo"

Do you really think I don't know this?

Regression and coincidence etc., are all ironed out using statistical techniques in the analysis of results.

Which is possible because of the way the trial is designed, with all but a single variable controlled.

This is the best method that we have but it doesn't work real well and for reasons that doctors and researchers don't want to admit to. The reason is that we cannot "ensure that the only variable which is different between the two groups is one gets the medical treatment and the other gets the placebo". The only variable, which is taken into account, is the physical variable, i.e., the drug or medical treatment, but that is not the only variable and they know it but won't admit it.

It's not perfect and not always perfectly executed, but it's the best we can do.

In reality every idea that is upheld with confidence, especially where there is an emotional response, creates heaps more variables, all of which affect the outcome. AND it is worse than that. Every patient will have a different set of variables, which will affect their particular outcome. So the same pills will have a good effect in some, a mediocre effect in other and a bad effect or no effect in still others. And the side effects are also different for each.

The main way to ensure that the variable we are studying is the only one to significantly affect the results is to make the study as large as possible, and repeat it several times.

The moral of the story is that physical means are not the only variables. Ideas and beliefs can and do play a far more significant role than the drug or medical treatment. That is why it is not uncommon to see that the dummy drug, the placebo or control whatever you want to call it, can give better results than the real drug.

The fact that these factors play a role is precisely why we need to do several large scale properly blinded clinical trials before we can be certain that a particular medical treatment is indeed effective. I remind you again that you are claiming effectiveness for a treatment for which not even one small scale clinical trial has been done.

 

[Donn]

One can have evidence as to be certain of God's existence beyond the shadow of doubt but still not be able to show that evidence to a third party.

Your depreciation of evidence is summed in those words.

Evidence that speaks to you alone is not evidence; it certainly is Faith. You should have the smallest self respect and strictly distinguish.

If one person gathers evidence and postulates an hypothesis — it is not victory for their postulate. It's a start. From there it goes under trial to subtract all folly. If it still stands, it gets stronger. If it falls, it has the honour of being wrong.

You are not even wrong.

 

[Pup]

Firstly, am I understanding you correctly that toxic, inhumane and evil is used as an excuse to justify failure? This is wrong thinking. You can't say that if the person has not had a remission then they must be toxic.

I mean before treatment. There would be no point in treating a toxic person.

Also you are thinking along the lines of conventional medicine and I understand that. But this has nothing to do with tests and test results. It has everything to do with an awakening process an ah ha experience and the changes that brings.

I thought you were wanting to show the world of conventional medicine that there's evidence this works, in some sort of trial. At some point, you'll be showing that it works as well or better than conventional treatment.

Let's say it works on 10% of nontoxic people and 0% of toxic, and let's say 50% of all patients are toxic (just tossing out random numbers that are easy to work with). If you include everyone, 5 out of 100 would be healed, on average. If you include only the nontoxic ones, 10 out of 100 would be healed and the procedure would carry a disclaimer: only effective on nontoxic people.

In real life the numbers might not matter, but on the other hand, the difference might be significant enough to make a difference. Just depends on what the real numbers are.

This is what evidence looks like. Lots of statistics. Lots and lots of statistics, very few impassioned testimonials.

 

[kyrani99]

How do you know that the same thing wouldn't have happened if you hadn't moved away and cut your ties with those people?

How do you know that the same thing wouldn't have happened if you hadn't taken away the means by which others were trying to harm you?

How do you know that the same thing wouldn't have happened if you hadn't applied your findings?

How do you know ....

you get the point, I hope.

The only reliable way to find out whether a medical intervention really works is with a large scale, double blinded clinical trial. This has been learned the hard way. Fail to eliminate even one possible source of error and there remains an alternative explanation for any apparent improvement.

Sorry to say this but your reasoning is daft!
A clinical trial only comes AT THE END of discovery and not before.
Drugs are not plucked out of the blue and tested. They need to be developed based on the understanding of what is going on. That understanding comes with experimentation, observation and making sense of what one observes in a rational fashion.

In the first instance I could NOT have known what would happen if I stayed because I can't split in two and have one of me stay behind.

HOWEVER I saw DRAMATIC EVIDENCE. Most of my symptoms began to vanish within the first week and were gone by the time i was two thirds of the way to Sydney (about 3 1/2 weeks) and some of them were serious as for example coughing up phlegm with blood in it.

One can't draw conclusion on this much evidence BUT one doesn't throw the evidence away.

Next episode I saw that flu-like symptoms vanished in the space of 15 mins when I resolved a pressing issue. I had suffered with what I thought was the flu and it evaporates in that space of time? can't have been the flu. And so did fear, episodic inexplicable anger and worry. I began to see how these emotions gave rise to the flu-like symptoms. The "sore throat" that I thought I had stopped hurting in 24 hours and cleared completely in days. Why? Because it was inflammation and not a sore throat. And the lump disappeared more slowly in 3 or 4 weeks. Again one doesn't throw this info away. It begins to explain the first episode. I did get well because I moved. At the time I had no other knowledge so this intuitive move was the best move.

As far as applying my findings, this was confirmed another five times. I first let the situation stand while I did more investigations and then I applied my findings and without fail each time I cleared the cancer. This is evidence that one can't just discard.

This is no different to what a research scientist would do only my method of investigation differs. Although there are scientists like Einstein and Newton that also used insightful methods.

Kekulé, a German organic chemist said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail. This vision, he said, came to him after years of studying the nature of carbon-carbon bonds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekulé

My findings need to be tested but before that happens I need to put my theory in scientific terms and show mechanisms why the genetic changes take place. And might I add I don't expect that the pharmaceutical companies are going to help put themselves out of business, because my work is a drug-free, treatment free, self-induced cure.

Now do YOU get the point?

 

[kyrani99]

Environmental and psychological factors which affect how patients respond to treatment are certainly studied by conventional medicine. But they are investigated using the scientific method, not by collecting anecdotes.

Citation please.