Presumably the documentation is in Pagano's book "Healing Psoriasis: The Natural Alternative."
"Presumably" doesn't cut it in what purports to be a scientific study. Any undergraduate at even a half-decent college knows that the professor grading your paper is not going to give you the benefit of doubt if you fail to cite a reference for your evidence and
presume that the evidence exists and that it says what you claim it does. Mein's failure to give a proper citation for Pagano's "well documented cases" is sloppy, and indicative of his bad methodology.
So Pagano is a quack because he takes a broader view of traditional chiropractic care?
Do try to comprehend what I'm writing. Pagano is a quack because he calls himself a "chiropractic physician." The fact he doesn't stick to the fundamental tenet of chiropractic "care" is a good indication that he doesn't even believe in it, and is therefore a knowing and deliberate fraud.
A proper comparison is how these patients did on traditional psoriasis treatment vs. Cayce's treatment.
You're right, that
would have been the proper thing to do. We can only wonder why that idea evidently did not occur to Mein. He is an M.D., after all, so you'd think he'd have heard of this intriguing concept while in med school.
The patients themselves seem to be quite satisfied, even if you're not.
[...]
But they report generally positive results using Cayce's treatment.
I already pointed out--as you might have noticed if you were actually trying to
comprehend my post--why it is not implausible (to put it mildly) that the subjects' perception might be flawed. This is precisely the reason that proper clinical studies are at least single-blinded: in order to prevent bias from coloring the results. As things stand, the only thing Mein presents are testimonials, and due to the flaws in human perception,
testimonials are not valid scientific evidence.
And I will emphasize, lest it be sufficiently clear, that these people are not Mein's patients; they are
test subjects.
If Mein recommended that psoriasis sufferers summarily stop their conventional treatments, Randi and his minions would be apoplectic.
The JREF has nothing to do with this, so I'll ignore that red herring. The point stands that if a test subject continues conventional treatment, it is practically impossible to tell whether any improvement occurred as a result of the Cayce regimen. Given that psoriasis is currently incurable by established medicine, the only thing that would lend credence to the effectiveness of the Cayce treatment would be a complete and permanent cure. But as we see, that hasn't happened. Mein has
nothing. He claims his article,
"Systemic Aspects of Psoriasis: An Integrative Model Based on Intestinal Etiology," "has been submitted to a peer-reviewed medical journal and is currently in the review process." That's nice, but submission proves nothing; it's
acceptance that counts, and seeing as how that article is from 1999, and it's currently 2006, maybe Mein should take down that misleading statement and amdit he couldn't get it published (and rightly so, considering even a layman like myself can see the flaws in it).
I'm sorry you suffer from psoriasis, but your dismissal of Cayce's treatment seems to be based on your worldview.
If you mean that I hold a worldview which requires that some actual evidence be presented before I'm prepared to believe something, you are quite correct. I am perhaps more vehement about this particular instance of quackery because I have personal experience with the condition in question.
Has anyone debunked the claims John Pagano makes in his book? If not, why not?
If you're trying to argue that there might be something to Pagano's claims because nobody has yet proven him wrong, I would remind you that the burden of proof is, as always, on the claimant. Pagano claims his treatment is successful; it is up to him to convince the medical scientific community of that. The usual procedure is to submit a research paper to a peer-reviewed medical journal. As far as I can make out, PubMed contains nothing by John O.A. Pagano on this subject. There's only his book, and it's not considered acceptable to line your pockets by requiring people interested in verifying your "research" to buy your book.
So, apparently, the issue to Dave is not whether Pagano's method successfully treats psoriasis, but whether his website is up to snuff.
You really ought to try reading pages in their entirety, rather than ripping a quote out of context and trying to twist it to what you want it to mean. It's clear Dave is interested in whether Pagano's method works, he's just not prepared to shell out $15 for the book. His disclaimer that he doesn't allege that Pagano's method doesn't work is just legal a**-covering, and more importantly, he makes it pretty clear that, based on what he can glean from the website advertising the book, he can find no evidence to indicate that the method does work. Dave's comments on other pages are revealing in this matter.
From
this page:
Forget the books. Most are published through popular-press or self-publishing houses. They don't care whether or not the content of the book is correct, they just want to sell it. Anyone can write a book and state just about anything they want to in it.
And from his
"Quackery Index" page:
37. 20 points if they've written and published a popular-press book about their theories or therapy, instead of subjecting the ideas to rigorous clinical trials and peer review. 20 extra points if their book is self-published.
Guess who the publisher of
Healing Psoriasis is? The
Pagano Organization, that's who. So Pagano gets 40 points on the Quackery Index by dint of that fact alone.
And frankly, I'm not interested in shelling out $15 to find out what is wrong with Pagano's book either. I have access to plenty of medical journals (both mainstream and alternative) via my college, and if Pagano has anything of substance to say, that's where I expect to find it. I don't expect much, though, because
Mein's peer-reviewed-and-found-wanting article contains this passage:
Pagano [6] reports significant improvement of psoriasis in patients using a restrictive diet (discussed below) and dietary supplementation with herbal teas (most often yellow saffron and slippery elm) and olive oil.
"Significant improvement." I think I'm safe in saying that if Pagano had reported actually
curing anyone, both he and Mein would have said so. Well, that resolves that question, then.
So, to sum up: according to Mein, there is only person who regularly treats patients for psoriasis using the Cayce method, and that person is not an M.D. and doesn't report ever actually curing anyone. Finally, we have an answer to
thaiboxerken's question as to whether any medical doctors use any therapies developed by Cayce to treat patients. In the case of the proferred example of psoriasis, the answer is
no.
