Medical claims

[pmurray]

You know, it might be worth pointing out in the clallenge FAQs that medicines and other cures are very difficult to test. The challenge is a challenge to demonstrate that you can do what you say you can do. Medical claims are very difficult to demonstrate: drug companies take years and millions of dollars conducting trial with hundereds or even thousands of subjects to demonstrate that a cure is efficacious.

There is also the not inconsiderable problem of finding ill people. Once again, people in mainstream medicine have stringent ethical guidelines to adhere to in conducting their trials. If manipulating soneone's Qi is effective, then it will nessesarily be potentially dangerous. I personally would not care to be acupunctured by someone who dismisses such western notions as that one ought not stick needles into nerves and suchlike.

This is not to say that medical claims cannot be tested: a case in point is a homeopath demonstrating that they can tell the difference between a properly "poteniatised" remedy and plain water. It is however very difficult to find a safe, effective experimental protocol that is feasible to execute.

The onus is on the claimant to demonstrate his or her claim.

 

[Gayle]

Well said, pmurray.

 

[trainman]

ONE DAY'S BREATH

Dear Sceptics

I have to work intensivly today, and I have to apologise for not answering personaly to your replies. You see, life can be tenacious, especially if you don't have one million dollars in your pocket!

I want to thank all the friends that were ready to deal with me with respect, even if they didn't feel to, and, even more, those that turned to do so in the process. I am going to answer to every interesting argument, even if written provocatively - as for those that call me to "apply or back off", I will have to ignore them, not because their manner is "cultish" but because it is boring.

This is a public forum - it may be an arena, but an arena that uses arguments.

In the meanwhile, let me just quote a part of an article. It is from TNT audio e-magazine from Italy, and bears the title "Bits of wire and pieces of string - Why cable reviews are almost useless"(http://www.tnt-audio.com/clinica/bitsofwire_e.html).

"Whenever we discuss bits of wire, sorry, "cables", we are right back in the territory of the 70s subjective vs objective debate; one which still rages among certain folk. There is a perfectly valid psychological explanation for the heat of these debates that has nothing to do with audio, art or science. Good science and good engineering are largely a matter of amassing sufficient repeatable data to be able to draw hypothesis and use these to make reasonable predictions of what might result from a certain action. This must be checked by experiments that test these hypotheses. Very simple really, one might think.

Repeatable personal observation provides us with uniquely validated evidence more than the rhetoric of church, state or audio advertisement. But there are those who cloak themselves in the language of science who insist that phenomena do not exist if they cannot explain them in their own terms, rather like the tobbacco companies who until recently insisted that no causal link could be proved between smoking and lung-cancer, may have been a technically accurate statement at the time but was a lie in any other conventional phenomenological encounter with evidence, and was illogically extended to the hypothesis that therefore cancer was not caused by smoking. For example there are still those who insist that we cannot hear differences between bits of wire in audio systems because they have cannot envisage how such differences could exist. They use logical argument to override sensory experience, which is how many of us manage to spend years living unsatisfactory lives because we ought to do what we are doing, because we have been told that is the way to do it.

To me those objectivists who refute all cable differences are merely taking a position similar to the Rennaissance religious backlash against new knowledge of the solar-system. The objectivist position is equal in evidence base to any other religious faith.

The Subjectivists, on the other extreme, know that copious doses of money & snake-oil & pixie-dust (mined until quite recently in the English county of Cornwall, whose residents don't call themselves English, but Kernow, where it is still called Piskie-dust) will transform the electrical signals entering & leaving amplifiers from ignorant neanderthal electrons leaping from cave-to-cave (electron holes) into elegant sophisticates possessed of the savoire-faire of soundstage & screen.

The cable-charmers imbue bits-of-wire with mystical magical properties not yet known to science, but familiar to spiritualist mediums. This subjectivist position ranks alongside faith healing in its adherence to an empirical evidence base backed by academic rigour.

Now I know that I have angered both the Objectivists and the Subjectivists in equal measure. They are both suffering from the same psychological condition: an inability to cope with uncertainty. Indeed, they may suffer from a fear of uncertainty. To both groups, "uncertain = unsafe". The objectivists want to measurable-repeatable readable test results that clearly state that there is a difference between A & B and that the difference proves that A is better than B and therefore might justify higher unit cost. The subjectivists need to know that they will hear that A is better than B because several other people say they have heard that A sounds better than B and that there is unlikely to be an even better C because only A has ingredient/process X.

I wouldn't express it in a better way.

Hope to talk with you tomorrow, with even more of you, people!

Trainman

 

[Frinkiak7]

Re: ONE DAY'S BREATH

*snip*

To me those objectivists who refute all cable differences are merely taking a position similar to the Rennaissance religious backlash against new knowledge of the solar-system. The objectivist position is equal in evidence base to any other religious faith.

*snip*

Nitpick: I have a bit of a problem with this statement. In the case of such revolutionary ideas about astronomy, there was measurable, repeatable experimental evidence showing that the propsed hypotheses had merit. The new arguments were dismissed not on their objective grounds, but because they ran counter to the accepted knowledge put forth by the church. In the case of "special" cables, there is no such evidence; there is merely SUBJECTIVE interpretation and anecdotal evidence. Treating these two situations as the same requires a bit of a logical leap.

/end nitpick

Sorry, sometimes I can't help being a pedant. Anyway, I'm going to agree entirely with pmurray, although I'd like to add something. There are entirely too many instances of medical, technological, and spiritual jggery-pokery about which purport to be based on actual scientific principles, but which wither and die when placed under the lens of real scientific scrutiny. The proponents of these methodologies then use terms along the lines of, "Oh, well, science can't explain everything", and then go right back to claiming that their approaches are scientific! It irritates me to no end that they are allowed to have it both ways.