America, the Beautiful (And Nutty): A Skeptic’s Lament | Hacker News Reader

America, the Beautiful (And Nutty): A Skeptic’s Lament

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The problem is that people are very good at avoiding sources of contrasting opinion. What we need to do is force people outside of their comfort zone. Imagine if somebody rich paid for 24/7 ads on popular networks that do nothing but teach science and demystify common beliefs.

> Imagine if somebody rich paid for 24/7 ads on popular networks that do nothing but teach science and demystify common beliefs.

That's one more reason to get rich - to save mankind from itself.

Yet, I think that, even in our skepticism, we must keep our minds open and don't forget that we must impose high standards on ourselves too. It's not enough to say homeopathy is a farce and faith cures are a joke when the more accurate statement would be that both illustrate how placebos work. Our brains are not capable of producing perfect reasoning all the time: reasoning evolved to help us elude predators. We could have ended up very inconspicuous, with better muscles, claws and teeth or being extremely allergenic - all popular ways to deal with other animals.

And, for the record, I'm all in for homeopathy and faith cures - they may help remove some undesirable genetic traits from the gene pool. OTOH, the populations presenting such traits can evolve to have better immune systems. Life has a way to perpetuate itself.

    > And, for the record, I'm all in for homeopathy and faith
    > cures - they may help remove some undesirable genetic
    > traits from the gene pool. OTOH, the populations presenting
    > such traits can evolve to have better immune systems. Life
    > has a way to perpetuate itself.

Susceptibility to harmful ideologies really doesn't work like that. Being raised within a religion or cultural practice is an amazingly better predictor for continuing that belief in the next generation than what genes were passed along. Faith cures and placebos operate at the level of belief and culture, not the gene level.

Further, look no further than the anti-vaccination movement to see how harmful medical ideas can put the general population at a greater risk for entirely preventable diseases.

Sorry. I was half joking. I'd much rather educate people than negligently allow them to self-select themselves out of the gene pool.

Part of my point was that "self-selecting out the gene pool" does nothing to dispel harmful beliefs. That is a culture and education problem.

There will always be metaphysical questions. As much as it's worth fighting against people who have their head in the sand about basic scientific evidence, I don't think it's a requirement that we give up all spirituality and resign ourselves to only caring what science can prove. Human experience is after all entirely subjective, and there's no logical reason why the pursuit of objective truth should be the meaning of life for everyone.

What do you mean by "spirituality" which you think we should not give up?

The idea that there may be greater purpose in the universe.

Greater than what?

And, if you don't want to investigate that "greater purpose" with evidence, logic and rationality, how do you propose for "spirituality" to tackle the problem?

The point of homeopathy practiced today, by licensed doctors, is to administer placebo in cases where it is likely to help. Placebo is amazingly powerful--in particular when prescribed by a doctor. Funny enough, one of the most helpful medicines is seeing a doctor. Seeing a doctor has been proven to correlate very well with curing many diseases--independant of whether medication was prescribed.

Keep that in mind when spreading FUD about homeopathy. Yeah, it has no medicinal effect. But that does not make it worthless, if handled properly by a trained doctor. There aren't too many ways for a doctor to prescribe placebo...

Friends of mine took their baby to a chiropractor when it had a cold. The chiropractor put a sugar cube on the baby's head and the baby got better in a couple of days. It works!

The baby grew up and started suffering from what I presume is an allergy of the airways. They still take this kid to the chiropractor because he's such a nice and understanding man, and they have lots of self-deluding stories about how the kid's condition often improves after visits.

Draw your own conclusions.

That is far too kind to the homeopathics, who are also licensed doctors. In particular, they:

1) Will often charge more than licensed doctors who don't do homeopathy.

2) Advise people not to go to their regular doctors.

See the many homeopathics who claim they can cure cancer or HIV.

Now, I'm not sure how many homeopathics are just very misguided, and how many are outright charlatans, but they are certainly not just helping.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”

R. P. Feynman

The point of homeopathy is to take your money for fooling you. And if placebo is likely to help won't real medicine help more?

There are plenty of cases where there is no real medicine. In many cases, all they can do is administer painkillers. Take a bad joint, lower back pain, migraine. In a good percentage of these cases, placebo works really well. If you don't believe me, ask a specialist. Pain specialists (trained doctors, mind you) often prescribe homeopathy, biofeedback, acupuncturing and the like, simply because it works.

Also, long time medication is rarely desirable. Treatment gets less effective, there can be addiction issues and not least of all, it's expensive. This is particularly important for chronical diseases.

If placebo, in whatever form, helps some ten or twenty percent of people (and it does!), why not try it?

This is just wrong on so many levels...

That is absolutely not the "point" of modern homeopathy... The point of modern homeopathy is to spread a lot of nonsense about water with memory and other such bunk.

Secondly, you seem to have some funny ideas about the placebo effect. Placebos are used to try and measure peripheral factors. It could be that just going outside is what is curing the patient, and not the new drug you are giving them.... Or maybe spraying anything up the nose will help some symptoms, not the new nose spray you are testing. That's the whole point of a placebo...if your medicine is only working as well as the placebo, it's not working at all.

It so happens that additionally, sometimes you can get what is called "the placebo effect" where just the idea of being treated can help somewhat...but generally only in certain cases and for subjective things, like pain. It makes sense that people feel a little better subjectively when they are treated.

However, not all placebos cause the placebo effect and if a placebo helps it is not necessarily because of the placebo effect. Using placebos in the way you suggest is not good medicine, they are not reliable enough and require some dishonesty with the patient, a serious ethical concern. Furthermore, you should be able to get similar or better results from a variety of real treatments!

Outside of research, there may be occasionally a reason for a doctor to dispense a placebo...but overall they are not good medicine and neither is homeopathy.

> Yeah, it has no medicinal effect. But that does not make it worthless,

Actually, yes...that's exactly what it does. That's the whole point. If something only works as well as a placebo, it's literally worthless.

Sorry, you are wrong. Placebo is astonishingly powerful. Read up about it. Clinical trials usually test three cases: No medication, placebo and actual medication. Placebo usually works really well compared to no treatment. Not for a broken bone, of course, but for a huge range of illnesses, including cancer. Of course it is especially potent for illnesses with a psychosomatic angle, which is just about anything except flesh wounds.

A healthy, optimistic mindset is tremendously efficient medicine. Feeling like you are being helped is, therefore, very important.

Don't get me wrong: I am not proposing to actively try to cure stuff using placebo. But judicious use of placebo, particularly in cases where tradinional medication has been proven to be ineffective or has too many unwanted side effects, is a valid course of action, if done professionally.

I think perhaps you are the one who needs to read up about it more.

> Placebo is astonishingly powerful

I would agree that placebo is "powerful", in that it can provide surprisingly powerful subjective effects...however it's mechanism is fairly well understood and it's nothing special.

Placebo is not an effective treatment overall, and the places where it is effective are things like say pain... in those cases it works by releasing endogenous pain relievers. Ditto for things like relaxation etc...

> Placebo usually works really well compared to no treatment

Well of course it works "really well" compared to no treatment...

Positive thinking, receiving attention from people around you, etc are all things that can have a positive impact on your health but these are not part and parcel with "the placebo effect".

Even so, I find the claim that "placebo works really well" dubious, and I'd ask you to provide a basis for support if you wish to make it again.

The fact is in the end, the placebo effect is small, unreliable, requires you to lie to your patient....and you could achieve as good or better results with real medicine.

It's just not a good practice...placebos belong in research as a control, and very rarely in certain situations yes it can be useful to dispense them...but not in an effort to "treat" people with the placebo effect.

"Placebo is amazingly powerful"

Not really. http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/spin-city-plac...

Placebo mostly just /feels/ amazingly powerful. For some symptoms, like pain, this is good enough. But it doesn't really have much of an effect in terms of treating an actual physiological problem.

A lot of homeopathy/other placebo is administered by CAM "doctors" who think that it actually works! The idea that someone with that little real knowledge and a wealth of misinformation about how the human body works (ditto biology, basic chemistry, or the scientific process) is trying to treat medical problems is, frankly, terrifying.