How do sceptics respond to the argument that you need money to give proof?

Question

ok I've been hanging around this section for a bit now and find the arguments put forward by different regular members on here really interesting.

one of them is that the demands of sceptics are skewed when they say they want hard evidence like double-blinded RCTs for AM as these cost so much money that only drug companies who can afford them by patenting therapies will get them. since a lot of AM therapies can't be patented, there isn't the money to get those kind of trials.

and there's also the argument that AM can't be trialled because it accepts all the variables a patient presents with and provides holistic care that can't be mathematically reduced into a formula.

since the sceptics/critics often reduce the argument to the onus being on AM to give the evidence that it works, do they see any problem with this?

Answer 1

There are other ways to prove that a therapy works, or at least to works well enough to get funding for a rigorous trial.

1 - "Case studies" and "patient series" ... these are not the same as testimonials. It involves taking the medical and treatment records for either selected patients OR a series of them who consecutively were treated for something by your method "X" and having a third party examine them.

If you claim that X cures cancer, for example, and you have solid proof that the patient had cancer (x-rays, pathology reports, etc.) and also that you cured it (x-rays and pathology reports showing that the previous cancer was gone with no other known therapy being given), and find the patients later to see how they are doing several times post-therapy ... show those and you will see some real interest in X.

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Adding:

Doctor J ... ROFLMAO! That's brilliant!

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/f...  

But, they could have looked at people who went out of a plane with no chute, and those whose chute failed to open to see what the injury and mortality rate of the chuteless is compared to those who has a successful chute deployment.

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Adding more:

SCORPIAN says "Currently, German Rife Researchers are very excited about a new optical microscope that breaks the laws of physics, or optics to be exact, which can see a living virus, if rife researchers obtained one of these expensive microscopes"

Forget medicine! If this microscope actually existed, semiconductor manufacturers would pay billions for it. But when an engineer I personally know asked for a test drive so he could compare it to the existing technology, he never got a reply. When an company that spends millions on R&D and billions on fabs to make chips can't get the inventors to reply, it makes me wonder if they know it doesn't work.

Answer 2

I highly recommend the following article in the British Medical Journal:  "Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials."

In this paper researchers reviewed all of the RCTs in the world's scientific literature that documented the effectiveness of the use of parachutes.  Unfortunately, they were not able to find even one RCT proving parachutes actually work!

Here are their conclusions:  "As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomized controlled trials.  Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observation data.  We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute."

This entire article, and the accompanying editorials, are worth reading.  You can access them via Pubmed or at the BMJ website.

Note: the British Medical Journal is one of the world's top medical journals.

Best wishes.

Answer 3

I believe there have been those studies on alot of these things because if there was any proof of these things actually working, BIG PHARMA would be all over it selling it as real medicine..  I think that the fact that this is not the case speaks volumes about the effectiveness of the "alternatives"..

EDIT:

Since herbs cannot be patented why wouldnt "Big Pharma" use what they whished..  You saying pfizer wouldnt be able to release ground up tree bark and say it will make you "feel better" just because they cant patent it?  I figured it would be because it wouldn't stand up to testing..

Answer 4

The Never-Ending Catch-22

Unfortunetly Alt. medicine practionioners are in a dillema, as they have the 'burden of proof' that conventional medicine demands. Conventional medicine, or the gold {sacred cow of medicine} RCT, has defined 'evidence' in a very very narrow window, this makes it very difficult/impossible for alt. medicine to provide the evidence demanded, by doctors/scientists, patients and the general public.

This is similar to how the scienitific community defends the Theory of Evolution, for a long time creationists demanded proof of the theory, eventually the proof was given {all nonsense} and the scientists turned the tables on the creationists and asked them for proof of being 'created', ultimately, proof of a creator. Since the creator is part of a higher realm, the spiritual realm, and thus part of the unseen, it is a mighty task to prove such a thing with science. Since science deals with the 'seen' or physical world through observation. Although, even a scientist cannot deny the Scientific knowledge in the Holy Qur'an that is upto 14 centuries {the present day} ahead of its time, and is preposterous to conclude that these primitive arabs could have such a scientific understanding of: embryological stages {which are microscopic}, the solar system, the nature of the atom{and its constuent sub-atomic particles}, the water cycle, that the world is geo-spherical {centuries before this was even debated/accepted}, and much more. Download Qur'an and modern Science pdf, from here:

http://www.irf.net/irf/download/index.ht...

Neo-Darwinism, or macro Evolution, can easily be refuted, most of the 'evidence' pushed down our throats at med-school is 'lies': vestigal structures{e.g. wisdom teeth, tail bone, appendix}, Haekel's Embryological Sketches{a known hoax}, similarities in: biochemistry, DNA, homologous structures.

http://www.darwinismrefuted.com/

Anyhow, a bit of topic, yet relevant to the discussion of how the scientific community can be unjust, and ignorant.

The parachute argument is really good, thank you Doctor J for your contribution, and Abaca... for finding the article/links.

The parachute argument reminds me of the clinical trials medicine has demanded of Rife Frequency Technology, Gerson Therapy, Nutrition/Food as Medicine/Special Diets; Rife Technology is claimed to cure or improve almost every disease, it involves using the resonant frequency of pathogens, and make them explode, literally.

Rife Technology was/is suppressed, and most of Dr. Royal Rife's research, lab notes, and equipment have been confiscated by the US governement, without a warrant/court order, and thus illegal. It's no secret or conspiracy, that the wealthy rule the world. There exists a handful of powerful, rich, fat cats that rule this word, and do not want this technology in widespread use.

Currently, German Rife Researchers are very excited about a new optical microscope that breaks the laws of physics, or optics to be exact, which can see a living virus, if rife researchers obtained one of these expensive microscopes, they could find the resonant frequencies for all pathogens, including HIV, viruses that cause cancer{e.g. Human papilloma virus causes cervical cancer}, and anything that is resistant to antibiotics, like MRSA, VRSA, C. Diff. {we [the Rife Community] currently have our man, Peter Walker, working with the company, and spreading this to conventional microbiologists/doctors at the recent London MicroScience Show, and Rife Conference, held anually in Berlin, Germany}

Grayfield Microscopes - The World's most powerful optical microscope:

http://www.grayfieldoptical.com/online_v...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIhkjS6Ln...

http://www.rense.com/general73/requiem.h...

There exists a company that produces Rife Technology Machines, with clinical trials to support its efficacy, and thus use in Hospitals, or at the very least its reccommendation to patients:

http://www.oncotherm.org/eng/?menugroup=...

The fact that even when Clinical trials are produced, the technology still remains 'alternative medicine', and by implication of that term inferior or quackery; This is proof to me, that there is a medical conspiracy to supress this therapy and keep it away from the public, as it is so cheap, their is no profit in Rife Technology, except a few pennies for the electric bill; every person would have a rife machine at home, the need to visit a doctor would be a rare occurance. Now, some companies are making 'Rife' machines for the public, although they are not true Rife technology, since 90% of all his work has been lost, and thats why we have Rife Reseachers, working in their garage, to re-discover, understand, and implement Rife technology. Although, having said that, many people have claimed to be cured from these 'primitive' rife machines, of things as serious as cancer, to HIV.

www.resonantlight.com, PERL Rife machine, and GB-4000 Rife machines have good testomonial evidence, from my many months of researching which one to buy.

Rife Technology, re-invented, unknowingly, by a British Doctor in Perth, Austrailia:

http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/Rif...

Rife Technology re-discovered by Scientists, you don't see this on the News, Newspapers, Media:

http://www.davidicke.com/content/view/11...

http://www.livescience.com/health/080205...

There is no need for a RCT with a control/placebo group, this is unnecessary, as this is suitable for drugs exclusively, and thus RCT {the 'gold standard' for the medical profession} has the interests of big pharmaceutical companies exclusively. As stressed in the documenteey 'Dying To Have Known', MIT Scientist/grandson of Dr. Max Gerson, stresses how RCT's are not suitable for diets/Gerson Therapy, and that scientists should approach this by replicating the results, by following the same protocol, and obtaining testomonial evidence from patients and the doctors treating them, supported by pathology reports, to prove they had the disease, so the sceptics do not have a leg to stand on, with that argument, although there scap-goat will always help them in the time of need, simply...put it down to the placebo effect, thousands of people with terminal, un-treatable cancer, {and on their death bed, literally, since the medical trinity failed them: chemo-radiation-surgury} all cured by the 'placebo effect' is absurd.

See these video's of Rife Technology in action:

http://www.squarewaveresearch.com.pa/vid...

More and more rife researchers are beginning to speak out, video's showing evidence of this effective and promising technology are being scattered on the internet:

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?doci...

http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?q=...

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We need a Medical Revolution

This 'Never ending catch-22' that the medical pofession has condemned alternative medicine with, is not new, it has been a war that started long ago, this is detailed in the Hoxsey Documentery below, near the end, and also stresses the need, now more than ever, a medical revolution.

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?doci...

When you see through the lies, deception and propaganda, it all becomes so clear, but equally heart-breaking, disgusting, and cruel.

Answer 5

As I've said repeatedly I think the testing forum and model is the problem not testing.

When drug companies spend millions developing a product they want to sell it. If they can sponsor the testing and submit results to the FDA they will use copmpanies which work within the criteria to make the results look more favourable by changing the experiment design if they don't get the results they want.

Stretching the rules / law to your benefit to make your product look more favourable is basic business and widely practiced in all markets.

This would end if drug companies were not allowed to conduct / sponser their own testing. Being allowed to do so is as ridiculous as selecting and paying for your own independent tax inspector.

Instead the testing should be done by a body who has no interest in whether the products are on the market or not.

Everyone who manufactures healthcare products or provides healthcare should have to pay into a central fund. This central fund should then independently test all products and therapies, be it allopathic drugs, herbs, electro-therapy, crystal therapy, chakra balancing using a fair experimental model.

Claims on all healthcare products etc., could be tested truely independently.

This will never happen in the US as senate for both major parties receive big funding from big pharma which would vanish if any major political party put forward serious proposal to change this.

In regards to Alt-med being big business, both the asker and skep doc are right.

It is mostly made up of indiviuals or very small institutions. Akron, who manufacture couches are probably the biggest suppliers to osteopaths but they will quite happily sell their couches to anyone.

Some osteopaths purchase ultrasound and laser units etc....

Supplementation and Homeopethic remedies are big sellers though and big money can be made from these by the manufacturers.

Another fair test would be to refer chronically sick patients onto therapist from different fields and see what effect a course of treatment will have on the requirement for medication.

Each treatment could be compared.

Skep doc I do have to comment on this part of your answer.

####The other argument you make, and that I hear frequently is that somehow AM treatment "transcends" scientific investigation. It is ahead of science, It uses energies and forces science can't detect. It works on a "spiritual" plane. It is based on the "intentionality" of the healer. Hence my frequent comparisons to religious faith and AM that really seems to p**s off some people...who shall be nameless. ;)

Many if not most AM philosophies are indistinguishable from faith based religious ideas. It has an appeal to people beyond the level of proof. ###

There is no proof of the existence of any of these things you mentioned. There is also none of their NON-EXISTENCE.

Nobody is asking you to beleive in them, they are simply asking you to consider them as possibilities.

Science is incomplete. To deny these possibilities without conclusive proof means you are not allowed to consider a specific possibility.

This is nothing short of a belief system and philosophy.

People who are anti-altmed /anti -religion, anti belief forget that they also subscribe to a belief system and are often as evangelical and zealous of promoting that system as the people they ciritcise.

I see this a lot in the anti-altmed community. Something not palitable to their belief system is not considered but either ignored or ridiculed.

Answer 6

One of the fundamental characteristics of all religions is that they  claim a monopoly on truth.

One of the simplest examples would be Christianity; God said ___ in the bible, therefore it's true, end of discussion.

One of the more complex examples however applies to modern science.  It took me a while to pick up on this since the system is predicated upon being a rational transcendence of the previous faith based ideologies, but once you gain the ability to look at science from an unbiased perspective it becomes much easier to see.  (or put differently, even a "system of logic" can be inherently subjective and cannot be evaluated objectively with the same system).

The way modern medicine has transformed these days with the church of science, they've essentially reached the point of arrogance (or religious zeal depending on how you look at it) to make the following claims:

Our system is the sole correct arbiter of truth in the universe.

If science can explain something it exists, if science cannot it does not.

Truth must be established through our flawless system, which in the case of medicine means being evidence based.

I have a few objections to these postulations.

The first is the assumption that science is omnipotent and can explain everything.  Previously (in my opinion "real") scientists had the opinion that most of the world was a mystery and they wanted to try and understand most of what they could (in other words they were "open minded").  Given that's it's impossible to actually "know everything" (unless you are god), the only way to accomplish this goal is to selectively regulate your perception of reality, which in this context means science simply ignores and denies the existence of anything it cannot explain.  This belief is a stark contrast from the real scientific systems of the world, and in my own opinion just another way of individuals to invoke a sacred institution to support whatever ideology or agenda they have.

The second objection I hold is that science's critieria for establishing truth is effective (even within their own system).  There are many reasons, but some of the many which pop into mind for me are (in response to things not being validated by RTCs).

*If experimental evidence demonstrates something differing from the main stream thought process, or the interests of other parties (be it an academic who does not want his precious theory refuted, a corporation needing to protect their commercial interests, or simply something which shatters science's artifically constructed notion of universal understanding), it will be disregarded ridiculed and ignored.  I have seen more examples of this during my life time than I can count.

*RTCs are often extremely ineffective for testing extraneous or invisible variables, or for testing "holistic" processes which have more than one factor at work in the subject.  The best example I can think of for this would be the current stance on the placebo effect.   Previously, it's existence was denied, since the notion that the mind could influence the body's health was absurd.  Now it's been established that 35% of remissions are triggered solely by the placebo effect, and any  mind body therapy is lumped under "it works because it uses the placebo effect."  Yet, this argument makes a ridiculous reductionist assumption; all mind body techniques have equivalent healing effects; a 35% chance of improvement.  Any person who has actually learned a (semi decent) mind/body healing system can vouch for a very simple fact.  Different practices (and the way in which they are conducted) yield different results, they don't all just magically turn on the 35% placebo effect switch.  However, from the standpoint of a scientist trying to religiously define the totality of reality, the simpler placebo effect notion is necessary; fitting anything more complicated within the framework of a simple experimental model is difficult if not impossible.

*RTCs often yield flawed results.  The reasons are numerous, but include that patients are often aware they are using placebos during trials (for life saving drugs) or that the funders of a study have a motivation to doctor the results.  If one browses the medical literature, numerous meta analysis have been done establishing that curiously, corporate funded testing always seems to yield more favorable results than independent research.  

*RTCs are prohibitively expensive, especially if done to the standards that alternative therapies are demanded for.  I've taken multiple classes in college where we were introduced to a simple healing method (my favorite was biofeedback) and then taught a treatment protocol for a simple condition (which were pretty obvious in terms of why they would work).  At the end of the semester when we finished our actual clinical and experimental work, we were given a simple question.  It's pretty clear to you all that this methodology works, and the places you can make errors in the treatment protocol for it result in failure.  How much do you think it would have cost to prove this works in a RTC trial?  After some math we came out to around 10 million dollars.  The teacher than said, did you know the NCCAM's annual budget is 113 million dolars?  The point was pretty clear to me; forgetting the issue of funding it, why even bother proving a self evident treatment?  For that amount of money you could have actually done something which had a purpose instead of establishing that relaxation reduces stress.

To put it briefly, I think RTCs are a useful investigative tool (and in certain cases very useful for discerning truth), but it's a gigantic fallacy to assume that they are the one and only way to validate trials.  The FDA has a policy that it will only approve drugs with RTC research backing them.  I just finished reading a wonderful book on DMSO which essentially said:

DMSO is completely non toxic, it has been used by tens of thousands of people since the 70s and no toxicity has been reported, it's demonstrated remarkable efficacy in all sorts of applications (especially curing pain for people who had chronic incurable conditions, along with when mixed with antibiotics, able to kill bacteria which previously had a resistance to the bacteria), and many of it's biochemical and physiological properties have been studied and confirmed in laboratory.  However, if one uses DMSO, they smell like garlic and get a minor taste in their mouth.  Hence, it's impossible to carry out a RTC trial on the drug, having a control is impossible.  Isn't that absurd?

The US gov did a study, and found that about 85% of medical procedures in the US are not based on experimentally validated research (after all, how exactly do you conduct RTCs of different types of heart surgery for those in danger of dying?).  RTCs work well in small trials where one variable is being tested (aka. pharamacutical tests), but aside from that, it's value drops dramatically.  So the question essentially becomes, is this argument fair?

Alternative Medicine: We have some amazing treatments which produce repeated amazing clinical results for people who had exhausted every other option without sucess.

Allopaths: Your treatments are quackery and there's no evidence it works.

Alt Med: But what about all the people we've treated who were given a 0% chance of survival?

Allop: Anecdotal placebo effects and spontaneous remissions.

Alt Med: Then why did your treatments not envoke a placebo effect?

Allop: Your treatments were not validated by RTCs, therefore it's not worth my time to entertain your fantastic delusions.

Alt Med: But how are the results you obtain through RTCs any better?  Clear and immediate dangers in the treatments which were never shown in testing pop up once the drug goes to market, and your experimentally validated drugs don't actually do anything for the parties they are supposed to help.

Allop: Observation bias, put up the trials or shut up.

Alt Med: How exactly do you suppose we fund trials?  A satisfactorily conducted trials cost is in the millions and we aren't major corporations proliferating drugs for profit, the NIHs budget for testing our therapies is less than 1% of conventional's chunk of the pie.  Effectively you've set the stage where without financial backing, one cannot practice medicine.

Allop: Insert ad-hominem attack.

Truthfully, if I was to boil this down very concisely,

Skep doc is on record as saying that if Alt med wants to play in the sandbox with actual medicine they can't have special rules or exceptions.  My argument's quite simple, who gave your group the right to have a monopoly on medicine?  I'm not even complaining your rules that the fact evidence for alt med is held to a much higher standard than evidence allopathy, or that the method is somewhat flawed.  It's fine if we don't receive validation from your system for efficacy, BUT you can't claim anything outside your system is a falsehood, and use that as the primary argument for why our practice is worthless.  At that point the debate sinks to trying to convince a religious fundamentalist to change their beliefs.