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Pendulum Healing/Reiki/Hypnosis


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Guest Tam o' Shantie

I have found Pendulum to be quite bad for my health, since whenever I hear their music I run to the nearest wall and repeatedly smash my face against it until I lose consciousness.

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Your kneebone's connected to your... thighbone

Your thighbone's connected to your... hipbone

Your big toe's connected to your... boaby... wait what? no it isn't!

It's pyschosomatic more than anything I reckon. Being put in a relaxing environment where someone speaks softly to you and touches your body will make you feel better whatever the philosophy behind it.

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Guest Tam o' Shantie
Being put in a relaxing environment where someone speaks softly to you and touches your body will make you feel better whatever the philosophy behind it.

Regardless of whether the service is being provided by a level 5 Raiki shaman-ess or a toothless hooker, the effect on your wallet is similar too. The difference is that you have to embarassedly put the blame on "those bloody crystals being too strong" in the former instance when you inevitably blow your load.

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Faith/Holistic healing and Psychics are two of my biggest pet hates and I've spent a fair amount of time reading about/researching both, so let me save you a bit of money.

On the subject of 'alternative medicine', scientists have worked for hundreds of years to finds cures and treatments for every ailment known to man (they haven't found every cure but they've done a lot more than Holistic Medicine). These are treatments that although not 100% effective in every case, are rigorously tested to ensure they have basis in scientific fact and logic.

Holistic/alternative medicine is a mixture of guess work, spiritual pseudo-science and pure fiction which is propagated entirely by the 'placebo' effect and sheer desperation. If you have a genuine ailment, be it physical or psychological, see a GP.

On the subject of psychics, there is not a single shred of evidence to support anything they do. Ask yourself one question when you watch a psychic...'why do they say things like 'I'm getting name starting with B' or 'Is there something to do with your dead uncle and a hat' instead of giving a full name and address. Why on Earth would the dead be trying to trick the living with cryptic clues? It's all done through a combination of cold reading and linguistic trickery. If you want a Psychic reading, I'll do it for you and charge you half the price of whoever you plan on going to will and I'll probably get a fair amount right through pure guess work.

Watch anything by Derren Brown as an example, he does exactly what 'psychics' do yet openly explains it's done by nothing more than trickery and psychology.

If you need further convincing watch these documentaries by Richard Dawkins, the first dealing with psychics etc, the second with alternative medicine.

Richard Dawkins - The Enemies Of Reason - Part1 - Slaves to Superstition

Richard Dawkins - Enemies Of Reason - (Part 2)

On the subject of hypnosis, it's a very different thing. Hypnosis is undoubtedly real but it can only be used for a number of very specific issues, so it would depend entirely on what problem you have.

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I have found Pendulum to be quite bad for my health, since whenever I hear their music I run to the nearest wall and repeatedly smash my face against it until I lose consciousness.

Well, it doesn't work for everyone but Pendulum can stimulate the cheese chakra. I'd suggest trying one of their many similar mantras after consuming a nice piece of brie:

"dooble durble weeb worb, wooble deeble nurb."

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Faith/Holistic healing and Psychics are two of my biggest pet hates and I've spent a fair amount of time reading about/researching both, so let me save you a bit of money.

On the subject of 'alternative medicine', scientists have worked for hundreds of years to finds cures and treatments for every ailment known to man (they haven't found every cure but they've done a lot more than Holistic Medicine). These are treatments that although not 100% effective in every case, are rigorously tested to ensure they have basis in scientific fact and logic.

Holistic/alternative medicine is a mixture of guess work, spiritual pseudo-science and pure fiction which is propagated entirely by the 'placebo' effect and sheer desperation. If you have a genuine ailment, be it physical or psychological, see a GP.

On the subject of psychics, there is not a single shred of evidence to support anything they do. Ask yourself one question when you watch a psychic...'why do they say things like 'I'm getting name starting with B' or 'Is there something to do with your dead uncle and a hat' instead of giving a full name and address. Why on Earth would the dead be trying to trick the living with cryptic clues? It's all done through a combination of cold reading and linguistic trickery. If you want a Psychic reading, I'll do it for you and charge you half the price of whoever you plan on going to will and I'll probably get a fair amount right through pure guess work.

Watch anything by Derren Brown as an example, he does exactly what 'psychics' do yet openly explains it's done by nothing more than trickery and psychology.

If you need further convincing watch these documentaries by Richard Dawkins, the first dealing with psychics etc, the second with alternative medicine.

Richard Dawkins - The Enemies Of Reason - Part1 - Slaves to Superstition

Richard Dawkins - Enemies Of Reason - (Part 2)

On the subject of hypnosis, it's a very different thing. Hypnosis is undoubtedly real but it can only be used for a number of very specific issues, so it would depend entirely on what problem you have.

A great post sir.

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Does anyone bundle accupuncture in with faith healing?!

That's an interesting question. I know my mum had acupuncture on her knee and she swears it helped her with the pain and she's not known for believing in nonsense. I would say no, as Traditional Chinese Medicine, that clinical acupuncture is derived from, actually seems to have some basis which science can't adequately explain.

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I'm just reading Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst's "Trick or Treatment" and am about to start the chapter on acupuncture, so I'll try and remember to post a summary of their conclusions :)

So far, it's an excellent book. Simon Singh is getting sued by the British Chiropractic Association for suggesting that some of their claims are 'bogus'. The BCA took offense, as the implication is that practitioners are knowingly misleading people. The trial, as it unfolds, is a great test of how libel laws can impact scientific discussion and how this could suppress anyone publically denouncing potentially harmful 'therapies' or 'treatments'. Unfortunately for Simon it must be an incredibly testing, trying and financially draining time.

For those of you what would like to see the lengths that an alternative therapy lobby group will go to protect their livelihood against allegations of being 'bogus' rather than face scientific scrutiny to support their claims, Google Simon Singh and folllow the laughs.

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That's an interesting question. I know my mum had acupuncture on her knee and she swears it helped her with the pain and she's not known for believing in nonsense.

Believing in nonsense or not may not impact the ability of these therapies to work, as the effectiveness of the placebo effect has been shown, in some cases, to not be affected by knowing you're taking a sugar pill: The fact that some intervention has taken place is often enough to cause relief of symptoms, especially when considering pain (a highly subjective measurement).

Alternatively, your mum may have regressed to the mean. In other words, your mum was probably suffering at the height of her discomfort when she considered acupuncture. The tendency for most things is to return to some level of normality (in this case either through recovery or by your mum possibly becoming accustomed to the pain). The result of this would be that she feels better naturally, but associates recovery with the acupuncture instead.

A third option, of course, is that the acupuncture did actually work. There are well designed and developed ways to test the effectiveness of medical treatments across a large number of patients, using controlled treatment groups, so this is something that can be scientifically tested to see if there really is something in acupuncture. I'm reading a book chapter about it at the moment, so will report back soon :)

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Not entirely. At least there is controversy surrounding it in scientific research as opposed to pure derision.

Reflexology?

Scientology?

I'd like to believe in most of these treatments and wonder if believing in it fully can add an element of placebo into the equation?

I had a treatment of Reflexology and thought it was amazing. The woman could tell any thing that I had bothering me just from my feet. The tingly rushes you feel which shoot up your legs through your body are ace! And I was so relaxed I pretty much drifted off towards the end of each session. I would highly recommend if you don't mind people touching your feet, if not for healing just for relaxing.

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I'd like to believe in most of these treatments and wonder if believing in it fully can add an element of placebo into the equation?

I'd like to believe in God and I'm sure if I did I would be able to see his work, feel his love and have a relationship with him like all those crazy Christians. Kinda the same thing?

Whatever makes you happy (.....at the same time as lining the pockets of these shysters)

Perhaps nullmouse will summarise the chapter on Reflexology for us also?

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accupuncture TCM

It's easy for someone to dismiss something they either don't understand or don't want to understand.I went to a TCM practitioner for treatment.Not only did he help me with that particular ailment,he also diagnosed symptoms of another ailment....that my doctor has been trying to treat for a year.In my opinion if it doesn't work for YOU,then don't go back.

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Perhaps nullmouse will summarise the chapter on Reflexology for us also?

Got homeopathy and chiropracty to get through first :D

Ended up being busier than expected this weekend, only just finished the acupuncture chapter yesterday evening. Fascinating stuff, and there's a lot of contradictory evidence out there. For example, the World Health Organisation has twice stated that acupuncture works - but both times their methodology for concluding this was flawed: First time around the type of studies they gathered together were limited by not being randomized, controlled studies but instead just looked at two groups - Untreated or treated. Obviously, this type of design can't rule out the possibility of the placebo effect, but the results all looked in favour of acupuncture working.

The development of randomized, controlled studies meant better, more reliable data could be generated but the second WHO report that looked at this data was compiled by an active practitioner of acupuncture and is likely to be heavily biased. Indeed, the second report included many studies that originated from China and may have been fabricated or selectively positive due to no-one wanting to publish their negative results. The book made some interesting points about the vested interest of the Chinese goverment (Mao himself promoted acupuncture as a way of getting the cheap healthcare for all he promised, but did not believe it was an effective treatment himself), and generally dismissed the WHOs findings on this and several other grounds.

One of the major grounds the WHO reports were dismissed was due to the lack of proper weighting given to studies when bringing them all together to look at as a whole. The Cochrane Library (regarded as the definitive collaboration on these types of analysis, on any medical treatment or intervention) weights studies based on how well they were conducted, the numbers of patients used etc and gives them a score based on how reliable they are judged to be. Under this more definitive scrutinism, the majority of the claims about acupuncture were found to be unsupported. In two specific cases, where the evidence was too sparse to perform a full analysis on, the trend seemed to be towards an effect above a placebo effect. These cases were related to the relief of mild pain.

Part of the problem in looking at acupuncture is how to authoritatively rule out the placebo effect: How can you fake sticking needles in people so that (a) they don't know it's a sham and (b) the person performing the needling doesn't know it's a sham. There are clever ways around point (a), such as trick needles that don't penetrate but do stick to the skin with just enough pressure to give the sensation of being pricked, but (b) is an ongoing issue: The conviction of the person giving the treatment is just as crucial as the belief of the person receiving.

However, despite these problems, there seems to be no weight to the claims of acupuncture being any better than a placebo. That said, even the placebo treatments used often showed an improvement in the patient's condition. The ethical dilemma that ensues is interesting: Is it OK to promote a treatment that 'works' but not for the reasons stated? Open to discussion, but is a placebo treatment really a cure or is it just a mask that hides underlying conditions without resolving them?

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