Here’s a science news headline perfectly penned for abuse:
Trouble is, the headline is fairly accurate. “Several” plant extracts (3, 33, 333?) were tested for their ability to kill off Petri-dish fungi and bacteria.
Eight of the plants tested were able to significantly affect the growth of organisms collected by oral swab, and pure cultures of bacteria and fungi grown in the lab. This included wild asparagus, desert date, false daisy, curry tree, caster oil plant and fenugreek.
Okay, so there is something to the finding. However, there is great room for mis-interpreting the headline and overall significance of the finding. For one, it is easy to read the headline as a blanket “thumbs up” to herbal remedies in general. Why not “several herbal remedies offer hope”? And there are the “offering hope” and the “new” parts. As if alternative medicine is going to lead the charge, be the new new thing in treating disease, leaving that stuffy old, limited conventional medicine behind.
But no. In the words of researcher Dr. Jaya Pakash Yadav, we see what the herbal remedies really do offer:
Although the plants tested had a lower potency than conventional antibiotics they offer hope against resistant species. These results are a starting point for further testing in the lab and clinic.
“A starting point.” That’s what some alternative medical treatments provide — an idea about what might work. Then it’s up to science-based medicine, conventional medicine, to test whether the ideas have merit or not, whether they do in fact work, and later to bring them to highest safe potency, etc.
Alternative medicine isn’t all bad. Sure, there are those bogus treatments that have been well-tested and have failed but are still clung to. These should be completely moved on from — homeopathy, reflexology, the “chi” aspect of acupuncture (in the least)…. But some yet-to-be-tested others, particularly of the herbal sort, might indeed provide something good. Starting points for further stringent testing.
Man, I really wish I knew what the study author’s meant by “several” plant extracts. That’s bugging me.
[travel mode - recycled material - first appeared here]
I sometimes think of “alternative medicine” as hunch-based medicine. Typically there is no scientific superstructure supporting the claims. Folklore, ancient dogma, yes. Hunches about how to treat illness get clothed-in or justified-by pseudoscientific reasoning.
That said, hunches have their place. They are one of the first steps of discovery. But for something to prove effective it has to be tested. And once tested it would be nice if the mechanisms of action were understood and disclosed.
Alternative medicine also tends to take small finds and speculate wildly, blowing them up to ridiculous proportions. In effect, a pretty little truth become a grotesque falsity. For instance -
A few decades ago Norman Cousins wrote of his self-treatment of an auto-immune disease. He chose laughter as his medicine. And got better.
One person getting better is a very small tidbit of data. From his experience Cousins wrote a best-selling book: Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient. Suddenly there was a grotesque ground swell of healers professing the power of laughter and positive attitude.
You might call his “laughter is good for your overall health” hypothesis a hunch. Perhaps it was even an educated hunch. And it turns out to have had some merit. Some. A recent, very-well conducted study has indeed shown that laughter has healthful effects on humans. As good science will do, details were shared:
The patients in the laughter group (Group L) had lower epinephrine and norepinephrine levels by the second month, suggesting lower stress levels. They had increased HDL (good) cholesterol. The laughter group also had lower levels of TNF-a, IFN-?, IL-6 and hs-CRP levels, indicating lower levels of inflammation.
At the end of one year, the research team saw significant improvement in Group L: HDL cholesterol had risen by 26 percent in Group L (laughter), and only 3 percent in the Group C (control). Harmful C-reactive proteins decreased 66 % in the laughter group vs. 26 percent for the control group.
Woo hunches and treatments are not always wrong. Yes, laughter is good for you. But to claim it is a cure-all and/or that stress is thus the cause of disease is to venture far into the land woo.
How can something good for you be bad? Like vitamins. The body naturally uses them. It needs them. So how could taking a vitamin be bad thing?
It seems human physiology is quite complex. Sometimes more of a good thing isn’t better, it’s worse. One example: In recent research it was found that for older women calcium supplement use increased the risk of cardiovascular “events” — particularly heart attacks. [source]
That’s not good. Should elderly women at risk for osteoporosis then not take calcium supplements? As much as peddlers of simplistic “vitamins and diet” solutions might deny it, the answer to that question, and so many like it, is complex.
Beware of simplistic, “no risk” solutions.
[recycled material - first appeared here]
As a critical thinker, if I were to read or hear the statement, Chinese herbs work, I would be inclined to ask follow-up questions.
What herbs? Work on what condition? How well do they work? Etc.
There is an expression “the devil is in the details.” This expression is somewhat fitting for scientific research. Sure, the headlines can be superlative, but what do we find in the details? Sometimes we may indeed find a devil of shoddy research lurking there. Other times we encounter the opposite: near saintly methods, data and reasoning. Most often one will find a mix.
The most slyly devilish science article simply leaves out the important details. And that is at least partly true with this one from ScienceDaily: Chinese Herbs May Relieve Endometriosis Symptoms, Review Finds.
May–okay, that’s good. But check out this statement by lead researcher Andrew Flower:
These findings suggest that Chinese herbs may be just as effective as certain conventional drug treatments for women suffering from endometriosis, but at present we don’t have enough evidence to generalize the results.
Follow-up questions anyone? For one I would ask, “how effective is effective?” If you are comparing Chinese herbs to a very effective treatment, that is one thing. Comparing the effectiveness of Chinese herbs to a minimally effective conventional treatment is another. And just what herb or herbs were used? Critical thinkers want to know.
Being an informed consumer isn’t easy. And that is true whether we are in the market for a car, an herbal treatment, or for a basic, better understanding of the treatment of illness.
I’m not a fan of acupressure and acupuncture. Why? For two reasons. Both tend to be offered by less-the-skeptical practitioners of … um … the healing arts. And that offering typically involves quite a bit of “woo” thinking, both magical — including elements of unseen dimensions and quasi-supernatural influence — and pseudoscientific.
That is the first reason. The second is the pseudoscience itself. With acupressure and acupuncture the fundamental component is the concept of meridians. Which is pure pseudoscience. While it sounds kinda science-y, it absolutely isn’t.
Consider this statement by the lead author of a new study on acupressure:
“Think of the meridians as freeways and the pressure points as towns along the way,” she said. “When there is a traffic jam in Denver that causes adverse effects as far away as Boulder, clearing the energy blocks, or in this case traffic jams, helps improve flow and overall health.”
Oy. That from U. of Colorado study shows acupressure effective in helping to treat traumatic brain injury
When I read the above title the alarm bells of my skepticism went off. Acupressure for treating traumatic brain injury!? What, are you kidding me? What did they do, send in a spirit to guide the energy traffic into taking a healing detour?
And why, I wonder, has this all-important energy flow never been detected?
Did you notice the help preceding the to treat? And it seems it was a sub-type of brain injury. The conditioned treated was mild traumatic brain injury (“mild traumatic” — isn’t that a bit of an oxymoron?).
That said, I must admit that some of the write-up surprised me. In a good way. It seems (as far as I can tell from the very brief news release) the researchers actually conducted some solid science: random assignment, adequate control, double-blinded . . . .
Huh. Well, good.
My initial suspicion was that there either wouldn’t be a control group, or the control would be inadequate. I.e., this group got the acupressure treatment, that group got nada. But no -
… a control group that received treatments from the same experts on places on the body that are not considered to be acupressure points, acting as a placebo.
And the finding?
Those subjects receiving active acupressure treatments showed increased memory function.
Son of a gun. Wish they had included the degree of increase to memory function, however. Effect size. Which is important.
Of course, while this is news, it is preliminary news. Many, many study results later evaporate on attempted replication. I look forward to reading updates. Of course, because null results rarely make the news, I may have to go out of my way to dig that up, if replication fails.
But for now, I’ve got to applaud the scientific elements of this test of acupressure.
But wait, it wasn’t just acupressure, it was Jin Shin acupressure.
Groan.
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