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Humanist_Activist

(7,670 posts)
Wed Jan 8, 2014, 06:22 PM Jan 2014

The limits of using the term Woo, what it is, what it isn't, and why it should be retired...

in a medical context for more accurate terms such as quackery and fraud.

First, Woo is a catch-all term, and basically has two basic definitions, the first is it applies to beliefs in things that have been thoroughly debunked using science, but still have adherents, Lamarckism is a type of woo, so would the Flat Earth Society, etc. The second definition is slightly more abstract, but its asserting beliefs in things, using scientific terminology, without understanding the science behind it, to support superstition or unsupported assertions, the quantum consciousness(collective consciousness), so called scientific support for the afterlife, reincarnation, psychic powers, telepathy, etc. fits this trope to a T.

That is what woo is, now here it what it isn't, everything else that can be falsifiable, in a medical context this includes pretty much everything that can be tested. When something hasn't been tested yet, it is NOT woo, its simply not tested yet, that's it. I was inspired to make this thread because of the Marijuana thread about the little girl with seizures who is treated by an oil from the plant, and it apparently works. That is NOT woo, indeed, do you know the difference between the naturopaths of the past and scientists of today? Their experimentation was limited by their lack of understanding of things such as bacteria, cellular theory, etc.

Using modern instruments, scientists and doctors today can use the compounds in plants such as MJ, reduce the side effects, if any, isolate the chemicals responsible, refine them, help figure out safe dosages, etc. For many medicines, the difference between a chemical that is useful and one that can kill you can be very small, best to make sure its consistent and safe. They can even synthesize other chemicals that have the same useful effects, but with fewer side effects or lower dosages necessary. This is why its important to know how a substance works on the body, its not enough to know that it works, but also how, so we can understand how to have the same effects repeated in other people, can see if it has other useful affects, etc. This is why double blind studies and research is so important.

Now we move to quackery, which I will consider a subset of woo, but refrain from using that term.

First things first, remember what I said above, anything that is falsifiable is NOT woo, that means the physical effects of acupuncture, chiropractic, meditation, yoga, etc. are testable and falsifiable, so testing should be done on them.

The ideas behind most of these, at least the traditional ones, about chi(Qi), "Life force&quot vitalism), Chackras, etc. are simply superstition, discredited ideas, and untestable. That doesn't make the practice behind them useless, just that the people who developed these practices didn't understand the human body, so they made shit up, the results were real, the ideas of what people thought was going on was wrong. Its similar to people thinking that lightening came from the Gods, that part isn't true, but lightening itself is real.

So what is quackery? Well, take what I said above with the first definition of woo, apply it to "alternative therapies" and multiply it by a thousand. For example, chiropractic may help you with lower back pain, that part isn't woo, but it will not cure colic for your infant, that part is quackery, and anyone who advocates for it is a quack. Same applies for pretty much all the alternative therapies on this list, particularly their more far out claims of curing cancer. Vaccinations causing autism, since its thoroughly unproven, and even a mechanism for how it could happen isn't even possible, its quackery.

Frauds are people who are quacks who actually don't believe the shit they are peddling.

And now I move to homeopathy, which I failed to mention before, mostly because it kinda belongs in its own category of wrongness. At least the other alternatives, where they are wrong in how they work, at least its "metaphysical" wrongness. Homeopathy is its own category because it makes assumptions about the nature of matter that are not only unproven, but impossible to work. Its a type of magic, in a way, but trying to make it sound real. Not only do homeopathic treatments have to dilute things beyond the molar limit, that is, you have to dilute less than one molecule of a substance in water, which is impossible, the water itself has to be able to retain a memory of that substance(since it can't exist in the water), and this memory is locked by vigorous shaking, of all things. This is homeopathy in a nutshell.

Oh, and did I mention that the term homeopathy isn't protected by any sort of law? That means that, even if something is labeled homeopathic, that doesn't mean it is "just water", though in most cases its true, sometimes, like in the case of Zicam, it had an ingredient, like Zinc, that had the unadvertised side affect of damaging your sense of smell. But hey, its not like this industry needs to be regulated or anything!

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dipsydoodle

(42,239 posts)
1. Then you will doubtless find it odd that the health service you can only dream of
Wed Jan 8, 2014, 06:51 PM
Jan 2014

uses both acupuncture and chiropractery. Its called the UK NHS.

 

Humanist_Activist

(7,670 posts)
8. Then you don't understand the meaning of the word falsifiable.
Wed Jan 8, 2014, 07:23 PM
Jan 2014

Especially in a scientific context such as what I was talking about.

frazzled

(18,402 posts)
2. This is an excellent explanation
Wed Jan 8, 2014, 06:52 PM
Jan 2014

And using the concept of falsifiability (the basic condition for the scientific method) is important. People need to understand this.

One more aspect should be added as well. While the effect of chicken soup on a cold, for instance, is theoretically testable (it has been, and no definitive conclusions have been drawn; it does tend to make people feel better, but we're not entirely sure why at all), one can at least say that eating chicken soup while you are sick is not going to harm you at all—even if it turns out to be just a wife's tale. (As your Jewish mother might say: "It couldn't hurt!&quot The same can be said, for the most part, for the items in your list of non-proven-but-not-necessarily-woo things such as yoga, acupuncture, chiropractic medicine, etc. (The one proviso being that you could be harmed if something serious is at stake and you don't seek a proven treatment.)

I sought chiropractic treatment once for an extremely painful injury that turned out to be a cervical sprain (the chiropractor X-rayed my upper spine and showed me how my neck was like a roller-coaster). The treatments did make me feel better, temporarily, but what helped most were his recommendations for constant ice treatments at home and a set of neck exercises I followed religiously for four or five weeks (as well as sleep on a special pillow): these were all things that I could have gotten from a physical therapist, on recommendation from an orthopedist. The chiropractor was cheaper and closer (and didn't try to get me to take pain meds, which I hate.) And it didn't hurt me: I knew this guy would send me to an orthopedic surgeon if he thought it was necessary.

Then there is that fuzzy line: those "treatments" such as the marijuana for epilepsy you mentioned that are conceivably testable, possibly have some measure of validity, but that could do extreme harm, even kill you, if administered in unscientific doses. Most herbal remedies fall under this category to larger or smaller degrees. Some might not hurt you much, some might be damaging over time, some might kill you. So no, don't go giving pot to your kids.

I go the "do no harm" route. Spraying with a saline solution may help prevent a sinus infection when you get a cold (doctors say they don't know why it works, but it seems to help). It may not really do anything in the end, but it's certainly a benign treatment that can't hurt. And there's nothing else you can do about a cold anyway, except ride it out and hope you don't get a secondary infection. You don't ride out cancer, however, with unproven treatments. Science, however deficient it may be in the moment, is the only way to go. You can always pray on the side, for a little extra oomph, even though it may be useless. It couldn't hurt!

This is my first and last word regarding the recent woo controversies.

 

Bluenorthwest

(45,319 posts)
4. You do understand that the folks who made Charlotte's medicine are not scienctists but
Wed Jan 8, 2014, 07:08 PM
Jan 2014

growers, who have for most of their careers been outlaws for growing Charlotte's medicine which is still illegal in the eyes of the FDA whose doctors and scientists still insist that marijuana has no medicinal value and treat it thusly under the laws of the United States?
I recently asked my MD physician if she'd heard about this compound, she said something about 'getting high' so I asked her if she knew the different components of the plant and she said this to me : 'I do not believe in medical marijuana'. Science speaks. I'm getting a new doctor in the morning.

 

Humanist_Activist

(7,670 posts)
5. And do they understand the exact mechanism behind how it works?
Wed Jan 8, 2014, 07:12 PM
Jan 2014

What dosages are safe for what weight of children, or what are even effective dosages? Can they not only extract it, but extract it with the exact same quality every time, or are they just winging it?

This is why clinical testing and research is important, and I don't know why the prejudices of one doctor matters one bit in this conversation.

 

Bluenorthwest

(45,319 posts)
7. The point is, and I'll try to go slowly for you, this medicine you want to claim for Big
Wed Jan 8, 2014, 07:23 PM
Jan 2014

Science was discovered, researched, developed and tested outside the mainstream, so far outside that nearly every action associated with it was a Felony. OK? No one was sitting with a University Grant running some plant matter though some million dollar process, this was kitchen sink, on the sly, covert work.
Your OP says this: "Using modern instruments, scientists and doctors today can use the compounds in plants such as MJ, reduce the side effects, if any, isolate the chemicals responsible, refine them, help figure out safe dosages, etc."

And yes, they can, but no, they did not have not and other people did, without much in the way of modern instruments, by which I mean instruments folks have around the house, not around Johns Hopkins. Doctors and scientists did not do this. It was done by marijuana growers, cannabis researchers, the entire medical marijuana community. It was made possible by the medical marijuana laws in CA, OR, WA and Colorado. Years of work, different but similar stories abound, Charlotte is not the only, nor the first.
Doctors and scientists did not do this, and more importantly others did, at great personal risk, because the medical science community rejected the very idea as laughable, as 'woo' as 'hippies wanting to get high'.

 

Humanist_Activist

(7,670 posts)
9. No, its because the government, due to prejudice, war on drugs, etc. suppressed scientific...
Wed Jan 8, 2014, 07:28 PM
Jan 2014

inquiry into the usefulness of marijuana as a medicine.

There is no concise "science community" that decides whether things are worthy of being studied or not, but individuals who try to get grants to study things that interest them, and you do realize that for the longest time, any scientist that tried to study MJ risked getting arrested if they didn't try to get it through "official" channels? And the approval process for that was long and damned near impossible to do.

 

Bluenorthwest

(45,319 posts)
10. Those government prejudices as you call them all come with Scientist Approval
Wed Jan 8, 2014, 07:41 PM
Jan 2014

It is the FDA that put and keeps cannabis on the most restrictive list and says it has no medicinal value. Doctors and scientists. Those laws and restrictions did not come from the sky god, they came from pedigreed idiots. Such as the CDC and the Surgeon General, read this for a laugh, not a single mention from those experts about the medicinal properties of this plant they were demonizing. From 1982:
The Surgeon General's Warning on Marijuana
On March 24, 1982, the Department of Health and Human Services submitted to Congress a report reviewing the consequences of marijuana use. Marijuana and Health, 1982, ninth in a series, is primarily based on two recently conducted, comprehensive, scientific reviews by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the Canadian Addiction Research Foundation, and the World Health Organization (WHO). Both independent reviews corroborate the Public Health Service's findings of health hazards associated with marijuana use: Acute intoxication with marijuana interferes with many aspects of mental functioning and has serious, acute effects on perception and skilled performance, such as driving and other complex tasks involving judgement or fine motor skills.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00001143.htm

That's 82. Want to talk about 72? In 72, the 'Medical and Scientific' experts claimed that being gay was a disease, which they claimed they could 'treat' using all manner of ugly modalities, such as shock and lobotomy. They were all about curing the gay. They said they had evidence, well tested, proven to the point that they could feel good giving electroshock to gay people. But it was just quackery, woo of the darkest and most harmful sort, presented as 'science' with cold casualness by folks who got rich 'curing the disease of homosexuality.
It goes on like this.

 

Humanist_Activist

(7,670 posts)
11. Actually, that study you are citing seems quite accurate, having smoked weed myself...
Wed Jan 8, 2014, 07:54 PM
Jan 2014

I would have judged myself as impaired while under its influence, but you seem to be using the dark ages of psychiatry to prejudice yourself against the scientific method itself, I'm puzzled by this.

Am I saying that scientists nor doctors are immune from money or politics as corrupting their research, no, I am not, but that doesn't validate pseudo-scientific nonsense.

 

Bluenorthwest

(45,319 posts)
12. You are not correct, I love the scienctific method, but evidence shows us that it is not
Wed Jan 8, 2014, 08:21 PM
Jan 2014

always reaching the correct conclusions, and that too much self certainty is one of the traits that prevents that community from learning and self correcting.
It is not the method, but the faithful certainty that anything currently being touted as 'good science' is actually correct. 1973 was not the dark ages, that was the world in which I grew up gay. 'Science' claimed it was curable disease. The entire world of science and medicine was deeply prejudiced against gay people, and they presented 'facts' to support their made up crapola. So they need to be taken with grains of salt and much, much inspection when they claim that gay people are diseased or that marijuana has no medical value and is instead a huge health crisis, as that study says, it 's not accurate at all, they are talking about Charlotte's Medicine, and what a problem it is, how bad it is for the immune system and other unsupported bullshit.
Much of what is called science today gets called 'the dark ages' in a year. Because science is not always right. Nor honest. So following that crowd with abandon, in my lifetime, would be similar to following Pat Robertson, gays are bad, marijuana is the demon weed, plague to the youth. Many people accepted 'gay is a disease' because it was 'science' and thus no one should ever believe something because it is called science.
Sorry, but that set of folks said their own bigotry was a natural truth, based on nothing. In the 70's. That thinking infected medical people so badly that when AIDS came they were virtually worthless heaps of fear, unable to come up with so much as a protocol for years on end. Helpless, ignorant of their patients, holding false facts that had been taught to them as science based truth just a few years before. Less than 10 years before AIDS, doctors thought gay was the disease! Not the dark ages, but moments before their most challenging moment. Because they were steeped in ignorance, people died.
So your whole 'this is science, thus it is truth' routine is to me, just like some religious person saying 'it's in the Bible, the BIBLE!'
Some jerk selling a quack product does not make those who said gay is a disease and pot is not medicine correct about anything, it makes the jerk a criminal, that's all it does.

 

Humanist_Activist

(7,670 posts)
13. So apparently, you don't know how the scientific method works...
Wed Jan 8, 2014, 08:36 PM
Jan 2014

Science is self correcting, you are apparently complaining about that, then claiming that saying this is like looking to the Bible for answers, the Bible is UNCHANGING, hence why its wrong on damn near everything.

What is the point of your post? To give us a history lesson on prejudice and, frankly, the bad science that came out of it?

The scientific consensus changes all the time, this is a good thing, not a bad thing, when new information comes in, new data, more accurate data, and abandoning of prejudices, then the consensus changes.

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