(November is going to be Complementary and Alternative Medicine month here on Panda Bear, MD. My recent posts on the subject have generated a lot of interest, quite a few visits, and a bunch of angry email so I believe there is some interest in the subject out there. I apologize to you, oh my long-suffering readers, who would like to read more about residency and medical school but as I have categorized all of my previous articles on that subject and I have recently thrown you plenty of red meat on the subject of Emergency Medicine I ask for your indulgence as we explore the inroads of the lunatic fringe into the medical profession.-PB)
If Wishes and Buts Were Candies and Nuts We’d All Have a Merry Christmas
No one thinks rationally anymore, not even the well-educated. While I don’t necessarily expect critical thinking from the unwashed, higher education, while of no practical value to the legions of college graduates sporting their polyurethane diplomas, should at least teach people to think critically or there is no point to it and it becomes just a four year interlude where you learned a bunch of trivia and borrowed a lot of money to party with sorority girls. Certainly you should ask for your money back if you graduated without the intellectual skill to distinguish something that you want to be true from something that is. And you should ask for a refund if you have been awarded a diploma in any field without obtaining the fund of knowledge to recognize the difference between something that could be possible and something that can’t possibly be.
Take Homeopathy, a medical therapy which relies on the imaginary property of water to retain the memory of a substance which it has diluted to a point where not a single atom of the substance remains. People often ask me if my experience with Emergency Medicine, the most practical and hard-nosed of the medical specialties, has left me cynical about the possibility of finding some validity in Homeopathy and other equally ridiculous Complementary and Alternative Medicine therapies. Actually, by the time I had finished the eighth grade I had a sufficient background in chemistry and biology to recognize that these things cannot possibly work. How much education do you need, for example, to definitively state that spinal manipulation cannot possibly obviate the need for vaccinations (as many of our chiropractic friends believe) or that spiritual fire cannot possibly, a la Saturday morning cartoons, stream out of the fingers of Reiki healers? It’s not even as if we’re arguing some subtle point about the energy state of an electron shell or an obscure ion channel in yer’ fucking spleen. This is literally third grade stuff and the fact that many prestigious medical centers lack the institutional courage to point it out should make you cringe in shame, either at their gullibility or their venality.
“Well, we’re just being open-minded,” is the formula used to justify spending large sums of money to investigate therapies that even my ten-year-old son could instantly recognize as not only impossible but also somewhat ridiculous. I guess I’ll just have to be closed-minded because if you asked me for money to investigate the healing properties of magical gnomes I would turn you down. Gnomes, like Reiki, Homeopathy, faith healing, and ayurvedic medicine are ridiculous at face value. The extent that they are investigated highlights one of the biggest problems with Complementary and Alternative Medicine, not that it is mostly ridiculous (which it is), takes money from the gullible including those who really can’t afford it (which it does), or even that it sometimes delays the effective treatment of health problems (which I see regularly), but that it has the potential at a time when we should be looking for ways to economize on medical care to suck up even more public money with nothing to show in return except the enrichment of a pack of charlatans.
As many of my regular readers know I have a deep skepticism for much of what we do even in the practice of real medicine and believe we waste vast sums on only marginally effective and oftentimes inopportune therapies. It is not unusual in our system, for example, for a nonagenarian patient teetering on the edge of death to be followed by six specialists as well as a primary physican, have undergone batteries of repetitive tests and redundant imaging studies, and been the recipient of scores of procedures, many of them of dubious benefit as it relates to decreasing their morbidity or mortality. There is also no question that cognitive medicine, the art of deliberating and arriving at the optimal and usually the simplest treatment regimen for a patient, is playing second fiddle to procedural medicine. I confess that I sometimes fantasize about being a primary care physician if only so I could sit down with my masively polypharmic and polyiatric patients to make sense of everything being done to them, much of it harmful or of only limited use.
No need to make the problem worse by invoking qi, karma, and magic pixies as therapies except if you believe that everyone should have an equal opportunity to steal money from the public. In other words, the answer to the oft-cited rational for patients turning to CAM, that they have exhausted all that real medicine can offer, is not to keep feeding their delusions that they’ll live forever or can achieve health without effort but to have the economic courage to tell them that nothing more needs or can be done and that medicine cannot solve most of their problems. In other words, we need to continue to make medicine as rational as we possibly can, eschewing treatments and practices that are ineffective or ridiculous despite what the public wants. More importantly, medicine shoud be a minimalistic pursuit where we have the common sense to limit what we do instead of continuing to expand our scope so that everything under the sun, including the great spiritual void in the hearts of those who dabble in Complementary and Alternative Medicine, becomes a medical problem.
The desire to spread the tentacles of Complementary and Alternative Medicine to real patients, those who have real diseases and not nebulous emotional complaints, has the potential to suck even more money into health care, money that is going to be thrown away as surely as we throw it away keeping the living dead warm in the ICU.
Forgive me if I’m mistaken, but I do believe you’ve stated in previous posts that you are a xtian. And yet you make statements like this:
“Certainly you should ask for your money back if you graduated without the intellectual skill to distinguish something that you want to be true from something that is. And you should ask for a refund if you have been awarded a diploma in any field without obtaining the fund of knowledge to recognize the difference between something that could be possible and something that can’t possibly be.”
Your posts on EM and bogus medicine are spot on, but have show some coherence and intellectual consistency by not pretending to know things that are patently false.
And now I must go pray to Zeus, the real one true god.
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(What on Earth is an “xtian?”-PB)
Don’t hold back there, Panda, tell us how you really feel.
I’m with you on this. Unfortunately, even in primary care, it isn’t easy to deal with the airy-fairyness people come in believing.
I have never understood why people go to regular docs like me when they prefer to take the advice of some hack working for the “newspapers” with the short words and pretty pictures. If the Daily Mail says vaccines cause autism, then vaccines cause autism and no number of clinical trials and actual honest-to-goodness real science is going to convince these people otherwise.
Me, rolling eyes: “Alright then, off you go. Perhaps you can say hi to Elvis who is flipping burgers at the local diner.”
When I was a young mother with many babies there was a radio program in our area featuring Carleton Fredricks (sp?) who encouraged mothers not to pacify their babies with jello water between bottles or to give them paragoric to help them sleep (or to cope with teething) — all of which my pediatricians had told me to do. Fredricks’ comments made sense to me (I know nothing about him except what he said at that time), so I followed that advice. And because my babies came pretty fast, I also continued the prenatal capsules prescribed (vitamins) even I was not pregnant. And continued giving the babies those vitamin drops even as they grew older (pregnancies, birthings and babies all normal). And thus it was I came to think of vitamins and supplements, within reason, as helpful to good health, along with sensible diets (high protein (non-fried), carbs from veggies, fruits, nuts and berries, eschew sugar and refined flour — simple, really), and brief daily exercising and swimming as often as possible. My parents and siblings and the siblings’ children all suffered obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes and allergies, which my children and I never have had to cope with, even after they became middle-aged adults.
I’ve taken plenty of mocking about all this, though I don’t preach it or really care what anyone else chooses. I’ll die of something or other some day and don’t worry about it. My only concern is to try to make sure I’m allowed to do so without all the indignities I hear about.
Panda, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your writings. The best to you.
wealthandtaste,
I did a quick imaginary search of Panda’s posts in my head.
Oddly enough, I can’t remember a single time he endorsed faith healing, snake-handling, or speaking in tongues as legitimate medical practices.
This post pointed out, yet again, that just believing in a particular made-up cure doesn’t make it happen, much like optimists don’t win at cancer over pessimists. Until Panda says that his faith is the only way to healing or tries to start a holy war against you, your point appear to be irrelevant.
While I can respect your POV and logic in your post, I must ask you to refrain from hasty generalisation. Ayurvedic Medicine does not deserve to be linked with such CAMs as homeopathy. The efficacy of the drug substances in various remedies was never in question. It is true that proper EBM could improve and test the level of veracity of certain prescribed substances and that there are plenty of business that sell ayurveda instaed of practicing it.But the “business” of medicine is a problem for allopthic medicine as well.
The antibacterocidal effect of tumeric, the antiinflammatory effect of garlic are examples of what is common knowledge in india. The very drugs that pharmaceutical co.s produce are based on refined extracts from plants and herbs such as the ones used in ayurveda. Some European and american companies are in fact engaged in legal tussles due to declaring patents on medicine that was never theirs to begin with. I will readily admit that
The theory of pathology that it proposes is incorrect but this is largely no longer taught in ayurvedic schools any longer.
No sane practitioner in his right mind is going to offer an opinion that it is an alternative to vaccination or surgery when necessary.
I would also point out that the history of medicine indicates that europe by and large learned it from the arabs not the greeks as is believed, who in turn learned it from the indians. Accurate textbooks of medicine already existed 2000years ago that describe cataract removal and treatment of diabetes ulcers with honey. The modern rhinoplasty techhnique itself was indian and thus ayurvedic as the name was synonymous with medicine at the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_science#Medicine_and_surgery
As such it is probably modern medicine’s predecessor. Might I also point out tt EBM is a recent phenomenon and that many discoveries in medicine were out of sheer dumb luck (eg. penicillin,cocaine) and that there are plenty of instances where we have administered drugs that were found to have disastrous side effects or have been sheer wrong about some issues: homosexuality being a mental disorder or hysteresis due to a mobile uterus.
My point is that Ayurveda just like modern med has its fair share of well-deserved criticism. but being relegated to a from of quakery with no scientific basis is not one of them. I think it was not quite right for you to comment simplistically on something you may know little or nothing about. It’s your blog and certainly your personal views have the right to be expressed but I hope you can respect my need for objectivity.thank you.
great blog panda. as a fellow EM resident, I share many of your views. I would love to hear your take on the recent MRSA lawsuit that is attracting so much media attention…
Alternative medicine has an innate wholesomeness that appeals to people who are dumbfounded by the maze of pharmaceutical products that are packaged and re-packaged in efforts to fatten the bottom line. When you eat an anti-inflammatory diet and rely on age-old curative techniques for the occasional blip in your health, you are free from the sterile impersonality of the GP’s office. The solution for dealing with this ideology and expanding your practice? Incorporating it into hospitals! It makes perfect sense. You just need to consider business objectives and the needs of patients that go beyond immunology or the sutcher. Live and let live.
(“Age-old curative techniques.” I guess the next time you have “bad humors” you will have the barber bleed you a little. As a proud capitalist tool, it pains me to say it but honesty, integrity, and the service to our patients trumps business objectives every time and I’d rather be poor than sell snake oil to the gullible….which is kind of what you are advocating.
You cannot possibly know anything about people who are really sick (as opposed to just playing at it) if you think the typical hospitalized patient will benefit from some woo.-PB)
Had you a little deep knowledge of the subject called Homoeopathy!!!
Had you unbiasedly got the feedback from those benefiited from Homoeopathy !!!
Best thing is not to write about things which we do not understand but are guided by only emotions working against it.
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(I want you, in clear terms, to explain ot me how Homeopathy works. Ready….go…-PB)
As an MS1, we just got our first and only CAM lecture. Can’t say I blame most of the class for bailing on it to study patho. I hear that stuff saves lives.
Fewer people would turn to alternative medicine if conventional medicine were more humane. I spent two years in the world of CAM after being treated as if I were insane by mainstream doctors. While I did pick up some value during those two years (chiefly the benefits of regular massage and a couple of dietary supplements that have since been validated by the scientific community), it was mostly a waste of time and money. But the one thing I got from those people that regular doctors did not provide was a sense that someone was listening to me and actually cared. No one discounted information I provided them about my own body. Granted they weren’t able to do a whole hell of a lot about it, but that feeling of being treated like an intelligent person and not a collection of symptoms or a hysterical person goes a long way. People are willing to pay for that privilege (which should not be a privilege at all but a basic human right).
I finally found a conventional MD who was willing to listen to me, run some blood tests that had not been done before, and diagnose the problem. It was easily fixed because someone looked beyond the obvious and didn’t tell me it was all in my head when my symptoms didn’t improve in the way they “should” have on the wrong treatment.
I now take the money I spent before on CAM and use it to pay the retainer fee for my concierge physician. I get the best of both worlds: evidence-based medicine and someone who has the time to listen to me and the curiosity to go beyond the obvious when needed. (I do still get those massages twice a month though!)
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(But you see, that’s the point. All (or most) of CAM follows a “concierge” model, that is, the patients pay up front to be seen by practitioner who, since he isn’t really treating pathology, can conduct a low-overhead, almost zero liability business. Therefore, since he has fairly good control of his revenue stream, he can market large slices of his time and “caring” to his patients. Try doing that as a typical primary care physician being overwhelmed by up to forty patients per day, many of them with incredibly complicated collections of medical problems and the ever-present risk of making a mistake or missing something. Or consider the deluge of patients we see every day in the Emergency Department. Hand-holding is nice but we don’t have the time or the resources.
If CAM had to operate in the real world of medicine, where patients are, actually, physically sick and if its practioners were held to the same standard of care and liability as well as the expectation that their services were a right that had to be given away for free to their patients, a visit to your herbalist would be like a visit to any public health clinic. You’d sit all day in a crappy waiting room with filthy welfare babies and their polybabydadic mothers surgically attached to their cell phones waiting for your ten minutes with the bored, frazzled herbalist who would write you for some ginseng just to get rid of you. -PB)
Filthy welfare babies? Yes, that sounds like a self-effacing pro-life capitalist who cares. Not. I can now see why some of your posts generate such a stir. Response frenzies thrive on contradiction.
(I believe I have as much experience with welfare mothers and their babies as anybody. There is just something about being on the public dole that correlates with bad hygeine although I don’t know if it is a cause or a symptom. Once again, if you want me to sugar-coat it for you you will be disappointed.-PB)
I have a reputation as a sceptic in my circle, but it’s not always clear to me what is impossible and what is not.
– Bleeding – clearly ridiculous, except to the extent that it’s fatal, right? That’s what I always thought. Turns out that an occasional purge might lower the iron load of a man who eats a high-meat diet and lower his risk of heart disease. Not that I would recommend it over a more moderate diet, exercise and a statin… but it’s not as impossible as it seems.
(Phlebotomy is indicated for polycythemia vera, for example, but that has nothing to do with the ancient use of the technique which dates from a time when the function of blood was not understood at all. -PB)
– Homeopathy – about as impossible as it gets, and I would never actually try it. I would feel too ridiculous. But apparently minute amounts of antigen delivered to the gut can have a desensitising effect that larger (but still small) amounts do not, and anecdotally the people I know who claim to have been helped by homeopathy say that it helped for their atopic conditions but not their other problems. (Yes I am aware that if the solution were as dilute as claimed there would not be even minute amounts of allergen and that the theoretical basis claimed for homeopathy is completely baseless.) I’m not aware of any evidence base for the use of any homeopathy-type treatments, but I am open to the idea that sometimes – by accident – they might actually do something. I couldn’t support research into homeopathy on this basis, because any plausible effect would be better approached through direct study of immunology. But still, not completely impossible.
(If you know anything at all about how the immune system functions, you would, I repeat, realize how silly this arguement for homeopathy really is. I suspect you do not. Perhaps a lot of what we learn in medical school, as the PAs insist, is unecessary to practice medicine but for better or worse I do know a fair amount of immunology which is why I laugh at a homeopaths and their complete ignorance of it. Sorry. This is like dragging in quantum physics which is another thing the CAM quacks do without, I might add, understanding it either. -PB)
– Herbal medicines – they aren’t impossible at all. Any activity would be a pretty straightforward pharmaceutical one. Antiseptic properties of plants are completely plausible because plants need to be able to protect themselves from microbes just like we do. I keep some goldenseal in the house for cuts that become infected (my beloved works with his hands and doesn’t heal well) so that I don’t have to try to figure out how to find someone to prescribe a topical antibiotic for a cut finger at ten at night. The concerns here are more with diagnosis and the reliablity of the particular herbal preparation than with the inherent plausibility of herbal treatments. A friend of mine was told by an MD to use suppositories of garlic cloves when she had a vaginal infection because she was breastfeeding and he didn’t want to prescribe an antibiotic. (Incidentally, the infection, which she had been enduring for weeks, went away. No, it doesn’t prove anything.) I’d be willing to consult an MD like that. Someone who knows what they are seeing and treating.
So really, from a lay point of view, it might be hard to know what’s plausible and what’s not.
I don’t know what the CAM lectures in med school are like, but it seems to me that they could be useful to people who will be dealing with patients so that they will be able to understand what their patients are doing and take the potentially dangerous treatments into account and know that they don’t have to worry about the other ones.
You oppose irrational treatments on rational grounds, as you should. Absolutely. But your commenters are trying to say that people choose irrational treatments for other reasons. Not because the treatments are scientifically credible, but because the people feel listened to. Because they are given rituals to enact that give them a feeling of control. Feeling listened to and having a feeling of control are completely legitimate human needs. If medicine cannot meet these needs, it will have to share healthcare with charlatans who can. No amount of railing against the darkness will change that.
I am new in primary care, and I take time, speak softly, and listen. I work slowly and carefully. I care about my patients.
Most of them appreciate this.
But there are some patients who are so demanding and entitled that nothing less than clearing my entire day to listen to their (usually minor) complaints and arrange ridiculous numbers of complex and wasteful tests and procedures with various consultants would be sufficient.
I don’t endorse CAM. I can’t, because nobody can prove anything to me about it. But I am really thankful for the charlatans some days to take these self-important whingers off my hands.
*sigh*
I am a bad doctor.
I agree with part of your response to my comment, Panda Bear, but part of it just validates what I’m saying. When you use phrases such as “isn’t really treating pathology” and “the real world of medicine, where patients are actually, physically sick,” your implication is that people who go to these practitioners don’t really have anything wrong with them. Maybe people who use CAM aren’t bleeding with gunshot wounds or suffering heart attacks on the spot, but neither are most patients in conventional medicine. As I pointed out, I ultimately ended up being diagnosed with a real medical condition by a real doctor. That condition is now being treated with mainstream pharmaceuticals and monitored with standard lab tests.
While it’s true that the CAM practitioners did not do anything medical for my problem, they did at least take the time to listen and did provide some advice that ultimately turned out to be helpful, if not curative. If a real doctor had used the same listening skills, I probably could have avoided over two years of pain and suffering. For what it’s worth, I think the people I saw really believed they were helping me and did their best given their capabilities. Even though empathy can’t cure disease directly, its expression can be healing. How much more powerful it would be in the hands of someone who actually has the right tools to cure illness.
Dee –
On the other hand, you could have continued to seek care from “real doctors” as you ultimately did, rather than spending 2 years in CAM with people who ultimately did not help you. Perhaps, had you not spent 2 years with CAM, you would have been “better” 2 years earlier.
Panda,
I am more or less in agreement with you on many issues but I think your lambasting of CAM is a bit harsh. It’s not that I don’t think CAM is bogus, I do, but I don’t see it as having such a powerful grip on American health society.
We get CAM lectures as med students, but in many cases the lecturers have been almost laughed off the stage. A lecture on Homeopathy to my class was greeted with open scorn, and we’re a pretty progressive group.
Out of the maybe 8 hospitals in which I have now worked/rotated I have yet to see one where CAM was allowed in the door. I doubt anyone would have stopped the homeopathologist from coming to see a patient but he certainly wasn’t going to be allowed to leave notes in the chart.
In summary, you are spot on with your derision for CAM but you are overestimating its impact.
R,P
Richard, I was seeing real doctors the whole time. I used CAM as an adjunct, not my sole regimen of care.
Dee, certainly real doctors make mistakes. I had a friend with pernicious anemia. It was not until the third specialist he found out what was wrong, despite the others taking blood samples. One told him his blood was in he mess it was in becuae he had had an infection and it would get better. Since he came pretty near death and had some permenant damage, I think he is suing two of them.
Doctors are human, and it helps to have one that knows who you, has seen you often, and treats you as a person.
“If you know anything at all about how the immune system functions, you would, I repeat, realize how silly this arguement for homeopathy really is. I suspect you do not.”
Yes! Exactly my point! A third-grader might have enough common-sense to know that the theoretical basis for homeopathy (water memory? can anything be sillier?) can’t be anything other than fantasy. I, however, with my little learning (a dangerous thing) having read an article in Nature about oral desensitisation (that, by the way, never referred to homeopathy anywhere) made a link and speculated privately that some people might (accidentally) be actually helped by some treatments offered to them as homeopathy. To understand that there is no actual link I would need to conduct more research than I particularly care to – or than a typical third-grader is even capable of. If there is no link, I’m fine with that. Homeopathy as a discipline is pure magical thinking and I don’t use it. I really don’t care enough to find out whether some preparations do contain immunogens (they aren’t supposed to), whether those immunogens would be present in the appropriate quantities to act as oral desensitisation agents, or whether that mechanism of action would even be relevant in the first place. I know I don’t have that information, so when someone says that homeopathy helped her hayfever but not her menstrual cramps, or her eczema but not her insomnia, I have different hypotheses and no means of choosing definitively between them. 1) Hayfever and eczema are not constant, so any perceived benefit of a treatment (of whaever discipline) is likely to be coincidental. 2) They got an improperly prepared homeopathic treatment that functioned as a desensitisation agent and not a homeopathic treatment, and it helped.
The point is, I don’t know for sure. I would need more education to know for sure (and I do in fact have some understanding of how the immune system works).
The point is, knowing for sure what is impossible and what is not is more complicated than you are making it sound.
When evaluating the likeliness of a given approach being helpful, I look at different aspects. 1) Is the proposed mode of action plausible? (Homeopathy’s water memory fails this test). 2) Was the approach invented by a particular person? (Homeopathy was invented by Samuel Hahnemann – fails this test.) 3) Is there a single treatment that is supposed to fix everything? (Homeopathy passes this test) or 4) Are there many treatments to try for any given thing? (Homeopathy fails again.) 5) Does it appear to help anyone in any objective way? (Homeopathy… absolutely not in controlled trials, but sometimes anecdotally.)
Plausibility of the proposed mode of action is only one means of assessing an approach, because empirically something can help for other reasons. For instance, macrobiotic diets can help in treating osteoarthritis if they cause someone to lose a lot of weight, even if the proposed mode of action is balancing yin and yang.
I’m sorry you didn’t show up on my radar earlier! Great post! Non illigitimi corborundum!
A more reasonable discussion of alternative medicine from a reasonable website that normally discusses the state of health care in general:
http://www.letstalkhealthcare.org/?p=98
Panda, you’re a great writer, a fun read, and, at heart, just a polemicist. There have been peer-reviewed studies that show the efficacy of some “alternative” treatments. Certainly there are many hocus pocus claims out there, but let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
nice post. in our part of the world my main gripe is against sangomas. a commenter once said western alternative medicine is nothing like sangomas, as if us africans are stupid and backward but enlightened westerners know about magical crystals etc. thanks for putting their ‘enlightenment’ into perspection,
the other interesting point has to do with our health minister’s official solution to hiv. she suggests garlic and beetroot as first line therapy. i see one of your commenters praised the effects of garlic. but i would humbly suggest antiretrovirals may be a better bet. if you want to munch garlic, be my guest. (i hear it works for vampires too). but to tell thousands of hiv infected people to essentially not take legitimate treatment strikes me as criminal.
I’d bet there’s a tremendous placebo effect of having someone come and waive their hands over you for an hour (Reiki). Where else is the patient getting that much attention?
Plus, I’m betting the hospital is billing someone for it.
Hey Panda – great blog. I’ve been reading for quite a long time now but have never written in before. I suppose that because the CAM topic is so controversial, it motivated me to speak up.
I’m an M2 student and we have CAM lectures at our school – quite a few actually. I have to agree with one of your other posters that CAM therapists don’t fare too well in this setting. Interestingly enough, our class is usually pretty open-minded before the presenters speak, but more often than not, ends up leaving these presentations quite skeptical. Often times, this happens because the CAM therapist in question attempts to use some combination of science and logic (both of which are usually in short supply) to explain the mechanism behind their respective treatments. For example, an acupuncturist attempted to explain to our class that placing small needles into muscle fascia would cause tension to release at a distant site, thereby alleviating pain at that location. Having gone through anatomy and an engineering degree, I can tell you that this is certainly not happening (though common sense would really be enough to make this call). Ultimately, this acupuncturist would have had an easier time selling us on the benefits of his therapy had he relied solely on a mystical (i.e. Qi – based) explanation or simply said that the underlying mechanism wasn’t understood.
I guess my point in writing in is to underscore one theme of your blogs: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. For those of you reading this without scientific backgrounds that support alternative therapies, please understand that it can be incredibly frustrating – and even insulting – for doctors and scientists to entertain the explanations given to us regarding the merits of CAM. Most of us have spent several years learning how to apply the principals of science to answer or interpret scientific questions regarding the efficacy of a given treatment. In contrast, your average CAM proponent typically uses some combination of anecdotal support (see post above), pseudo science and flawed logic to arrive at the conclusions they desire. Often times, this behavior is delivered by someone with minimal scientific training and even less rational thought. Meanwhile, modern medical therapy is (ideally) based on randomized clinical trials, the intricacies of which almost no average person will ever appreciate.
For those of you with paranoid personality disorders, let me underscore something simple: the medical community is not, as a whole, out to trick you into accepting the treatment it prescribes. Your average doc is trying to do what he thinks will help you most; and more often than not, his advice is based on some reasonable amount of scientific evidence, and not on some secret agenda that includes collusion with the federal government and one or more pharmaceutical companies. Certainly, Western physicians are open to using any treatment modalities shown to help their patients, including those of the CAM variety. Unfortunately, though, very little research of sufficient quality exists to support the use of nearly all CAM therapies. So please understand that if you expect CAM therapies to be held in the same regard as conventional Western therapies, they need to be scrutinized to the same degree before that will ever happen. Until then, you won’t convince any self-respecting scientist otherwise.
Note to Panda Bear, M.D.: Never, never, never pontificate on that which you do not know.
And, since reality is not what YOU think it is, maybe it is YOU that should ask for a refund for your college diploma as well as your M.D. degree?
See:
Evidence Of ‘Memory’ In Cells And Molecules
ScienceDaily (Nov. 3, 2007) — New research provides evidence that some molecular interactions on cell surfaces may have a “memory” that affects their future interactions. The report could lead to a re-examination of results from certain single-molecule research.
Researchers who use sequentially repeated tests to obtain statistical samples of molecular properties usually assume that each test is identical to — and independent of — any other tests in the sequence. In their article, however, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology provide examples of test sequences that may not be composed of independent and identically-distributed (i.i.d.) random variables.
“If you are probing a cell to get a bit of information, how do you know that the cell is not going to respond by changing the information it reveals the next time you probe it?” asked Cheng Zhu, a Regents’ Professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “If you are probing a molecule, can you assume that the molecule will return to its original configuration before you test it the next time? We didn’t think about this until we had been doing these kinds of experiments for more than ten years.”
Supported by the National Institutes of Health, the research demonstrates that certain cells can “remember” their earlier encounters through specific receptor-ligand interactions. That would mean that some sequential measurements may not have been truly independent, and could therefore prompt re-examination of some research that obtained data under the i.i.d. assumption.
“People doing research in this area ought to look at what we have found to see if their systems also have memories that may have affected their conclusions,” Zhu said. “They may discover new aspects that may have been overlooked.”
Using a micropipette adhesion frequency assay, Zhu’s research team studied a number of receptor-ligand interactions. The sequence data analysis conducted by Veronika Zarnitsyna, a research scientist in the Coulter Department, revealed examples in which an interaction observed in one test affected the outcome of a future test. Depending on the biological system, the effect could either increase or decrease the likelihood of a future interaction.
For instance, interaction between T cell receptors and an antigen bound to major histocompatibility molecules showed positive correlation, with one interaction increasing the likelihood of a future interaction. Interaction between C-adherins exhibited the opposite behavior, with one interaction reducing the likelihood of a future interaction. In a third system the researchers studied, the events appeared to be truly independent, with one interaction not affecting a future one. “The i.i.d. assumption in single-molecule experiments was something that people usually took for granted,” Zarnitsyna said.
The research reported in PNAS* began when Jun Huang, a graduate student in the Zhu lab, examined T cell test data and noted a distinct difference: interactions appeared consecutively in long strings and then disappeared for a long while. Huang asked Zhu about the pattern. Zhu then shared his concerns about the independence of the tests with Zarnitsyna, a biophysicist.
Zarnitsyna analyzed data generated by Huang and Fang Zhang — another graduate student in the Zhu lab — and additional data obtained in the lab by Yuan-Hung Chien, a student from the laboratory of Deborah Leckband at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“Positive memory increases the likelihood of having two interactions in a row, which generates long strings of interactions,” said Zarnitsyna. “The negative memory, conversely, decreases the likelihood of having consecutive interactions, which results in more solitary interactions in the sequence.”
Zhu compares the negative correlation to the effects of strong light on the eyes. “If you go from the dark to the bright, time is required before you can see well again,” he noted. “Exposure to strong light temporarily inhibits the eyes’ response to the next input.”
Zhu’s research team studies single-molecule mechanics using sensitive force techniques, such as atomic force microscopes and biomembrane force probes, to put cells and molecules together and then measure the forces or times required to pull them apart. Ideas developed for the adhesion frequency assay may also be applicable to this research because the i.i.d. assumption is violated if the force or time depends on where in a test sequence it was measured.
As a next step, Zhu would like to further characterize the memory effect to determine how long it lasts. “It seems reasonable that if you prolong the cycle time — the period between trials — the cell or molecule would gradually forget,” he said.
He would also like to study the biological mechanisms of the memory effects.
“We believe this phenomenon may be biologically important, though we don’t yet know the implications for it,” Zhu said. “This may represent a way for cells to regulate their adhesion and signaling. For T cells, the ability to ‘remember’ even a brief interaction with a pathogen may be related to their ability to tell an intruder from “self” molecules, which is crucial to the body’s defense in the immune system.”
*This research is to be reported October 29 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Adapted from materials provided by Georgia Institute of Technology Research News.
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(Which of course has nothing to do with the memory of water. Look at it like this, if water retains a memory of every substance which it has dissolved, every water molecule on earth is contaminated with trillions and trillions upon trillions of memories of every substance whch it has encountered. More grasping at straws on your part. There is nothing in this article that implies that water, a simple molecule, has memory, only that cell surface receptors, complicated molecular proteins folded in complicated ways, can retain the shape of a ligand at a binding site. Receptor: Complicated molecule with sometimes unkown properties. Water: simple molecule with well-known properties. Save your BS for people with no education. -PB)
“Which of course has nothing to do with the memory of water.”
Really? Reads hydrophilic to me.
From the article
“For instance, interaction between T cell receptors and an antigen bound to major histocompatibility molecules showed positive correlation, with one interaction increasing the likelihood of a future interaction. Interaction between C-adherins exhibited the opposite behavior, with one interaction reducing the likelihood of a future interaction….”
“Save your BS for people with no education.”
It wasn’t “BS’ and it wasn’t my “BS’ in any event.
If the post angered you then take it up with Cheng Zhu, a Regents’ Professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, National Institutes of Health, journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Georgia Institute of Technology Research News.
I merely pointed out that you bloviated upon a subject of which you are not informed.
Obviously and unfortunately to no affect.
For your patient’s sake keep an open mind.
Â
(Dude, by your user name I suppose you are a chiropractor and thus have essentially no knowledge of microbiology or immunology. Cell surface receptors are combinations of long molecular chains of amino acids otherwise known as “proteins” which fold into complicated shapes or conformations. The shape of a particular receptor fits the complementary shape of a ligand,sort of like a lock and a key, and this binding can change the structure of the receptor leading to all kinds of chemical events which I cannot begin to go into in a short response like this. The ligand in this case is an antigen, usually a fragment of a cell surface carbohydrate or other compound. The subject of immunology is wonderfully complicated and cannot be described in one or two simple sentences which is why homeopaths can fool many people. Suffice to say that while this is a fascinating topic and I still remember the thrill I got when I first learned about this kind of thing, all your article says is that some receptors may be more plastic than fixed and be able to retain the memory or “mold” of a ligand that has left their binding site. It’s as if you googled for an article, read the words “memory” and “molecule,” skipped over the rest of the complicated stuff and now present your article, one which has nothing to do with Homeopathy, as proof of the same.
Hydrophillic? Wow. I bet you had to dredge deep for that one. Big scientific discovery on your part but it is well known that cell membranes are mostly composed of two layers of molecules, held in position by the lipophilic and hydrophilic properties of their various ends. Again, so what? Explain to me how this translates into diluting a chemical in water until not even an atom of it remains and then using it as a medicine. If not, kindly refrain from discussing or presenting topics that you oh-so-clearly do not understand, the difference between me and you being that I while I am not a research scientist I do understand the article and have no doubt that I have forgotten more about imunology than your whole class at chiropractic school ever learned.-PB)
OMFG, I can’t believe he brought up the water memory!!!!
It has been so completely obliterated as a legitimate scientific topic, the poster should be embarrassed.
It has been trounced by Respectful Insolence, A canna change the laws of physics, and myself, among many others.
The issue of Homeopathy devoted to the topic was an embarrassment.
“Note to Panda Bear, M.D.: Never, never, never pontificate on that which you do not know.”
Note to im1dc: Take your own advice. You clearly don’t know anything about receptor-ligand binding, which is exactly what your article was about. This is like comparing a lump of steel (water) to a Corvette (protein).
Hello Panda, MD. This is my first time reading your blog thanks to a link I followed from #2 Dinosaur.
I share your frustration when dealing with disciples of CAM. I am but a nursing student but have always been passionate about medicine. My approach to medicine is from a science perspective, and I don’t hold much truck for phenomena that can’t be explained logically.
Even then, if something cannot be explained, at least prove to me that it works – and not just subjectively. If someone tells me that sticking out your tongue and standing on one foot cures bunions, and there is actual evidence that it has happened, then I’m your girl. Otherwise, I’ll just stick to conventional therapy.
Wow, I wouldn’t have gone to that much trouble to explaining undergrad biochem to him. I would have probably used Play-Doh somewhere in the example, though.
“For your patient’s sake keep an open mind.”
There’s a significant difference between keeping an open mind and keeping an empty one.
When my patients ask me about some altie thing or another, I usually give them the evidence, if there is any.
If what I say doesn’t match their foregone conclusions, they usually ignore me, but at least I took them seriously, and gave them info.
ROLF!! Another example of “Yes, all that woo-woo medicine is pure quackery, except **my** pet woo-woo medicine, which is real.”
Ayurvedic medicine, like many “traditional” medicinal practices, was developed in a time of ignorance about how the human body actually worked. Humans knew nothing of the germ theory of disease or the chemistry or cellular structure of the human body–or pretty much anything except crude anatomy.
Ayurvedic medicine claims that symptoms of disease are a function of the balance of the 3 humors, or doshas: vata, pitta, and kapha. It has its origins in ancient texts which attribute disease to devils, daemons and astrology. Ayurvedic medicine is the kind of medicine kids would invent while playing or story telling. It is not evidence based medicine rooted in reality. Don’t know how something works? Just make s*** up. As long as you remain ignorant nothing can contradict your theory. That’s Ayurvedic medicine, but with with the imprimatur of “tradition” taken to be proof of validity.
There is no justification for claiming that Ayurvedic medicine is any different or any more credible than homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine or European medieval humeric medicine (an oft overlooked form of “traditional” medicine) which said that health was based on the balance between the four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile–sound familiar?
The whole concept of “alternative medicine” is an oxymoron. “Medicine” (most of it, anyway, and certainly as an ideal) is a compendium of treatments and theories of disease that have been tested and found to be true. If, say, homeopathy, were tested in the same way — using verifiable scientific method — and were found to be factual, then it’d be “medicine” and not “alternative.” Ideas and modalities which haven’t been tested, or — as with most CAM — have been and found to be useless — are junk, pure and simple. That med schools and other hospitals are buying in is really depressing. Hey, depressing? Take a number.
“There is no justification for claiming that Ayurvedic medicine is any different or any more credible than homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine or European medieval humeric medicine (an oft overlooked form of “traditional†medicine) which said that health was based on the balance between the four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile–sound familiar?”
I’ve always wondered about that. If you could repackage the four humours as originating in the magically mysterious Orient rather than boring old Europe, or at least maybe say it was just stolen from Arabia or something, would it catch on big over here, too?
“Dude, by your user name I suppose you are a chiropractor and thus have essentially no knowledge of microbiology or immunology.”
“It’s as if you googled for an article, read the words “memory†and “molecule,†skipped over the rest of the complicated stuff and now present your article, one which has nothing to do with Homeopathy, as proof of the same.”
“Hydrophillic? Wow. I bet you had to dredge deep for that one. Big scientific discovery on your part…”
“Again, so what? Explain to me how this translates into diluting a chemical in water until not even an atom of it remains and then using it as a medicine.”
“…If not, kindly refrain from discussing or presenting topics that you oh-so-clearly do not understand, the difference between me and you being that I while I am not a research scientist I do understand the article and have no doubt that I have forgotten more about imunology than your whole class at chiropractic school ever learned.-PB)”
Panda Bear,
You should have ‘more doubts’.
If you did, you would be a better doctor and person, imo.
What you engaged in above is the Logical Fallacy called ad Hominem attack. You appealed to personal considerations (rather than to fact or reason).
It also means you lost the debate due to your lack of reasoned factual argument.
I’m sure you must have come across Logical Fallacy’s sometime in college–yes? If not, give back your diploma and ask for your money back.
The article on Molecule Memory stands on its own. I hope everyone here reads it for themselves, makes up their own mind and does not accept your depiction.
Here it is again:
Evidence Of ‘Memory’ In Cells And MoleculesScienceDaily.com (Nov. 3, 2007) — New research provides evidence that some molecular interactions on cell surfaces may have a “memory†that affects their future interactions. The report could lead to a re-examination of results from certain single-molecule research.
No amount of your snide unprofessional egotistical Freudian ego complex rhetoric will change the conclusions of that article.
(Dude, did you read the article? It has nothing to do with so-called water memory but only a potentially interesting property of receptors on cell surfaces. Like I said, you’re a chiropractor so your knowledge of medicine is almost by definition incredibly superficial and shoddy, something you demonstrate with every post. It is not an ad hominem attack to point out your ignorance, just a factual statement. Can I get you to just admit that you don’t have the background to understand the article or its significance? Come on now. Just ‘fess up to yer’ Uncle Panda. -PB)
Actually, our exchange points out something important, but its not what you may think.
It points out that a person’s bias, prejudices and preconceptions gets in the way of clear thinking.
On a personal note let me say that its a good thing you are not a research scientist.
Here’s why:
Panda says: “…Look at it like this, if water retains a memory of every substance which it has dissolved, every water molecule on earth is contaminated with trillions and trillions upon trillions of memories of every substance whch it has encountered.”
Here’s what Dr. Zhu notes in the article: “As a next step, Zhu would like to further characterize the memory effect to determine how long it lasts. “It seems reasonable that if you prolong the cycle time — the period between trials — the cell or molecule would gradually forget,†he said.”
This shows you either did not read the article or did not understand what you read.
And that gives an objective indication of your ability regardless of the subjective self assessment of your abilities you provided here.
Further, your following rant appears unencumbered with the thought process:
“…Complementary and Alternative Medicine, not that it is mostly ridiculous (which it is), takes money from the gullible including those who really can’t afford it (which it does), or even that it sometimes delays the effective treatment of health problems (which I see regularly)…”
I guess you never considered that the opposite is equally true.
Some patients seen by non-M.D. healthcare providers go to them precisely b/c the M.D.’s failed them.
Some non-M.D.’s build their practices solely on medical failures of which there are too many. Don’t you agree?
I do not wish to devalue a legitimate criticism of charlatans or quackery of which there is way way too many and way too much but I believe the problem is widespread and not localized in one particular community as you seem to believe.
Now this is just plain silly of you Panda Bear: “…a time when we should be looking for ways to economize on medical care to suck up even more public money with nothing to show in return except the enrichment of a pack of charlatans.”
Serious charge. But who is the charlatan? The M.D or the non-M.D.?
It would do you good to recall that a person’s perspective is dependent upon where one is standing in the universe. (That is from Albert Einstein but go ahead and argue with him if you choose)
Since this is your blog your opinion reigns here but that does not mean your opinions reign supreme elsewhere.
ER trauma surgeons do wonderful work and I hope you continue to enjoy what you do saving lives at the most critical point of contact most people will ever have with medicine. It’s what you do, its what your patients need and when it works to save lives it’s a beautiful wonderful thing. I’ve personally benefited as have my family from our local hospital’s ER trauma surgeons dedicated professionalism. Top notch!
(I am not a Trauma Surgeon. Emergency Medicine Physicians are not surgeons. General Surgeons are trauma surgeons.-PB)
Let’s take a look at the article you say stands on its own:
“Supported by the National Institutes of Health, the research demonstrates that certain cells can “remember” their earlier encounters through specific receptor-ligand interactions. That would mean that some sequential measurements may not have been truly independent, and could therefore prompt re-examination of some research that obtained data under the i.i.d. assumption.”
Hmm…yes, the article stands on its own. But what it doesn’t do is support Homeopathy, as you falsely implied. The article does not find that that water, a very simple molecule, retains a memory of substances that it has been in contact with–were that true water would be a confusion of billions and billions of memories since water molecules or their component atoms have been around since the dawn of man. Further, there is no reason to believe that this imaginary water memory would survive when dosed on a sugar pill and digested through the stomach. Nor is there reason to believe that the imaginary water memory would have a substantial clinical effect, one greater than the presence of actual molecules of the substance rather than the imaginary remembrance of them.
The law of similars and the law of infinitesimals are pretend. Fantasy. Magical thinking. It is argument by assertion. It would be nice if medicine could be so simple–or in the case of homeopathy, naively simplistic–but reality is no so accomodating. You can’t make biology and chemistry conform to your wishes anymore than you can make calculus easy by simply asserting that you have discovered “alternative, holistic” calculous which only requires easy single digit addition but can’t be tested by “allopathic,” mathematicians using reductionist math.
Homeopathic medicine has all the authenticity and eficaciouness of the invisible tea that little girls serve up for their dolls and teddy bears. While cute, it is not real.
Okay, quick review of logical fallacies.
You are a moron, therefore your argument is fallacious. -> Ad hominem, as the argument itself is never addressed and the conclusion does not necessarily follow. Therefore logical fallacy as A does not necessarily prove B, and B was the subject of the debate.
Your argument is fallacious and here is why, therefore you must be a moron to come to such a false conclusion. -> Simple bluntness. No logical fallacy so long as the argument itself is addressed. A is properly addressed, A was the topic of debate, and B was pretty much just gravy.
Take a biochem course, get a basic understanding of how proteins work, then get back at how this paper shows how terribly close-minded everyone who actually does understand basic properties of proteins is.
scartose,
“Hmm…yes, the article stands on its own. But what it doesn’t do is support Homeopathy, as you falsely implied…”
There is a confusion here b/c I implied no such thing.
Here is what I posted: “Note to Panda Bear, M.D.: Never, never, never pontificate on that which you do not know.”
“And, since reality is not what YOU think it is, maybe it is YOU that should ask for a refund for your college diploma as well as your M.D. degree?”
“See:
Evidence Of ‘Memory’ In Cells And Molecules”
“ScienceDaily (Nov. 3, 2007) — New research provides evidence that some molecular interactions on cell surfaces may have a “memory†that affects their future interactions. The report could lead to a re-examination of results from certain single-molecule research.”
“Researchers who use sequentially repeated tests to obtain statistical samples of molecular properties usually assume that each test is identical to — and independent of — any other tests in the sequence. In their article, however, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology provide examples of test sequences that may not be composed of independent and identically-distributed (i.i.d.) random variables.”
And,…SKIPPING…”“People doing research in this area ought to look at what we have found to see if their systems also have memories that may have affected their conclusions,†Zhu said. “They may discover new aspects that may have been overlooked.—
And, this…SKIPPING…”“The i.i.d. assumption in single-molecule experiments was something that people usually took for granted,†Zarnitsyna said.”
The reason for posting that article was to show that the concept of “molecular memory” is a valid assumption as implied by this new research.
IOW, don’t take for granted what you learned in school, there is always something new coming out of the research labs, do your best to stay up to date.
I was not supporting Homeopathy or “Water memory” as much as to demonstrate the need to keep an open mind about things we know little or nothing, like homeopathy and other CAM’s.
Or, to put it in the scurrilous rhetoric used by Panda Bear ‘to establish that PB doesn’t know what he ranted about.’
I did that and now PB’s upset with me as evidenced by his use of ad hominem attacks.
I prefer to look at the difference of opinion this way: I showed you my PROOF, now you show me yours. Keep in mind that your opinion is not PROOF of anything. The standard is peer reviewed published science not rhetoric, opinion or MD vox populi.
Shining Hector,
“Okay, quick review of logical fallacies…You are a moron…”
That’s a good example of an ad hominem attack, i.e., Appealing to personal considerations rather than to fact or reason.
There is too much of that here and not enough reasoned factual argument.
Â
(Don’t you know how to read? Shining Hector was just giving you an example of an ad hominem argument, not calling you a moron. Go back and read what he wrote. And nobody is insulting you, we’re just pointing out that you have a terrific ignorance on a subject that most of us around here, as we are medical doctors or medical students, have studied extensively. Just admit that you know nothing about ligands or receptors and that you don’t understand the article you are flogging. There is no shame in not knowing something. My wife plays the piano beautifully. I am tone deaf. I would never lecture her about music, a subject about which I know less about than you do about cell biology.-PB)
The following does not surprise me given the attidudes expressed by PD and many of his posters.
AHA: Evidence of Lack of Benefit for Statins in Heart Failure Finds Deaf Ears
ORLANDO — Statin therapy for older heart failure patients seems to bestow little benefit, according to a randomized Swedish study. But others remained believers, the evidence notwithstanding.
link: http://www.medpagetoday.com/
I wonder when was it that your minds closed to new findings, after receiving your M.D. degree or your Medical license?
PD, now you are being ridiculous in addition to being disingenuous.
You don’t want to agree that the cellular research that I posted for you is hydrophillic, you don’t want to admit that you used ad hominem attacks when you couldn’t argue the facts and now you want me to believe that Shining Hector did not call me a moron as he laid out his inaccurate example of ad hominem.
Please, grow up and stop your infantile superiority. Its nauseating.
(The article you posted three times is about receptor-ligand binding, not water memory. I also want to point out that the hydrophilic properties of certain molecules have everything to do with molecular structure and imbalanced molecular forces (why water is a dipolar molecule, for example) and nothing to do with water retaining a memory of a substance which it has dissolved. Nothing. Zip. Zero. Nada. Rein. Nicht. I cannot believe that you are still beating the tocsin of your own ignorance so vehemently. What do you have to gain by it especially since as of yet you have given no evidence that you have even read more than the title of the article.-PB)
I think you are doing a good job of exemplifying the advocates of woo-woo medicine. You are all indignation and emotional argument. Facts are irrelevant to you and when you are loosing an argument you get all haughty about some alleged injustices. “Look! Over there, something shiny!” These transparent rhetorical tricks might impress your sycophantic woo-woo forum friends, assuming you have any, but they won’t fly here.
What Shining Hector did was make a clear hypothetical conditional. Yet even that was far too close to home for you and you’ve seen fit to take offense since you can’t actually disprove what he said, it being factually correct and all.
Let’s take a look:
These are clearly examples, not actual attacks. That you can’t tell the difference tells us that you are either being disingenuous or are, in fact, an actual moron, though I suppose the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
Come back when you have facts and rational argument to present.
Well, to be honest, there was a little bit of insult implied. In all fairness willful ignorance would probably be more accurate than moron, though. 😛
As others have pointed out, what I basically meant to say was that pointing out examples where people said something you found personally insulting does not translate to them using ad hominem attacks to dismiss your arguments in an illogical manner that ignores the facts.
To put the paper in quick perspective, it’s been known for some time that conformational change is one of the key properties of protein receptor function. Sort of like a closed door vs. an open door. To follow the analogy, what the paper was saying is that if you take a closed door, open it, than close it again, the door is not returned 100% to its pristine closed state but instead is changed a little by being open then shut. They thought the memory effect would be so negligible as to make no measurable difference, but further analysis showed the effect was larger than they expected. In effect, they thought they were working with a steel door with well-oiled hinges, when in fact the door acted like it was made of more pliable materials, like foam or something. This actually makes intuitive sense if you do understand a little about proteins. It’s already known that proteins don’t retain their functionality forever; they suffer constant wear and tear through use and need to be continually replaced.
In no way does this translate to water memory or some similar hocus pocus, though. It’s simply a small extenstion of previously known properties of proteins. Again, something that should be obvious to anyone with the appropriate science background.
The hydrostatic paradox of controversy, made famous by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.
“If you had a bent tube, one arm of which was the size of a pipe stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men the same way, and the fools know it.”
As a new reader (came here from Skeptics’ Circle), this has been an entertaining thread. Nice work, Dr. Bear!
And, to im1dc:
Please explain how research can be hydrophilic.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Are you familiar with electronic gem therapy or assemblage point therapy? If not, please visit this site and learn about this new energy healing method.
“You don’t want to agree that the cellular research that I posted for you is hydrophillic…”
Oh man, I’m still chuckling from this one.
I’d really love to hear im1dc’s definition of “hydrophilic.”
To: Panda Bear, scartose, Shining Hector, qetzal and L-Dub:
I have two things to share with you today.
First:
Here is another article, this time on Hydrogen molecules, that suggests a ‘memory’, of sorts, this time a memory at both the molecular and quantum levels.
You will find it an interesting read.
Of course, anticipating your objections, in this experiment to learn how to build “solid-state quantum computers” they used photoionization from high X-Ray energy to bombard Hydrogen gas molecules, not water, not cells, not human beings and not health care related. In fact, their conclusion has nothing to do with “molecular memory” per se except that they conclude is does exist — at some level.
As before with the “cell memory” link, that the research is focused on something other than homeopathy, water memory, etc., doesn’t matter one wit.
What matters is that there is a “memory” at the molecular, and now seemingly at the quantum level, of existence of a hydrogen molecule. Pretty classy stuff this.
And this one is undeniably 2/3’s of H2O.
PB, let me remind you it was your considered position such ‘memories’ were impossible, thus homeopathy was impossible.
You may be correct. However, you have PRODUCED NO EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT YOUR OPINION in contrast to the two submissions supporting “molecular memory” that I provided.
I have shown, from peer reviewed legitimate hard science scientific literature, that “memory” does exist.
The evidence thus far is 2 to 0 supporting my argument.
I don’t know if “water memory” exists or not or whether that is even pertinent to “homeopathy”. I know nothing about either and am not advocating either.
Never have.
I am however advocating that you all need to keep your mind open to new scientific evidence that negates prejudices based on prior learning.
FYI, my posts here have been on “molecular memory” not “water memory”, if your egos had not been so seriously pathological you would have recognized that instead of assuming otherwise and then making specious assumptions to label, lambaste and libel me in an effort to feel superior while you engaged in your charade of intellectual and educational superiority.
Bad boys!
That display of demeaning correspondence has not reflected well on any of you, your education or the institutions where you spend your days or nights. In general, you have embarrassed yourselves and them.
Line Between Quantum And Classical Worlds Is At Scale Of Hydrogen Molecule
ScienceDaily (Nov. 12, 2007) — The big world of classical physics mostly seems sensible: waves are waves and particles are particles, and the moon rises whether anyone watches or not. The tiny quantum world is different: particles are waves (and vice versa), and quantum systems remain in a state of multiple possibilities until they are measured — which amounts to an intrusion by an observer from the big world — and forced to choose: the exact position or momentum of an electron, say.
On what scale do the quantum world and the classical world begin to cross into each other? How big does an “observer” have to be? It’s a long-argued question of fundamental scientific interest and practical importance as well, with significant implications for attempts to build solid-state quantum computers.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and their collaborators at the University of Frankfurt, Germany; Kansas State University; and Auburn University have now established that quantum particles start behaving in a classical way on a scale as small as a single hydrogen molecule. They reached this conclusion after performing what they call the world’s simplest — and certainly its smallest — double slit experiment, using as their two “slits” the two proton nuclei of a hydrogen molecule, only 1.4 atomic units apart (a few ten-billionths of a meter). Their results appear in the November 9, 2007 issue of Science.
Double slit experiment
“One of the most powerful ways to explore the quantum world is the double slit experiment,” says Ali Belkacem of Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division, one of the research leaders. In its familiar form, the double slit experiment uses a single light source shining through two slits, side by side in an opaque screen; the light that passes through falls on a screen.
If either of the two slits is closed, the light going through the other slit forms a bright bar on the screen, striking the screen like a stream of BBs or Ping-Pong balls or other solid particles. But if both slits are open, the beams overlap to form interference fringes, just as waves in water do, with bright bands where the wavecrests reinforce one another and dark bands where they cancel.
So is light particles or waves? The ambiguous results of early double slit experiments (the first on record was in 1801) were not resolved until well into the 20th century, when it became clear from both experiment and the theory of quantum mechanics that light is both waves and particles — moreover, that particles, including electrons, also have a wave nature.
“It’s the wave nature of electrons that allows them to act in a correlated way in a hydrogen molecule,” says Thorsten Weber of the Chemical Sciences Division, another of the experiment’s leading researchers. “When two particles are part of the same quantum system, their interactions are not restricted to electromagnetism, for example, or gravity. They also possess quantum coherence — they share information about their states nonlocally, even when separated by arbitrary distances.”
Correlation between its two electrons is actually what makes double photoionization possible with a hydrogen molecule. Photoionization means that an energetic photon, in this case an x-ray, knocks an electron out of an atom or molecule, leaving the system with net charge (ionized); in double photoionization a single photon triggers the emission of two electrons.
“The photon hits only one electron, but because they are correlated, because they cohere in the quantum sense, the electron that’s hit flies off in one direction with a certain momentum, and the other electron also flies off at a specific angle to it with a different momentum,” Weber explains.
The experimental set-up used by Belkacem and Weber and their colleagues, being movable, was employed on both beamlines 4.0 and 11.0 of Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS). In the apparatus a stream of hydrogen gas is sent through an interaction region, where some of the molecules are struck by an x-ray beam from the ALS. When the two negatively charged electrons are knocked out of a molecule, the two positively charged protons (the nuclei of the hydrogen atoms) blow themselves apart by mutual repulsion. An electric field in the experiment’s interaction region separates the positively and negatively charged particles, sending the protons to one detector and the electrons to a detector in the opposite direction.
“It’s what’s called a kinematically complete experiment,” Belkacem says, “one in which every particle is accounted for. We can determine the momentum of all the particles, the initial orientation and distance between the protons, and the momentum of the electrons.”
What the simplest double slit experiment reveals
“At the high photon energies we used for photoionization, most of the time we observed one fast electron and one slow electron,” says Weber. “What we were interested in was the interference patterns.”
Considered as particles, the electrons fly off at an angle to one another that depends on their energy and how they scatter from the two hydrogen nuclei (the “double slit”). Considered as waves, an electron makes an interference pattern that can be seen by calculating the probability that the electron will be found at a given position relative to the orientation of the two nuclei.
The wave nature of the electron means that in a double slit experiment even a single electron is capable of interfering with itself. Double slit experiments with photoionized hydrogen molecules at first showed only the self-interference patterns of the fast electrons, their waves bouncing off both protons, with little action from the slow electrons.
“From these patterns, it might look like the slow electron is not important, that double photoionization is pretty unspectacular,” says Weber. The fast electrons’ energies were 185 to 190 eV (electron volts), while the slow electrons had energies of 5 eV or less. But what happens if the slow electron is given just a bit more energy, say somewhere between 5 and 25 eV? As Weber puts it, “What if we make the slow electron a little more active? What if we turn it into an ‘observer?'”
As long as both electrons are isolated from their surroundings, quantum coherence prevails, as revealed by the fast electron’s wavelike interference pattern. But this interference pattern disappears when the slow electron is made into an observer of the fast one, a stand-in for the larger environment: the quantum system of the fast electron now interacts with the wider world (e.g., its next neighboring particle, the slow electron) and begins to decohere. The system has entered the realm of classical physics.
Not completely, however. And here is what Belkacem calls “the meat of the experiment:” “Even when the interference pattern has disappeared, we can see that coherence is still there, hidden in the entanglement between the two electrons.”
Although one electron has become entangled with its environment, the two electrons are still entangled with each other in a way that allows interference between them to be reconstructed, simply by graphing their correlated momenta from the angles at which the electrons were ejected. Two waveforms appear in the graph, either of which can be projected to show an interference pattern. But the two waveforms are out of phase with each other: viewed simultaneously, interference vanishes.
If the two-electron system is split into its subsystems and one (the “observer”) is thought of as the environment of the other, it becomes evident that classical properties such as loss of coherence can emerge even when only four particles (two electrons, two protons) are involved. Yet because the two electron subsystems are entangled in a tractable way, their quantum coherence can be reconstructed. What Weber calls “the which-way information exchanged between the particles” persists.
Says Belkacem, “For researchers who are trying to build solid-state quantum computers this is both good news and bad news. The bad news is that decoherence and loss of information occur on the very tiny scale of a single hydrogen molecule. The good news is that, theoretically, the information isn’t necessarily lost — or at least not completely.”
“The Simplest Double Slit: Interference and Entanglement in Double Photoionization of H2,” by D. Akoury, K. Kreidi, T. Jahnke, Th. Weber, A. Staudte, M. Schöffler, N. Neumann, J. Titze, L. Ph. H. Schmidt, A. Czasch, O. Jagutzki, R. A. Costa Fraga, R. E. Grisenti, R. DÃez Muiño, N. A. Cherepkov, S. K. Semenov, P. Ranitovic, C. L. Cocke, T. Osipov, H. Adaniya, J. C. Thompson, M. H. Prior, A. Belkacem, A. L. Landers, H. Schmidt-Böcking, and R. Dörner, appears in the 9 November issue of Science.
Adapted from materials provided by DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Need to cite this story in your essay, paper, or report? Use one of the following formats:
APA
MLA
DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2007, November 12). Line Between Quantum And Classical Worlds Is At Scale Of Hydrogen Molecule. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 13, 2007, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2007/11/071109090639.htm
Link: http://tinyurl.com/2j28o2
Â
(Ah, I see you’ve played your trump card, Quantum Physics, something you know even less about than receptor-ligand binding. Again, a fascinating article especially since I know a little about quantum mechanics but not really about the memory of water molecules for scorpion venom diluted to the point where not a single molecule of the venom exists in the water…which is kind of what homeopathy is about. In your next post, prove to me that you understand one thing about quantum physics…hell…physics in general.-PB)
Panda Bear, I see that even today and after that elegant article on Hydrogen molecular memory you insist on continuing your silly and meaningless personal attack on me instead of dealing with the data.
I am sorry to see that, but not surprised.
Here is the second of two things I have to share with you today.
Perhaps this next article and its real human drama of the harm some in your profession cause by their ‘I-already-know-it-all closed minds’ do to those who come to them for healing will turn you around and open your mind to the possibility of things you don’t understand. And, yes, there are things you don’t understand just as there are things I don’t understand.
This article is intended to show the danger of closed minds and the benefit of an open mind, both as witnessed within the Medical community.
A Pain in the Head
By Sandra G. Boodman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 13, 2007; Page HE01
For six years, Lee J. Nelson searched in vain for the cause of the unrelenting headache centered like a bull’s-eye above the bridge of his nose.
He consulted nearly 60 doctors, none of whom could find a physical explanation for his pain. He took 100 different medications, but even powerful narcotics brought no more than temporary relief. One doctor who considered his headache a symptom of severe depression suggested electroshock; a specialist at Johns Hopkins proposed last-ditch brain surgery reserved for intractable psychiatric problems.
So the day in 2003 that the Northern Virginia consultant found the answer to his baffling and rare medical problem in a 40-year-old article in the National Library of Medicine, he was overcome. “It described patients just like me,” Nelson recalled. “I started crying.”
For Nelson, now 55, and his wife, Neta, an executive at a small pharmaceutical company in Herndon, the discovery of that article in a British medical journal proved to be life-changing. It not only provided a diagnosis for a problem that had stumped dozens of specialists, but also described a surgical treatment for the malady that at times had driven Nelson to talk about suicide and his wife of nearly 30 years to contemplate divorce.
While Nelson credits Washington otolaryngologist Sonya Malekzadeh, one of the surgeons who performed an operation similar to the procedure outlined in the article, with saving his life, Malekzadeh regards Nelson’s unswerving determination as central to the case she considers among her most memorable.
“He was very persistent,” said Malekzadeh, an assistant professor of otolaryngology at Georgetown University who has co-written a paper about the case that has been submitted to a medical journal. “Without his help, I doubt we would have gotten to the end of it,” in part because his problem was so uncommon.
Ironically, it was also Nelson’s persistence — reflected in the extraordinary number of doctors he consulted — that may have prolonged his ordeal. “I saw just about every specialty,” he said, many only once because they offered neither “help nor hope.”
“As the number got larger and larger I was inadvertently portraying desperation, and that’s a red flag,” Nelson noted. Doctors tend to regard such patients as having a psychiatric illness or angling for drugs.
One insurance company employee who reviewed his claims asked incredulously, “What is this: a hobby of yours?” Nelson recalled.
His problem surfaced in the winter of 1997 after he recovered from a bad cold. He was left with a sharp headache, which his internist predicted would go away. When it didn’t, Nelson saw an otolaryngologist — the first of six — who ordered X-rays. They were normal. So were the MRIs and CT scans that followed.
Doctors subsequently ruled out a brain tumor, multiple sclerosis, chronic sinusitis, temporomandibular joint disorder, a nerve problem called atypical trigeminal neuralgia, epilepsy and migraines.
“I kept saying this is an ENT [ear, nose and throat] problem,” Nelson said, “and ENTs kept saying there is no evidence of it.”
By the time he had seen about a dozen specialists, Nelson and his wife said, doctors had settled on a likely diagnosis: clinical depression.
“I didn’t have other symptoms of depression, but as this went on, I did get deeply depressed,” Nelson said. He and his wife say they regarded depression as a consequence, not a cause, of his grinding headache.
Nelson underwent psychotherapy and treatment that included numerous medications: anti-seizure drugs, antidepressants and even powerful antipsychotics. He tried biofeedback, acupuncture, hypnosis, Botox injections and a nerve block. He spent a total of six weeks in an inpatient head-pain unit affiliated with the University of Michigan. The couple say they spent tens of thousands of dollars that insurance didn’t cover.
The day an ophthalmologist at Johns Hopkins suggested cingulotomy, controversial psychosurgery reserved for intractable psychiatric problems, was arguably “the worst moment,” recalled Neta Nelson, who accompanied her husband to many appointments.
“There were times I wondered, ‘How long can I do this?’ ” she remembered. “I cried many nights. There were times I would lie in bed, and just before I fell asleep I’d try and feel what it would be like to be Lee. It was a very difficult period.”
Lee Nelson said he had pretty much given up — “I couldn’t tell the story again” — and planned to file for disability when his wife called Georgetown. Acting on her husband’s hunch that the problem was ENT-related, she sought an appointment with an otolaryngologist. Malekzadeh had the next open slot.
Lee Nelson vividly remembers their first meeting in November 2002. “She spent one and a half hours talking with me before she picked up an instrument,” he recalled. “I really felt like she was listening.”
Malekzadeh remembers the meeting, too. “He was slightly desperate, very unhappy, but he seemed genuine, and he was there with his wife,” she recalled. “I didn’t think he was crazy or drug-seeking.” Her records show he was on a slew of medications at the time: the antipsychotic Seroquel, antidepressants, narcotic pain relievers, allergy medications and nasal steroid sprays.
To her surprise, she was unable to examine the internal anatomy of his nose with an endoscope, a basic procedure that, surprisingly, none of the five other ENTs had attempted. His nasal passages were too narrow for the instrument.
After a variety of medicines failed to open them sufficiently, Malekzadeh told Nelson the best option might be exploratory sinus surgery.
Two surgeries did reduce the pain. Unsure how to proceed, she sent Nelson to the University of Pennsylvania expert who had pioneered endoscopic sinus surgery.
During the examination at Penn, a junior doctor probed a spot inside Nelson’s nose, eliciting an immediate response.
“I almost flew out of the chair,” Nelson recalled. “I said, ‘That’s it! That’s the pain generator!’ The nugget I got was the name of the anatomical structure: the anterior ethmoid neurovascular complex.”
The Philadelphia specialist told the couple he didn’t think it was germane. Neta Nelson insisted they head to the National Library of Medicine.
There on microfiche they found the 1963 article in the British Journal of Laryngology & Otology. A London surgeon described five cases very similar to Nelson’s in which a respiratory infection had caused swelling and compression of the ethmoid nerve in the sinuses, triggering a headache. The only permanent treatment appeared to involve removing bony tissue, thereby freeing the nerve from compression.
“It was pretty classic,” said Malekzadeh, who had heard about such a problem during her training but had never seen a case.
On July 1, 2004, she and her colleague Suzette Mikula operated on Nelson.
The pain, Nelson said, gradually lessened. “One day in January 2005 I woke up and realized there was no more pain. That was life-changing.” He hasn’t had the headache since.
Although elated, Nelson said his recovery “got me into a whole other place of anger and frustration: Why did I have to go through this?”
Malekzadeh considers it “a very gratifying case.”
To Neta Nelson, the ordeal illustrates the importance of “never giving up. That’s the only take-home message.”
Lee Nelson said the experience has radically altered his view of doctors. “I’m very thankful I had the [financial] resources and the gray matter to do what I did,” he said. “But I think that a lot of physicians have lost their intellectual curiosity and don’t want to work with a patient.”
If you have a Medical Mystery that’s been solved, [email protected].
link: http://tinyurl.com/2ojmk2
PS “Ah, I see you’ve played your trump card, Quantum Physics, something you know even less about than receptor-ligand binding…”
Reading about Quantum Theory is a hobby of mine and one of the chief reasons I read ScienceDaily and other sources of Science reviews daily.
I find it all amazing.
You are quite right that I am not bright enough to do Quantum Physics and be any good at it, but that does not stop me from enjoying the fruit of those who are and do.
I believe you would benefit by adopting the same attitude which would have the salutary effect of broadening your obviously self limiting intellectual horizon.
Â
(Look, you admit that quantum physics is well beyond you capabilities and that, like receptor-ligand binding and cell biology in general, you know nothing about it. I am not a research scientist but, like I said, I have a pretty good grasp of medical science and physics and I assure you that your article has nothing to do with homeopathy at all. I repeat: Homeopaths believe that if you dilute a substance enough and shake the dilution vessel between dilutions, the water will retain a never defined memory of the substance even though it is never explained how, as there is not one molecule of the orginal substance left a) the water does not instead retain the memory of the container, b) the water does not retain a memory of every substance to which it has ever been exposed including the milk, vinegar, or sugars that are used as fillers in homeopathic remedies, c) how this never-defined water memory can cure disease, and d) what shaking’s got to do with it anyways (three shakes, four, half-shakes, stirs, what?).
That’s homeopathy. Please explain it to me and how it can work. “Like cures like,” the basis of homeopathy, is not even remotely based on anything resembling science but just the late nineteenth century observations of guy who had even less of a grasp of science than you. It was a fad. Like radium baths and magnets except it was rediscovered and repackaged for the rubes of whom, if you’ll pardon me, you are one. -PB)
Panda Bear why did you have to go and say this “…for the rubes of whom, if you’ll pardon me, you are one”?
You are as entitled to your opinion as I am mine of you.
Its too bad for you you have recorded your errors of reasoning on the INTERNET so everyone can see for themselves the opinionated knucklehead you have made out of yourself.
Let’s review, you rejected homeopathy on the basis of what you believe to be the scientific impossibility of “water memory.”
So far so good?
Earlier in the day of my first post here I skimmed ScienceDaily.com and the intro to the article on “molecule memory”.
When I got around to Medpage.com later that day and saw the new section on medical blogs your blog was mentioned and I saw your “Complementary and Alternative Medicine month” article where you rail against alternative medical care and especially homeopathy (water memory) and chiropractic (manipulations instead of vacinnations).
Are we on the same page so far?
Since I am a chiropractor and know I have never been taught that vaccinations are to be avoided I knew I was dealing with a someone who thinks he knows what he knows but instead is someone who knows not.
To be frank, that is very common with M.D.’s as Mr. Nelson’s story of severe crippling pain in his sinuses vividly, humanly and very humbly made clear.
Therefore, I took my time to post the “molecular memory” on cell walls article which you and others summarily dismissed on the basis that it does not directly apply.
Of course, it does not directly apply, and I never said it did. I never said that it proved homeopathy or water memory.
What I posted was simply that “molecular memory” exists and has been shown to be valid scientifically.
How you and the others could misinterpret that is beyond me. Well, not actually, but I want to remain humble, for now.
This was the first research done on “molecular memory” that proved its existence according to the paper.
As the lead researcher said in the article prior to this it was “assumed” not to exist and it was not looked for or controlled for in scientific research. I actually posted that TWICE!
Somehow you and your cohorts still managed to let that escape your notice.
Maybe you were just tired from working a long hard day in the ER. I’ll give you that out.
So just how could I provide proof of “water memory” when the specific scientific research doesn’t yet exist?
More research will obviously have to be done on to determine what if any effect homeopathy remedies have on “water memory”.
An aside, you might like to read this http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3817.html
Yesterday, inadvertently but surreptitiously I happened upon another article that mentioned “molecule memory”, this time from researchers looking at the hydrogen molecule from both the molecule physics and quantum physics perspectives while doing research for quantum computing, the new hot area of computing technology, where they have utilized the concept of “molecular memory,” but in wires. (that’s a whole different story, check wiki)
Viola, I found they discovered that at some level of existence “molecule memory” exists at what appears to be both the quantum level and molecule level as shown in the hydrogen experiment.
Assuredly, neither experimental finding alone or together proves homeopathy or water memory, but they do call into question the basis for your outright rejection of water memory, i.e., that it cannot possibly exist.
It can possibly exist, therefore, your ‘theory’ of nonexistence has been downgraded to a premise that must now be tested for its validity and reliability.
I have showed you the proof and evidence I have, reproduced here for all to see with links to the original sources.
Let me be crystal clear, I did not attempt to prove homeopathy or water memory, and I have not, I only set out to show that you were too quick to dismiss them given the new research, i.e., you don’t know everything that you think you do, or said more plainly, there are things you do not know and therefore ought not pontificate upon.
That is plain to all even those that agree wholly with you about water memory.
FYI, I have noticed and I am sure others have as well that you engage in the Logical Fallacies of Begging the Question, Straw Man Red Herring and Appeal to Authority when you respond to me. Unimpressive, lame and weak argumentum, imo.
I suggest another tact is in order.
FYI, you mentioned in your opening that some chiropractors tell patients to forgo vaccination’s and instead get manipulations. As a chiropractor I can affirmatively tell you that such nonsense is not taught at any nationally accredited College of Chiropractic. If it were they would lose accreditation.
If a local chiropractor of your knowledge is telling patients that he is in violation of national norms and standards of care in all 50 States and therefore ought to be brought before the Chiropractic Board.
Unfortunately, I know that sort of thing does go on among those who believe chiropractic can cure all, which it most assuredly cannot.
I see chiropractors that say that sort of thing in the same light as I see you, wrongheaded and potentially dangerous to others b/c of it.
But that does not mean chiropractors and you don’t have an important role to play in the health care of patients.
(Chiropractors have no role to play whatsoever in the health care of patients unless it is that of an expensive masseur. So sorry. This is the kind of parasitism of which I speak. The “me too” aspect of CAM. As for the rest of your comment, again, I have the distinct idea that you have not read the articles which you copied. -PB)
“Chiropractors have no role to play whatsoever in the health care of patients…”
You have every right to your opinion.
That your opinion convinces fewer everyday ought to have concerned you sufficiently to cause you to entertain the notion that others know or see something you don’t and that you need to re-examine the premises that you base your opinion upon.
(1000 unique visits a day which is a lot for an amateur blog. Convinced or not, people do read.-PB)
That it doesn’t cause you to re-examine your bias, prejudices and predilections seems to me to be most telling of the level of your mentation abilities and by extension the weight that people ought to be give to your ‘opinions’.
Which is to say you are just another bloviating, egotistical and insufferable bore that is safely ignored.
BTW, today I noticed Part 2 of your series and in it you repeat “Quantum Physics, The Last Refuge of Scoundrals” {sic} where you repeat the claims made to me in Part 1.
(Whoops. Since WordPress does not have a spell checker, I operate without a safety net and appreciate spelling corrections from whatever source.-PB)
For the record, I note you do so again without any scientific citations.
(Have I misrepresented the fundamental principle of Quantum Physics? If I have I await enlightment.-PB)
You are long on opinion but short (missing) hard evidence.
It ought to be clear to everyone here that you have not done any research on what you pontificate about, you simply repeat what you heard, read and believe without any examination at all b/c it suits your prejudices and political pov.
Since you claim to have finished medical school and to be a practicing ER physician you should recognize that individuals that rail against things they do no understand while pretending, saying and repeating how trustworthy, intelligent and superior they are are expressing a psychiatric compensatory mechanism for their inadequate personality disorder.
(I am an Emergency Medicine Resident, not a practicing ER physician just yet. But I do understand medicine, physics, engineering, infantry squad tactics, the workings of an M60 machine gun, mortar gunnery, and any number of things in which I have had experience or an interest. I have, for example, no opinion on any number of subjects but…and this is key….this blog is not about French literature or Famous Danish Skiers.-PB)
You need professional help for yours imo.
im1dc,
I think I speak for a number of my colleagues when I say you were just p0wnd in the worst way. I mean, really.
Your comments are insufferably arrogant with no substance to back them up. You have only a passing and elementary knowledge of biochemistry, physiology, and physics, yet you claim to be able to correctly interpret some pretty heavy primary research in the fields.
Even your knowledge of psychiatry is lacking. Inadequate personality disorder? I guess the closest the DSM-IV comes to such a diagnosis is avoidant personality disorder, characterized by a feeling of inadequacy, social inhibition, and a reluctance to put oneself out there for fear of embarassment. That sure doesn’t sound like the kind of person who would put his viewpoints on controversial topics up on the internet for all to see.
I think scartose summed it up nicely, you are doing a great job showing what a little knowledge in arrogant hands can do.
I’m starting to think “open-mindedness” is the last refuge of those with no discernment. Funny how the guy claiming Appeal to
Authority logical fallacies is the one pointing out the credentials of his sources to bolster his arguments while having absolutely no idea of what they’re actually talking about.
Panda Bear,
Can this be real or is it simply more quackery according to you since you can’t explain it?
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Repels Severe Depression
Dr J and Shining Hector,
The field is yours to prove I’m wrong, as yet no one has though many have tried.
Its too early for you to take victory laps.
Declarations and divinations of and about me don’t count.
Proof boys, proof.
Your time is up, PB.
Its real, not quackery. I’m so glad to rub all your nasty nudnik know-it-all noses in it.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Repels Severe Depression
11/21/07 PHILADELPHIA — Transcranial magnetic stimulation significantly reduces acute symptoms of major depression and offers an alternative to conventional therapy, investigators in a multicenter trial have concluded.
link: http://www.medpagetoday.com/Geriatrics/Depression/tb/7459
Watching “60 Minutes” just now there is a story on “Ambien Awakenings”. Another quite interesting finding that would escape your notice b/c of your learned biases.
(“Transcranial magnetic stimulation involves discharge of a time-varying current from an insulated coil placed on the scalp surface. The discharge generates a brief dynamic magnetic field that induces current flow when reaching a conductive medium, such as neural tissue. The current offers the potential to modulate neural circuitry in a therapeutic fashion.”
You do know that ECT has been used for many year as a treatment for depression, right? As the article states, Magnetic fields induce a current in particular areas of the brain. I fail to see your point and/or what this has to do with chiropracty or homeopathy. And more importantly, do you even read the articles you link?-PB) Â
Panda Bear,
Did you happen to see Dr. Ben Carson on C-Span Thanksgiving?
He’s the world famous Pediatric Neurosurgeon of Johns Hopkins.
His humanity and humility shown brightly.
He makes your profession look good.
If you missed it, try a search of C-Span’s archives for the 11-07-07 speech.
You and the other M.D.’s here need a dose of his medicine, perhaps even a double dose.
To me you and your series on Complimentary Alternative Medicine will be joining these gentlemen and their predictions:
Bad Predictions about the Future
Light Bulb
«… good enough for our transatlantic friends … but unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men.»
British Parliamentary Committee, referring to Edison’s light bulb, 1878.
«Such startling announcements as these should be deprecated as being unworthy of science and mischievous to its true progress.»
Sir William Siemens, on Edison’s light bulb, 1880.
«Everyone acquainted with the subject will recognize it as a conspicuous failure.»
Henry Morton, president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, on Edison’s light bulb, 1880.
Automobiles
«The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad.»
The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903.
«That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.»
Scientific American, Jan. 2 edition, 1909.
«The ordinary “horseless carriage” is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle.»
Literary Digest, 1899.
Airplanes
«Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical (sic) and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.» – Simon Newcomb; The Wright Brothers flew at Kittyhawk 18 months later. Newcomb was not impressed.
«Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.»
Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society, 1895.
«It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the [flying machine] problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere.»
Thomas Edison, American inventor, 1895.
«Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.»
Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre, 1904.
«There will never be a bigger plane built.»
A Boeing engineer, after the first flight of the 247, a twin engine plane that holds ten people.
I can supply many more if you would like.
Â
(Ooh, let me supply one too:
“Like Cures Like”
-Some lunatic from two centuries ago who had about as much knowledge of medicine as you do.
-PB)
ECT: Electroconvulsive Therapy
http://www.healthyplace.com/Communities/depression/treatment/ect/index.asp
Panda Bear,
ECT as in Electroshock Therapy is not Transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Not even close.
Nice try but you are fading fast.
But let’s pretend you accept Transcranial magnetic stimulation for the treatment of Depression, does that now mean you also accept in the use of magnetic stimulation of other body parts for the treatment of other nerve mediated disorders?
Yes or no and explain why or why not.
Â
(Whoa. The article clearly states that the magnetic field induces a current in a conductor, in this case neural tissue. This is an application of either Faraday’s law or Lenz’s law (I can never keep them straight). When you move a magnetic field over a conductor you will induce an electrical potential or a voltage which provides the “force” for a current to flow.  Making current flow through neural tissue is the exact modality of ECT and I suspect the breakthrough of TMS is that the currents are milder and sedation, intubation and paralysis (neuromuscular blockade) are not required as they are with ECT. Fantastic. I’m all for it. But note that I still don’t understand your point. Are you saying this is some magical process that transcends physics? Not hardly. -PB)
I have a sneaking suspicion that im1dc sells magnets at his establishment as a form of therapy.
I’m suddenly reminded of one of the last scenes from Billy Madison.
Principal: “Mr. Madison, what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
Seriously, on what basis are you declaring victory? What exactly are we supposed to disprove? You post articles which you obviously fail to understand, we point out what they actually mean, you ignore that and proclaim you were right all along. Huh? Did they hand you these articles in chiropracty school and tie it all in to what you were covering at the time and you just forgot to include all the context or what?
Hmmm, after reading this I can’t help but think you don’t have much faith in anything but allopathic medicine..
Too bad, because there are other ways of caring for people that are as good and sometimes better, than business-as-usual-western-medicine.
I’ve got to say, life is not all about being cured. We create (knowingly and unknowingly) many of our own illnesses.
But your writing makes me think you’ve never considered possiblities in living such as quantum physics, or that man may not (ever) be omniscient.
Â
(Karen, I want you to explain, in as many words as you need, “Quantum Physics,” particularly what it has to do with anything that we routinely discuss on this blog. And I want a tight definition, not what you think it means. As to creating our own illnesses, I see smokers, drug users, the morbidly obese, and alcoholics who have created their own illness.Â
I do not, by the way, “care for people.” They come to me with a medical complaint and I try my best to manage or cure it. Faith has got nothing to do with it. I am not in the “making them feel good about themselves” business. Sorry. That’s a personal problem and if that’s all you mean by alternative medicine, then have at it. My problem is when the purveyors of what is spirituality at best and entertainment at worst decide that they can actually address real medical complaints, many of which we actually do not create but are thrust upon us by bacteria, viruses, genetic damage, bad luck, and a whole host of things completely out of our control. Even happy people get cancer you know.
Will you at least admit that, unless you are a medical doctor I might know a little bit more about medicine, disease, physiology, and pharmacology than you and that maybe I know what I’m talking about? -PB)
OK, Karen Johnson. There is no such thing as allopathic medicine. There is medicine that works, and is supported by evidence, and there is quackery. And, for your information, the term “allopathy” was coined by Samuel Hahnemann, the inventor of that fantasy otherwise known as homeopathy, some 200 years ago. In case you didn’t know, Mr Hahnemann was German which, unless I am very mistaken, is in the West.
As for the quantum physics I suspect you don’t know the first thing about. I think you must have been reading too many of Lionel Milgrom’s post hoc fantasies to justify why he wants the world to believe magic water and sugar pills can cure all the world’s known and unknown diseases. He doesn’t appear to understand quantum theory either.
Sweet blog. I never know what I am going to come across next. I think you should do more posting as you have some pretty intelligent stuff to say.
I’ll be watching you . 🙂