3alarmer 

...to go back to this, how do you explain suggestion and auto suggestion, as treatments for pain using trance states ? Is there some unacceptable risk, that the hypnotist is going to slide down into the grifty quackery state, and make you cluck like a chicken, like the hypnotism show at the state fair ?

OldTryGuy

seems appropriate >>>

livedarklions

​​​​​​Really maybe actually reread the statement I'm actually making instead of assuming you know what I have or haven't managed. I've basically had to remodel my entire body and drastically change my entire daily routine to get to the point where I can actually walk any significant distance without paying for it over several entirely sleepless nights. So, yes I am very aware of the usefulness of visualization in managing pain.

What you're missing is that I'm saying that the placebo effect is itself a visualization technique. That's a good thing. There's now research showing that people with chronic conditions who are actually told that the pill they are getting is a placebo actually show improvement. In other words, they're actually consciously visualizing this sugar pill is helping them. I'm a great believer in the usefulness of placebo.

I've said several times that my problem with this is the absurd electrical explanation--you feel better walking barefoot, by all means, do it. I was very specific in saying that it's the naming of a false mechanism, in this case electricity, that is widely available and actually dangerous if mishandled is a bad thing to do, especially when it's clear that the reason it's being done is to make people buy special shoes or whatever. I'm sorry, but I'm way past the point where I see obvious false information becoming widespread as being benign. Seriously, we had people taking aquarium cleaner to treat COVID, and you don't see the potential harm of misinformation? I think telling people who are in pain and desperate that what they need is to channel more electricity through their body is not a benign piece of misinformation. Some people are true shut-ins who can't go outside. I don't think it's at all farfetched for them to experiment with "earth circuit" simulators.

So here's my syllogism:
Visualization is good for dealing with pain.
Placebo is visualization.
Therefore, placebo is good for dealing with pain.

The danger of this is that if the placebo itself is harmful, then it negates the good that visualization can do, and may actually be worse than doing nothing.

Frankly, if this was being sold as a mystical way to commune with Gaia or whatever, I'd be a lot more comfortable with it.

Now if you can stop arguing with things I didn't say, and providing me with a false biography, I'd appreciate it.

livedarklions

You're just cherry-picking what they're saying to take out the electric nonsense. Leaving out the pseudoscience makes it benign or possibly even helpful. If you actually read what I've written, you'll see you're arguing with things I haven't said.

BTW, attacking my motives is classic ad hominem. I expect better from you.

PeteHski

Your question is irrelevant. The reason I asked if you were an expert is because you are asserting an absolute position about this (i.e. 100% bs, zero chance of probability, impossible etc), while there are qualified experts still debating it. The guy who is being labelled a "quack" by many here is at least a qualified cardiologist and has been studying these effects for decades. Other experts may well disagree with the claims or be very sceptical, but labelling things as 100% bs from a position of a layman is always questionable and something I personally try to avoid. It's worth remembering that historically many famous scientists have been labelled as "morons" in their own lifetime, simply because their theories were not widely accepted or proven at the time. Try Googling Ludwig Boltzmann for example.

pdlamb

Partial credit there. But since electric fields are measured in volts/meter, and the calibration process for the wrist stat measures volts from ground to the person, in practical terms you've found a distinction without a difference.

livedarklions

I'm sorry, but what authority does a lone cardiologist carry here? He isn't a significant part of the medical community, he's just one guy. And his "research" is utter BS. You want to appeal to authority? Fine, here's an article by an MD debunking this crap:

https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room...feet-to-earth/

Please spare us from the poor, lone genius bucking the norms of an entrenched profession BS trope. It's the tell-tale hallmark of a quack argument. For every time that has turned out to actually be the case, I can give you a zillion "broccoli cures cancer" quack doctors.

My question was irrelevant only because the point you made--that some animals may employ sensing earth's magnetic field to navigate--was also irrelevant to the point of whether "grounding" could have potential benefits. Obviously, you are now conceding that.

tomato coupe

Those readouts are in volts because they're measuring potential, not electric field. Declaring it's a distinction without a difference is like stating your speed in miles instead of miles per hour, and saying it's a distinction without a difference.

PeteHski

You need to chill out. Seriously. I'm not getting dragged into an argument with the most argumentative guy on BF! For me this topic is mildly interesting and I'm not arrogant enough to call it all utter BS from my armchair. That doesn't imply that I believe it. Whatever you say about it carries no particular weight either way.

livedarklions

What's hilarious is you've been having this argument with about 4 people in this thread, and in the process you slagged the entire medical profession as being too focused on profits to be studying this. Then you turn around and call me argumentative and arrogant. Seriously, you needed to chill many posts ago to make this credible.

I don't consider calling BS on clear BS arrogant. The link I provided you debunking this nonsense was not written by a layman. I do consider telling people they need to keep an open mind towards any crackpot theory that comes around just because a lone doctor says it and you can't prove to a certainty it's absolutely impossible absurd.

PeteHski

I knew it was a mistake taking you back off my ignore list!

livedarklions

Likewise.

3alarmer 

...where do you think I attacked your motives ? I have no idea at all what your motives might be. Give me a quote where you think I have done this, please. More importantly, why, if I have indeed supported my point that this is another visualization technique, is my statement "cherry picking" ?. Again, I have nowhere claimed to know why this might work. I have only associated it with a multitude of mind/body techniques that have a well documented rate of success (which is not 100%), in the treatment of chronic pain.

If pain is in your head (and it can easily be defined that way. I don't feel your pain at all), then why not use your head to approach it. Your fear of being duped is overriding your rational self. Chronic pain, and the treatment of it, is not well solved in the conventional medical literature.

I do not wish you any pain, but perhaps the people who have it are better motivated to try things that have worked for others, in the hope they might also work for them ?

3alarmer 

...I was unaware of this history. I am sorry about your pain. Chronic pain just sucks the life out of you.
But I guess we disagree on whether this particular "thing" is being sold as a harmful quack remedy. I honestly do not see it that way.

And to compare it with Covid 19 misinformation seems a bit overdramatic to me. Everything has the potential for quackery and misuse. That includes allopathic medicine, which is our predominant model. In my own life, I prefer to go with what works, and in answer to the OP's original inquiry, I see no reason why this particular set of mental images would in any way be harmful in the search for relief from chronic pain. You're envisioning problems, as an argument against experimenting with it. I just don't agree with that. It may or may not help the OP's wife with her pain, But it's pretty much guaranteed it won't help if she's afraid to try it.

livedarklions

I'd say that accusing me of having a "compulsion to pee on the parade" is a very direct attack on my motives, especially coupled with the obviously rhetorical smart-ass question about my doing it to "ground".

I'll deal with the rest of the post shortly.

livedarklions

I'm being very, very clear why that was cherry picking. You deliberately left out the part of the schtick I was objecting to. I have never once objected to people using visualization if it's helpful. That does not for a second provide a good argument for polluting scientific discourse and objective information with crappy metaphors being treated as if they're real. People can and do take other implications for that and invent other applications from this "alternative science" that can be harmful and/or unnecesarily wallet-draining. It also may dissuade people from taking other more effective steps if they're constantly being told there's nothing special about science-based medicine and much that's supposedly being kept hidden from them. Just ask Steve Jobs, oh, wait, you can't.

livedarklions

I almost posted some of the comments on the debunking article I linked, because I think they actually illustrated some of what it is I'm actually getting at, and I think you're somewhat too dead set on being mad at me for some reason that you don't really ralize we're really disagreeing about very little.
These people were actually calling themselves "barefooters" and they were extolling the benefits of walking around barefoot in all sorts of environments. What was interesting was that they were actually thanking the author for debunking the pseudoscientific nonsense as they thought that all making wild claims about it curing inflammatory diseases and improbable mechanisms was accomplishing was to make it harder for people to appreciate the real effects it had on their mental state, posture, comfort, whatever. In other words, by tying the thing up with a buch of BS that clearly has more to do with selling shoes without rubber soles or whatever than anything real it was just easier to write off anyone saying "hey, try walking barefoot" as a crank.

I said above I had no problem with people trying walking around barefoot to see if it helps them. I have a big problem with lying to people about what is and what isn't science, that never ends well. This isn't being presented to people as a metaphor, it's being sold them as a true electrical connection with the ground vs. fake connections with the ground. And lo and behold, if you buy the special leather-soled athletic footwear or whatever, you're going to be cured is not a message I'm going to get behind.

And yeah, I'm not going to feel bad if I discourage someone from buying overpriced crap like this:
https://www.earthing.com/products/grounders-yoga-mat

3alarmer 

...note please that is in the inquisitive. This is why it contains the word "why". Asking about motive, and surmising a motive, are very different things. Again, I have no idea why this topic has so distressed you.

3alarmer 

...cherry picking is when you select out one or several instances of a cash revenue marketing gimmick, and use it to condemn everything written about a topic. Like this:


By your rationale here, my selecting out the portions of that web link (which I included), that were pertinent to my point, is "cherry picking". I think you are wrong in that. Were I engaging in that practice, I would hardly have linked you to the entire page and suggested that you read it. "Cherry picking, as such, is a deliberate practice to deceive, by omitting pertinent information from a source. In this case, the other stuff is hardly relevant to my chosen subject of visualization techniques to address chronic pain. I might have missed it, but it appeared to me that all of it was offered for free, on the internet. And none of it contained advice to avoid any other method or source of treatment. I think you're just making **** up now. Again, I have no idea of why.

If it's in an effort to defend the less sophisticated from quackery, I would suggest to you that's a very tall order. I hope you're up to it, because there are a lot of places you need to visit on the internet before you're finished.



...I suspect our main disagreement is that you seem to feel there is a danger from keeping an open mind on stuff like this. I understand that there are various levels of crazy, but I don't feel qualified to solve the problem. And I would hate it, if someone who might actually benefit from something like this, were put off from trying it, simply because portions of it are not currently demonstrated or refuted by science. Human pain is a complex and poorly understood phenomenon. And it's not like you can't get into serious trouble searching out a solution to chronic pain in the standard, allopathic medical treatment model.

Not everyone who looks for a solution to chronic pain ends up as a victim of some greedy pain clinic owner, writing endless scripts for Oxycontin. Similarly, not everyone who explores this "earthing" business will end up poorer and wearing special shoes.

Again, I won't speculate on why your view of this might be what it is. We're all different.

livedarklions

"Are you sill beating your wife?" is also in the inquisitive. You clearly accused me of having a compulsion. Now you're accusing me of being "distressed".
I know you know what loaded language looks like, and this stuff is loaded with implications that I'm somehow irrational.

I've explained this in as many ways as I care to/ I have no idea why you think I'm going to believe your puzzlement is sincere at this point.

JohnDThompson 

I'm thinking that it's time to close this thread.

livedarklions

That thing I showed you--that's from the website of the guy who started the whole grounding thing. That isn't the cherry, that's the root of the tree it all springs from. It's about selling the book and the merch. I just linked the first one on his page. You want to pretend this isn't about a whole bunch of money? Look at this page where I got it from:

https://www.earthing.com/collections/all-products-1

Again, this is the website of the guy who started the whole thing. You want to pretend it's peripheral, go ahead, but it's BS and I'm calling it BS.
Being open-minded doesn't mean I have to be gullible.

I'm sorry, but I don't think lying to people with chronic pain is defensible. Allopathic medicine did way too much of that, but that doesn't justify leaving people in the clutches of woo-woo hucksters.

I don't like scammers, got it?

livedarklions

I've long been of the opinion that this forum shouldn't allow medical threads as it's really asking too much of the mods to be able to sort out the harmful junk from anything worthwhile.

This really had nothing substantial to do with cycling from the git-go.

livedarklions

Let's take it out on a happy note:


https://www.google.com/search?q=bare...id:azIytXgdggA

StanSeven

Yes. Definitely. Thread closed