Originally Posted by billh92109

Absolutely not. It is dose-response dependent. If I stray from the treatment, even *without knowing it* (an unnanounced change in a food I eat - this has happened) - the pain comes back. I could literally go in, get my inflammation levels measured, then eat something I know I am not supposed to like potatoes, and 3-4 hours later have an ESR rate wayyyy above normal, like 100 or more, and be unable to stand up from a chair due to extreme pain.

Science will always have a difficult time understanding the body. There are too many individual differences, the mind has an effect, and the number of variables needed to be held constant from person to person is ludicrous. Hard science just does not easily mix with the body. Too complex. The best thing we can do is do our best to cause desired effects and then say 'I dont know' - to the rest.

I dont know why it works but it does. If its placebo then its the best damn placebo I've ever seen, and my mind is literally capable of causing new bone formation and cartilage destruction depending on whether or not I believe my treatment works. Heh.

PS - medical science has many false assumptions at its root, assumptions which are necessary to produce useable results. One of those assumptions is that all people are the same. They aren't. Often times a drug or treatment doesnt work better than placebo on average, but strangely there may be 1 or 2 people in the study who get amazing results, and without knowing or understanding why the treatment is assumed to be worthless. Not to those people.

Anecdotal in the worst, but: A friend of mine tells the story of his friend who tried to start a biotech startup where they would start looking at genetic differences in people and the outcome of different drug treatments. The idea was that there might be a way to test someone to know whether a particular treatment would be the best thing for them or not. He had to give up this idea when they discovered so many individual differences between people and how their livers converted different drugs that they couldnt come up with anything that more than a few people would be able to benefit from. The body is so complex, and people are different enough, that I think we are LUCKY that there are any worthwhile general treatments out there, at all.

Also note I am not talking about magnetic bracelets or anything like that - I am just saying that there may not be an iron-clad way to really know whether something works or not. Things simply are not that black or white. We just want them to be so we can be 'right' about something.

Originally Posted by myrridin

The human body is hardly the most complex system studied by science. Our understanding is still in its infancy, but we are far enough along in the process to be able to determine efficacy, if not understand why something works. And there is no reason to doubt that we will develop a better understanding as time progresses.

Medicine doesn't assume all people are the same, very much the opposite. All drugs have side effects that will occur in a certain percentage of the recipients. The question becomes are the risks worth the potential benefits. Its a question of cost benefit.

I suspect your condition falls into the category of "orphan diseases", where the potential market for treatments is not large enough to justify the cost involved in developing those treatments.

Originally Posted by Bikewer

There does appear to be a certain percentage of the population that sees "big medicine" or even "science-based medicine" as an enormous conspiracy to make vast amounts of money and essentially promote bad health.
"Alternative" treatments are seen as remedies that at worst are being vilified by the bad guys as part of the conspiracy.... They will point out one or another spectacular failure as proof of the conspiracy....

All the while entirely forgetting history and the overall picture. I'm old enough to recall children dying of diptheria, scarlet fever, German measles, and half-a-dozen other diseases that are seldom if ever heard of today.
As well the horrors of polio and "polio season" and iron lungs and all that....
When was the last time you saw an iron lung?
I have stents. I had an angina episode and went in for cardiac catheterization. found 70% blockage in one artery. Procedure took about 20 minutes and I went home the next day. I'm back on my bike and capable of hard efforts with no problem
50 years ago I would have been reduced to a sedentary lifestyle and a diet of nitroglycerine....

Traditional medicine in Asia has persisted because they didn't have anything else. Note that life has historically been cheap in Asian countries and short lifespan the norm. Traditional medicine gave people a sense of comfort even when it didn't cure disease or prolong life.
Note that many modern "herbal" remedies in Asia contain healthy doses of pharmaceutical drugs...Often unmentioned.
The median lifespan for Western countries has risen to about 80, and in most cases with excellent health.
"60 is the new 40", as they say. Why do you think this is the case?
Power bracelets?
Homeopathy?
Megavitamins?

Look elsewhere, friends.

Originally Posted by slowandsteady

What is more complex in your opinion than a human(or any other animal)?

Originally Posted by njkayaker

Note that one doesn't need to know why/how a treatment works to establish that it does actually work.

Originally Posted by Mr. Fly

That is very true. If one bothers to read any of the package inserts of drugs one takes, one will see that the mechanism may only be postulated and not be well-established. These are FDA-approved drugs which have to meet stringent requirements of efficacy and safety, as proven by data from (likely) double-blind, randomized trials.

Originally Posted by myrridin

The nature of matter. The structure of the universe. To name a few. I was also going to say weather, but I think that one might be a toss up.

A human or other animal are relatively simple systems and further they share large portions of the same structures. The genetic differences between a chimp and **** sapien are only 2-3 percent. Heck a chicken and person share about 60% of the same genetic code... Hell the entire Human genome is only about 25,000 genes or about 3 billion base pairs (less than a gigabyte of information). The complexity is in the combinations and environmental factors and how they affect genetic activation (epigenetics).

The only hindrance to understanding the mechanics involved are ethical not procedural. For ethical reason we have to rely on a complicated and lengthy style of testing and statistical analysis to infer cause and effects. The ethical constraints only slow the understanding, we will get to the point where we understand the physiology well enough that we will likely eliminate "live testing" completely and rely on mathematical/computer models. Its also why animal testing is so useful. No one really cares if we have to kill a billion mice to develop a cure for cancer, well at least no most people.

Originally Posted by slowandsteady

We will not be able to use computer models to predict with any real certainty pharmacological effects on disease in the next 80 years or so. The universe isn't more complex, it is just harder to study because it is so darn far away. There are literally billions upon billions of interactions of a network of proteins and cells in the human body.

Originally Posted by myrridin

So glad to see your an expert on such a wide variety of subjects (physiology, physics, computer science, etc...)! :-)

We already have limited computer models for aspects of human physiology, its one of the ways new compounds are screened for determination if further testing is warranted.

It is not the number of combinations, its the ability to control the combination that limits the ability to study the problem. The human body is a relatively simple system. Further, we have no evidence that any aspect of human physiology is subject to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, meaning we can measure the inputs and outputs of every system and therefore develop statistical models even before we develop an understanding of the mechanisms involved allowing for the development of deterministic models.

I seem to remember a number of predictions that the first genome mapping would take up to 50 years, yet it was completed in less then ten. Which included development of brand new technology to allow the research. We are almost to the point that individual genomes can be mapped in a reasonable time frame. The recent discoveries related to epigenetics highlight the next area needing such resource commitments.

Of course as others have mentioned none of this is relevant to the point of the thread--people buying hokum based on faith healing.

Originally Posted by slowandsteady

I am a research pharmacologist by the way. Knowing the genome is all well and good, but it is like getting a map of the roads on the earth with no key. Frankly it is meaningless until you know what each gene does in the context of every other gene and what causes an individual gene to turn on. We currently design drugs to either block or enhance a single target. This is extremely basic when clearly there are a network of interactions going on. We are really just getting into decent in silico models, but they are still in their infancy. There are diseases such as systemic lupus where despite nearly 100 years of study we really have no clue about the mechanisms. There hasn't been a new drug for the disease in 50 years. Why? Because it is becoming increasingly clear that there are a network of interactions that in some cases are redundant with other networks.

Originally Posted by badamsjr

Yeah, buddy--all that magnetic/power stuff is hokum! Unless, of course, it works for you.

Originally Posted by safariofthemind

Bingo! Just look at Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors. To this day no one can accurately describe why they work. That's why the trials are so important. We are FAR from fully understanding how all drugs and treatments work. That does not negate that making claims without being able to prove them is a bad idea. Trials are a good tool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selecti...take_inhibitor

Originally Posted by myrridin

Lupus is an excellent example of what is wrong with the medical industry. Since it is a pretty rare condition (only 0.5% of Americans suffer from it) it doesn't get as much attention as "popular" diseases such as Hypertension and Diabetes. Which is sad considering the "big" diseases are largely self inflicted. A balanced diet and moderate exercise would all but eliminate them (and are the best treatments), yet we continue to spend the majority of our resources on such self-inflicted medical problems...

Originally Posted by myrridin

From Merriam-webster

Placebo effect (noun): improvement in the condition of a patient that occurs in response to treatment but cannot be considered due to the specific treatment used


In other words, just because you feel better doesn't mean the magnet/hologram had anything to do with it. Belief in these gadgets are the same as belief in any other form of faith healing, and just as irrational.

Originally Posted by badamsjr

So you feel it is your DUTY to make people feel bad if it works for them?

Originally Posted by myrridin

Lupus is an excellent example of what is wrong with the medical industry. Since it is a pretty rare condition (only 0.5% of Americans suffer from it) it doesn't get as much attention as "popular" diseases such as Hypertension and Diabetes. Which is sad considering the "big" diseases are largely self inflicted. A balanced diet and moderate exercise would all but eliminate them (and are the best treatments), yet we continue to spend the majority of our resources on such self-inflicted medical problems...

Originally Posted by slowandsteady

Lupus gets plenty of attention. It gets about 50% of my team's attention and resources. It is just so difficult to predict a drug's efficacy because the disease models are not predictive and the disease itself is highly complex. Hypertension doesn't get much resources anymore. It is a crowded market and there are tons of generics that do well. Any drug company would love to have 100% of a 1.4 million person market than 1% of a 30 million person market. It isn't that we haven't been trying to get a drug for lupus it is just that none of the drugs worked.

There is a drug for RSV in preterm infants with serious breathing disorders. Now THAT is a small market. Much rarer than lupus and that drug makes over one billion dollars a year.

Drug companies now realize that they can make money even on smaller markets so there are a lot of resources going to the smaller indications. The orphan drug status has helped with this as well.