Therapeutic Touch: Quackery?

[Haykakan]

Re: Therapeutic Touch: Quackery?

I think both the control group and the variable groups should include more subjects to increase the validity of the study. Also having a good mixture of blonds brunetts and redheads is important for um scientific reasons of course.

[Siggie]

Re: Therapeutic Touch: Quackery?

I'll see if I can get some funding from Men's Health magazine. This experiment might be more beneficial to Haykakan and myself than the test subjects

See? It can be in your favor to have a scientist look over your proposal before you send it off.
Yeah it would certainly be more beneficial to you, perhaps even more so if the two of you are the ones administering the treatment.

[KanadaHye]

Re: Therapeutic Touch: Quackery?

Three per group isn't enough, you should revise your request.

I'll see if I can get some funding from Men's Health magazine. This experiment might be more beneficial to Haykakan and myself than the test subjects

[Siggie]

Re: Therapeutic Touch: Quackery?

Alright Haykakan, here is the experiment.

I'm gonna send an email off to the Hawaiin Tropic and request their assistance in providing our test subjects.

We need... 3 of each Brunettes, Blondes, Red Heads

From each group, we take 1 and test

a) tissue formation/wound healing rates prior to and after Therapeutic Touch

b) tissue formation/wound healing rates prior to and after Full Body Massage

c) tissue formation/wound healing rates prior to and after 1 hour of Nude Sunbathing (no human energy transfer)

Three per group isn't enough, you should revise your request.

[KanadaHye]

Re: Therapeutic Touch: Quackery?

I know all that Siggie. I just wanted to share my experience regarding the matter. A control group is a must in most experiments.

Alright Haykakan, here is the experiment.

I'm gonna send an email off to the Hawaiin Tropic and request their assistance in providing our test subjects.

We need... 3 of each Brunettes, Blondes, Red Heads

From each group, we take 1 and test

a) tissue formation/wound healing rates prior to and after Therapeutic Touch

b) tissue formation/wound healing rates prior to and after Full Body Massage

c) tissue formation/wound healing rates prior to and after 1 hour of Nude Sunbathing (no human energy transfer)

[Haykakan]

Re: Therapeutic Touch: Quackery?

I know all that Siggie. I just wanted to share my experience regarding the matter. A control group is a must in most experiments.

[Siggie]

Re: Therapeutic Touch: Quackery?

I read the source names "quakwatch.com" and "Skepdic" and figured the information I had read on REIKI was more reliable. Business is business... if you can fool people out of their money then all is fair in love and war in a Capitalistic society. This method of deception is used in everything from hi-tech equipment to the clothing/fashion industry, automotive, pharmaceutical and medical....and even the marriage industry. Nothing is ever quite what is advertised

On a serious note, here is what I'm wondering... if there is a bad product on the market, word of mouth spreads pretty fast. If this doesn't work or the people who undergo the Theraputic Touch experience think it's a scam, you would think word of mouth would take care of the problem no? Maybe they see some benefit in it.... or are just quacks themselves.

I know your psycho babble explains this phenomenon, but it's just a shot in the dark by someone who thinks higher of themselves and doesn't realize that they are also merely justifying their own existence.

Well yeah, there's lots of deceptive advertising out there, but there are avenues to deal with that. We don't just say yeah that's how it is and throw up our hands. Particularly when it's not just about buying one product over another, but rather concerns public health.

As for word of mouth problems, see comment below which also applies to Haykakan's comments please.

I went to one of these healers once. I had a lot of constant pain and i went there because modern medicine could not help me. The practitioner was a short asian man in his upper 30s. He told me upfront that his technique was more effective in healing certain kinds of diseases and pains and that my case was not one of them but it may help somewhat. I was not expecting much anyways but went ahead with it. He applied his hands along some lines on my back and i could feel a great deal of heat from his hands as he was doing it. I wondered what caused his hands to warm up that much. There was no chemical being used and hardly any friction in the process plus i shook his hand before we started and it was warm but nothing like the heat he was generating during the procedure. After about 10 minutes he declared the procedure finished and i went home. Did it help? I simply do not know. I did not feel less pain nor did i feel more pain but that doesnt mean necesserily it did not help because perhaps you can argue it prevented it from getting worst but again no way of knowing. He did handled himself in a professional manner and right at the start told me it probably wont work for me. I am not trying to prove or disprove anything here but i did want to share this experience since it seems relavent to the topic.

You know how science works. The plural of personal anecdote is not data. We have to have a control group. An individual's experience is not informative because there are all kinds of confounds.
E.g. If I have a headache at noon, around 2 pm I trip and fall, and at 6pm my headache is gone, does that mean my fall relieved my headache? No, right? Because headaches as pain and some illnesses can go away on their own. This is called "regression to the mean."

Beyond this, we also know that when people think they are getting treatment they tend to report changes. The placebo effect is powerful and well documented and when dealing with a single person, we cannot account for it. We must have a control/comparison group! This is very basic right? If someone says X works, the critical thinker must ask "compared to what?"

In the above criticism it summarizes a lot of the research. One of the TT experiments found that on subjective reports of pain, the TT group reported greater relief than did the control group, but on an objective measure, how much pain medication they took, the TT group actually took MORE. So, this objective (and thus more reliable measure; the problems will self-report measures are also well-known) measure demonstrates that TT did not help. This is why we need a control! Even if we only used the subjective self report numbers you can't just say on average they reported less pain so it works. You have to see if the relief they reported was significantly greater (than chance variation) compared to the control group.

[Haykakan]

Re: Therapeutic Touch: Quackery?

I went to one of these healers once. I had a lot of constant pain and i went there because modern medicine could not help me. The practitioner was a short asian man in his upper 30s. He told me upfront that his technique was more effective in healing certain kinds of diseases and pains and that my case was not one of them but it may help somewhat. I was not expecting much anyways but went ahead with it. He applied his hands along some lines on my back and i could feel a great deal of heat from his hands as he was doing it. I wondered what caused his hands to warm up that much. There was no chemical being used and hardly any friction in the process plus i shook his hand before we started and it was warm but nothing like the heat he was generating during the procedure. After about 10 minutes he declared the procedure finished and i went home. Did it help? I simply do not know. I did not feel less pain nor did i feel more pain but that doesnt mean necesserily it did not help because perhaps you can argue it prevented it from getting worst but again no way of knowing. He did handled himself in a professional manner and right at the start told me it probably wont work for me. I am not trying to prove or disprove anything here but i did want to share this experience since it seems relavent to the topic.

[KanadaHye]

Re: Homeopathic medicines are JUST WATER!

Oh you're really stretching. Regardless, the end result is enhanced healing, but the research doesn't support that. Did you read what I posted at all? You replied so quickly, I doubt you did.
Dodge and joke... Classic KanadaHye.
As they say, "There is none so blind..."

I read the source names "quakwatch.com" and "Skepdic" and figured the information I had read on REIKI was more reliable. Business is business... if you can fool people out of their money then all is fair in love and war in a Capitalistic society. This method of deception is used in everything from hi-tech equipment to the clothing/fashion industry, automotive, pharmaceutical and medical....and even the marriage industry. Nothing is ever quite what is advertised

On a serious note, here is what I'm wondering... if there is a bad product on the market, word of mouth spreads pretty fast. If this doesn't work or the people who undergo the Theraputic Touch experience think it's a scam, you would think word of mouth would take care of the problem no? Maybe they see some benefit in it.... or are just quacks themselves.

I know your psycho babble explains this phenomenon, but it's just a shot in the dark by someone who thinks higher of themselves and doesn't realize that they are also merely justifying their own existence.

[Siggie]

Re: Homeopathic medicines are JUST WATER!

Womaaaaaaaaan. Who taught you how to read good? lol. It all depends on how your interpret it and your understanding of the wording.

"enhances the body's natural ability to heal"
- your body is constantly healing and is at its most capable state when you are resting/relaxing

"heals the spirit-body"
- translation.... puts you in a better mood or different state of mind

There is not a single wrong claim of what it does for someone. Infact, I might just hire some attractive women to operate some REIKI therapy centres. Thanks for the business idea, LOL.

Oh you're really stretching. Regardless, the end result is enhanced healing, but the research doesn't support that. Did you read what I posted at all? You replied so quickly, I doubt you did.
Dodge and joke... Classic KanadaHye.
As they say, "There is none so blind..."