sdyer@bbncc5.UUCP (Steve Dyer) (08/31/85)
> Here's an interesting point, what the holistic health field knows has to be > proved by the same methods as conventional medicine???? If a pro-conventional > person wants to state a point he simple picks up an "approved" source, quotes > it, and voila --- "TRUTH". Yet when a holistic practitioner speaks from > experience or knowledge or simple fact he must present bonified documents. > These documents are then trashed out if they disagree with conventional > medicine as being "unapproved" or if they are then we are told "See > conventional medicine isn't all that bad". I think this latest posting by Stanions reveals the depths of his misunderstanding of the scientific approach to anything, not the least human health and well-being. There is no argument from authority in science: the reason that these sources are "approved sources" is NOT because they are high-tech, or payed off by the AMA, or non-holistic: it is simply because the source has been published in a refereed journal, and thus supposedly reviewed for correct methodology to minimize experimenter bias. Epidemiological studies and reviews of therapy use the tools of statistics to examine the nature of disease or the efficacy of a therapy in a population. Their results reveal "TRUTH" much better than would simply saying "ELECTROMAGNETIC SMOG IS A DANGER TO ONE'S HEALTH" or "high colonics cure acne." The most basic physiological facts are held as "TRUTH" simply because they have been studied in the laboratory and the predicted results observed over and over and over again. The same cannot be said for any of the theories or therapies which you and Stoll support. Mr. Stanions, comments like your and Stoll's are held suspect precisely because so many of them fly directly in the face of well-known observation: "catarrh" is a meaningless, creaky abstraction in direct contradiction to the experimentally observed and clinically confirmed mechanisms of the body's response to infection, bowel fixations and "autointoxication" depend on the existence of "toxins" which have never been observed in mammals, let alone the laboratory, "iridology" founded on a theory of disease which is in direct contradiction to the science of physiology and whose predictions are almost unbelievably overreaching, and so on and so on... Even with these suspicions, positive clinical results would speak for themselves, but there are no studies I know of which look at the efficacy of such controversial therapies which produce positive evidence. This paucity of results makes us all the more skeptical, a perfectly reasonable reaction, I might add. All we have is more individual testimony from people such as yourselves, and I addressed the problems with using this as evidence in an earlier message: the strict formality of a scientific study is needed to minimize the overwhelming tendency of people to "find" whatever evidence they are looking for, or in the case of a patient, to be "cured" after receiving treatment. All we are asking for is objective substantiation for the claims you make. It seems to me that the "scientific method" as a way of testing the efficacy of a treatment is no less valid for a "holistic" therapy: therapies aren't "holistic", practitioners are. It is beyond me why one would be reluctant to put your practices up to proper examination. -- /Steve Dyer {harvard,seismo}!bbnccv!bbncc5!sdyer sdyer@bbncc5.ARPA