Whoops, here's the link.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-role-of-anecdotes-in-s...
It is certainly reasonable to tolerate different belief systems when it comes to aesthetics, culture, and values. However, factual statements are not about belief or opinion....It is objectively demonstrable that anecdotal evidence is very unreliable when compared to controlled studies.
Sineed, that article is an opinion piece.
I think it might be easier to accept if the practice of medicine was as perfect as the science (well, some of the science, anyway).
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/03/11/a-new-low-in-drug-research-21-fab...
But the reality is that people don't go to a clinic to sit down and be diagnosed and treated by a textbook.
For that matter, I'd find some of your arguments a bit easier if they weren't so absolute - particularly when it comes to some things for which the evidence is not absolute. Or for that matter some things which are recognized by some medical professionals and under some medical systems.
Regarding controlled studies, Dr. Hoffer wrote the following in a book called Finding a Cure for Depression, in the preface he writes...
"We then applied to Ottawa for a research grant so that we could run a larger scale clinical study. We were advised that we must do the trial using a double dummy design. This was later called double blind. It meant that the patients to be tested would be divided by random selection into two groups: half would be given a placebo (an inert substance) and the other half, the vitamins being tested. These patients were not chronic mental hospital back ward patients. They were ill for the first time or had had several attacks with remissions. For this type of patient, the generally recognized recovery rate is about 35 percent. No one, including the patients involved in a double blind study, would know whether they were getting placebo or vitamins. We agreed to the conditions of this study and as a result, by 1960, we conducted the first six double blind controlled experiments in psychiatry. Since you cannot hide the effect of the niacin flush, we added a hidden group who were given a form of vitamin B-3 called niacinamide which does not cause any flush. We found that the two year recovery rate using the vitamin therapy was 75 percent compared to the 35 percent recovery using the placebo.These positive clinical trials and the experience gained by many hundreds of other patients treated outside of the controlled trails convinced me that the addition of this vitamin to the standard treatment of that day would markedly improve the therapeutic outcome."
Hoffer's take on evidence based medicine in the same preface...
"Evidence-based medicine has become the fashion at least in the medical journals and perhaps in the colleges of medicine. I find this ironic sincephysicians have used evidence-based medicine for thousands of years. The evidence was sometimes faulty and often biased, but at the times these practices were used, they were the best available. Modern evidence-based medicine is not what you might think. It is evidence that can be gained only from the double blind controlled randomized prospective therapeutic trial. My colleagues and I were the first psychiatrists to conduct this type of experiment; I was among the first to examine the method carefully and conclude that while useful, it was not the gold standard, but only one of several ways to research. For many types of disease, this type of experiment is totally unusable. Devotees of this approach will not take Mr. Sealey’s account of his illness and his recovery seriously, because they are blinded by the clothes fashioned by the double blind method, like the naked Emperor’s clothes.I ask readers to throw away their blindfolds and to read this account carefully and seriously, because it is one account of a serious illness which might have left the patient forever incapacitated and a charge on his family and community. His anecdote represents only one of thousands of similar cases which have recovered given orthomolecular treatment. The evidence has been published in many clinical accounts, in many standard and complementary journals, and in many books. The evidence is there. It needs only to be read and studied.
So far, out of over fifty physicians who have spent a day or more in my office to observe my practice and talk to my patients, none have resumed their original way of practice. They all became orthomolecular physicians."
If you believe that all knowledge is relative, and reality a matter of opinion, then all viewpoints would be equal. And in such a world, if you took enough vitamins, you could fly. After all, in a world of equivalent opinions, wishful thinking is a fact, and gravity is only a theory.
I have to keep editing my reply here because I can't quite wrap my head around what part of this comment is most problematic to me.
I'll start with: Has there ever been a time when knowledge has been absolute?
If empirical evidence was as absolute as Sineed is implying here, then there would not be cultural differences in psychiatric delivery. It would be uniform across the globe, simply because of its innate perfection, and there would not be so many people trying to get off their psychiatric drugs because of their lack of effectiveness and high levels of side effects. Also, the drug companies would not have to skew their data to make their drugs appear to perfrom better than they are, nor pump the billions of dollars annually into marketing their drugs to doctors across North America in order to boost sales.
These absolute ideals in medical research are simply that...ideals.
Like Rebecca suggested we should start another thread. I have to run off to work, and leave with a little beat poetry for your Monday.
Like Rebecca suggested we should start another thread. I have to run off to work, and leave with a little beat poetry for your Monday.
Great video, thanks. And some good lessons WRT all concerned, near as I can see.
Also, if anyone hasn't watched Julius Sumner Miller, check out the vids on the side (they popped up on my browser, anyway).
As I mentioned upthread, I am pretty sure the thread is open from the last time we talked about this general subject. We could just go back and re-read that all over again.
Hoffer's wiki entry seems to outline the controversy and provides links to articles which critique him. Thomas Szasz called his ideas "complete quackery". I guess I was inadvertantly being a plagiarist above although I have withdrawn the term since some found it offensive.
If empirical evidence was as absolute as Sineed is implying here, then there would not be cultural differences in psychiatric delivery. It would be uniform across the globe, simply because of its innate perfection, and there would not be so many people trying to get off their psychiatric drugs because of their lack of effectiveness and high levels of side effects. Also, the drug companies would not have to skew their data to make their drugs appear to perfrom better than they are, nor pump the billions of dollars annually into marketing their drugs to doctors across North America in order to boost sales.
These absolute ideals in medical research are simply that...ideals.
This thread is about surviving psychiatric abuse. Not quackery, not vitamin therapies, not Sineed's use of logic. If people can't or won't stick to the topic or open another thread, I'll close this one. And that would be a shame, since it would appear that so few are interested in the topic as it is.
Hoffer's wiki entry seems to outline the controversy and provides links to articles which critique him. Thomas Szasz called his ideas "complete quackery". I guess I was inadvertantly being a plagiarist above although I have withdrawn the term since some found it offensive.
thanks! for 'withdrawing the term' while simultaneously finding an authority figure that shared that contextually based aggression and repeating it here. a very sensitive and genuine appeal to others' feelings I must say
I don't know why I keep making noise while being hit? something must be wrong with me
This thread is about surviving psychiatric abuse. Not quackery, not vitamin therapies, not Sineed's use of logic. If people can't or won't stick to the topic or open another thread, I'll close this one. And that would be a shame, since it would appear that so few are interested in the topic as it is.
Okay, but why are you picking on Goggles' statement over anyone else's?
I would add that the few posters here who can actually speak from personal authority about psychiatrist abuse are the ones who want this discussion to continue. So why would you shut that down?
This thread is clearly not about resistance to psychiatry anymore. I don't think it can be salvaged. I welcome anyone to try again to open either a thread on resistance to instiutionalized psychiatry, alternative vs institutionalized medicine (or some other framing) or any of the topics broached here. This thread, however, has met its end.
Can those who have had good care from psychiatrists not alkso have a voice here?
Quelle surprise.
