

How do you regulate Wu? - baha_man
http://www.badscience.net/2010/02/how-do-you-regulate-wu/

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oliveoil
Out of curiosity: how many of you guys here consider the traditional Chinese
medicine valid? (by valid I mean "possibly having positive healing outcomes
beyond the placebo effect")

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paul
What make you think that the placebo effect is not "valid"?

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necubi
The placebo effect exists, but it exists independently of whatever expensive
alt-medicine crap is being pushed at the moment. Therefore, if we're
discussing the efficacy of the "medicine," you can't include placebo effects.
This is also why medical trials nearly always include a placebo group.

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est
OK, this is a dumb question, what makes 'western' medicine not a placebo?

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skybrian
A reasonable compromise would be to require providers of alternative medicine
to show that it's _not harmful_. Maybe it doesn't do anything, but that's for
others to decide.

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ikitat
No.

Water can poison and kill you at a large enough dosage. Oxygen too. Treating
cancer with homeopathy is harmless until the cancer kills you. All medicine
(supported by science or not) carries some risk, the poison is in the dosage.

Woo practitioners are more than happy to bankrupt their victims, what's the
harm?

A Milwaukee girl died of diabetes recently, her parents were trying to cure
her with prayer.

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jff
There's a difference between things that are generally harmless in their
prescribed doses--water, aspirin, homeopathy BS--and the example given in the
article, where the patient took the pills as specified and soon lost her
kidneys, got cancer, and had a heart attack.

If the Wu practitioners are giving out lethal doses of their medicine, they
should be crushed by the FDA.

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MaysonL
The FDA doesn't have any jurisdiction in Britain.

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jff
Forgot that this took place in Britain. I guess Her Majesty's Royal Tasters,
or whatever their equivalent of the FDA is, would have to handle it.

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CoreDumpling
From what I've seen in the US, a lot of Chinese medicine is actually FDA-
approved as "beverages" -- supposedly they are safe to drink, but it's up to
the user to believe whether or not there's any medicinal effect.

Placebo or not, I can say that 板蓝根
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isatis_tinctoria>) has pretty consistently made
me feel better when I had the flu or sore throat.

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a-priori
I think the best solution would be to say that 'alternative medicine' is still
medicine and must follow existing regulations. So, treatments must be
prescribed by a doctor, they must be approved for use in humans (and so must
demonstrate utility and safety), and so on.

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KirinDave
But the practitioners will fight this. Many of them are canny enough to know
that if you measure them by the same yardstick as real medicine they're going
to fall short. That's why they dance around the FDA regulations with their
disclaimers so often.

And what for the more established practices, like chiropractic? They already
have "doctors". How do you bootstrap this procedure when hundreds of "trained"
professional practitioners already flood the market? Do you say, "Okay guys,
put your careers on hold while we do 5-year trials!" And we've already _done_
those trials for the most part, and they've come up negative. So do we just
say, "Find a new business?"

And you've got to do this all without giving your opponents an opportunity to
rile up the public against your actions. Voters can be an irrational lot, but
a lot of irrational people can outvote a few rational people. Unless you spin
it just so, a narrative of big government crushing small business can be
devastating.

I think what you're proposing is what we'd like to have happen, but it's
incredibly difficult to have it turn out that way.

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leif
I am disappointed that this article does not discuss chambers.

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dylanz
This blog assumes its readers are already at the 36th.

