If you haven't cured yourself with a magic diet with no reproducible studies, maybe don't marginalize the very real pain chronic sufferers are experiencing and their many attempts to get better with a suggestion that they should just follow a fad diet.
Most people tend to discredit diet therapy because it's "not mainstream" or against the norm.
Of course you don't see nearly as many "studies" on diet therapy as you do a typical medicine or pill, most scientists and doctors that practice alternative therapy are considered heretics (cooks, crazy people, etc) and banished from the "mainstream" portion of the medical world (the one with all the cash flow).
Look up Dr. Max Gerson and all of the amazing things he's done with the use of a simple diet therapy consisting mainly of juices and fruits and vegetables. I would highly recommend his biography - http://www.amazon.com/Dr-Max-Gerson-Healing-Hopeless/dp/0976...
It's a fascinating read and really challenges you to think against the mainstream medical world.
When you are suffering from some chronic disease you really only care about finding a solution that works for you.
If there was a place where one could submit anecdotal experiences then you could analyze that data and use it as a basis for professionally run medical experiments. For example, if 1000 people said X food triggered symptoms of severe depression for a few hours after consumption then a professional could look at that and say "this is something worth looking into". You would be correct in remaining skeptical of individual claims which haven't been carefully verified, but you would be a fool to just ignore and discard those claims.
Mikhaila Peterson is one example of an individual that was suffering from serious chronic problems who found a solution that appears to work for her. She's now on a carnivore diet, which means she only consumes meat and water. Now, that doesn't mean that everyone should go out and start imitating her, but it sure as hell sounds like something that medical professionals should look into.
A lot of "alternative medicine" is just not science, and simply does not work. Unless you consider being temporarily "cured" by your own endorphins as an instance of evidence based medicine.
There was no ad-hom. My point was that you're denying the judgements of grown adults about what is effective for them, and you haven't provided any insights with any expert backing but rather are just contemptuously arguing for adherence to what you consider to be mainstream orthodoxy.
Recall that this whole subthread began with your mockery of a method developed by a mainstream-qualified doctor that has helped thousands of people over many years.
The thing is, what you're arguing for is not even part of mainstream medical orthodoxy.
Mainstream medical literature linking chronic muscle-tension and pain to mental health is plentiful, along with the effectiveness of mainstream psychiatric treatments like CBT, and less-mainstream-accepted practices like mindfulness and meditation.
I'm the first to concede that none of these studies are a home run. Human physiology is vastly complex and the factors leading to chronic illness and pain will inevitably be hard to isolate and different from one person to another.
But the plentiful supply of both anecdotal and clinical evidence warrants far more open-minded consideration than you're allowing for with your contemptuous dismissals.
> I don't require any evidence, if given practitioner helps me with my problem, while traditional ones can't.
Let's say you wake up with back pain, and there's nothing obviously wrong with your spine.
You can go to a physical therapist, and they will check your spine and muscles, move your body, tell you to do some exercises to improve your posture. There is no clear diagnosis beyond some muscle tension and no immediate relief, and you are disappointed, and when the pain goes away on its own in a few days you think visiting the therapist was pointless. You tell your friends how pointless traditional medicine is.
Or you visit a chiropracter. He tells you a very satisfying diagnosis, promises to heal you, and makes a few movements that feel surprising. You are impressed. After a few days the pain is completely gone! You are stoked! This person healed you! You don't need evidence from scientific trials, because you experienced the power of alternative medicine yourself!! You tell all your friends how you were healed by this persons magic hands!
Of course, without any treatment at all, the pain would also have gone away after a few days.
This is why we need evidence based medicine. (And this of course applies to traditional medicine as well -- just because real doctors went to university doesn't make them immune to this problems. There are plenty of doctors who prescribe inefficient treatments.)
You are unintentionally illustrating my point. We are aware of the perception that non-medical people believe there is a miracle cure to be found in everything from eliminating tomatoes to according to one enterprising individual drinking your own pee.
My wife naturally rarely eats nightshades and consumption has zero correlation with inflammation or RA. If it were as simple as not eating tomatoes everyone would be cured. Instead every person that deals with that who goes to specialists regularly, who deals with the negative side effects of the drugs that actually reduce inflammation and keep your insides and joints from being destroyed has heard countless fake cures.
This is where the healthy skepticism part comes in. Going all out woo or quack isn't what I'm suggesting, and I'd agree that that's even worse than being too closed minded. Crystal healing doesn't work and people shouldn't try it.
But if something sounds sort-of plausible, has some tentative but low quality evidence, and it's low cost and low risk, and it's not going to distract you from more proven treatments, then just try it out and see if it works. A small handful of people won't even go that far because of dogmatically orthodox thinking, and those are the people I'm addressing.
> To assume that someone can solve a debilitating problem that affects millions in hours by selling you a book is probably in 99% of cases a scam.
If it's psychosomatic pain, there's legitimate scope for a self-help book to actually improve things for them. Also why wouldn't we expect practitioners who have been hands on with clients for 20 years to not have picked up some useful tricks that didn't make it into peer reviewed studies? I feel like your statement here is too heavy on the skepticism, even though you're right that there are loads of books that are quackery. There can be learned wisdom built up through practice that isn't peer reviewed.
Would you have been likely to recommend this book if your pain didn't resolve after trying it? I'm skeptical of this specific theory of how the mind and body are interacting to cause pain and what he thinks is the proper way to treat it. First of all, on the back cover a 2-6 week period is given. A lot of back pain resolves itself within this time frame so without a proper study done there is no telling how many of his "success" stories are just back pain taking it's usual course. He relies a lot on testimonials. That is never a good proof of a treatment's efficacy. Why not do a proper study and not push the treatment until the results are in? We see this a lot in the medical field where some doctor has convinced themselves they have found the key to treating something yet never actually bothers to do a proper study of it. I can understand that, studies are expensive and it's much easier to live in the world where you think you are helping people and the self-selecting testimonials reinforce this. On the flip side I see a lot of people who are convinced that some "alternative" therapy works for them simply because they tried it and got some relief but are convinced others are BS because it didn't "work" for them. The problem here isn't people not believing in the mind-body connection.
Edit: there may be some slight truth to why his treatment seems to work for some in that if you can mentally reframe your pain you are more likely to get better but that nugget seems to be buried in the fluff of his TMS theory: (https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/chronic-pain-a-disease-in-i...)
Maybe I'm a cynic but it strains credulity that the miracle cure is also a laundry list of fad health trends from the the last decade. Gluten free, intermittent fasting, yoga, melatonin, probiotics, etc etc
I think you are both right and wrong.
I think geeks have a heard time hearing that they are wrong but I don't think that is why you were downvoted. Your comment looks extremely spammy. Firstly, it reads like one of those "This housewife lost gazillions pounds with this one secret trick. Click to find out more". Secondly, there are a lot of "do this one miracle thing and you will feel better/get thinner/whatever" miracle cures and most of them are bullshit. You claim your recipe is changing lives but what data do you have to back that claim other than a poorly conducted study (friends testimonies) on an extremely small sample size? Maybe we don't think you are a liar, but everyone pretending to be an expert and/or promoting some miracle cure has gotten really, really old.
Copied from a thread comment I read years ago which changed my life.
>I suffered from chronic pain that was starting to seriously interfere with my life for a couple of years. I could find neither a cause nor non-invasive solution till I read The Mind-Body Prescription[0]. It quickly and completely fixed my problem.
I actually learned about the book here on HN: I'm usually a very skeptical person, but enough self-proclaimed skeptics (who were embarrassed to admit they even read it) claimed success with it that I decided to check it out.
I highly recommend reading it (with an open mind) if you're suffering from a chronic ailment that lacks an obvious physical cause. I used it for chronic pain, but the author claims success with just about any other type of "catch-all" diagnosis that doctors make when they're stumped, like IBD.
BTW: the doctor is an American psychiatrist with a long career, so it's not your usual alternative medical book. But I consider it "alternative medicine" in that it's based on similar principles as some other alternative medicines and the theory does not seem to have any sort of acceptance in the western medical community. (The author cites his evidence, and provides his explanation for why the medical community rejects that sort of evidence.)
> For most back pain, you can't even prove that person is actually suffering from it.
Why does this matter? You ask the patient to report on their subjective experience the same way you would in studies about cures for depression and headaches.
My point is that 1) only when no surefire scientifically backed cure exists will most people take alternative therapies seriously and 2) problems that can resolve on their own (self-limiting) are very susceptible to generating unreliable anecdotes about cures. Back pain fits these two so generates many unreliable anecdotes which you should be highly skeptical about.
Like most psychology findings there will also be issues reproducing the results as well. It is a bit of a common occurrence to get these big calls around how people don't need pain drugs anymore while all the recipients of these new treatments are crying out in pain on support forums across the globe. It never seems to actually work.
I have encoutered this argument a lot, and this is why I think it's harmful:
The problem with this is that unsubstantiated cures, even really cheap ones apparently harmless ones, have an opportunity cost in time and effort, and the number of them that exist is almost unbounded. I have heard similar arguments about a hundred fad diets, a hundred nutritional supplements, going vegan/paleo/gluten-free/etc, meditation, homeopathy, accupunture, changing religions, "spacing out vacinations", and so on. Some of this stuff may actually be cheap and effective, but how do you choose?
There are only so many hours in the day and every minute we spend chasing the next dubious fad cure is a minute we can't use to cook and eat healthy food, sleep enough, excercise, take care of our teeth, or go to a doctor.
Furthermore, some of these things have negative side effects, even if those may only be apparent in aggregate (e.g. delaying vacinations).
I know I'm a contrarian here, but frankly I won't take health suggestions from someone who is an amateur and has never studied the field (where "studied" means at least a degree not taken from Youtube university) and never done proper peer-reviewed research. "My wife feels better" is just different superstition, not science.
They certainly worded it poorly, but what they meant was "voodoo doesn't work". As in, educate your patient about their wacky home remedies, and try to get them to engage with realistic recovery outcomes.
From the paper:
> E for educate
> Therapists should educate patients on the benefits of an active approach to recovery. Passive modalities, such as electrotherapy, manual therapy or acupuncture, early after injury have insignificant effects on pain and function compared with an active approach, and may even be counterproductive in the long term. Indeed, nurturing an external locus of control or the ‘need to be fixed’ can lead to therapy- dependent behaviour. Better education on the condition and load management will help avoid overtreatment. This in turn reduces the likelihood of unnecessary injections or surgery, and supports a reduction in the cost of healthcare (eg, due to disability compensation associated with low back pain). In an era of hi- tech therapeutic options, we strongly advocate for setting realistic expectations with patients about recovery times instead of chasing the ‘magic cure’ approach.
>This year my girlfriend put me on some decent snake oil indeed. Tens of euros worth of food supplements per month. I also went to see an acupuncturist. My problems aren't reduced, they're gone. I can be outside for an entire day and not notice a thing. My problem is, 0% of what I did is evidence-based medicine.
For one, your issues could have healed by themselves, even without it, just through time passing. Since there's a sample of 1 of you, and you did take those drugs, we don't have a control group, and can't know.
Second, those food supplements make have actually had some good stuff -- like a vitamin you're deficient in -- that helped in this case.
Lastly, there's always the placebo effect.
None of the above are an argument against the Goop stuff being snake-oil (and neither is "but it worked for me" for some Goop product).
I suffered from chronic pain that was starting to seriously interfere with my life for a couple of years. I could find neither a cause nor non-invasive solution till I read The Mind-Body Prescription[0]. It quickly and completely fixed my problem.
I actually learned about the book here on HN: I'm usually a very skeptical person, but enough self-proclaimed skeptics (who were embarrassed to admit they even read it) claimed success with it that I decided to check it out.
I highly recommend reading it (with an open mind) if you're suffering from a chronic ailment that lacks an obvious physical cause. I used it for chronic pain, but the author claims success with just about any other type of "catch-all" diagnosis that doctors make when they're stumped, like IBD.
BTW: the doctor is an American psychiatrist with a long career, so it's not your usual alternative medical book. But I consider it "alternative medicine" in that it's based on similar principles as some other alternative medicines and the theory does not seem to have any sort of acceptance in the western medical community. (The author cites his evidence, and provides his explanation for why the medical community rejects that sort of evidence.)
reply