Some links about health care matters.
Why the placebo effect is weirder and potentially more useful than we imagined.
Placebos only affect what the brain can modulate. It's not going to
shrink a tumor. It's not going to deal with malaria. But it will
deal with pain, fatigue, and nausea. Or will deal with feeling
malaise. But it's not going to deal with killing bacteria. That
doesn't happen on the level of the brain.
...
The first open-label study we did was in irritable bowel syndrome.
People on no treatment got about 30 percent better.
And people who were given an open-label placebo got 60 percent
improvement in the adequate relief of their irritable bowel syndrome.
In response to articles like: Coconut oil 'as unhealthy as beef fat and butter'
The studies don't link eating more coconut oil to heart
disease-they link it to a changing cholesterol metric. A metric
that, if you look for it, has lots of conflicting data as to how it
makes things worse and how badly (may I point you to Gary Taubes'
Good Calories, Bad Calories).
So, coconut oil is fine. It's not fantastic. It's not
horrible. It's just a source of saturated fat probably not as
bad as butter. Which we also don't think is that bad.
You shouldn't trust them with your spine or any other part of your body.
Chiropractic care, I'm sorry to say, is little more than the
buffoonery of a 19th-century lunatic who derived most of his
medical theory from séances. It has not evolved much since its
creation. Chiropractic beliefs are dangerously far removed from
mainstream medicine, and the vocation's practices have been linked
to strokes, herniated discs, and even death. Chiropractors can't
replace your doctor, and I'm amazed that they're still even
allowed to practice. You shouldn't trust them with your spine or
any other part of your body, and here's why.
...
Though some chiropractors are now making an effort to introduce
evidence-based practices into their treatment, chiropractic as
a whole hasn't evolved like other areas of medicine -- with
hypotheses, experimentation, and peer review. Instead, it was
birthed by a strange combination of hocus pocus, guesswork, and
strongly held religious beliefs. I'm not being hyperbolic when I
cite hocus pocus. Palmer held séances to contact a dead physician
named Jim Atkinson, and said that those séances helped him develop
chiropractic.
Physicians are still recommending the blood test for prostate cancer even though it harms far more men than it helps.
The problem is that inflammation and other problems unrelated to
cancer can also elevate PSA levels. And when the PSA test correctly
detects cancer, it is often so slow-growing that it would never
have caused death or even impairment of health. Detection of these
non-deadly cancers is called overdiagnosis.
...
Just to be clear: you are 240-120 times more likely to misdiagnosed
as a result of a positive PSA test and 80-40 times more likely
to get unnecessary surgery or radiation than you are to have your
life saved.