Re: Marriage is under fire!!

From: andy (news4_at_earthsong.free-online.co.uk)
Date: 08/18/04 

Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 13:18:59 +0100

On Tue, 17 Aug 2004 06:46:01 +0000, Kevin Aylward wrote:

> I don't accept it as I see no credible scientific evidence that it
> actually works. Like, controlled independent double-blind experiments
> using 10000's of people, by several independent qualified research
> groups.

How would you do a double-blind trial on a therapy like shiatsu?

Double-blind means neither the doctor nor the patient know whether the
treatment being given is the correct one or a placebo. But shiatsu is a
hands-on therapy - like a form of massage but based on the principles of
chinese medicine. And to do it properly needs a long period of training
(at least 3 years) where the doctor learns how to detect imbalances in chi
using methods like feeling muscle tone in various parts of the body
(according to the chinese understanding there's more to it than that, but
I'll stick at that for the purpose of argument), looking at skin colour,
tone of voice etc. The treatment consists of pressure point massage along
the meridians, stretching limbs in particular ways, and similar things.

There's no way that you could do this properly without knowing whether or
not you were doing it properly, if you see what I mean - it wouldn't be
enough to have an untrained person read a chart and do the massages
because they might not do it in the right way, and the right treatment to
apply would vary session by session anyhow.

This is quite different to a drug trial, where nurses can be given drugs
and apparently identical placebos in unmarked containers, and then it's
just a question of the patient swallowing one or the other.

The best you could do for something like this would be either a
single-blind trial where the practitioner deliberately applies an
irrelevant treatment to some of the patients, or a non-blind trial where
you compare with some other kind of treatment like a normal massage.
But if it was done like this, then people might reject the results
just because it's not double-blind.

The point being that it's easy to say 'I won't believe it until I've seen
a double-blind trial', without really thinking about what this would mean
for a treatment like shiatsu. Which is an example of the point I'm arguing
- judging something like that by the standards of scientific medicine, and
expecting to be able to apply the same sort of tests that are used there
isn't necessarily going to be the best way to find out whether it really
works or not. It's not a case of special pleading - saying it's not fair
to apply those tests because they are too harsh or something, it's because
at least in this example, they are simply not appropriate to the situation. 

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