PING kevin.

From: andy (news4_at_earthsong.free-online.co.uk)
Date: 08/19/04 

Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 16:18:07 +0100

It would be good if you would reply to this one, as it's one of the posts
where I feel like I'm getting more to the point of the sort of thing I'm
trying to say.

On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 13:18:59 +0100, andy wrote:

> 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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