I remember reading a memoir of a manual therapist who described his work with Ida Rolf. Rolf discovered a specific approach to massage, "rolfing". It appeared very effective, she had a number of apprentices and followers and she was interested in clinical testing and such. Turned out that it would be very expensive. With all her money she could maybe afford a couple small-scale trials. She decided money could be better spent elsewhere.
I think we should really just stop asking if "the old ways" actually work or not as it seems entirely irrelevant to the people that seek them out most of the time. They are acts of pure ritual.
Well that's a bit too much of a generalisation maybe?
Yes, there are old ways that have been proven wrong, which were based on ignorance at the time, but there are also old ways which are totally legit and are little known or accepted nowadays based on nowadays ignorance.
I have an interesting story with non-scientific medicine. Normally, I'm a very science-oriented person—"read the paper or it didn't happen." I will even avoid reading a news article about the paper; I'll just go and read the paper itself. The way I treat my illnesses and injuries is the same. That being said, I suffer a lot from sore throats—I will get some flu, get better in 3–4 days, and then my throat will hurt for weeks. In a particularly bad bout, I tried waiting for 2 weeks with no improvement. I almost couldn't swallow. I went to the doctor and was prescribed antibiotics. That resolved it in about 24 hours, and I completed the full course. Three weeks later, the same thing happened. I waited 2 weeks to see if it would resolve on its own, and when it didn’t—antibiotics again. Of course, the problem came back only weeks later.
So I thought—I'm going to try homeopathy. What's the worst that can happen? I'm in pain anyway. I decided to try a scientific approach (not very, given N=1), so again I waited 2 weeks to see if it was going to resolve itself. It didn’t. I went to a homeopathic doctor and got a bottle with some "magic." It took 3–4 days for the symptoms to improve, but they didn’t come back for months. When they did, I jumped straight to the homeopathic medicine, and it helped in the same way it did the first time around. I haven’t used antibiotics for my throat since.
I have no explanation for this. There have been hundreds or thousands of studies on homeopathy, and my reading is that the consensus is that it's "quack medicine." Yet it clearly worked for me, and it worked better than antibiotics for that particular issue. What gives?
Interesting, you're describing exactly what I went through a few years ago.
In my case, however, I turned to pure ginger infusions, following the advice of a herbalist. Haven't gone through it again so far, plus it also works great for colds and flu.
So, gingerol is anti inflammatory. Fun fact, so is allicin, which is produced by garlic. You get a lot of medicine that looks quite a bit like quack medicine - for instance people making garlic extract: https://www.allicin-c.com/?AFFID=549212
> You get a lot of medicine that looks quite a bit like quack medicine
It depends what you understand by "quack medicine".
To me, in the beginning, all the stuff about drinking weird plants and doing homemade remedies did sound a bit quacky. But that was because of my absolute ignorance.
People have been using these remedies for thousands of years based on a deeper knowledge of nature than your random dude has, but we've fallen into a scam where we are made to feel that anything not made in a lab and costing a certain amount of money is nonsense.
Garlic, onion, ginger, turmeric, honey, echinacea, raspberry... those are natural wonders for basic natural medicine.
It could be that you didn't get real homeopathic medicine. There's been quite a few cases of babies dying after being given "homeopathic" medicine. Because real homeopathic medicine is indeed quack science, literally diluting a substance to the degree of one molecule per a sphere of water the size of the entire solar system, but homeopathic producers are grossly immoral and stupid/bad and unregulated, so can contain high, in some cases deadly, doses of various substances.
TLDR:
Homeopathic medicine is, in theory, 100% safe, since it's literally nothing.
Homeopathic medicine is, in theory, 100% ineffective, since it's literally nothing.
Homeopathic medicine is, in practice, rolling the dice with unregulated producers that have been known to ship poisons.
I have asthma, a few times I got an attack when I left my drugs at different home. Usually in such situation I have to go to a nightly doctor office (it always happens in the middle of the night on weekends).
But several times this happened I've been at my home and I have some old empty inhalers with 0 doses left and like 5 years past expiry date. I'm talking the disk inhaler, with discreet capsules of the drug that get used on every application - so if there were any traces of the drug substance - it would have been very small amounts that stuck to the inhaler walls or whatever.
I still used it and it stopped the asthma attack just as well as the real thing.
Placebo is one hell of a drug.
Similarly - even just preparing to go to the doctor in the middle of the night lessens the asthma attack for me. Just before I go to the doctor waiting in the queue the symptoms are often very minor.
No one ever said homeophaty has no effect. But there is no evidence it works beyond being a placebo.. which is what I suspect happened also in your case, whether your consciouss mind believes in homeopathy or not. You gave it a chance, so some parts of your mind decided it will magically work, so it did.
Oh and unlike homeopathy, leeches have a real effect besides placebo.
"We have no evidence how well this works, or if it works at all, but we must agree that leeches are good because a recovering alcoholic's mother suggested he try leeches like they do in quixotic Russia. Don't dismiss them because this other completely unrelated treatment also originated in folk medicine (don't ask us how many quack folk medicines are bullshit)"
I remember reading a memoir of a manual therapist who described his work with Ida Rolf. Rolf discovered a specific approach to massage, "rolfing". It appeared very effective, she had a number of apprentices and followers and she was interested in clinical testing and such. Turned out that it would be very expensive. With all her money she could maybe afford a couple small-scale trials. She decided money could be better spent elsewhere.
I think we should really just stop asking if "the old ways" actually work or not as it seems entirely irrelevant to the people that seek them out most of the time. They are acts of pure ritual.
Well that's a bit too much of a generalisation maybe?
Yes, there are old ways that have been proven wrong, which were based on ignorance at the time, but there are also old ways which are totally legit and are little known or accepted nowadays based on nowadays ignorance.
I have an interesting story with non-scientific medicine. Normally, I'm a very science-oriented person—"read the paper or it didn't happen." I will even avoid reading a news article about the paper; I'll just go and read the paper itself. The way I treat my illnesses and injuries is the same. That being said, I suffer a lot from sore throats—I will get some flu, get better in 3–4 days, and then my throat will hurt for weeks. In a particularly bad bout, I tried waiting for 2 weeks with no improvement. I almost couldn't swallow. I went to the doctor and was prescribed antibiotics. That resolved it in about 24 hours, and I completed the full course. Three weeks later, the same thing happened. I waited 2 weeks to see if it would resolve on its own, and when it didn’t—antibiotics again. Of course, the problem came back only weeks later.
So I thought—I'm going to try homeopathy. What's the worst that can happen? I'm in pain anyway. I decided to try a scientific approach (not very, given N=1), so again I waited 2 weeks to see if it was going to resolve itself. It didn’t. I went to a homeopathic doctor and got a bottle with some "magic." It took 3–4 days for the symptoms to improve, but they didn’t come back for months. When they did, I jumped straight to the homeopathic medicine, and it helped in the same way it did the first time around. I haven’t used antibiotics for my throat since.
I have no explanation for this. There have been hundreds or thousands of studies on homeopathy, and my reading is that the consensus is that it's "quack medicine." Yet it clearly worked for me, and it worked better than antibiotics for that particular issue. What gives?
Interesting, you're describing exactly what I went through a few years ago.
In my case, however, I turned to pure ginger infusions, following the advice of a herbalist. Haven't gone through it again so far, plus it also works great for colds and flu.
So, gingerol is anti inflammatory. Fun fact, so is allicin, which is produced by garlic. You get a lot of medicine that looks quite a bit like quack medicine - for instance people making garlic extract: https://www.allicin-c.com/?AFFID=549212
But then you end up with peer reviewed studies which indicate some anti-viral properties of garlic: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7434784/
> You get a lot of medicine that looks quite a bit like quack medicine
It depends what you understand by "quack medicine".
To me, in the beginning, all the stuff about drinking weird plants and doing homemade remedies did sound a bit quacky. But that was because of my absolute ignorance.
People have been using these remedies for thousands of years based on a deeper knowledge of nature than your random dude has, but we've fallen into a scam where we are made to feel that anything not made in a lab and costing a certain amount of money is nonsense.
Garlic, onion, ginger, turmeric, honey, echinacea, raspberry... those are natural wonders for basic natural medicine.
It could be that you didn't get real homeopathic medicine. There's been quite a few cases of babies dying after being given "homeopathic" medicine. Because real homeopathic medicine is indeed quack science, literally diluting a substance to the degree of one molecule per a sphere of water the size of the entire solar system, but homeopathic producers are grossly immoral and stupid/bad and unregulated, so can contain high, in some cases deadly, doses of various substances.
TLDR:
Homeopathic medicine is, in theory, 100% safe, since it's literally nothing.
Homeopathic medicine is, in theory, 100% ineffective, since it's literally nothing.
Homeopathic medicine is, in practice, rolling the dice with unregulated producers that have been known to ship poisons.
I have asthma, a few times I got an attack when I left my drugs at different home. Usually in such situation I have to go to a nightly doctor office (it always happens in the middle of the night on weekends).
But several times this happened I've been at my home and I have some old empty inhalers with 0 doses left and like 5 years past expiry date. I'm talking the disk inhaler, with discreet capsules of the drug that get used on every application - so if there were any traces of the drug substance - it would have been very small amounts that stuck to the inhaler walls or whatever.
I still used it and it stopped the asthma attack just as well as the real thing.
Placebo is one hell of a drug.
Similarly - even just preparing to go to the doctor in the middle of the night lessens the asthma attack for me. Just before I go to the doctor waiting in the queue the symptoms are often very minor.
No one ever said homeophaty has no effect. But there is no evidence it works beyond being a placebo.. which is what I suspect happened also in your case, whether your consciouss mind believes in homeopathy or not. You gave it a chance, so some parts of your mind decided it will magically work, so it did.
Oh and unlike homeopathy, leeches have a real effect besides placebo.
placebo is not that effective
Placebo is by definition highly subjective, and not even in the sense of one's opinion, but rather that it works or not at a subject level.
Do you assume that, or did you read about it in studies?
"We have no evidence how well this works, or if it works at all, but we must agree that leeches are good because a recovering alcoholic's mother suggested he try leeches like they do in quixotic Russia. Don't dismiss them because this other completely unrelated treatment also originated in folk medicine (don't ask us how many quack folk medicines are bullshit)"
Maybe in next century we discover that "horse medicine" is very good against viral infections!