vendredi 25 mars 2016

Live Cell Therapy - Testimonials vs. science

There's a guy called Dr. Kuhnau who does a variation of "live cell therapy" involving injecting people with shark cartilage in the butt and that's supposed to heal whatever's wrong with the body. Dr. Velazquez is the guy who's currently taken over his practice. It operates in Mexico because he's not allowed to do it in the states due to the "oppression of Big Pharma".

That said, my parents are convinced of this guy's legitimacy (hell, they took me to see him when I was a little kid), most recently because they met a doctor who talked about someone with a ton of medical problems wrong with them (they couldn't list any, medical terms are hard), and was giving something like 6 months to live and now is all healed up. My parents' first argument is "You can't argue with results." Live cell therapy is supposed to heal damaged organs and the recoveries are not the kind that can be explained by the placebo said. It doesn't matter that the purported science makes no sense, because . . . "You can't argue with results". I can't really come up with an argument against it other than "maybe the doctors were wrong". My mom said she *could* read an article picking apart live cell therapy too my dad but it'd be meaningless because of the testimonials she's heard, the results that can't be argued against.

Because of this the conversation went into Big Pharma and medical science. My mom thinks he's being oppressed because that Big Pharma and the hospital industry suppresses anything that actually fixes problems because it's not profitable. I point out surgery and she said 90% of it is not about healing. Big Pharma can't put patents on live cell therapy because Dr. Kuhnau is already giving it out and passing it on to his protege.

The conversation came with the attitude that asking for peer review is the same as asking for the approval of a stuffy establishment. We talked about how many theories were rejected by science and built up evidence and my mom brought up a book he wrote full of case studies. I say results have to be replicated by multiple people and, of course there's the doctor's protege but getting any doctor to try it is hard.

The conversation went into a bunch of other stuff like how you can't know anything you don't test firsthand, especially for something as important as medicine and health.

Because you can't argue with results. And there's such a tangled web of arguments why anything else is unreliable.


via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1UPKWD9

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