5) The Wonder Of Placebo
I can hear some of the more staunch alternative medicine crowd mumbling “well how come people report the benefits of chiropractics and the like? They must do something?”
The simple answer is that these interventions seem to help; people perceive that the methods work and a lot of that is down to the surprisingly powerful placebo effect.
Just thinking that something will make you feel better will make you feel better. It makes pharmacological drug trials difficult to do, because whether the drug you’re giving is better than a sugar tablet is sometimes tricky to see behind the might of the placebo. Studies on the placebo effect have shown that there are many ways to increase the strength of the effect. For instance a red sugar tablet works better than a blue one, two red tablets make you feel better than one.
On top of that, there are other more subtle ways to influence the power of the effect. For instance, the length of time the practitioner spends with the patient makes a difference, even if the same amount of “therapy” is carried out on the patient, if the doctor is simply with the patient for longer the patient feels markedly better.
Click here to read more about the odd self healing placebo effect.
6) Swine Flu Vaccine Scaremongering
Vaccines have got a bad press in the media over the last few years, through no fault of their own. When medicine has bad things written about it it’s not a big deal, but when it gets bad mouthed without any evidence at all and lives are in danger because of it that certainly is a bad thing.
The flu sounds like a fairly non-menacing illness, but if you’re already a bit ill, or old, or young it can be a killer. In 1918 a strain similar to swine flu managed to infect 20% of the entire population of planet earth and killed 50 million people.
If you’re going to tell people not to protect themselves against dangerous diseases you need to have your facts straight. No one wants another plague on their hands, or all over their faces.
