odds and ending

[Guest guest]

Picked up the Volker Scheid book. Looks fabulous and only $25!

Politics! Intrigue! Medicine!

 

I'm not sure where the placebo thread started but Ted Kaptchuk and

Michael Croucher have a book from 1987 (Summit Books) which I really

like. One story that always got me was a research study of heart surgery

vs. a " fake surgery " where only a scar was made but nothing was changed

inside. (Man, who approves these things!) The placebo, of course, was

as effective as the real surgery. The kicker to the story is that the

doctors abandoned both procedures because if the placebo was as

effective then the surgery had no merit. And if they didn't know why the

placebo worked then they couldn't use it.

 

As to my publicity issue, thanks for letting me talk it out, and I've

got a better handle on how to approach it. The problem I further

realized was that advertising, classically, creates a discomfort/lack

and then the product fulfills the desire. That was making me

uncomfortable but knowing that, I think I can write something that I

feel Ok about.

 

And as to my last post, I had a paper translated today that a Beijing

doctor had given me that she had written about Hep C. In one study, it

said that interferon effectively gave a negative viral count in 50

percent of the cases againest the herbs 32 percent. Because the virus

often becomes detectable later they retest. 6 months later the

interferon patients were at 27 percent and the herbs at 26 percent.

There were 50 herb patients total and 11 interferon patients total so it

was a very small sample. It was published in the Chinese Journal of

Basic Med TCM 2001, Vol 7 Number 9.