Ah, but if the problem had cured itself nearly contemporaneously with your visit to the chiropractor… well, I can’t say anything about you personally, but a lot of people in that situation would have been convinced that his treatment worked.

Probably you’re more of an expert than I. Is it true that discovery of new treatments is a blind process? That we accept new treatment on the evidence that ‘it seems to work’?

If so – what’s wrong with drawing a line between financial support for rituals that make sick people happier and real treatments? At least then the zealots can’t claim financial support as scientific legitimation and we can keep track of powerful placebo effects (& maybe indirectly make psychiatry less of an approximation).

I don’t read medical literature so I can’t say if there’s a problem with findings about low-cost procedures competing for journal space with findings about expensive ones. But I could see this being a real problem with something like chiro where the very nature of the techniques make it more of an “art”, and harder to reproduce results because it’s harder to guarantee that a given technique is being applied consistently. That would explain both the apparently high rate of ineffective or harmful practice, and the fact that so many people swear by it and have what sound to me like pretty good explanations for why it works for certain things.

So, the apparently too-permissive attitude of regulating agencies towards “alternative” treatments supports the very same criticism that proponents of alternative medicine level against the state of medical practice. This was the whole point of Daniel’s original post, was it not?

Homeopahy, Chiropractic, American exceptionalism (liberal or otherwise) Libertarianism,
Rational action theory.
They all make people feel better about themselves.

Many.

“I can’t see how acupuncture would work (non-psychosomatically), but I am willing to believe it does given good enough evidence ”

“even if it is poking: poking + faith might work better than poking + skepticism. ”

Indeed it might, but we don’t know. It should be researched, if for no other reason than to expand our knowledge about placebo. There are multiple double blind studies showing that “real” acupuncture (ie needles in the “right” places and penetrating deep) is somewhat efficacious at treating chronic pain. The thing is that “fake” acupuncture (penetrating needles in random places, no penetration in the right places, no penetration in random places) produces exactly the same benefit. Hence my point about the placebo effect. I’d like to see a study (and there may well be one, I just haven’t seen it) testing placebo acupuncture versus openly acknowledged placebo acupuncture, to isolate how much of it is down to the placebo effect.

Their motto was ‘don’t fire until you can see the flecks in their eyes’.

Than’ ew, than’ ew, I’m ‘ere all week.

No. I know some people in the the health insurance market here in the Netherlands, where private insurers do the same. It’s fully “two”. Insurers are very willing to pay for anythingyou want to visit, no matter how quacky, if that means you stick with them and pay enough premiums.

This is not even evil business practice (some of the private insurers here are not-for-profits). It’s simply that being hostile to alternative medicine loses you lots and lots of customers.

“There is no compelling, credible scientific evidence to suggest
that any CAM therapy benefits any medical condition or reduces
any medical symptom (pain or otherwise) better than a placebo.”

Why then do I receive cost-effective and simple treatments for the common maladies I see my doctor about?