# Quantum Biofeedback?



## silentrage (May 11, 2009)

So my Dad bought one of these devices called a Quantum Biofeedback device. It cost 2k, and it looks like a plastic box with blinky lights on it.

It's suppose to have a database of frequencies associated with the conditions of various systems and organs of the human body, and by using frequency feedback it can detect if any of those are in a "unhealthy" state and correct those frequencies with resonance. 

It was invented by a german scientist who wrote a book called "global scaling" if memory serves correctly, which is an interesting theory on its own. He supposedly found a way to use gravitional standing waves to transfer information at greater than the speed of light. However I couldn't find any peer reviewed publications with his work on it so that was kinda suspicious too. 

As for his device, I thought it was very iffy at best, and an outright scam at worst. It was never clearly stated what kind of frequencies was used, no mentions of electromagnetism whatsoever, which is the most likely type of wave the human body would emit as far as I know. It just says "quantum" frequencies.

Anyway, long story short, I got to see my Dad use this to diagnose a few clients, and holy balls it WORKS. 
Last week he took it to someone's private clinic to do a demo, and the test results for the patient whom my dad's never met before said there's a 90% chance she has or will get cancer, and it turn out it was spot on, she has leukemia.

He did a diagnostic on my mom, and the results said she was under a lot of financial stress, had a bad temper, and was emotionally hurt by a friend recently. This struck me as pretty crazy, because she was cheated out of some money by a friend, but she didn't want to tell anyone due to various reasons, she told me and wouldn't let me tell anyone, so my dad doesn't even know this, yet somehow the device picked it up. 

Now those experiences are already pretty weird/amazing, but to top it off, this device is supposed to be able to cure almost any illnesses, including physical injuries, allergies, emotional stress, chemical contamination, viruses/bacteria, even cancer, by slowly realigning your body's frequencies to the "healthy" frequencies it has stored. Of course it also points out the source of those stresses on your body so you have to get rid of those sources. 

I met this traditional Chinese doctor who said he cured 8 people of terminal cancer using a combination of herbs and quantum biofeedback and that those people and many more of his patients are believers, but I don't know how much of that was the herbal medicine and how much was the device. 

And to top THAT off, this device has adjustments for what it calls "11 dimensional" frequencies, I don't know much about it since I've only taken a few glances while my dad used it, but it had things like "Karma", "Past Lives", "Creativity", "Aura", etc etc in it, I don't even know what the hell it's supposed to adjust for those, are there frequencies in the human body that are associated with past sins and karma? /headexplodes

Anyway, I'm bored out of my skull, thought I'd share this and see what you guys feel/know about it. I'm still not 100% convinced until my Dad uses it to cure someone who has like 3 weeks to live right in front of my eyes. 
Btw he's taking it to a lab to do some spectral analysis or whatever to try and find out what the hell kind of frequency this thing emits, ooooo, the mystery.


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## Stealthdjentstic (May 11, 2009)

Interesting, if you dont mind me asking, what is it exactly that your dad does for a living?


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## jaxadam (May 11, 2009)

This is very interesting. I've always had a few theories on the electromagnetic and frequency response of the human systems, because essential all the human body is, is a big collection of them.


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## silentrage (May 11, 2009)

As for profession, he's in Visa Consulting, mostly for international students.



jaxadam said:


> This is very interesting. I've always had a few theories on the electromagnetic and frequency response of the human systems, because essential all the human body is, is a big collection of them.



See that's what I assumed at first. But after a while of looking through the menus and the manuals, I actually noticed that they very much avoided saying "electromagnetic" at all. And on the specifications there's only one frequency that's listed that the device uses. My dad thinks there's something going on here and that frequency could be a carrier frequency for other stuff. So he's going to take it to a lab for some diagnosis. 

Oh I forgot another funky thing about this device, once it has done a diagnosis on you and has your information, along with the (fairly) exact date and time of your birth saved, it's able to diagnose and adjust your frequencies from anywhere on the global. I find this highly improbable by conventional means, but I'm gonna remain open minded until those analysis results come in.

There's an upgrade you can buy with this system that does just this, it stores hundreds of client information and just remotely broadcasts "healthy" frequencies 24/7 to those paying clients. Like a PA... for health... 
The plot definitely thickens.


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## troyguitar (May 11, 2009)

Call me a naysayer, but I think my father-in-law has been fooled and is currently fooling others.

On the other hand, the dude who made it could be the next Tesla...


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## silentrage (May 11, 2009)

troyguitar said:


> Call me a naysayer, but I think my father-in-law has been fooled and is currently fooling others.
> 
> On the other hand, the dude who made it could be the next Tesla...



I know I always have this nagging feeling that my dad got conned, but everytime the thing works it kinda gives me goosebumps. 
However that's only for accurate diagnosis, so far I haven't seen it cure anything yet, but it's supposed to be a very slow process. 
It didn't do anything for my mom's temper problems, lol.

I'll wait for the lab results.


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## jaxadam (May 11, 2009)

I don't think I buy into the whole "cure anyone from anywhere in the world" portion of it.


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## Cadavuh (May 12, 2009)

This is amazing. My girlfriend is really into this kind of stuff. Steven Hawking's The Universe in A Nutshell talks about 11-dimensional stuff


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## leftyguitarjoe (May 12, 2009)

There is no evidence of 11 dimensions. It works out great on parer though. When ever the LHC gets back up and running, it will make or break the theory.

M-theory.

look it up. Its cool.


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## Cadavuh (May 12, 2009)

The book has M-theory too . Check it out man!


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## thesimo (May 12, 2009)

i just closed my browser by accident so have to type this twice - this time in a more concise manor 

This is complete bullshit.

If you believe this you should be shot to stop your clearly dominant gullible gene spreading.

(yes there probably is 11 dimensions)

as for the perceived healing of this - Placebo effect


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## silentrage (May 12, 2009)

Well I might have to track down some people and find out for sure, if that placebo effect cured a guy who was given 4 weeks to live by the hospital, then it's some strong placebo.


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## thesimo (May 12, 2009)

well all the faith healers will tell you that too, but there's not a single case of it being proven


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## silentrage (May 12, 2009)

I want to find out, don't know if his patient will be up for showing me his medical records though...


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## Cadavuh (May 12, 2009)

Mind over matter is a powerful thing


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## CapenCyber (May 12, 2009)

To qualify my statement I would like to say I am a medical student right now, have been for three years and I also have qualifications in physics, maths and chemistry up to A-level, although I have a personal interest in these areas beyond this. I probably have a better understanding of how the body works and fails at chemical and cellular levels than most people, though obviously I am not an expert by any means.

This is absolute baloney.

Not a single part of this makes sense, I've heard this sort of pseudo-science hundreds of times before, and I'm shocked that people still fall for it.

Really...do you actually think that something so groundbreaking and revolutionary as what this machine claims to be would not have been front page news? If you showed this to a doctor/physicist/anyone intelligent and involved with science they would laugh at you. Frankly, I'm amazed people still think acupuncture/astrology/homeopathy/aromatherapy etc have any merit whatsoever, despite countless attempts to verify them there is no evidence supporting them beyond circumstance and placebo.

The ONLY difference between "alternative medicine" and "medicine" is that real medicine has evidence, alternative does not. The second acupuncture etc get verifies by reproducible, significant data they will simply become a part of conventional medicine, until that happens they will remain, in my eyes (any the scientific community's) unproven garbage.

Lifelong physicists cannot explain the quantum processes going on, the best we can hope for is a guess at their effects, and yet this guy (William C. Nelson) has managed to understand them, harness the "quantum energies" (eugh..) and apply it to the human body, all in a tiny machine that costs only 2 grand! HOLY SHIT, even an x-ray machine costs tens of thousands of pounds, this guy is amazing!

Or not. 

Some Notes on the Quantum Xrroid (QXCI) and William C. Nelson

"Taken together, the above sources claim that Nelson received eight doctoral degrees between 1980 and 1993 when he moved to Hungary. As far as I can tellnone of these came from an accredited school."

"The Quantum Xrroid devicealso called QXCI, EPFX, or SCIOis claimed to balance "bio-energetic" forces that the scientific community does not recognize as real. It mainly reflects skin resistance (how easily low-voltage electric currents from the device pass through the skin), which is not related to the body's health. It is promoted with elaborate pseudoscientific explanations and disclaimers intended to protect its practitioners from prosecution. Use of the device can cause unnecessary expense as well as delay in getting appropriate treatment. If you encounter a practitioner who uses one, please ask the appropriate government agencies to investigate."

Hahahahahahahahahhhahhahahahhahahahahahahahhahahhahahhhaahaaa

I'm sorry, but this, like so many other similar things is a HUUGGEE con.


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## thesimo (May 12, 2009)

well said


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## silentrage (May 12, 2009)

I understand perfectly well how herbal medicine and acupuncture among other things have been rejected by the western or "modern" medicine and science community, but I've also witnessed first hand how they can be used effectively to heal. 
IMO Quantum medicine may be far fetched but the close-mindedness displayed by the west on a lot of eastern philosophies and practices is also just astonishing. 
Like tell me, has _real_ science decided if matter is matter or waves yet? Have you decided how many dimensions there are? Have you decided if the human soul exists or are we just walking piles of chemical reactions? 

You say it's a crock of bull, we say we've been using it to real effects for 5000 years.  (Acupuncture, astrology, fengshui, etc, not quantum medicine, lol.)


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## vampiregenocide (May 12, 2009)

Stealthtastic said:


> Interesting, if you dont mind me asking, what is it exactly that your dad does for a living?



Time Lord maybe?


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## silentrage (May 12, 2009)

CapenCyber said:


> "The Quantum Xrroid device&#8212;also called QXCI, EPFX, or SCIO&#8212;is claimed to balance "bio-energetic" forces that the scientific community does not recognize as real. It mainly reflects skin resistance (how easily low-voltage electric currents from the device pass through the skin), which is not related to the body's health. It is promoted with elaborate pseudoscientific explanations and disclaimers intended to protect its practitioners from prosecution. Use of the device can cause unnecessary expense as well as delay in getting appropriate treatment. If you encounter a practitioner who uses one, please ask the appropriate government agencies to investigate."



Could you try to find the official source of this? 
The device my dad has is supposed to be registered with the FDA and Health Canada as a class 2 medical device.
First of all I don't know what a class 2 medical device is supposed to be, and secondly I havn't tried to verify this with the FDA or HC yet. 

If we can find out how the FDA and HC actually regards this device then it'll probably help.

Edit: http://www.fda.gov/ora/fiars/ora_import_ia8006.html
Ouch, kind of a nail in the coffin there. 
However the device listed there is supposed to be by a different company and different inventor. So now I'm wondering if the same thing is coming down the pipe for the device my dad has or could it be different?
And I wish the FDA would have some details on how they determine these things made false claims.


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## CapenCyber (May 12, 2009)

Local News | How one man's invention is part of a growing worldwide scam that snares the desperately ill | Seattle Times Newspaper

This link has a bit more on the history of these devices

In all seriousness, I feel a lot of sympathy for regular people who spend their time and money on this sort of thing in good faith, when the people behind them only have a quick buck in mind.



silentrage said:


> I understand perfectly well how herbal medicine and acupuncture among other things have been rejected by the western or "modern" medicine and science community, but I've also witnessed first hand how they can be used effectively to heal.



Then can you (or anyone) explain how they work? Can you provide double-blinded randomised controlled trial data to support this fact? Can you provide any reproducible data? 
Didn't think so.



silentrage said:


> IMO Quantum medicine may be far fetched but the close-mindedness displayed by the west on a lot of eastern philosophies and practices is also just astonishing.



"Quantum medicine" goes way beyond far fetched, it's more ridiculous then that old-wives take where if you wipe a piece of bacon on a wart then bury the bacon in your garden the wart will disappear (I shit you not).

You seem to like these different terms (eastern/western etc), let me reiterate, the only difference between alternative and conventional medicine is one has evidence to back it up. We still use many therapies which have been developed from ancient remedies, these have involved for example finding the pharmacologically active ingredient and isolating and concentrating it, then using it as a drug. 

Science has nothing against ancient therapies that work, only those that don't.



silentrage said:


> Like tell me, has _real_ science decided if matter is matter or waves yet? Have you decided how many dimensions there are? Have you decided if the human soul exists or are we just walking piles of chemical reactions?
> 
> You say it's a crock of bull, we say we've been using it to real effects for 5000 years.  (Acupuncture, astrology, fengshui, etc, not quantum medicine, lol.)



Umm, there is no "real" and "alternative" science, it is either science or not, perhaps you need to look at what something must do to qualify as science (hint: reproducible evidence). Alternative medicine is by definition NOT a science.
"Real" science (as you like to call it) has not decided that about matter or dimensions or souls yet. In fact Real science does not decide, it discovers, alternative things (and religion for that matter) decide. 
You're using the creationist argument of "well you don't know everything, so what you don't know yet must have been done by a magic man!" which is at best laughable and at worst depressing and dangerous. Actual real-life science is actually quite hard today, so cut us some slack and give us some time, or better yet help us yourself!

You may have been using it to "real effect" for 5000 years, but have you noticed how life expectancy stayed at around 30 right up until around...ooh...the industrial/scientific revolution and the birth of modern science since when it has been skyrocketing? Coincindence?


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## DaveCarter (May 12, 2009)

I was sceptical at first......



silentrage said:


> And to top THAT off, this device has adjustments for what it calls "11 dimensional" frequencies, I don't know much about it since I've only taken a few glances while my dad used it, but it had things like *"Karma", "Past Lives",* "Creativity", *"Aura"*, etc etc in it, I don't even know what the hell it's supposed to adjust for those, are there frequencies in the human body that are associated with past sins and karma? /headexplodes



...and this is where I stopped reading.


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## silentrage (May 12, 2009)

CapenCyber said:


> Local News | How one man's invention is part of a growing worldwide scam that snares the desperately ill | Seattle Times Newspaper
> 
> This link has a bit more on the history of these devices
> 
> ...



I think we got off on the wrong foot here, for some reason you think I'm defending this quantum biofeedback device, I'm not. I just wanted to share my experiences with it and see what others know about it. 

And I'm not trying to prove anything by saying you or science don't know anything, because it doesn't work that way. 
I guess I"m just saying, I say something is 100% impossible and will never happen until it can be proven. 
If I told you we'd discover 11 dimensions maybe 100 years ago, you would've given me this same speech, and yet here we are. 

That's the thing I like about science, is that it's never afraid to admit it's wrong and it always tries to find the answer, but the fact is science doesn't have all the answers, and if there is even a chance that something works, I'll try to find out for myself. 

Btw I didn't use the terms wester and eastern not for arbitrary grandstanding. I know that in China acupuncture is recognized by the government and medical officials as a form of effective treatment, the med schools there have programs and degrees for it and herbal medicine. 
There is a real difference in the way it's perceived and portrayed in the east and west, among other things like iChing, FengShui and Chi Gong. 

And just out of curiosity what do you think is the scientific explaination for those shao lin monk stunts? Like the one where you push a sharp spear into the soft spot under someone's throat until the wooden stick breaks? I've always wondered about that, and now I have an actual science/med student here. 



SplinteredDave said:


> I was sceptical at first......
> 
> 
> 
> ...and this is where I stopped reading.



Lmao, yeah, it does seem to fall apart right there doesn't it. 

I'm wondering about the diagnosis process now, and I think you can possibly cheat that too. The client has to enter his/her personal info into the device, things like age, sex, height, etc etc. I'm thinking there might be an algorithm that takes this info, finds the most commonly occuring illnesses that fit this profile, and just spits it out. But the cancer diagnosis for that 1 client still gets me though, AFAIK that's the only time the device diagnosed someone with cancer, out of a few dozens of clients, and it was spot on. 
Hmmm......


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## Adam Of Angels (May 12, 2009)

So... if the Placebo effect is found to be a reality sometimes, what's the problem here? Let's say that Pill A is actually a sugar pill, and because somebody is completely convinced that it will cure their cold, it does. Pill B was created in a laboratory and has been proven to cure the symptoms of the cold, but also has side effects. Which is the better healer? The mind would seem to be the best in that scenario.

On the other hand, what if the person taking Pill B doesn't at all believe that it will cure their illness? Does that mean that the Placebo effect is taking place, or that the medicine doesn't work very effectively in that person's body? Is there a difference? Who proves this and by what means is it proven? Is it because there's data and numbers on a sheet of paper? We use absolutes to "prove" things but don't always consider that we're simply observing a result or a manifestation to be studied. 

Basically, what I'm saying is that we can observe the way our reality works, but when we decide that what we can observe is all there is to reality, then we're defining our own limitations in order to observe them. To me, its simply a matter of feeling the need to be in control; to have a sense of security where you would otherwise see absolutely no meaning or purpose in anything.

If you have a problem with anything I just said, you had a problem with similar ideas before I even brought it up, in which case I'm not really trying to get through to you or anything like that. 

But, being that everything that exists within our physical reality exists at some vibrational frequency (even though at a micro-scopic level molecules are either a wave OR a particle, nearly simultaneously), is it so outrageous to think that science hasn't yet discovered the bridge between consciousness and frequency at a physical level?


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## Setnakt (May 12, 2009)

silentrage said:


> I understand perfectly well how herbal medicine and acupuncture among other things have been rejected by the western or "modern" medicine and science community, but I've also witnessed first hand how they can be used effectively to heal.


First of all, this language sounds very disingenuous. You're grouping "herbal medicine" in with acupuncture and "other things," which creates a false connection between these mystical "other things," suggesting that there are "other," possibly equally valid things that for some reason the mean old scientists won't recognize.

I'm pretty sure we can all agree that medicine has recognized some "herbal" medicine, being that most drugs are basically boiled down from herbs in the first place. There are real actual testable consequences of ingesting certain things that can matter. There may not be as much evidence for these "other things."



silentrage said:


> IMO Quantum medicine may be far fetched but the close-mindedness displayed by the west on a lot of eastern philosophies and practices is also just astonishing.


Quantum mechanics is not an eastern philosophy or practice. For that matter it is not a philosophy, or "practice," whatever that may mean. It is a scientific theory structure that is actually real and not just a worldview or mystical philosophy. While I have a lot of respect for and often spend some time reading a bit of philosophy, some of it "eastern," and would love to debate it under the right context, understand that quantum mechanics is a real actual functional, physical, real reality that actually really corresponds to things that matter and isn't just a re-evaluation of the same sensory stimuli or a difference of opinion between cultures, no matter how significant those can be in their own contexts.



silentrage said:


> Like tell me, has _real_ science decided if matter is matter or waves yet? Have you decided how many dimensions there are? Have you decided if the human soul exists or are we just walking piles of chemical reactions?



The idea of "matter" vs "waves" is an abstraction and really is just a difficulty of language. It is both, if you wish. Light for example is both a particle and a wave. Deal with it.

The idea of extra dimensions comes from string theory. This is VERY DIFFERENT from quantum mechanics. To my knowledge it is generally agreed that we do not have any mechanism for independently testing or verifying any claims that could become observable or verifiable that string theory could ever make. Does that sound weird? Good. It is. String theory is a way to make different, high-level theories that correspond to different parts of reality relate to each other. Personally I don't have that level of a functional knowledge base on general relativity or quantum mechanics so I personally try not to go around conflating terms between different sets of definitions.

These 11 other dimensions, by the way, if they exist, are very tightly curled; in other words, they relate very little to the "reality" we take for granted. You could go your whole life, suddenly discover they exist, and they may make absolutely no practical difference to you ever. The same holds in some ways for quantum mechanics. When we talk about the "quantum level," we're just talking about the sub-atomic level. Does it make any difference in your worldview whether your skin is made of cells are made of molecules are made of atoms are made of quantum particles, or what they "look like" at a level so small that they're actually smaller than a particle of light and thus cannot be directly observed? Would it matter if I told you they were blue? Would you care if I explained that color has no meaning on a level that light cannot interact with?

In this way we can see that "quantum biofeedback" is a contradiction in irrelevant terms. Nothing "biological" exists on the quantum level, because it takes cells which take molecules which take atoms which take quantum particles (which may take limited-dimensional strings) to make a living organism. "Quantum radiation" kind of means nothing because all energy, all radiation, and all matter is defined in the same way in quantum theory.

The human soul, on the other hand, I have never seen described in terms that remotely correspond to anything that could be even passingly referred to as scientific; until then, science has very little to say on such a purposefully obtuse mystical generalization about the identity. On a neurophysiological level, yes, you are just a bunch of electro-chemical reactions. However these reactions are so complex that you may be surprised just how much is made possible with them.



> You say it's a crock of bull, we say we've been using it to real effects for 5000 years.  (Acupuncture, astrology, fengshui, etc, not quantum medicine, lol.)


No you most certainly have not been using astrology to real effects, not for 5,000 years, not for a day.



> There is a real difference in the way it's perceived and portrayed in the east and west, among other things like iChing, FengShui and Chi Gong.
> 
> And just out of curiosity what do you think is the scientific explaination for those shao lin monk stunts? Like the one where you push a sharp spear into the soft spot under someone's throat until the wooden stick breaks? I've always wondered about that, and now I have an actual science/med student here.


Chi is basically just a conceptualization of a principle physicists know as knietic energy transference. It can be very real. As for the iron shirt training I've never seen it in person but I'm inclined to believe at least some of it. I'm not a med student but I've been interested in that kind of training so I'll just have to find the opportunity to see how that goes and weigh in at that time.


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## CapenCyber (May 12, 2009)

silentrage said:


> I think we got off on the wrong foot here, for some reason you think I'm defending this quantum biofeedback device, I'm not. I just wanted to share my experiences with it and see what others know about it.



OK, I'm a bit ratty myself right now thanks to impending exams, I'll try to calm down!



silentrage said:


> And I'm not trying to prove anything by saying you or science don't know anything, because it doesn't work that way.
> I guess I"m just saying, I say something is 100% impossible and will never happen until it can be proven.
> If I told you we'd discover 11 dimensions maybe 100 years ago, you would've given me this same speech, and yet here we are.
> 
> That's the thing I like about science, is that it's never afraid to admit it's wrong and it always tries to find the answer, but the fact is science doesn't have all the answers, and if there is even a chance that something works, I'll try to find out for myself.



Please do! Science is not some obscure ritual carried out by bearded men with test tubes in labs, it is merely using learning by evidence gained from controlled experiments. The human animal is all to quick to see patterns where there are none and overemphasise certain results in our consciousness allow us to validate things we want to be true, the scientific method takes the flawed human perception out of the equation and this is where alternative therapies fall short.



silentrage said:


> Btw I didn't use the terms wester and eastern not for arbitrary grandstanding. I know that in China acupuncture is recognized by the government and medical officials as a form of effective treatment, the med schools there have programs and degrees for it and herbal medicine.
> There is a real difference in the way it's perceived and portrayed in the east and west, among other things like iChing, FengShui and Chi Gong.



There is one word I take issue with and that is "effective". There is simply no proof that it is. Western medical practitioners have no fundamental problem with any alternative therapy; they will accept them and adopt them as soon as they have proven themselves, they have had 5000 years to do this (as you said above) and still nothing! You can get degrees in anything nowadays, that does not make them valid or worthwhile.



silentrage said:


> And just out of curiosity what do you think is the scientific explaination for those shao lin monk stunts? Like the one where you push a sharp spear into the soft spot under someone's throat until the wooden stick breaks? I've always wondered about that, and now I have an actual science/med student here.



I have seen this myself, there are many things to consider, suffice to say I am impressed by this, but I think all parts are explainable.
I am going to base what I say on this sort of stunt:


You can see from this video that the spear is indeed placed above the uppermost part of the sternum (the manubrium, meaning little hand, because it's shaped like a fist) and is somewhere on the trachea (windpipe)

Sometimes they like to say something along the lines of, "the throat is one of the weakest parts of the body". This is plain rubbish, anyone who has done any basic life support knows from ABC that Airway is the number one priority. Why would your body make such a vital component weak? Well it didn't. The trachea is very strong, it is supported by cartilageonous rings that wrap around about 70% of the diameter (they have a break in the ring to allow for flexibility and for the oesophagus behind). Feel the lower edge of your ribcage, the middle third part is cartilage also yet it feel as hard as bone, some cartilage is softer like in the nose, the hardness depends upon the amount of calcification in the cartilage, this fact is important later on. 

Your body is designed to protect the airway a huge amount, even feeling your trachea is uncomfortable. In anaesthesia when intubating someone (putting a tube either above or below the the entrance to the trachea in order to maintain an airway (think ER stuff)) the body goes crazy, it is impossible to do on an unsedated person. In surgery the patient is given a huge dose of opiates (similar to heroin) to relax the airway. If you tried to stick a tube down the windpipe of a conscious person their blood pressure would raise so much that they'd either die from a cerebral haemorrhage or arrhythmia. Basically your body (well, evolution) has designed the airway to be strong, flexible and to go fucking nuts whenever anything is wrong, this is why they are so sensitive, not because they are weak, but because they are very important.

You might say, "well it's easy to strangle people, they go out cold in a few seconds", yes this is true, but it has nothing to do with compressing the trachea, it is to do with occluding the carotid arteries, you can hold your breath for a few minutes, even when panicking for a good 20 seconds but if you stop the blood flow your brain turns off to protect itself. So to actually asphyxiate someone by occluding the trachea is very difficult.

Another thing they say is that it takes a lot of practice (eg 10 years I have heard), this I can believe entirely. As with any tissue, subjecting the trachea to a metal point on the end of a spear will cause injury. Injury initally is healed, repeated injury leads to fibrosis and ultimately calcification. Calcification make the area more rigid and also stronger. In repeated "practicing" by ramming a spear into your throat the whole area will become fibrosed and calcified. I would like to see an x-ray radiograph of one of these monks' necks, I'd bet there are a couple of rings fused together to provide a plate to rest the spear on. 

OK, now the spear, there is no way this is sharp, I'm not sure they ever claimed it to be, obviously though if thrown it could stick into someone. I'm going to assume that they are not pre-broken either, since that would be cheating!
Think about spears for a moment, are they designed to be strong against bending? No, they are thrusting weapons, not slashing, watch them being demonstrated, they bend like crazy. The shaft is strong, but very flexible, this is also key.

Now watch the technique used to break it. Initially there is pressure on the neck to bend the spear, but not a whole lot, considering how long the spear is the moments involved are not that great. With a strengthened neck it is possible.

Now watch just after the initial bend, now the flat of the spear point is pressing against the sternum, a massive lump of bone, the rest is easy.


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## silentrage (May 12, 2009)

Setnakt said:


> First of all, this language sounds very disingenuous. You're grouping "herbal medicine" in with acupuncture and "other things," which creates a false connection between these mystical "other things," suggesting that there are "other," possibly equally valid things that for some reason the mean old scientists won't recognize.



I don't think it's disingenous at all, and I will try not to offend/convince/pursuade anyone here, I just want to stimulate some discussions. 

Western science used to completely reject herbal medicine and acupuncture and is only coming around to accepting it very recently. 
FengShui and iChing are used by millions of people in Asia, very often by large businesses, I know this first hand. I don't want to have to list every single practice western science doesn't recognize, it would take too long, so I abbreviated. 



Setnakt said:


> I'm pretty sure we can all agree that medicine has recognized some "herbal" medicine, being that most drugs are basically boiled down from herbs in the first place. There are real actual testable consequences of ingesting certain things that can matter. There may not be as much evidence for these "other things."


Again, can't disagree with that, and I never did. 



Setnakt said:


> Quantum mechanics is not an eastern philosophy or practice. For that matter it is not a philosophy, or "practice," whatever that may mean. It is a scientific theory structure that is actually real and not just a worldview or mystical philosophy. While I have a lot of respect for and often spend some time reading a bit of philosophy, some of it "eastern," and would love to debate it under the right context, understand that quantum mechanics is a real actual functional, physical, real reality that actually really corresponds to things that matter and isn't just a re-evaluation of the same sensory stimuli or a difference of opinion between cultures, no matter how significant those can be in their own contexts.
> [\quote]
> You don't say.
> 
> ...


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## CapenCyber (May 12, 2009)

silentrage said:


> Well I'm not educated on this, so you're gonna have to correct me if I'm wrong, but you're telling me the fact that matter as we know it could be the same as energy and light has no real implications on our lives?



Err, there is a famous equation that says yes, energy and matter are equivalent, you may have heard it.

e=mc^2 ?????

Matter is just highly condensed energy.


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## Setnakt (May 12, 2009)

silentrage said:


> Well I'm not educated on this, so you're gonna have to correct me if I'm wrong, but you're telling me the fact that matter as we know it could be the same as energy and light has no real implications on our lives?


If it's been this way all along and you haven't noticed, it's only interesting to philosophers and specialists. We can all be philosophers but no it won't change your daily routine or how you view relationships or probably even what you choose to watch on TV or which politician you vote for. I can tell you right now that even if string theory and all its 11-dimensional glory were suddenly to become independently verifiable 99% of people on the planet would not change anything at all. They would still commit or ignore all the same crimes and a billion people would still be below the poverty line and unemployment would still be increasing in all the same places and possibly some new ones while we're at it.




> Yes it would, I would want to know what the smallest building block of matter or energy is, and what color it is, if only for curiosity's sake.


Cool, you're curious. I totally support this and relate to it. Just try not to jump to your existing preclusions about metaphysics before you gain an understanding of modern physics.




> Ok so whatever explaination they have for QB is probably bullshit anyways, but still you're interpreting it wrong. They're saying that everything fundamentally is some kind of vibrations first and foremost, and anything material is a manifestation of those vibrations.


What does that even mean? Not even a physicist well-versed in quantum theory can say that. Try not to assume that just because it's "weird" it somehow automatically proves the possibility of the completely, totally, categorically impossible.



> Well I don't have anything remotely scientific here. The only thing I know is historical records show that as early as the 3 kingdoms era in China Astrology had been used by tacticians to aid in fighting wars.


Okay, full-stop, no. Astrology has played an important role in our history, because for the most part people weren't really interested in the stars unless they were somehow seen as representing something that they were already conditioned to feel was emotionally convenient for them, but those times are over, and we know that the stars are just more suns and there aren't any faster-than-light or even slower-than-light radioactive energy vibrations that somehow make you economically successful or whatever just because you can draw lines between them.



> Where do you see this defintion?
> I didnn't even know that ki had a definition. From what I know it can be wielded through meditation, and it comes LITERALLY out of thin air.
> Unexplainable, invisible, energy.


Anything that can be perceived or conceived can be defined. Please don't overly mystify things to the point of uselessness. I have actually taken martial arts and practiced chi.
You're talking about energy. It is not a form of radiation unto itself. It is not unexplainable, and does not come from the air, save for the air you take into your lungs so you can power your muscles to actualize the force you're already capable of. Yes, it helps to visualize energy rising from the ground; it's called leverage, which is very important in wrestling and all martial arts. You can visualize it coming from all around you, to find your "center," literally your "balance."

Just because it's not something people are generally used to talking about in casual conversation doesn't mean it can't be defined.



> Amazing indeed, but I don't think it's agreed that the soul is just a chemical reaction, or is it?


Define "soul." Then we can talk about chemical reactions.



> The tibetans supposedly have thousands of practitioners who can reincarnate, including the dalai lama.
> Is there some method by which a consciousness can be reborn into a new physical vessel that we don't yet understand? Or have they been pulling a giant scam for no good reason for a really long time?


The key point here is where you said "that we don't yet understand." If we don't understand it please don't try to conflate these issues with things we don't understand about other things that you don't understand. It's fine to admit limits of knowledge but another to purposelessly confuse issues by claiming that your superstitions are automatically supported by the gaps in your own knowledge.

On the topic of out-of-body experiences, ALL of human experience is subjective. I recommend reading up on the concept of representationalism, or subjectivism. Literally all of the processes that make up all of our experiences and everything we think we know is defined in subjective terms. These are very complicated processes along every step and a lot can go wrong or just "weird" with them. There are always things that we don't understand and are very personal and subjectively defined. This does not make them less important or relevant, just more debatable. However, this does not mean that ghosts and faeries and dragons and deities and leprechauns are real just because of the quantum uncertainty principle just because we want them to be true; if anything, it makes conviction in the existence of the supernatural even more subject to skepticism. Just because you "feel" that you have a sould oes not mean that you do.


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## silentrage (May 12, 2009)

Lawl, noob is me.
Ok that did change the way we look at the world right?



Setnakt said:


> If it's been this way all along and you haven't noticed, it's only interesting to philosophers and specialists. We can all be philosophers but no it won't change your daily routine or how you view relationships or probably even what you choose to watch on TV or which politician you vote for. I can tell you right now that even if string theory and all its 11-dimensional glory were suddenly to become independently verifiable 99% of people on the planet would not change anything at all. They would still commit or ignore all the same crimes and a billion people would still be below the poverty line and unemployment would still be increasing in all the same places and possibly some new ones while we're at it.


So you're now saying new discoveries in science that completely change our understanding of reality has no impact on reality?



> Cool, you're curious. I totally support this and relate to it. Just try not to jump to your existing preclusions about metaphysics before you gain an understanding of modern physics.


I havn't.



> What does that even mean? Not even a physicist well-versed in quantum theory can say that. Try not to assume that just because it's "weird" it somehow automatically proves the possibility of the completely, totally, categorically impossible.


You were bashing QB on a misunderstanding of its "claimed" principles.
I merely gave you my interpretation of what it's "supposed" to do. 



> Okay, full-stop, no. Astrology has played an important role in our history, because for the most part people weren't really interested in the stars unless they were somehow seen as representing something that they were already conditioned to feel was emotionally convenient for them, but those times are over, and we know that the stars are just more suns and there aren't any faster-than-light or even slower-than-light radioactive energy vibrations that somehow make you economically successful or whatever just because you can draw lines between them.


Yeah it's almost 100% likely to be bull but then again, it's unfalsifiable, you can't scientifically prove it's false. 




> Anything that can be perceived or conceived can be defined. Please don't overly mystify things to the point of uselessness. I have actually taken martial arts and practiced chi.
> You're talking about energy. It is not a form of radiation unto itself. It is not unexplainable, and does not come from the air, save for the air you take into your lungs so you can power your muscles to actualize the force you're already capable of. Yes, it helps to visualize energy rising from the ground; it's called leverage, which is very important in wrestling and all martial arts. You can visualize it coming from all around you, to find your "center," literally your "balance."
> 
> Just because it's not something people are generally used to talking about in casual conversation doesn't mean it can't be defined.


That's your understanding of it. You're saying Chi comes completely from physical means generated by your muscles and body motion, but that's not what Chi is supposed to be, that's just muscles and body motion. You don't have to sit there and meditate for 30 years to do that. 
Again, I can't give you measurements of Chi on a scientific device, so I'm sorry, you can save me the bashing on this one, we'll agree to disagree. 




> Define "soul." Then we can talk about chemical reactions.


A collection of memories, personality, intelligence and consciousness that's believed to exist in some state beyond physical. 



> The key point here is where you said "that we don't yet understand." If we don't understand it please don't try to conflate these issues with things we don't understand about other things that you don't understand. It's fine to admit limits of knowledge but another to purposelessly confuse issues by claiming that your superstitions are automatically supported by the gaps in your own knowledge.


I wanted to know what your thoughts are on these supposed reincarnations, not my lack of knowledge and concrete proof. 
I could've asked myself for those. 
Judging from your tone I'd say I have my answer. 



> On the topic of out-of-body experiences, ALL of human experience is subjective. I recommend reading up on the concept of representationalism, or subjectivism. Literally all of the processes that make up all of our experiences and everything we think we know is defined in subjective terms. These are very complicated processes along every step and a lot can go wrong or just "weird" with them. There are always things that we don't understand and are very personal and subjectively defined. This does not make them less important or relevant, just more debatable. However, this does not mean that ghosts and faeries and dragons and deities and leprechauns are real just because of the quantum uncertainty principle just because we want them to be true; if anything, it makes conviction in the existence of the supernatural even more subject to skepticism. Just because you "feel" that you have a sould oes not mean that you do.


Subjective enough that you know for sure it's all in our heads and definitely not plausible at all?


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## rvai (May 12, 2009)

I was ready to type a really long post, but then I saw all those super long posts and I forgot what I was gonna type lol

IMO alternative medicine should be taken in consideration for tratment for a lot of things, homepathy, for example, most active substances in medicines can be found in nature, for example the aspirine and penicullium.

I had honestly never heard of that treatment described in the first post, but I just wanted to say that about homeopathy lol.


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## darren (May 12, 2009)

I don't have a problem with any kind of treatment as long as there is scientifically-obtained *evidence* to back up any claims being made.

There's lots of quasi-scientific bullshit flying around out there.


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## Setnakt (May 12, 2009)

silentrage said:


> Lawl, noob is me.
> Ok that did change the way we look at the world right?


It may change how I look at the world, but I can't speak for anyone else. The answer on that front seems to be "no." While quantum physics has given us a lot of modern technology (even the computers we're using now), most people take these things for granted and just use them to waste time and post youtube videos making fun of themselves or each other or whatever.



> So you're now saying new discoveries in science that completely change our understanding of reality has no impact on reality?


Your reality? Probably not. Unless you integrate it into ethics or something somehow. Quantum mechanics has deep ramifications that reach into epistemology but unless you're already looking at that then it probably won't meaningfully impact your life; that is to say, your daily routine and how you interact with reality.
There are a lot of immensely important discoveries and developments in philosophy, on its own and how it deals with the natural sciences. These have been developing for many centuries. However the only people who tend to care are "academics" and stuffy, mean old "scientists" with their supposed prejudices.



> That's your understanding of it. You're saying Chi comes completely from physical means generated by your muscles and body motion, but that's not what Chi is supposed to be, that's just muscles and body motion.


And a nuclear reactor is just splitting atoms. Oh, gee, that's all that is, it must not be so complicated after all.



> You don't have to sit there and meditate for 30 years to do that.


To do it well I would think you would. The human body is strange and complex and takes a lot of discipline to master its use.

The soul:


> A collection of memories, personality, intelligence and consciousness that's believed to exist in some state *beyond physical*.


ALL of those terms are very complex issues to debate. How do you measure personality? How do you define intelligence? How do you define or measure consciousness? However, the entirety of philosophy and psychology and psychiatry and neurophysiology and all the social sciences kind of are already dealing with that, so we don't really have to reinvent the wheel to discuss terms as long as we're willing to define them.
The "beyond physical" part is the only part that seems to throw a wrench into the works, and it seems a little vague. Feel free to elaborate on what you think it would mean for my memories to exist "beyond" a physical state.



> Subjective enough that you know for sure it's all in our heads and definitely not plausible at all?


Read Schopenhauer if you like solipsism so much. Just understand that all of science is based on an objectivist perspective, which is completely at odds with that attitude. Either you are willing to entertain the idea of an externally consistent reality or you're not, because if it's all in your head, you should be imagining a better reality anyway.


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## silentrage (May 12, 2009)

Setnakt said:


> It may change how I look at the world, but I can't speak for anyone else. The answer on that front seems to be "no." While quantum physics has given us a lot of modern technology (even the computers we're using now), most people take these things for granted and just use them to waste time and post youtube videos making fun of themselves or each other or whatever.
> 
> Your reality? Probably not. Unless you integrate it into ethics or something somehow. Quantum mechanics has deep ramifications that reach into epistemology but unless you're already looking at that then it probably won't meaningfully impact your life; that is to say, your daily routine and how you interact with reality.
> There are a lot of immensely important discoveries and developments in philosophy, on its own and how it deals with the natural sciences. These have been developing for many centuries. However the only people who tend to care are "academics" and stuffy, mean old "scientists" with their supposed prejudices.


So freaking true, lol, but there must come a time when technology will catch up to those discoveries and they will actually impact our lives, it's just not instantaneous, but I still like to see those paradigm shifts as the cause. 



> And a nuclear reactor is just splitting atoms. Oh, gee, that's all that is, it must not be so complicated after all.
> 
> 
> To do it well I would think you would. The human body is strange and complex and takes a lot of discipline to master its use.


I probably will, and maybe we're not talking about the same thing here?
My dad practices chi gong and from the dumbed down explaination I got from him it seems you meditate and imagine an energy filling you, from within or from all around you, and you guide that energy to various parts of your body and use it to heal or in case of martial arts to harm. 



> The soul:
> ALL of those terms are very complex issues to debate. How do you measure personality? How do you define intelligence? How do you define or measure consciousness? However, the entirety of philosophy and psychology and psychiatry and neurophysiology and all the social sciences kind of are already dealing with that, so we don't really have to reinvent the wheel to discuss terms as long as we're willing to define them.
> The "beyond physical" part is the only part that seems to throw a wrench into the works, and it seems a little vague. Feel free to elaborate on what you think it would mean for my memories to exist "beyond" a physical state.


 Sorry but it's the best I can do.
Beyond physical is indeed ridiculous sounding, but from that article I posted above regarding the scientific search for the soul, it seems like there's a possible explaination for what the soul is.

Soul Search | Mind & Brain | DISCOVER Magazine



> Read Schopenhauer if you like solipsism so much. Just understand that all of science is based on an objectivist perspective, which is completely at odds with that attitude. Either you are willing to entertain the idea of an externally consistent reality or you're not, because if it's all in your head, you should be imagining a better reality anyway.


That's impossible to say, I could've been conditioned 

I don't like solipsism, it sounds too self-centred. I like the idea of a collective consciousness better. 

Doesn't quantum physics show that the idea of an objective measurement is meaningless? 

Is science opposed to the idea that it's possible for consciousness to 
"create" reality? 

I do imagine a better reality, if only I could convince myself enough that I never have to come back to this crappy one here, lol.


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## G0DLESSENDEAVOR (May 12, 2009)

CapenCyber said:


> In fact Real science does not decide, it discovers, alternative things (and religion for that matter) decide. You're using the creationist argument of, "Well you don't know everything, so what you don't know yet must have been done by a magic man!" Which is at best laughable and at worst depressing and dangerous. Actual real-life science is actually quite hard today, so cut us some slack and give us some time. Better yet help us yourself!


 
This is why people like creationists should never present themselves with a bigger problem than they can solve. There useless theory of how the universe and all living beings came to life does just that for them.


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## Metal Ken (May 12, 2009)

Okay, i found out this device is bullshit. 
Here's the proof (from Quackwatch)--


> After leaving Colorado, Nelson became a Professor of Homeopathy at the College of Practical Homeopathy in London



Anyone who has 8 PhDs and teaches homeopathy is either a quack or an outright liar on either their number of degrees or their products.


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## silentrage (May 13, 2009)

G0DLESSENDEAVOR said:


> This is why people like creationists should never present themselves with a bigger problem than they can solve. There useless theory of how the universe and all living beings came to life does just that for them.



Hehe, I get what your saying, but didn't Newton say something to the effect of "Maybe god gave it a kick" after failing to determine where this series of deterministic(in his view) events we call existence came from?
He had it all worked out, all he needed was "God" to start it off. 

Creationists are something else though. 





Metal Ken said:


> Okay, i found out this device is bullshit.
> Here's the proof (from Quackwatch)--
> 
> 
> Anyone who has 8 PhDs and teaches homeopathy is either a quack or an outright liar on either their number of degrees or their products.



Yeah, I found that out about Nelson too.
I'd like to find out if the inventor for my dad's device is as full of shit. 
Wish me luck?


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## budda (May 13, 2009)

good luck.

this thread is a long fucking read, i didnt even finish it. its 1:50am, im going to bed.

you kids and your big words...  (i understand 98% of what i've read)


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## Stealthdjentstic (May 13, 2009)

This thread is monster huge, good work guys


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## All_¥our_Bass (May 13, 2009)

vampiregenocide said:


> Time Lord maybe?


"He's 'The Doctor'."


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## MF_Kitten (May 13, 2009)

i hate these types of things with a passion. i really do. it´s like acupuncture and homeopathy.

there´s lots of proof, but absolutely NO evidence. it´s like when you go to a psychic, and he/she tells you shitloads of accurate things, and you´re gobsmacked by the accuracy of it, and fail to realize how easy that stuff is.

it saddens me that these humbug medicinal treatments are gaining ground. healing crystals, magnet therapy, all that crap.

the idea is that ancient medicine has been evolved for thousands of years, but if you think about how bullshit all ancient medicine has been throughout the years, it´s oldness shouldn´t be a proof of quality. i mean, seriously, tobacco wasn´t officially bad for you until some time this century.

quicksilver and mercury baths were used as therapy at some point in history. how´s that for ancient science?

no disrespect to you or your dad, it´s not the people who fall for it that are the dickheads, it´s the people marketing it. they´re risking millions (probably billions really) of lives by luring them away from actual medicine and over to complete bullshit, all while feeding their bank accounts.

i would tell you to show the FDA import alert link, along with evidence against alternative medicine in general, to your dad, but people that believe in these things are as impossible to convert as fundamental christians.

i know all this because my mom is a huge alternative medicine/healing believer, and works as a face-to-face psychic AND a telephone psychic. i won´t even begin to disprove all the crap she believes in. i won´t say anything unless she gets into homeopathic medicine or some bullshit like that 

i recommend you watch pretty much all episodes of Penn & Teller´s Bullshit (sure it´s their own opinions, and shouldn´t be taken as gospel, but they make excellent points), and pretty much all Rihard Dawkins documentaries (especially The Enemies Of Reason, which is about alternative medicine. he has one or two other documentaries about the subject as well, i think).

so yeah, i guess that was my rant


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## Adam Of Angels (May 13, 2009)

I'd like to point out that Philosophy by all means effects the way someone thinks, and in some cases, for better or worse, may effect the way MANY people think. Even if you believe that Jesus never existed, his story and philosophy still effects millions to this day. Remember, I said for better or worse. The reality is that every little thing effects everything else to some degree, even if its immeasurable or seemingly useless to you.

Astrology has some undeniable "coincidences" that have supported its validity throughout history. If you believe that we, our planet, our solar system, our galaxy, and our universe are simply results in a random and chaotic sphere of events, then you would of course have no reason to believe that something such as Astrology or any other metaphysical observation would have any place in reality, seeing as how order would be implied. However, there is far more evidence that everything is some form of very complex order, as opposed to not. Because the stars are known to be suns does not mean that their positioning is proven to be irrelevant. Because it doesn't make sense to you does not mean it is meaningless. You can get into subjectivism and such, but that's where philosophy branches from in the first place, and again, philosophy can change the quality of a person's life entirely. You can say that its irrelevant, but what else do you know other than this life?


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## DaveCarter (May 13, 2009)

MF_Kitten said:


> *much truth*



absolutely spot on, every word of it!!


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## HighGain510 (May 13, 2009)

silentrage said:


> He did a diagnostic on my mom, and the results said she was under a lot of financial stress, had a bad temper, and was emotionally hurt by a friend recently.



The machine said all this? I don't even see how that is physically possible for the machine to just pull that she specifically has "financial stress" out of the blue.  I think you could say 99% of people generally suffer from financial stress...


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## silentrage (May 13, 2009)

@Adam
I'm no expert on this, but I think *currently* quantum physics deems the universe as probablistic, meaning there's no sequence of events or combination of elements leading to this precise moment that can be used to predict the next moment or the rest of the history of time. However I don't think it's 100% sure and quantum physics is not yet complete so some still hold the deterministic view. I'm sure someone who knows more about this is about to rip me a new one soon, that's my prediction, lol. 

@highgain
Lmao, that's why I said they could've just used some algorithm that spits out results that are statistically probable. That would be hard to prove unless I hack this thing apart and try to reverse engineer the software, maybe if I can find someone who will do it for free some day. :/ 

And yeah it lists a category and a number that shows what kind of stresses are on you and how severe, and a short description for anything that's not totally self explainatory. And I distinctly remember it spitting out something along the lines of "Emotional trauma caused by a friend or family member or someone close. Betrayal, lie, etc" And that might be the only time I've seen that with a high severity. 

Could be all luck, I'm well aware how the mind can make otherwise mundane things like the occasional accurate diagnosis more than they are as an attempt to justify or "feel better", but I'm still not 100% convinced either way yet, I'll just try to be more objective in my observation from now on. 

@Kitten
I'll definitely show it to him, but he'll definitely cite that it's by a different manufacturer and different inventor, so I think I'll give health canada a call and find out what their stance is on the specific brand my dad has, I want to be sure because this may be hard to accept otherwise.


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## Adam Of Angels (May 13, 2009)

silentrage said:


> @Adam
> I'm no expert on this, but I think *currently* quantum physics deems the universe as probablistic, meaning there's no sequence of events or combination of elements leading to this precise moment that can be used to predict the next moment or the rest of the history of time. However I don't think it's 100% sure and quantum physics is not yet complete so some still hold the deterministic view. I'm sure someone who knows more about this is about to rip me a new one soon, that's my prediction, lol.


 
Right - currently it is accepted that seemingly local events are effected by non-local events. There's a better way to word that, but the illustration is basically the same. However, science is all about explaining events and shedding light on what was once unexplainable. So, simply by logic, we can draw the conclusion that there is some sort of underlying natural force or direction that ties non-local events together, given even the most basic laws of physics.

Edit: What I mean is that even if we're deciding that at a very microscopic level, nothing is defind, at some measurement, things are defined. Some energetic direction is orchestrating these defined aspects of reality.


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## silentrage (May 13, 2009)

I've looked into both sides of the arguement, and it seems the answer is definitely maybe.
So if it is deterministic like a giant quantum automaton, and you somehow know the rules to the whole thing in the form of a mathematical formula, and you have enough information to plugin the formulas, then can you KNOW the future? 
I think this is what iChing is supposed to be, I'd study it but I suck at math. :/

I'd love to hear your thoughts on acupuncture as well.
I've always taken for granted it works because I lived in China and every hospital offers them, state or privately owned, yet i seems highly controversial over here.
I'm under the impression that's it's slowly but steadily getting mainstream recognition, but I'm not about that entirely, could be just wishful thinking.

Does this hold any water? 
http://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...serid=10&md5=f7b552d5509e75fedab1a47181eeadf2

PS. Found this from what seems like a biased source, but it's interesting and worth looking into, which I'm doing now. 

"It was not until the 1940s that a German doctor, Reinhold Voll, and a Japanese doctor, Yoshio Nakatani, began doing electro-metric point measurements on the body and documented that acupuncture points represent points of least resistance on the body's surface. This was the beginning of acupuncture's acceptance in the West. Much research followed this initial work, verifying the existence of acupuncture meridians and exposing a gaping hole in Western medical science."


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## Adam Of Angels (May 13, 2009)

There is a form of photography that was developed sometime in the last century called Kirelean photography. With it, what is traditionally known as the human Aura can be viewed. Some traditions explain the aura as multi-layered, but at the very least, this type of photography pickups up on the most immediate subtle energy body, an energy body which is also measured by modern medicine in some cases. 

What's cool about this discovery is that there are 7 major light shafts that stand out - perfectly correlating with the 7 chakras (which are recognized by many traditions throughout history). Additionally, there's a great deal of smaller light shafts at very symmetrical points on the body that line up perfectly with a traditional accupuncture chart. 

Accupuncture is meant to work with energetic blockages. When an energetic blockage is relieved, the rest of the system is thought to be able to function normally/healthily. This doesn't really go against accepted ways of thinking at all - the body, a material existence of some kind, is obviously energetically sustained by the same energies that sustain the rest of our concrete universe (in other words, the energies that underly everything we know to be physical reality). If there were an inconsistency in this energetic flow, from a logical point of view, it would manifest as an inconsistency in the function of the body. These so called accupunture points represent what we could call, for all intents and purposes, the contact points. If you ask me, this isn't a bunch of bullshit, its just outside of the current paradigm. 

"Scientific" types get horribly pissed off when people buy into these ideas, but even science explains these same concepts in different (and sometimes understated) ways. Its only when people say to themselves "This information is true, but it makes absolutely no difference in my life and the way I go about my daily activities" that the connections aren't made.


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## Setnakt (May 13, 2009)

Adam Of Angels said:


> If you believe that we, our planet, our solar system, our galaxy, and our universe are simply results in a random and chaotic sphere of events, then you would of course have no reason to believe that something such as Astrology or any other metaphysical observation would have any place in reality, seeing as how order would be implied. However, there is far more evidence that everything is some form of very complex order, as opposed to not. Because the stars are known to be suns does not mean that their positioning is proven to be irrelevant. Because it doesn't make sense to you does not mean it is meaningless. You can get into subjectivism and such, but that's where philosophy branches from in the first place, and again, philosophy can change the quality of a person's life entirely.



You're making it sound like I'm an ambassador to the shrieking, mindless chaos of nothingness here. "Chaos" isn't necessarily "random," chaos itself can be predictable. Furthermore I never argued that the stars "randomly" drift around in space and that there couldn't ever be any kind of pattern to their movements, and I certainly never posited that you should give into intellectual defeatism. Bear in mind however that simply because there is "meaning" to their movements doesn't mean divining the way the stars move around the galaxy is going to tell you what you want to know about who's going to win the next football game, or the price of tea in China, or who you're going to marry, or if there's going to be a drought next season. In that sense you shouldn't expect it to be particularly practically meaningful to you. Unless you just really like star charts.

My position against astrology isn't that it makes predictions, but rather that its predictions are *wrong*. It's a thin veneer of meaningless superstition over some very cynically arranged psychological commonalities. You can read 10 horoscopes to the same people and they can all correspond to different signs of the zodiac and they'll all say they're totally amazed at how accurate they are. Wow! How did you totally know that I have self-esteem issues and am looking for new career opportunities and I've had relationship problems? Uh, because everyone has?



Adam Of Angels said:


> You can say that its irrelevant, but what else do you know other than this life?


This sounds like an empty statement. What I know of this life tells me that there's no reason to suspect the existence of any other, so we shouldn't just throw our hands in the air and start preaching astrology just because we want astronomy to be more personally relevant to "the working man."


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## silentrage (May 13, 2009)

Setnakt said:


> You're making it sound like I'm an ambassador to the shrieking, mindless chaos of nothingness here. "Chaos" isn't necessarily "random," chaos itself can be predictable. Furthermore I never argued that the stars "randomly" drift around in space and that there couldn't ever be any kind of pattern to their movements, and I certainly never posited that you should give into intellectual defeatism. Bear in mind however that simply because there is "meaning" to their movements doesn't mean divining the way the stars move around the galaxy is going to tell you what you want to know about who's going to win the next football game, or the price of tea in China, or who you're going to marry, or if there's going to be a drought next season. In that sense you shouldn't expect it to be particularly practically meaningful to you. Unless you just really like star charts.
> 
> My position against astrology isn't that it makes predictions, but rather that its predictions are *wrong*. It's a thin veneer of meaningless superstition over some very cynically arranged psychological commonalities. You can read 10 horoscopes to the same people and they can all correspond to different signs of the zodiac and they'll all say they're totally amazed at how accurate they are. Wow! How did you totally know that I have self-esteem issues and am looking for new career opportunities and I've had relationship problems? Uh, because everyone has?
> 
> ...



Lmao, I have to agree about the horoscope astrology aspect, I mean MAYBE at one point in time some people did studies and tried to corrolate the position of stars in the sky with occurrences on earth, but the way it is now on news papers and magazines is just retarded, they're basically saying there are only 12 types of people and they all have the same luck every month??? lawl.

I think the astrology in classic chinese literature is in the same vein as quantum theories of deterministic casuality in that with enough information about the past and present the future can be very accurately predicted. Just balls on a pool table, so to speak. 

How exactly they can do this through looking at the stars is way beyond me, hopefully I have some time in this lifetime to look into it.

If I have to guess it'd be due to the sheer number of stars and the vast portions of the universe they occupy providing better accuracy when corrolating to events on the earth than, say looking at flakes of sand on a beach? 

I'm sure I've read about historical events that were predicted by astrology, at least in chinese historical records, I'll see if I can find some. I know it won't be enough to justify as scientific evidence, but it's better than nothing. 

Regarding his "this life" remark. I know about occam's razor et al, but the way I look at it is this. 
1. You can't systematically disprove the possibility reincarnation. 
2. There could be billions of people in the world who believe in reincarnation, mostly in India and China, so there IS a reason to consider the possibility that it exists. 

Lastly, why don't we try to cut down on the veiled hostility and name calling in this thread? I'm of the mindset that you can learn something from anyone , and there's no need to shun any opinions, we can all disagree in a civil manner.


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## CapenCyber (May 13, 2009)

silentrage said:


> I think the astrology in classic chinese literature is in the same vein as quantum theories of deterministic casuality in that with enough information about the past and present the future can be very accurately predicted. Just balls on a pool table, so to speak.



I may be wrong on this but I'm pretty sure that quantum mechanics does not allow for very accurate prediction, at small enough levels things stop being either in one place or another, only a probability is known.

For instance, take an electron "spinning" around inside an atom. Most people think of an electron as a hard ball orbiting the nucleus like a planet around a star, actually the best we can do is assign a probability of the electron being in each place around the atom, before we interfere (eg by measurements) it is actually simultaneously in every state at once, this is the Schrodinger's cat analogy.




silentrage said:


> Regarding his "this life" remark. I know about occam's razor et al, but the way I look at it is this.
> 1. You can't systematically disprove the possibility reincarnation.
> 2. There could be billions of people in the world who believe in reincarnation, mostly in India and China, so there IS a reason to consider the possibility that it exists.



1. No, but the burden of proof lies with the originator of the theory, there is no "burden of dis-proof" with the sceptic. If we are to believe everything that cannot theoretically be disproved then we will have to add an unlimited amount of new theories.
2. Mass stupidity/faith is not at all empirical evidence. Hundreds of times "most" people have believe something incorrect eg: the sun orbiting the earth, flat earth, smoking being harmless etc...


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## silentrage (May 13, 2009)

CapenCyber said:


> I may be wrong on this but I'm pretty sure that quantum mechanics does not allow for very accurate prediction, at small enough levels things stop being either in one place or another, only a probability is known.
> 
> For instance, take an electron "spinning" around inside an atom. Most people think of an electron as a hard ball orbiting the nucleus like a planet around a star, actually the best we can do is assign a probability of the electron being in each place around the atom, before we interfere (eg by measurements) it is actually simultaneously in every state at once, this is the Schrodinger's cat analogy.


I understand this, and I think only a small percentage of the science community holds the deterministic view, but it's there none the less. 
It used to be a majority view before quantum mechanics was discovered. 




> 1. No, but the burden of proof lies with the originator of the theory, there is no "burden of dis-proof" with the sceptic. If we are to believe everything that cannot theoretically be disproved then we will have to add an unlimited amount of new theories.
> 2. Mass stupidity/faith is not at all empirical evidence. Hundreds of times "most" people have believe something incorrect eg: the sun orbiting the earth, flat earth, smoking being harmless etc...


[/quote]

Hey, I can't disagree with that, and I won't even try to prove astrology or reincarnation, I merely pointed out why people might be inclined to believe in it. For all I know there ARE an unlimited amount of new theories out there, but people stick to a few popular ones. Freewill, creativity, despair, they're all factors. You can laugh at them but I personally wouldn't want to live in a world where you dare not believe anything that's not thoroughly tested in a lab. 

It's not empirical evidence and I believe I stressed that I wasn't passing it off as such. It's just interesting how so many people can arrive at the same conclusions, about heaven and hell, karma, other lives, divine beings, etc. You can say it's stupidity or mass hysteria but when there are people believing in this "crap" who are intelligent, educated, and otherwise logical, then there may be deeper implications involved.


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## Adam Of Angels (May 13, 2009)

Setnakt, you for some reason assumed that I was talking to you. I really was only stating my opinion on a few of the topics that were brought up in this thread. I respectfully read and enjoyed your comments the whole way through this thread.

Silentrage - I actually have an unshakable belief in reincarnation. My comment was pointing out that even the minute details of this reality have full potential to be relevant to us because this is the reality we currently seem to occupy (and according to some of us, the only reality that we ever occupy).


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## MF_Kitten (May 13, 2009)

the guys that represent acupuncture in the modern world, over in china, has said that acupuncture works "if you believe in it"

i´m pretty sure you don´t have to believe in medicine to make it work 

when it comes to science, there´s evidence, and there´s bullshit. things can only be one of these things, but they may also end up passing from one state to the other.

yeah


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## Adam Of Angels (May 13, 2009)

The medicine you're talking about has side effects, though. That's a big difference. Something may cure your pain, but hurt your liver. Like I said before - if the placebo effect can take place in order to make a medication work, can it also take place to make it not work? So maybe you DO have to believe in medicine to make it work. It would be kind of silly to rule out the effects of consciousness because its really the only thing that we know to underly reality (may sound empty, but without it, we wouldn't exist as we know it, and science is all about defining what exists as we know it).

Edit: I guess I never really commented on the original subject so: This device sounds like some sort of futuristic ET technology. I've never heard of it, although I've heard of similar concepts. I'd need to know more about it before I can form an opinion, but as of now, it really doesn't seem to hold a whole lot of ground. Your story is definitely interesting, though, and I'd like to hear more if they come about.


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## silentrage (May 13, 2009)

You're pretty fixated on acupuncture being some kind of voodoo dude, but I think western medicine is starting to accept it. I read about this somewhere, will post it when I dig it up. 

Also western medicine's understanding of some diseases like cancer is flawed. I read a few papers published by doctors in as early as the 70s on the source of cancer. 

Most "treatments" you can get for it solely revolve around fighting the symptoms, radiation, chemo, pain meds, surgery to remove tumors, etc, without recognizing that it's stress induced imbalance in the body that cause some embryonic cells left over from birth and are all over the body to mutate into cancerous cells that retain some embryonic cell properties. 
This is why sometimes you find teeth, finger nails or other body parts in tumors. 

It's been a while since I read it so I might not have gotten that completely right, but it's the gist of it.

If this is accurate, then I believe traditional Chinese medicine may be more effective in fighting cancer, because it emphasizes on using diet to slowly and naturally restore the body to healthy conditions. According to herbal medicine, basically anything you can eat is a medicine, how and when you use it just depends on what ails you. 

Cheeseburgers and fries don't count, only NATURAL things. 



Adam Of Angels said:


> The medicine you're talking about has side effects, though. That's a big difference. Something may cure your pain, but hurt your liver. Like I said before - if the placebo effect can take place in order to make a medication work, can it also take place to make it not work? So maybe you DO have to believe in medicine to make it work. It would be kind of silly to rule out the effects of consciousness because its really the only thing that we know to underly reality (may sound empty, but without it, we wouldn't exist as we know it, and science is all about defining what exists as we know it).
> 
> Edit: I guess I never really commented on the original subject so: This device sounds like some sort of futuristic ET technology. I've never heard of it, although I've heard of similar concepts. I'd need to know more about it before I can form an opinion, but as of now, it really doesn't seem to hold a whole lot of ground. Your story is definitely interesting, though, and I'd like to hear more if they come about.



Science is all about finding God. 

I'll update any new findings here.


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## CapenCyber (May 14, 2009)

silentrage said:


> You're pretty fixated on acupuncture being some kind of voodoo dude, but I think western medicine is starting to accept it. I read about this somewhere, will post it when I dig it up.



No it isn't! Maybe in the US where they will provide it if people are willing to pay for it they are. In countries with state funded healthcare all these therapies are still very much disregarded, as they have no evidence.



silentrage said:


> Also western medicine's understanding of some diseases like cancer is flawed. I read a few papers published by doctors in as early as the 70s on the source of cancer.



Oh dear, please, link them, these will be good for a chuckle. So since the 70s we have just been stumbling around not knowing about the source of cancer have we, so how come survivability even in the last 10 years has increased significantly?



silentrage said:


> Most "treatments" you can get for it solely revolve around fighting the symptoms, radiation, chemo, pain meds, surgery to remove tumors, etc, without recognizing that it's stress induced imbalance in the body that cause some embryonic cells left over from birth and are all over the body to mutate into cancerous cells that retain some embryonic cell properties.
> This is why sometimes you find teeth, finger nails or other body parts in tumors.



Oh my god...
This actually made me laugh. Of course modern treatments for cancer are there to treat the cancer, chemotherapy often makes patients feel worse for gods sake! Do you have any idea how chemotherapy works?!?! Or radiotherapy?! It does work, and bloody well too, go away and look at cancer death rates in the last 50 years, not on single drop on the graph is attributable to an "alternative" therapy
You're saying that cancers are cause by "stress imbalances"? So we can just throw all the research of the last hundred or so years out the window then?

The part you mentioned about tumours with hair and skin and teeth etc do exist yes, they are called Teratomas and they are not at all caused by stress imbalances. They, like all cancers are caused by mutations of protooncogenes with serve to turn off inhibitory cell regulatory pathways and in other mutations also activate replication pathways. This is all established fact, please go into a cancer research facility which has helped save millions of lives in recent times and tell them that they're wasting their time and cancer is caused by stress imbalances, please do. Oh, and film their reaction for the rest of us too.



silentrage said:


> It's been a while since I read it so I might not have gotten that completely right, but it's the gist of it.



It's also been a while since anyone even diverted more than a moments notice to these baloney therapies so do yourself a favour and look up some recent research.



silentrage said:


> If this is accurate, then I believe traditional Chinese medicine may be more effective in fighting cancer, because it emphasizes on using diet to slowly and naturally restore the body to healthy conditions. According to herbal medicine, basically anything you can eat is a medicine, how and when you use it just depends on what ails you.



Firstly, this isn't accurate. As I have said before, the surge in life-expectancy has happened exactly as modern science and medicine have grown.

Chinese medicine had 5000 years to sort itself out and get results and it hasn't!

Anyway, I can't keep writing these long posts, I have exams in 2 weeks.


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## silentrage (May 14, 2009)

Lol, why do I have the feeling that you automatically assumed that when I say "imbalance" I'm talking about the some kind of energy field or aura or past life or other voodoo?

Here's my limited knowledge of cancer treatments, feel free to correct me.

Chemotherapy tries to target cancer cells and kill them, while killing a good portion of healthy cells in the process, is that right? Radiation therapy is similar, no? It's super effective in the short term, but it does damage to your bonemarrows because they also divide rapidly.
Then there's the antibiotic component that inhibits infections, right?

So if you could incorporate certain herbs into your diet that can have similar effects of inhibiting rapid cell division and preventing infections and won't cause harm to healthy cells, is that not a good long term alternative?

There is a trigger that turns healthy cells into cancer cells, and cancer treatments tries to kill the cancer cells while avoiding damaging healthy cells, which is the symptom or result of mutations, not the cause, correct?

As for the trigger, if I remember correctly, it can be carcinogens, viral or fungal infections, pollutants taken in from diet or the environment, or any number of things that puts undue stress on your bodily functions, most importantly the immune system. 
This coupled with an unhealthy lifestyle, negative emotions, and other factors, increase the likelihood of cancer mutations in healthy cells. Of course genetic predisposition is a factor too. 

Again I could be totally wrong, in which case you tell me what exactly causes cancer and how we cure it from the *root*, that's something I've always wanted to know. 

Like I said about Chinese medicine, it tries to deal with diseases through purely natural means. It means it will be slow, but it will also not cause any side effects or harm to your body like most if not all modern medicine will. 

Modern medicine is very effective at treating diseases, I never disputed that, but people are living such unhealthy lifestyles and so ignorant about their state of health that by the time they find out they have cancer, any long term treatment will not be fast enough to save them. You can cut the tumor out, or laser it, or kill it with chemicals, and feel you're free from cancer, but if you continue to live the life you did, then there's no guarantee whatsoever that it won't just come back again.

And again I have to point out, in YOUR view Chinese medicine is bullshit and only pedaled by shady looking chinamen in backalleys or wooden sheds of the filthiest streets in China town with dead hookers strewn about like used toys, but in China every hospital has a herbal medicine and acupuncture department that deals and treats patients on a daily basis. This is one thing I didn't _hear_ about.


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## CapenCyber (May 14, 2009)

silentrage said:


> Chemotherapy tries to target cancer cells and kill them, while killing a good portion of healthy cells in the process, is that right? Radiation therapy is similar, no? It's super effective in the short term, but it does damage to your bonemarrows because they also divide rapidly.
> Then there's the antibiotic component that inhibits infections, right?



Nearly, chemo/radio therapy target any cell which divides quickly by damaging or disrupting cell division, this is why people are sick and lose hair because gut and hair cells also divide quickly. Of course cancer cells divide very quickly also. Yeah, in the long term these treatments can predispose to more cancers but without these treatments you won't even survive till the long term so it's still worth it.

There are also the more recent hormonal therapies such as hercepin (trastuzumab I think) which target specific types of cancers. For instance breast tissue growth is sensitive to oestrogen, if the cancers derive from cells of certain types of tissue they too are sensitive to oestrogen. Therefore by blocking the oestrogen receptor from being stimulated the growth of these cancers can be slowed. 

Contrary to what most people think surgery is still by far the number one treatment modality. Radiotherapy is often used to clean up and make sure no stray cells are left and chemotherapy is comparitively not used very often at all. Of course the treatment is determined by the type of cancer and chemo is first line in a few types. 



silentrage said:


> So if you could incorporate certain herbs into your diet that can have similar effects of inhibiting rapid cell division and preventing infections and won't cause harm to healthy cells, is that not a good long term alternative?



There are certain plant chemicals which can help treat cancer. An old and effective group are called the Vinca Alkaloids. I am not aware of a single plant or herb which contains a chemical which can specifically target cancer cells. Generally chemo does not selectively target cancer cells, it targets ALL cells, just the effect is greatest on cancer cells.

In any case, when plants are found to contain substances which might help fight cancer the specific chemicals are extracted and refined so a clean, metered dose can be given, otherwise you'd have to say, "eat 10 leaves of X plant a day" which would not be a predictable dose.



silentrage said:


> There is a trigger that turns healthy cells into cancer cells, and cancer treatments tries to kill the cancer cells while avoiding damaging healthy cells, which is the symptom or result of mutations, not the cause, correct?



I'm not sure I understand this sentence, there are triggers yeah, but I don't know what you are referring to with, "which is the symptom or result of mutations, not the cause, correct?"



silentrage said:


> As for the trigger, if I remember correctly, it can be carcinogens, viral or fungal infections, pollutants taken in from diet or the environment, or any number of things that puts undue stress on your bodily functions, most importantly the immune system.
> This coupled with an unhealthy lifestyle, negative emotions, and other factors, increase the likelihood of cancer mutations in healthy cells. Of course genetic predisposition is a factor too.



This is fine apart from a few bits:
Define "stress on bodily functions", in a physical and biochemical perspective yes, but not stress as in "I have a lot of work to do etc"
Negative emotions have not been shown to increase the chance of cancer.



silentrage said:


> Again I could be totally wrong, in which case you tell me what exactly causes cancer and how we cure it from the *root*, that's something I've always wanted to know.



Curing cancer is so difficult because they are in effect the patients own cells that are killing them. Your immune system finds telling malignant and somatic (your body's normal) cells apart to be very difficult since the mutation affects the DNA right at the heart of the cell, and from the outside there may be no different proteins on the surface to tell them apart. 



silentrage said:


> Like I said about Chinese medicine, it tries to deal with diseases through purely natural means. It means it will be slow, but it will also not cause any side effects or harm to your body like most if not all modern medicine will.



Modern medicines also (in the vast majority) treat the body via natural means. Most medicines are found in some guise in the human body already. Even chemicals which are synthetic affect natural chemical pathways. Chinese medicine may be slow, natural, free from side effects etc but unfortunatley it also doesn't actually work. 



silentrage said:


> Modern medicine is very effective at treating diseases, I never disputed that, but people are living such unhealthy lifestyles and so ignorant about their state of health that by the time they find out they have cancer, any long term treatment will not be fast enough to save them. You can cut the tumor out, or laser it, or kill it with chemicals, and feel you're free from cancer, but if you continue to live the life you did, then there's no guarantee whatsoever that it won't just come back again.



I totally agree that people are living unhealthily, but even if we were all saints cancer would still be a huge problem.



silentrage said:


> And again I have to point out, in YOUR view Chinese medicine is bullshit and only pedaled by shady looking chinamen in backalleys or wooden sheds of the filthiest streets in China town with dead hookers strewn about like used toys, but in China every hospital has a herbal medicine and acupuncture department that deals and treats patients on a daily basis. This is one thing I didn't hear about.



Ummm, I never said anything about back alleys or filthy streets, hookers etc. All I said was it has no evidence that it works, that is why it is baloney. If some chinese therapy shows that it does work then there will be no issue in adopting it. Western medicine is all about using things that have been shown to work, chinese medicine has so far not been shown to work.


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## silentrage (May 14, 2009)

CapenCyber said:


> Nearly, chemo/radio therapy target any cell which divides quickly by damaging or disrupting cell division, this is why people are sick and lose hair because gut and hair cells also divide quickly. Of course cancer cells divide very quickly also. Yeah, in the long term these treatments can predispose to more cancers but without these treatments you won't even survive till the long term so it's still worth it.
> 
> There are also the more recent hormonal therapies such as hercepin (trastuzumab I think) which target specific types of cancers. For instance breast tissue growth is sensitive to oestrogen, if the cancers derive from cells of certain types of tissue they too are sensitive to oestrogen. Therefore by blocking the oestrogen receptor from being stimulated the growth of these cancers can be slowed.
> 
> ...


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## Adam Of Angels (May 14, 2009)

In pretty recent discoveries, we've made more sense of the purpose of the so called "Junk DNA" that makes up the majority of our DNA. Its been tested and proven that when someone is in a positive mood that the DNA basically curls up and becomes a tight strand, almost as if it were then more receptive as a coil. When someone is in a negative mood, the DNA unfurls itself. I don't think its too far off that we'll all be reading about this in much more detail and understanding it as fact, because what it implies is phenomenal to our current paradigm. 

That being said - Stress very much does cause cancer. Of course, there are various other sources, but it all essentially boils down to some form of stress whether on the physical body or the mind (which, when minding what I just said about DNA, is the same thing). The only thing that seperates so called physical reality and our mind/consciousness is the belief that the two are seperate. You observe from your perspective, not from an absolute perspective. We all do this, and thus, its our form of experience. If that can be understood at all, then its not too terribly difficult to understand that something like cancer can be caused by stress.


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## silentrage (May 14, 2009)

Can you post up an article or two about that junk DNA research?


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## CapenCyber (May 14, 2009)

Adam Of Angels said:


> Its been tested and proven that when someone is in a positive mood that the DNA basically curls up and becomes a tight strand, almost as if it were then more receptive as a coil. When someone is in a negative mood, the DNA unfurls itself. I don't think its too far off that we'll all be reading about this in much more detail and understanding it as fact, because what it implies is phenomenal to our current paradigm.




Please cite your sources, they should be easy to find.

Otherwise I'm afraid I'm very, very close to calling you insane over this statement.


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## Setnakt (May 14, 2009)

All this talk of "negative moods" strikes me as victim blaming. There is no such thing as a "bad" emotion, we all have emotions; stress can cause many forms of harm, but I think it's pretty clear that if you get cancer, it's not because you weren't thinking pretty thoughts.


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## silentrage (May 14, 2009)

So you would not agree with these statements about anger then?

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]"When someone becomes angry, their heart rate usually increases; as does their rate of respiration - which also becomes more laboured. Blood pressure rises, the digestive processes are suspended; and as blood is drawn away from the liver, stomach and intestines to flow to the central nervous system and the muscles, the individual's surface temperature rises and they may feel flushed. Their muscles tense, they become agitated, restless - to varying degrees, hyperactive. They may find they are grinding their teeth, clenching their fists, they raise their voices, feel like their are 'fit to burst' - but also they can feel (in true Incredible Hulk style) that they are somehow stronger than normal, and full of energy. [/FONT] [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]This build up of tension, if not released (i.e. as rage/violence - be it physical or verbal) can have serious physiological impact on the body. However, it also seems that 'letting it all out' - be it by ranting and raving, punching pillows, or verbally/physically attacking others - also has a detrimental impact on the individual's own body systems (aside, that is, from any damage caused when you miss the pillow and hit the wall, or when the individual you are venting your anger on retaliates).[/FONT]​ [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]As we will see below, anger - whether expressed or suppressed - can make you sick."

"Anger May Cause Stroke" 
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/4916

Negative Emotion and Heart diseases
http://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...serid=10&md5=a7079b30a327cefac0abe627b572e6b7

Edit: Lol, guess I'm gonna have to eat my own words, looks like there is no evidence suggesting a link between CANCER and emotions.
There is a study that shows this, but they measured patient's emotional states with a questionaire, I'm not sure that's the most scientific method, lol. 


What about prevention though?
http://www.itmonline.org/arts/cancemo.htm
Can you guys tell if this guy has real credentials or not? 

[/FONT]​
P.P.S. 
I'm reading The Universe In A Nutshell and something occurred to me.
1. Our universe is supposed to have an event horizon just like a blackhole, a boundary where due to the rapid expansions after the big bang, light from outside can never reach us because the rate of expansion would be greater than the speed of light. 

2. There seems to be entropy, or a decay in the observable universe where stars seem to be burning away energy faster than new stars are forming. 
Blackholes also decay, from hawking radiation or zero point fluctuations.

So from those parallels, is there a chance that we live inside a giant blackhole?


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## Adam Of Angels (May 15, 2009)

I've been real fuckin sick for the last few days so I haven't participated in this discussion real actively, but I did just come across an article/blog that pieces together the stuff on DNA I was talking about pretty well: Divine Cosmos - Groundbreaking Russian DNA Discoveries

I did a quick search on the subject and I came up with a few links that had essentially the same information, but didn't get far enough/spend enough time to pull up actual 1st hand write-ups on the experiments themselves. Even if I had though, you'll either understand and accept this stuff or not. If you don't see it as possible, then even talking to the people conducting these experiments won't convince you, so I'm not entirely sure that there's a whole lot I'm going to be able to bring to your attention in that regard. I've got a pretty solid working understanding of all of this stuff and would be more than happy to give further explanations on some of the implications of it all, if anyone is interested. If you're not interested, its simply not going to make any sense to begin with, which I'm fine with as well.


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## silentrage (May 15, 2009)

Nevermind, it works through a proxy.

This stuff is really fascinating, but even for me it's hard to believe in any of it without SOME kind of evidence aside from those diagrams.


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## Adam Of Angels (May 15, 2009)

I've actually read some articles that have given links to some of the 1st hand, important material. I'm going to lay down for a bit, but later on I'll try to dig some of that stuff up. I realize that its a bit hard to swallow for some, but this material DOES make a lot of sense. Again, it's just outside of the current paradigm, and perspective means everything. I've been researching and experimenting with the information that makes up my own personal paradigm for so long that I'm a bit non-chalant about spitting out bits and pieces of it. My appologies for that


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## silentrage (May 15, 2009)

No prob, I already have an overactive imagination, so I'd like hard evidence from time to time to keep myself grounded.

I'm hoping for some quantitative experimental data on those, then my mind will truly be blown.

But for now the articles will make for some KICKASS story ideas.


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## CapenCyber (May 16, 2009)

Adam Of Angels said:


> I realize that its a bit hard to swallow for some, but this material DOES make a lot of sense.



Haha, for a person involved in evidence based reasoning it is hard to swallow. Also as someone who knows a fair bit about how the human body works (including DNA) I have found that article to not make any sense at all. It is entirely conjecture or "proven" by one off tests in an uncontrolled environment that have not been reproduced anywhere. Seriously, I'd be on the floor in hysterics if only the fact that this sort of tripe is being taken at all seriously didn't depress me so much.



Adam Of Angels said:


> Again, it's just outside of the current paradigm, and perspective means everything.



"Just outside"; seriously are you having a laugh? This is batshit fucking insane.


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## Adam Of Angels (May 17, 2009)

An explanation of the fundamental energetic properties of the body's regenerative abilities doesn't make any sense? It may not be complete, but its certainly not headed in the wrong direction. I'm sorry, but being that the subject matter here is a fluctuating, loosely accepted bundle of concepts, and that the theories on universal energy that are being tied into it all are theories that you've not fairly considered with any working understanding, you don't shake me up by calling this material "batshit fucking insane." 

You can study something from the outside for as long as you like, but you may still be very much surprised when you begin to explore the inner workings of the subject. If I were to say that I have a very solid understanding of how our oceans/water-systems function in totality, you could assume that I was entirely too presumptuous, being that we haven't actually explored the vast majority of our waters, regardless of what we think we know about them. From a metaphysical perspective, the same can be said about our DNA, as well as all of existence around us.


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## CapenCyber (May 17, 2009)

Have you even read that ridiculous "paper" that you linked to that was written in Russia? Some of the assumptions they've made and conclusions they're reached are nuts.

"Explanation of the fundamental energetic properties of the body's regenerative abilities" my arse, go away and read up on how DNA actually works, I bet you have never read a real scientific paper which has controls, reproducibility and is published in a peer reviewed journal; If you had you'd know that they do NOT look like that link you posted to which is a bunch of hastily drawn conclusions from incomplete, incorrectly carried out experiments with no controls, no bias elimination and serves only to jump to lend credence to the writers own baseless conjectures.

I am not, nor have ever studies this subject from the outside. Just because I have looked at papers which have REAL, APPLICABLE, RIGOROUS EVIDENCE does not mean that I am somehow an outsider. 

You are the outsider, you give credence to "studies" which have no grounding in reality. 

Also, stop it with this "energies" crap. Unless you're talking about the one represented by "e" in physics (which you're not). In science Energy is a very specific, quantifiable thing, not some generalised term to be brazenly thrown about to make what you're saying seem somehow based in science.

Metaphysical perspectives are in the realm of philosophy, not biology; that deals in facts, our physical world and tangible reality. You seem to have confused the two.

I never said that I know everything about DNA, but even with my limited understanding I can see that you are not a scientist, you do not base what you believe on evidence, but on fantasy.


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## Adam Of Angels (May 17, 2009)

To be clear, I'm talking about the unharnessed, most basic, fundamental energy of the universe. The source of life/existence, if you will. The driving force that is essential to all that exists. It doesn't get any more general than that, so obviously I'm not breaking it down to a "science"/something specific. You seem to be completely misunderstanding me. However, I do believe that science is our attempt to bridge our finite observations with the unlimited, whether or not its a conscious endeavor or goal. 

I haven't accused you of delving into fantasy, and so I wouldn't expect you to do likewise. I don't know all that you know, and I can say for certain that you don't know all that I know. That being said, I'm done conversing with you, seeing as how you're not even trying to show some respect.


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## CapenCyber (May 17, 2009)

Adam Of Angels said:


> To be clear, I'm talking about the unharnessed, most basic, fundamental energy of the universe. The source of life/existence, if you will. The driving force that is essential to all that exists. It doesn't get any more general than that, so obviously I'm not breaking it down to a "science"/something specific. You seem to be completely misunderstanding me. However, I do believe that science is our attempt to bridge our finite observations with the unlimited, whether or not its a conscious endeavor or goal.


 
OK, you can talk about basic, fundamental energies all you want, that's philosophy and I really don't have much interest in that, and more importantly this thread is not about that. This is about reality, what we know to be true by evidence and the search to find out more using experiments and proof. 

You have absolutely mixed philosophy with scientific theory and evidence based accountability. I am talking about provable claims and all medicine, including "alternative" falls within this umbrella. You can claim all you want but without hard evidence you will always fall short, do not claim it is science when it is patently not.



Adam Of Angels said:


> I haven't accused you of delving into fantasy, and so I wouldn't expect you to do likewise. I don't know all that you know, and I can say for certain that you don't know all that I know. That being said, I'm done conversing with you, seeing as how you're not even trying to show some respect.



You would have a hard time calling me a fantasist when I have vast bodies of papers, studies, meta-analyses to back me up. I claim what I do with this evidence as my recourse, you are lacking such a bulwark and as such I am led to believe you have only your own imagination propping up your arguments.

I'm fairly certain you have run out of argument and have pretended to take great offence at what is really a pretty feeble jibe on my part in order to excuse yourself.


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## Adam Of Angels (May 17, 2009)

Dude, you still seem to be misunderstanding me, but more importantly, I'm not interested in what you think I know. I don't understand why you think that matters to me. I'm not actually interested in what you know. I'm actually pretty sick right now and don't feel like mustering up a rebuttle of any kind. I've made some points throughout this thread - some of which were responded to, some of which weren't. I'm throwing in my two cents just as you are. You don't know whether or not I'm a well studied individual who's greatly interested in both empirical scientific studies and metaphysical concepts. I'm not here to convince you one way or another. If you want to go attack a fantasist, go to a church. I'll return to this conversation when I'm feeling a bit better. You can excuse your condescendence.


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## Carrion (May 17, 2009)

"There is a form of photography that was developed sometime in the last century called Kirelean photography. With it, what is traditionally known as the human Aura can be viewed. Some traditions explain the aura as multi-layered, but at the very least, this type of photography pickups up on the most immediate subtle energy body, an energy body which is also measured by modern medicine in some cases."

See: Corona discharge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Human beings are moist. 

"What's cool about this discovery is that there are 7 major light shafts that stand out - perfectly correlating with the 7 chakras (which are recognized by many traditions throughout history). Additionally, there's a great deal of smaller light shafts at very symmetrical points on the body that line up perfectly with a traditional accupuncture chart."

Where did you get this information?

""Scientific" types get horribly pissed off when people buy into these ideas, but even science explains these same concepts in different (and sometimes understated) ways."

Like what?

"The only thing that seperates so called physical reality and our mind/consciousness is the belief that the two are seperate."

Proof? As far as I know, concepts do not exist in empirical reality.


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## silentrage (May 17, 2009)

Carrion said:


> See: Corona discharge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Human beings are moist.



But why? 

Can't say about ALL the chakras, but there's at least one that coincides with an acupuncture point and has quantifiable physical impacts on the human body. The acupuncture point being YinTang aka Third Eye and the Brow Chakra. 

"The journal _Medical Acupuncture_ published a 2005 study entitled "Shenting and Yintang: Quantification Of Cerebral Effects Of Acupressure, Manual Acupuncture, and Laserneedle Acupuncture Using High-Tech Neuromonitoring Methods," by Gerhard Litscher, MDsc. The study was about the electroencephalographic similarities of acupressure induced sedation and general anesthesia, as assessed by bispectral index and spectral edge frequency. Read the study here. The basic result showed similarities measured in the human brain both under sedation using yintang and sedation using anesthesia."


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## Carrion (May 17, 2009)

Interesting read. I wish it provided where the chosen control point was however.

Edit: Oh snap, they actually provide a picture of it. It would be interesting to see the values if the point was a few millimeters from the chakras and the subjects were told it was not a control.


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## silentrage (May 17, 2009)

Carrion said:


> Interesting read. I wish it provided where the chosen control point was however.
> 
> Edit: Oh snap, they actually provide a picture of it. It would be interesting to see the values if the point was a few millimeters from the chakras and the subjects were told it was not a control.



Hmm, pretty sure you can't tell the subject they're getting placebo, or there'd be a psychological factor to consider.


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## Carrion (May 17, 2009)

Well, I am not exactly sure what the patients were told prior to the experiment, but I imagine if they were told when the control and the chakras were being tested, the results would be consistent with a placebo. If the patients weren't told which points were supposed to work and which weren't then I would say this study may prove that acupuncture works independently of the placebo effect. If the point of the study was to show the effectiveness of acupuncture as a placebo, then it certainly shows it works.


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## silentrage (May 17, 2009)

Then I guess the question is if a placebo has real physical effects at a consistent rate, then is it still a placebo.


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## Varcolac (May 19, 2009)

So I heard Tom (CapenCyber) wouldn't be turning up to band practices until his exams were done, and now I find he's arguing about the Quantum Xrroid over the interwebs? Well played sir. Well played. This is actually far more worthwhile than study. 

Wait, shit, I have exams as well. Back to poring over the exploits of 9th century Tibetan emperors for me...

Oh, and that guy who invented the Quantum Biofeedback Paperweight? He's got a pretty good singing voice. You think we should cover this?

[googlevid]2441464197077804024&hl=en&fs=true[/googlevid]

I'll just leave this here. 

Video found by Ben Goldacre of Bad Science . Hilarious and informative site full of a doctor's rants about shitty science in the media and the wonderful world of "alternative medicines."


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## silentrage (May 29, 2009)

Are you a med student too? 
I'm really curious about the whole acupuncture and herbal medicine thing. Is it a prevalent view among medical professionals and academics that it just doesn't work?


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## Varcolac (May 29, 2009)

Hell no, I'm too stupid and irresponsible to be in charge of people's wellbeing. I'm a history student who takes an amateur interest in science. I'm a slut for evidence-based research (can't do history without it!), which mostly proves (unless there's something I missed) that accupuncture is nearly all placebo effect: you'd still feel better if they poked you just about _anywhere_ with a needle. 

"Herbal" medicine is a bit broader. Most opioid painkillers like vicodin are derived from the opium poppy _papaver somniferum_ which has been in Chinese medical dictionaries for centuries. Aspirin's from willow bark. St John's Wort is actually effective against short-term depression. "Herbal" doesn't immediately mean "new-age idiocy;" it's just... stuff from plants. Things usually perform better when the active ingredients are isolated though, which is why people don't start gnawing on tree bark when they have a headache, and why there's more heroin addicts than there ever were opium-smokers.

Cliffnotes: Take herbs with a pinch of salt. Take accupuncture with a truckload.


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## silentrage (May 29, 2009)

Varcolac said:


> Hell no, I'm too stupid and irresponsible to be in charge of people's wellbeing. I'm a history student who takes an amateur interest in science. I'm a slut for evidence-based research (can't do history without it!), which mostly proves (unless there's something I missed) that accupuncture is nearly all placebo effect: you'd still feel better if they poked you just about _anywhere_ with a needle.


Vol 16, #3 - Shenting And Yintang: Quantification Of Cerebral Effects Of Acupressure, Manual Acupuncture, And Laserneedle Acupuncture

Not according to this experiment.

http://www.medicalacupuncture.org/aama_marf/journal/vol16_1/article5.html

And this one shows reproducable, quantifiable changes in the brain caused by acupuncture points stimulation.



> "Herbal" medicine is a bit broader. Most opioid painkillers like vicodin are derived from the opium poppy _papaver somniferum_ which has been in Chinese medical dictionaries for centuries. Aspirin's from willow bark. St John's Wort is actually effective against short-term depression. "Herbal" doesn't immediately mean "new-age idiocy;" it's just... stuff from plants. Things usually perform better when the active ingredients are isolated though, which is why people don't start gnawing on tree bark when they have a headache, and why there's more heroin addicts than there ever were opium-smokers.
> 
> Cliffnotes: Take herbs with a pinch of salt. Take accupuncture with a truckload.


What's the new-age idiotic herbal medicine? I'm not familiar with it, I know Chinese herbal medicine is the study and documentation of the medicinal effects of plants and animals, among other things.


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## CapenCyber (Jun 1, 2009)

silentrage said:


> Vol 16, #3 - Shenting And Yintang: Quantification Of Cerebral Effects Of Acupressure, Manual Acupuncture, And Laserneedle Acupuncture
> 
> Not according to this experiment.
> 
> ...



Oh my god, those 2 "studies" are absolutely laughable, they have more holes than swiss cheese. For my BSc course next year we have to peer review papers and pick holes in them, those 2 will be a lot of fun (and easy) to do, cheers.

On top of that, you have simply cherry picked 2 positive trials. The real results can be made from meta-analyses and sytematic reviews, just go to the Cochrane Collaboration site, that is regarded to be the most accurate, critical and bias/error free collection of systematic reviews ever made. If you are going to just read the brief summary (and not the actual paper) then cite it in an argument use something from there. 

Yes, if you go to acupuncture you feel better, we all know this, tests have PROVEN this. However, it has not been shown that it is improved beyond placebo


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## silentrage (Jun 1, 2009)

I actually read the full studies, but I'm not a med student so how would I know if they're full of holes.  Could you point out some of the most obvious ones? And maybe give me some pointers on what to look for when looking at studies such as these?

Btw, did you just upgrade from "acupuncture is pure bull" to "it works but no better than placebo"?

edit: Ok, so from the first page of reviews, more than half of the trials are poorly designed, or have insufficient patients or data, the remaining half is split, some say acupuncture > placebo, some say they're about the same. 
Is that about the right accessment to take away here?

Wiley Interscience Access Error Page


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## Carrion (Jun 1, 2009)

I'm interested in hearing about some of these holes as well.


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## CapenCyber (Jun 1, 2009)

silentrage said:


> I actually read the full studies, but I'm not a med student so how would I know if they're full of holes.  Could you point out some of the most obvious ones? And maybe give me some pointers on what to look for when looking at studies such as these?



There's a whole load you can assess pretty much at a glance, then there are things you'd have to look up to verify.

To start with look at basic things like blinding (I'm going to use the first trial as an example) at a glance everything seems OK, a test like this should obviously be double-blinded:

"They [the patients] were partly informed about the nature of the investigation and were paid for their participation."

Great, the patients were "partly" informed, what does this mean? Were the patients aware of which stimulus was in an acupuncture place or control, how much exactly did they know? What population was this control group from, how was sampling done? This is extremely important to know to assess confounding factors and to later interpret the findings.
It does not say, but even if you give them the benefit of the doubt that they would not know the control from acupuncture point and they had no confounding interests (eg they might work in acupuncture) there is a much bigger problem in the blinding of the people conducting the trial.

"The investigators recording EEG and AAI data were blinded to the intervention"

Seems OK right, the people taking the measurements were blinded? True, as they should, but:

"To assess the reliability and validity of acupressure and manual needle acupuncture, pressure on both acupoints and the control point was applied by the same Chinese medical doctor experienced in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)."

The guy actually doing the testing is not blinded at all, he really REALLY wants this trial to show that acupuncture works, and he's doing ALL the testing! He knows the control points from the others. He could easily just make bigger movements at the "genuine" acupuncture points and voila you have bigger brain activity at those points.

Another thing is they took readings at one off specific points rather than an average of the time, considering that the value would be constantly moving why choose one point over another?

"After 7.5 minutes of laserneedle acupuncture at acupoint Yintang, the mean (SD) BIS values were 95.4 (4.1). After 5 minutes of acupressure at the control point, the mean (SD) BIS values were 94.2 (4.8)."

Also they are comparing laser and acupuncture with an acuPRESSURE control, so it's completely different, that's not a control at all!

So by this statement the control point worked better! (Lower BIS is better)

Now this BIS thing, this is used to measure brain activity, not anaesthesia as they claim here. In pharmacological anesthesia decreased brain activity happens by way of a hypnotic agent and this will drop the BIS number, but a low BIS does not directly correspond with anesthesia. Values of 20 happen as part of normal sleep and in surgery it's more often around 50, but I doubt you'd stay asleep if someone started cutting your chest open in your sleep. So the over point of this experiment is a bit pointless to me, simply relaxing in the chair will drop this value.

They're very quick to show off the results for the acupressure points, but there's no graph for the control point. They are meant to be comparing the two (although as I said this control point isn't a control at all). 

I can't be arsed to write any more but I recommend: Trick or Treatment?: Alternative Medicine on Trial: Simon Singh, Edzard Ernst: Amazon.co.uk: Books

One of the authors is actually a professor in alternative medicine. I'm not trying to convince you of anything, but it does explain what to look out for in terms of trial design.

Or for a more militant approach (this is funny, but still good an very informative): Bad Science: Ben Goldacre: Amazon.co.uk: Books

There is a lot to assess in trial design and presentation, but it's quite easy to spot the things that need to be present to make it fair.


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## silentrage (Jun 1, 2009)

Good info! 
I'll try to get a hold of those books, might have to resort to swashbuckling.

So what's the best study you've seen that shows the effectiveness of acupuncture over that of a placebo or sham treatments? There are a few on Cochrane that only show slight or moderately positive effects over placebo, nothing too significant. :/


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## CapenCyber (Jun 1, 2009)

Yeah that's the general consensus right now, that acupuncture may work for a few types of pain and nausea, but nothing spectacular, and nothing above conventional treatments.

There are some newer studies happening now which look at new sham needles which don't actually puncture the skin, obviously people know when they've had needles stuck in them so conducting a waterproof trial is pretty hard.

The Cochrane analyses filter out all the poor trials beforehand so probably all the far out ones are not included.


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## Rocapeter (Aug 5, 2009)

Hello,
I am a medical doctor working with alternative medicine since more than 30 years and living in Venezuela.
My interest on this subject arised as I was visited by a lady psycotherapist living in Florida who has the Quantum Epfx device and claims to have obtained wonderful results.
I have to say that over my life (I am now 60) I have spent large amounts of money buying all sorts of devices devoted to healing and... many of them are partially succesfull in its claims and are also a scam! HOw can that be?
Bigger scam I ever had was a Germany machine based on the Mora theory which is quite similar to Quantum Biofeedback. I spent some 25 years ago the sum of 24000 german marks which, as to have a way of measuring what it was, you could bye a brand new sport Mercedes benz with it. When I arrived home I discovered the machine worked... plugged and unplugged. When I say it worked I mean patients felt better after using it -some of them. So I had to solve this puzzle to myself. 
Then I learned quite a few things: 1.- Human brain has the capacity to do all what these manufacters of Quantum B. machine claim. 2.- We owners of human brains can do it, but do not beleive we can do it 3.- We use that part of our brains if we have "something outside" which sustains or backup our beleives. That means that if we have a computer with a fancy software in it and a piece of hardware outside of it which resembles something "scientific" then our brain activates itself to backup what ever the software says it do. That can simultaneously be very effective in terms of medical treatment and a big scam, mainly because we don´t need anything besides our own hardware which is our brains. 
By the way, today I am going to have a further gathering with the lady owner of the machine, which happens to be a very nice, loving human being, which makes even more difficult to me to tell her she has being object of a very large scam -she has paid 25... US $ for the laptop "dedicated computer" and the EPFX device.


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## Senensis (Aug 5, 2009)

I'm sorry but.. you claim to be a "medical doctor" and you just found out about the placebo effect ? Just tell people you are treating them, and depending on the disease and the patient, some will get better. Hell, sometimes, just tell the doctor he is treating the patient with a drug (but give him a placebo instead) and it will work even better.

That's why every medical treatment approved by the FDA (or any serious government run pharmaceutical survey team) has to be proven efficient in double-blind assays versus placebos...


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## JBroll (Aug 6, 2009)

Long story short, don't buy 'quantum *anything*' unless it's a textbook. It's just the newest way of sounding vaguely 'sciencey' without having to have any real content, ideas, or validity.

Jeff


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## loktide (Aug 6, 2009)

JBroll said:


> Long story short, don't buy 'quantum *anything*' unless it's a textbook. It's just the newest way of sounding vaguely 'sciencey' without having to have any real content, ideas, or validity.
> 
> Jeff



this +1000

i don't now how many times i've heard about this kind of shit, but every time it turns out to be the same scam hidden behind a lot of scientific bullshit. the first time i heard it, i got interested so i did a bit of reading, and it turns out that despite the "i heard she was told that her uncle was healed/diagnosed by this thing", there's no scientific or clinical evidence published supporting that this device works. I mean, doesn't "quantum biofeedback" already sound like bullshit to anyone with a fair bit of scientific education?

anybody claiming they have been healed by this, it's just additional proof of how effective "self suggestion" with some people. Any scientist would interpret this therapeutic response as a "placebo effect".


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## silentrage (Aug 6, 2009)

Scam or not, the placebo effect is pretty fucking amazing to me, does anyone know if we're attempting to find reliable ways to control it yet? Wouldn't that be the best medicine?


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## JBroll (Aug 6, 2009)

silentrage said:


> Scam or not, the placebo effect is pretty fucking amazing to me, does anyone know if we're attempting to find reliable ways to control it yet? Wouldn't that be the best medicine?



It's not at all the best medicine unless you have a very odd way of evaluating medicine (for example, one not concerned with high success rates) - if a drug doesn't beat the placebo effect, it has a hard time making it on the market if it's even approved.

Controlling the placebo effect is pretty simple - administer placebos without the patient knowing.

Jeff


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## loktide (Aug 6, 2009)

JBroll said:


> Controlling the placebo effect is pretty simple - administer placebos without the patient knowing.


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## silentrage (Aug 6, 2009)

JBroll said:


> It's not at all the best medicine unless you have a very odd way of evaluating medicine (for example, one not concerned with high success rates) - if a drug doesn't beat the placebo effect, it has a hard time making it on the market if it's even approved.
> 
> Controlling the placebo effect is pretty simple - administer placebos without the patient knowing.
> 
> Jeff



Look, I'm no scientist, so my thinking is probably very naive, but to me it'd be the best medicine if we can figure out the brain function that creates/allows this effect and control it so that it works 100% of the time.


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## JBroll (Aug 6, 2009)

Not all diseases can be destroyed just by the power of our minds. It's handy, but we're already exploiting it *directly* - and short of rewiring the brain to include "frickin' laser beams", as they're called, to destroy diseases with the power of happy thoughts there's not much else to do. The best medicine will always be dependent on the issues to be fixed - expecting one thing to fix everything is probably the most naive part of your thinking (although an understandable one, no doubt, since that would make many things much easier) but also the assumption that, when abandoned by what became modern science, led to medicine that didn't suck as much.

Don't get me wrong - it's handy, but not really promising in terms of research potential ("This grant money will go to giving cancer patients fuck-all to see if hopes and dreams can change their health..."), possible unanswered questions, or any possible status as a 'cure-all' since most diseases and conditions we're going up against don't exactly care how positive we are. The ebola virus doesn't care what you think you're putting into your system, it just turns you into jam; placebos work on occasion, but keep in mind that they're also the standard against which *all medicines* are judged - if you're taking a pill (assuming, of course, real medicine and not garbage like homeopathy or quantum bogochlorines), you can be damned certain it's working better than a placebo would.

Jeff


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## Adam Of Angels (Aug 9, 2009)

The problem with virtually all pills is that they have undesirable side effects. With that in mind, a placebo is more effective overall... however, when it comes down to simply treating the symptom in question, a pill is going to work more often - its just that the side effects may often leave the patient wondering whether or not it was worth it some time down the road. I'm a strong believer that as we evolve, the portions of our minds that allow us to heal ourselves will be much more efficient at doing so.


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## silentrage (Aug 9, 2009)

JBroll said:


> Not all diseases can be destroyed just by the power of our minds. It's handy, but we're already exploiting it *directly* - and short of rewiring the brain to include "frickin' laser beams", as they're called, to destroy diseases with the power of happy thoughts there's not much else to do. The best medicine will always be dependent on the issues to be fixed - expecting one thing to fix everything is probably the most naive part of your thinking (although an understandable one, no doubt, since that would make many things much easier) but also the assumption that, when abandoned by what became modern science, led to medicine that didn't suck as much.
> 
> Don't get me wrong - it's handy, but not really promising in terms of research potential ("This grant money will go to giving cancer patients fuck-all to see if hopes and dreams can change their health..."), possible unanswered questions, or any possible status as a 'cure-all' since most diseases and conditions we're going up against don't exactly care how positive we are. The ebola virus doesn't care what you think you're putting into your system, it just turns you into jam; placebos work on occasion, but keep in mind that they're also the standard against which *all medicines* are judged - if you're taking a pill (assuming, of course, real medicine and not garbage like homeopathy or quantum bogochlorines), you can be damned certain it's working better than a placebo would.
> 
> Jeff



I agree with you on most parts, I wouldn't trust my life to placebo entirely, I'd probably try to use it as a supplement on top of real medicine myself.

But I just think it probably has a physical mechanism that can be studied and controlled, maybe it causes the brain to release chemicals needed to repel diseases, maybe it's able to flip on and off certain unknown genes that help with curing diseases. I'm sure someone much smarter than me have thought of this already, so I guess I'd just like to know that line of thinking have been investigated or not.


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## JBroll (Aug 9, 2009)

The brain doesn't exactly tell the immune system "Hey, I know you can kill this bacterial infestation, but... yeah, we want some pills, so hold back for a bit and we'll see what I can get."

A lot of things can be controlled by the brain, and that is something that's researched, but it's quite impressive by any stretch that modern medicine considers that incredible phenomenon to be the worst-case scenario - think about it that way and everything else is pretty impressive.

Jeff


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## Koshchei (Aug 13, 2009)

Here's how it works:

Quantum Biofeedback = Bullshit scam some snake oil salesman made up, in order to trick: 

a) credulous fools who think that there's something wrong with them
b) people who are actually terminally ill and are desperately grasping at straws

into giving him their money.

A placebo is a psychological treatment that sometimes helps to alleviate psychological illnesses such as stress, where there is no measurable cause, but the symptoms are real, and potentially life-threatening to the patient. There is a lot of controversy in the scientific community about the ethics of administering a treatment to a person, where they can't know that it does nothing, or it stops working.

The difference between the two is that one is a non-functional device made by a thief for the sole purpose of defrauding desperate/naive people (and could end up causing a great deal of harm, if the purchaser chooses to believe in quantum thingies to heal them rather than medicine prescribed by the doctor). The other is a valid treatment for a specific type of diagnosed ailment.



Rocapeter said:


> Hello,
> I am a medical doctor working with alternative medicine since more than 30 years and living in Venezuela.
> My interest on this subject arised as I was visited by a lady psycotherapist living in Florida who has the Quantum Epfx device and claims to have obtained wonderful results.
> I have to say that over my life (I am now 60) I have spent large amounts of money buying all sorts of devices devoted to healing and... many of them are partially succesfull in its claims and are also a scam! HOw can that be?
> ...



You might want to consider applying for the James Randi Million Dollar Challenge, because what you're suggesting seems to me to toe over the line between proven science and woo-woo crackpottery of the Deepak Chopra "the body is a pharmacy" sort. 

Here's a link: James Randi Educational Foundation

PS. It doesn't matter how much you've spent on stuff. It's not material to the research.


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## Adam Of Angels (Aug 14, 2009)

^My response to the bit about "woo-woo crackpottery": 

"If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it." - Albert Einstein


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## JBroll (Aug 15, 2009)

That hardly implies that skullfuckingly stupid ideas automatically have some credence just by being absurd. It takes a lot more than being revolutionary or unusual for an idea to be worth consideration at all - it takes some combination of evidence, explanatory value, logical meaning, mathematical soundness, and, of course, *falsifiability* to be even worth considering. This fails miserably.

Jeff


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## Adam Of Angels (Aug 15, 2009)

It doesn't fail, in the slightest. I'm just combatting the tendency to write something off as over-the-top-crazy just because its "not rational".. doesn't have anything to do with me agreeing with the ramble in question, just that I hate the arrogance of strict, book-informed empiricism.

Additionally, even if I were defending the concepts that were brought up by Rocapeter, he's getting into ideas that can hardly even be touched by modern ways of scientific thinking, so to call it crazy is just as empty of a comment as saying its undoubtedly true.


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## JBroll (Aug 15, 2009)

That is not a good move. If something can't be handled scientifically and worked out in more detail than 'magic', it is worthless until that changes - even the theories of relativity, the greatest achievement of the physicist you quoted above, took years of mathematical development by the greatest minds of the day and demanding observations of several eclipses to be anything but nonsense! This is *exactly* why modern science actually gets shit done! This is why we're having this conversation over computers and not through the post office! 

It's not arrogance to rule things out without evidence and reason, it's the very heart of science itself. All the best ideas modern man has developed through passed through this filter - a good idea can survive these tests, but a bad idea... well, camel, needle, that sort of thing. It is our *duty* to throw things out until good evidence shows up, for many reasons - to throw in two, with little to no evidence and logical foundation (like this one), the idea is not going to be judged with as fair a defense as it may deserve and it does not give us any idea of how useful or deep an event might be.

It is our duty as thinking people to be relentless, cruel bastards with *everything* when trying to advance science. This is not arrogance or closed-mindedness, this is the best way we have of making the most of our time; this is not ruling out ideas arbitrarily, as all ideas must survive great cruelty and criticism to be accepted and we still progress rapidly in every direction we look.

Rocapeter's 'concepts' seem to be nothing more than the placebo effect. If he is, in fact, a 60-year-old doctor we'd all expect him to recognize that right off the bat. His credibility is questionable and his ideas are *far* from things that 'can hardly even be touched by modern ways of scientific thinking' - in fact, they were touchable by ways of scientific thinking that predate the atomic bomb. Be very careful when you say that something can't be dealt with scientifically - chances are not that our scientists are missing some magical little bit of mysticism but that the question is posed improperly. 

Consider that we can figure out what was going on in nearly the first slices of time after the Big Bang, forcibly smash apart the building blocks of matter itself for our own entertainment and curiosity, identify and change many things in genetic blueprints, cure countless diseases that would have been a death sentence not even a century ago... (insert another few pages of scientific advancements here, focusing heavily on the modern physics developments that have proved that wacky ideas aren't written off if they have good reasoning and evidence behind them), and power our home computers through the process of literally destroying the most basic known units of matter - and that we've only really been at this for two centuries! 

Even the most wacky shit that can be backed up reasonably can at least be approached. Even the idea that spacetime itself bends was testable in its father's lifetime. It is far more arrogant to say that something is beyond modern ways of scientific thinking (unless you have a position as a theoretical physicist that you haven't told anyone about) than it is to throw something out until better evidence is given.

Jeff


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## CapenCyber (Aug 15, 2009)

JBroll said:


> Sense



I tried earlier and just gave up, my head hurt after banging it against a wall for so long. 

Sometimes you just have to accept that some people cannot be convinced irrespective of the evidence and you just have to move on.


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## Adam Of Angels (Aug 15, 2009)

I wasn't so much referring to the placebo effect as I was the theories on consciousness (the placebo effect, in my opinion, being a crude example of the implications of these consciousness theories) that don't really meet any current, popular scientific models. Being a sceptic myself, I've done a lot of thinking and studying on both sides of the argument, and both positions result in banging one's head off the wall. With that said, I agree with what you're saying, Jeff. 

However, when considering that (read: if) our consciousness itself is responsible for every aspect of our experience, as well as infinite, our bodies having an untapped ability to self-heal is not really out of the question, but also insignificant in comparison to many other possibilities. Of course, these same concepts of universal consciousness imply that reality is built around and 100% loyal to our collective beliefs/agreements about reality, and therefore there is no tangible/observable interference made by consciousness that makes it observable. This is where the arguments start, but not where the assumption can be made that there is no logic at play. I'm having a hard time really articulating this idea, because the entire point is that it can't accurately be described.


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## JBroll (Aug 16, 2009)

My primary point was that 'combatting the tendency to write something off as over-the-top-crazy just because its "not rational"' is not a battle you can - or even want to - win. You say you're a skeptic, but you seem to be very selective with your skepticism.

The second paragraph... where to begin? What do you mean when you say that our consciousness is 'infinite' - in what regard? How 'infinite'? As for our ability to self heal... it's far from untapped, it just happens to be limited by things like our body's ability to generate parts of itself - it takes a hell of a lot more than willpower to regenerate an arm or bloop away a viral infection. As for your 'concepts of universal consciousness'... there simply isn't enough time, just go back to the drawing board with this stuff. There does not need to be any assumption that logic is at play - if you aren't making your starting points and methods clear, and explaining with at least some sense of coherence the steps between your starting points and 'reality is built around and 100% loyal to our collective beliefs/agreements about reality' there is absolutely no need to even try to find logic, especially given the inherent problem of actually defining consciousness... not to mention justifying the assumption that our consciousness has anything to do with 'reality' in a dictating sense and not simply a receiving one.

I'm not making an assumption that there is no logic at play - I'm simply not assuming that there is, since you haven't exactly demonstrated it. 

Jeff


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## Adam Of Angels (Aug 18, 2009)

JBroll said:


> My primary point was that 'combatting the tendency to write something off as over-the-top-crazy just because its "not rational"' is not a battle you can - or even want to - win. You say you're a skeptic, but you seem to be very selective with your skepticism.


 
As I said, I wasn't necessarily defending the "doctor", I was more or less playing devil's advocate for the sake of principle.



JBroll said:


> The second paragraph... where to begin? What do you mean when you say that our consciousness is 'infinite' - in what regard? How 'infinite'? As for our ability to self heal... it's far from untapped, it just happens to be limited by things like our body's ability to generate parts of itself - it takes a hell of a lot more than willpower to regenerate an arm or bloop away a viral infection. As for your 'concepts of universal consciousness'... there simply isn't enough time, just go back to the drawing board with this stuff. There does not need to be any assumption that logic is at play - if you aren't making your starting points and methods clear, and explaining with at least some sense of coherence the steps between your starting points and 'reality is built around and 100% loyal to our collective beliefs/agreements about reality' there is absolutely no need to even try to find logic, especially given the inherent problem of actually defining consciousness... not to mention justifying the assumption that our consciousness has anything to do with 'reality' in a dictating sense and not simply a receiving one.
> 
> I'm not making an assumption that there is no logic at play - I'm simply not assuming that there is, since you haven't exactly demonstrated it.
> 
> Jeff


 
I think that this is a much more in depth conversation than can be had via a forum. For what its worth at the moment, there's a lot of logic at play here, but not much can be successfully articulated with a monologue or two. Perhaps I'm just being lazy right now, but hopefully sometime we can just have an outright conversation about it.


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