Acupressure given "empirically validated status" by APA
Ok, so it's not strictly acupressure, but it's quite similar. I've been using EFT personally and with clients for years with fantastic success, and so it was nice to get the note today that said EFT qualifies to be labeled empirically proven by the American Psychological Association.
Read that again, all you skeptics: A form of acupressure was ( Read more... )
Read that again, all you skeptics: A form of acupressure was ( Read more... )
So when you have something that sits on the edge of accepted science, and you *know* from tons of personal experience and experimentation that it works, but the official word hasn't gotten back yet, who else can you go to for endorsements? That's where Deepak comes in.
Let me note that I know very little about the man - I think I've read one chapter of one short book that he wrote. I think. He may not have even been the author. But I do know the sphere that he has positioned himself in, and it's interesting to me - if he was right about this, what else might he be right about that hasn't been sufficiently researched yet?
Anyhoo, within his sphere, he has a ton of credibility. This just might be the first time that something he has supported has also been scientifically proven to show results.
And if EFT has proven results, what other types of alternative healing also have some amount of truth attached to them, but we haven't sufficiently researched them yet?
Makes me wonder what else Western medicine has been completely wrong about, since they've been screaming that this kind of stuff is false false false for hundreds of years. The world is a much wider place than we have supposed. :)
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I'd also be a bad choice because I'm not a doctor - but I certainly might be willing to try it, and report anecdotal success and encourage clinical trials.
But I do know the sphere that he has positioned himself in, and it's interesting to me - if he was right about this, what else might he be right about that hasn't been sufficiently researched yet?
The problem is that he endorses *everything*, whether it has results or not, whether there's a reason to think it might work or not. And he keeps endorsing things long after they're disproven, and he writes book after book of word salad explaining "science" by using the word "quantum" a lot and claiming deep meaning out of it.
Deepak Chopra endorsing your product is like TimeCube Guy endorsing your product: It still might be either a good product or a bad product, but the endorsement means nothing because the endorsER demonstrably has no idea what he's talking about.
within his sphere, he has a ton of credibility.
Only because "his sphere" does not value credibility.
This just might be the first time that something he has supported has also been scientifically proven to show results.
While true, that misses that he has supported and continues to support a great many things that have been proven to NOT show results, and he does not distinguish.
And if EFT has proven results, what other types of alternative healing also have some amount of truth attached to them, but we haven't sufficiently researched them yet?
What an excellent question! Which do you think are insufficiently studied?
Because, say, acupuncture? That has results way better than placebo - but it's ALSO been proven that the traditional explanation for why it works is complete bullshit, because you demonstrably aren't "rebalancing chi" using "mystical points" - because it doesn't matter where you stick the needles. Needle placement is irrelevant to results of acupuncture, which we know because we've studied it. We know something is happening, and we know that the traditional explanation is bunk: Science!
Or take homeopathy: Not only can homeopaths not provide an explanation for their claims, nor a consistent argument for why the logical results of their claims are demonstrably not happening, but we've done clinical trials anyway and determined: Identical to placebo, in every way. Homeopathy: proven to be bunk! Science!
Or reiki: Demonstrably no better than placebo. Science!
Or intercessory prayer: Does *nothing* if the target doesn't know about it, actually reduces outcomes slightly in believers if the target does know about it, presumably due to added anxiety. Prayer: bunk! Science!
Yoga: Meditation, relaxion, exercise! Produces real results! Science has shown it (and predicted it) and ALSO demonstrated that you get the same results without the woo. Yoga: Works, but the traditional explanation is bunk. Science!
I'm happy for you that something you like has been proven to have better-than-placebo results. Seriously. My complaint is entirely about the site's choice of spokesmodel: It's like getting Michael Vick to endorse a kennel or Ted Haggard to endorse Catholicism or Stephen Hawking to endorse BowFlex.
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LOL! Yeah, you're probably right. As I said, I know very little about him, except peripherally.
What an excellent question! Which do you think are insufficiently studied?
Because, say, acupuncture?
Or take homeopathy
Or reiki
Or intercessory prayer
Yoga
It was an open-ended question. :) There are tons more of alternative methods out there, many more than I have personally looked at, but I personally use EFT with my clients and nothing else. Partially from lack of time to get in to anything else (2 jobs will do that to you), and partially because I was able to get definite results right away when I used it, both on myself and on clients, so it piqued my interest at a time when I had a little time to study it.
So perhaps those have been sufficiently studied, but I'm betting there are plenty more that haven't. And I am personally less interested in the traditional explanation than I am in actual results, so if it turns up like yoga did, cool.
EFT shows that there is something to the Chinese philosophies of medicine. What exactly that is, I have no idea. Even if they stumbled on some mechanism in the body that they explained in a specious way, there's some kind of validity to the mechanism itself. I'm really curious to see what we can come up with as a deeper explanation. :)
As a complete side note, I have one of the older manuals of EFT as a pdf. I'm not weighing in on the why it works, but if you're interested to read up on what they say about why it works, I'd be happy to mail it to you. The current manual leaves out the full explanation of why it works the way it does. If you're interested, just let me know and I'll fire it off. It was written by an engineer.
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I'm just saying, "alt-med" DOES get studied. The stuff that works becomes "med". The stuff that doesn't remains what can accurately be described as "an alternative to medicine"
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Sort of. I mean, chiropractic has been around for a while and has been studied quite thoroughly, yet many doctors still scream that it's quackery. I'm not saying that all the claims chiropractors make about healing cancer and stuff is completely true, but at the very least, they know about how to heal up a good whiplash. I just don't see traditional medicine give them even that little inch of respect, despite the research to the contrary.
Granted, these doctors are reacting emotionally rather than leaning on the valid research that has been done, but there's enough of them rejecting the research on something new that I can't say that it's been accepted as "med", and it's been around way longer than EFT. Heck, the coverage most insurance companies give to chiropractic is minor and feels somewhat grudging.
*shrug* It's no skin off my nose either way, but I'm just pointing out that it's not as straightforward as your comment seemed to imply. You're just not going to see insurance companies rush out to put EFT practitioners on their policies, nor will you see widespread acceptance. There's too much negative inertia against something that seems so close to acupressure for it to become "med" quickly or easily.
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That's because there are a LOT of quacks in "chiro"
I'm not saying that all the claims chiropractors make about healing cancer and stuff is completely true,
By which I hope you mean "I understand that all the claims some 'chiropractors' make about healing cancer and stuff are completely false, and have been proven to be false".
at the very least, they know about how to heal up a good whiplash
The problem with that is that there are *two* kinds of chiropractors: Those who are basically physical therapists, who are trained, who are licensed, and who are doing stuff that's been tested, works, and won't hurt you.... and then there's untrained "cancer-curing" back-crackers who are likely to seriously injure you through incompetence.
And in a lot of places, there *is* no licensing required, so the quack gets to call himself a chiropractor exactly the way the real doctor does.
It's like.... imagine if there was a store that sells computers. Except instead of COMPUTER computers, they sell cardboard boxes full of rocks. Which they drop on your feet. And in the absence of government regulation and enforcement, you have great difficulty telling these guys from real computer stores until after you lose a toe.
Or if you go to a drug store, pass them a prescription, and they *might* fill it with the right pills, or they might fill it with pills at random, and you have no way of telling because there's no law saying that a pharmacy has to actually dispense the right pills. In some places? That's exactly what chiro is, and the good doctors get lumped in with the quacks because it's very hard to tell the quacks apart sometimes and the quacks will kill you.
Heck, the coverage most insurance companies give to chiropractic is minor and feels somewhat grudging.
That's because insurance companies don't like covering things at all, and chiro tends to be ongoing - it's not something they cover once and you're done, it's something you need to keep going to. OF COURSE insurance companies hate it.
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I will not argue that point even a little. :)
By which I hope you mean "I understand that all the claims some 'chiropractors' make about healing cancer and stuff are completely false, and have been proven to be false".
Here's where I struggle with your statement: the nervous system powers the whole body, and it stems from the spine. Let's imagine I was a telekinetic with super fine-tuned control and a perfect knowledge of human physiology. I could pinch your optic nerve shut, and you would go blind for as long as I held that optic nerve shut. As soon as I let go, you can see again. Voila! I just "cured" your blindness! Except all I really did was stop pinching the nerve shut. There was nothing wrong with your eyes.
So now, imagine your spine has shifted out of whack, pinching shut the nerve that leads to your eyes. Hey ho, you're blind, and no one can fix it! Doctors cannot find anything wrong with your eyes (because there isn't anything wrong with your eyes), and you are stuck as a blind person.
You go see a chiro who adjusts that part of your spine, and hey ho, you're not blind any more. Magic! Except all that happened was allowing the nervous system to do its job again.
This does not mean that all blindness is caused by a pinched nerve, but certainly sometimes it is. Expand that understanding to the rest of the body, and if you have a pinched nerve that prevents your immune system to do its job right, then hey ho, you might have cancer. Put that vertebrae back into place and your immune system suddenly starts doing what it was supposed to do all along, killing the cancer by itself without outside help.
Events like this are most likely rare, but it could easily lead some chiros to conflate their adjustment with "curing cancer", and fuel claims about their abilities farther than what that particular event truly allowed.
Does this make sense? So I cannot say that every single case is false because I can easily envision a rare case where it might not be. There are a host of physical ailments that might be caused by a pinched nerve, preventing the body from doing what it is supposed to do. Why not accept that if a pinched nervous system is the true source of the problem, opening that channel again fixes the issue? It just doesn't mean that they can fix things that don't source from a nervous system operating at below efficiency.
Maybe I'm seeing it wrong, but that's how it looks from my end. Any insights on this that I may be missing?
And in a lot of places, there *is* no licensing required, so the quack gets to call himself a chiropractor exactly the way the real doctor does.
This all makes sense to me. The computer store analogy is a good one. :)
But in the USA at least, chiros are required to go through at least as much (if not more) schooling and training and certifications as an MD. I can imagine that there are untrained quacks across the globe - sadly, I have never had the money to travel and see different cultures myself. I hope to remedy that someday.
Anyhow, I have trouble seeing how your analogy fits here in the US when licensing requires the same thing across the country, and yet I still hear American doctors say that American chiros are quacks. It just feels more like an emotional kickback against the researched truth, but that emotional reaction prevents (or at least vastly slows) the process of chiros becoming mainstream "med".
I mean, there are quacky MDs as well, but the medical community calls them out individually rather than condemning the whole kit and kaboodle.
That's because insurance companies don't like covering things at all, and chiro tends to be ongoing - it's not something they cover once and you're done, it's something you need to keep going to. OF COURSE insurance companies hate it.
HAHAHAHA! You are so right about that.
However, I still don't expect them to add EFT practitioners to their mental health coverage anytime soon, though, and when insurance companies are willing to cover things, it starts to become widely accepted as valid.
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Leaving aside the failure of "pinched shut" as an analogy for a nerve - it's not like they're arteries that contain fluid that flows - I'm not aware of any cases where a pinched nerve causes either blindness or cancer in a not-medically-diagnosable way where the removal of the pinched nerve will cause a cure. Especially since "cancer" is not normally a failure of the immune system to address a tumour in the first place...
... My problem is that you've basically said "Now, what IF the invisible elephant around your neck is giving you back pain, and we remove the invisible elephant, and your back pain is cured!" - even in cases where all other examinations show that there's no weird unexplained weight around your neck.
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Well, nerves carry electrical impulses from the brain. I'd be interested to know if physically clamping a nerve shut would cause the end point of that nerve to start malfunctioning. Chiros claim this is exactly what is going on, but they have a financial reason to claim it, so I wonder what other sources say about that.
And the cancer example is just something I pulled out of my butt. It could be anything else, really. I'm more interested in exploring the general principle than getting hung up on the specific detail.
My problem is that you've basically said "Now, what IF the invisible elephant around your neck is giving you back pain, and we remove the invisible elephant, and your back pain is cured!" - even in cases where all other examinations show that there's no weird unexplained weight around your neck.
That raises a good point. If I am suddenly blind, do doctors run a check of the optic nerves to ensure that they are getting signal from the brain? Is that kind of test even possible with our current medical technology? I just don't know.
If so, and the test comes back saying that the nerve is just fine, and then one adjustment from a chiro suddenly brings sight back, it would make me wonder what was actually going on. Not that I am thinking of a particular scenario where this has happened, just thinking out loud.
If not, then maybe there's something to it. Interesting.
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do doctors run a check of the optic nerves to ensure that they are getting signal from the brain? Is that kind of test even possible with our current medical technology?
Nerve conduction tests are totally doable, in general. I see no reason they couldn't do one on your eye?
then one adjustment from a chiro suddenly brings sight back, it would make me wonder what was actually going on.
That would certainly be a very strong indicator that something had happened with the chiro, yes, but....
Not that I am thinking of a particular scenario where this has happened,
... that would be my point.
You can imagine anything you want. Imagining a thing does not make it a real thing.
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Sure! I'll call it "pinching" instead. :)
Nerve conduction tests are totally doable, in general. I see no reason they couldn't do one on your eye?
Ah, cool.
... that would be my point.
You can imagine anything you want. Imagining a thing does not make it a real thing.
Well, heck - I'll use something I've had some experience with. :)
Nearly every chiropractor I have ever asked has confirmed this, so this isn't a single guy making a crazy claim, but here it is:
A chiro can clear up ear infections with an adjustment. I'm not a chiro, I cannot explain to you how it works, but every one of them have told me that multiple children who are about to have tubes put in their ears come in for adjustments, and within 1-3 adjustments, the ear infections completely stop. No tubes needed any more.
My wife gets ear infections on a regular basis, and while adjustments have not stopped them from occurring, when she feels one coming on and gets an adjustment, it goes away. Even if she's in the middle of a full-blown infection, she can still get an adjustment and it goes away.
I'm confident that they cannot make 100% of ear infections go away, but I'm fairly convinced that they can assist a large % of them to go away.
I say fairly convinced because I'm not a chiro and I have only some anecdotal 2nd hand info. My wife's experience is spotty as she has not consistently sought an adjustment for every infection (I don't know why not, but that's her decision), but when she does, it goes away quickly. I could easily be misinterpreting something, so I am reserving full judgment but it does *seem* to me at least that there is some amount of truth in their claims.
If you know any trustworthy chiros, go talk to them and see what they say. I'd be interested to find out how many of them are having the same experience (or not).
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