The meaning of "Energy"

[pozorvlak]

Last night a friend of mine retweeted this:
.@marzillk What energy!? Some completely unobservable thing? Energy is simply the ability to do work. Nothing more, nothing less.
-- rhysmorgan
It turned out that this was in response to the following:@AlabasterC My sister recommends homeopathic aconite and tapping various energy points. It is helping a

Comments

[susannahf]

I found three meta-analyses and one report of linked studies on acupressure. All RCTs

[pozorvlak]

Thanks! So, it might have some symptom-relieving effect after all?

[susannahf]

at least in some situations, yes, it would seem so.
I'd be fascinated to see if the physiological mechanism for this could be elucidated. I haven't had time to read the papers, so no promises about their methodological accuracy...

[susannahf]

Also, I should declare a competing interest that I didn't *want* to find any evidence that it might work. But I did, and academic integrity demands that I not pretend otherwise.
I still don't think I'd pay for acupressure/puncture unless I was a) unable to use conventional (ideally evidence-based) medicine, and b) was really suffering. And then I'd put anything down to placebo effect. But that's my prejudice I guess.

[andrewducker]

Metaphors are a perfectly good use of the English language. The fact that something may not literally exist doesn't mean that it might not still be a useful way of talking about something.

If the person is making claims of efficacy then they have to be able to back them up if they want to be believed. But if they want to use "energy" to mean "feeling good" then I'm fine with that.

[pozorvlak]

Yes! Exactly what I was trying to get at. Thank you!

[ext_300285]

I'm surprised by the credibility given to martial arts in an otherwise fairly rational post.
Martial arts has to be one of the largest mines of spurious mystical nonsense that I'm aware of. The vast majority is explainable by conventional physiology, and the stuff that seems extraordinary can invariably be shown to be fakirism, trickery or just plain lies.

A martial artist babbling about "qi" would make me MORE suspicious.

Regarding the acupuncture study, what's interesting is that it doesn't matter where you stick the needles - providing compelling falsification of the "meridian" hypothesis (at least insofar as it applies to acupuncture).

[pozorvlak]

Martial arts has to be one of the largest mines of spurious mystical nonsense that I'm aware of.

Agreed. To be a bit clearer, I give zero credence to the "iron shirt" stuff and the like. But when someone who can do impressive things says "I think about it in terms of X" then that suggests to me, not that X necessarily has any physical reality, but that X may well be a useful approximation to or metaphor for what's really going on. Does that make any sense?

Regarding the acupuncture study, what's interesting is that it doesn't matter where you stick the needles - providing compelling falsification of the "meridian" hypothesis (at least insofar as it applies to acupuncture).

Agreed. Elegant, isn't it?

[ext_300285]

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Sorry if I misunderstood.

[pozorvlak]

Thinking about it a bit further:

The question is not "does qi exist?", it's "does thinking about your actions and training in terms of qi improve your performance of those actions?" And in the crucible that is modern international athletic competition, we overwhelmingly find athletes whose training is shaped by the scientific understanding of physiology, suggesting that a qi-based training regime is outperformed by a scientific one. But a qi-based regime might still outperform a "make it up as you go along" regime.

[elvum]

If you separate things out, I guess you have anger at the reuse of the word energy and anger at the belief that the concept of qi (or whatever you're using the word energy to describe) is a useful way to describe anything with real-world relevance.

I probably agree that scientists don't have much of a right to insist that their careful definitions of words like "force", "energy", "mass" etc should override previous meanings, not to mention the general free-for-all nature of the English language.

I think it's more reasonable to object to claims that qi has physical meaningfulness, so long as those objections are to the lack of scientific evidence for the theory.

Anger at the fact that hundreds of years after the Enlightenment people are still basing their worldviews on unquestioning acceptance of what they've been told by authority figures and on highly subjective interpretations of personal experience - that's probably also justified, but not really possible to blame on individual people on Twitter...

[pozorvlak]

Agreed 100%. Further: if the real issue is number 3 (and I think it is), it's counterproductive to harp on about number 1.

[anonymous]

People with a physics background are taught to be ridiculously fussy about their choice of words, and this spills over into real life. I've had this issue with one of my PhD supervisors over my use of language in my (engineering) thesis.

Mind you, I've yet to meet a physicist who tells me that they've lost mass recently...

If you're interested in studies of chronic pain, I suggest you talk to my other half (also Mike), as this is his specialist field. Mike's general belief is that the majority of patients who present with chronic pain symptoms do so as a result of their mental state, which magnifies their physical symptoms. Simply getting people to relax and have an authority figure conduct some form of "treatment", then tell them that they ought to get better can be remarkably effective...

MPJ

[pozorvlak]

... whereas mathematicians are taught to be ridiculously fussy about their use of words, but also taught that the words themselves are arbitrary :-)

Chronic pain: interesting stuff! Has Mike ever done anything specifically with acupuncture?