wrongheaded pop medical movements/diagnoses

vaccine autism connection

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dc/Headon.jpg

ADD

Coca cola douches

countdown to roots/phrenology.jpg

Toilet seat AIDS

ADD might be over-self-diagnosed but it's real.

The oat bran craziness of the late '80s.

lactose intolerance

yeah seriously. i have no problem with milk, look i'm drinking some right now. what's the problem? no problem! here have some.

Any shit that involves the word holistic

in before someone makes hilarious "pop" reference (pop music DO YOU SEE)

home-bastard-opathy

Possession by the devil

lactose intolerance

― metametadata (n/a), Friday, October 17, 2008 2:55 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah seriously. i have no problem with milk, look i'm drinking some right now. what's the problem? no problem! here have some.

― rent, Friday, October 17, 2008 2:59 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you guys should come to my house and watch what happens when i drink milk.

chronic limes disease

home-bastard-opathy

reflex-fucking-ology
chiro-bloody-practic
acu-dicking-puncture

wuz joking que. still, sounds fun.

In every dream home an aromatherapy candle

30 leeches and a hazlenut candle = perfect weekend

lactose intolerance

― metametadata (n/a), Friday, October 17, 2008 10:55 AM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah seriously. i have no problem with milk, look i'm drinking some right now. what's the problem? no problem! here have some.

― rent, Friday, October 17, 2008 10:59 AM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol white people

Lactose intolerance levels also increase with age. At ages 2 - 3 yrs., 6 yrs., and 9 - 10 yrs., the amount of lactose intolerance is, respectively:

* 6% to 15% in white Americans and northern Europeans
* 18%, 30%, and 47% in Mexican Americans
* 25%, 45%, and 60% in black South Africans
* approximately 30%, 80%, and 85% in Chinese and Japanese
* 30–55%, 90%, and >90% in Mestizos of Peru

i fuckin love all lactose related food

i think lactose intolerance is just people realizing that drinking milk is gross

naw some of them can even eat ice cream

hay guyz whats the deal with sickle cell anemia whatta buncha crap amirite

i'm okay with ice cream and cheese, it's milk that equals death for me

Corn flakes as antidote to masturbation.

I.B.S.

back in my day we called it "the runs"

"hard" cheeses and yogurt i can do. cow's milk, ice cream ;_; & stuff like mozzarella makes me nauseous & head-achey. like motion-sickness almost.

(i still eat all of this yummy lactose)

sickness from leaky silicone boobs

hay guyz whats the deal with sickle cell anemia whatta buncha crap amirite

― and what, Friday, October 17, 2008 10:18 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

uh

hay guyz whats the deal with sickle cell anemia whatta buncha crap amirite

dude...
xpost

i get what you're going for, dude, but joeks about lactose intolerance (lol pooping) aren't really the same thing as clowning sickle cell anemia

and what i think your detector is still set too high
healing powers of magnets

I.B.S.

back in my day we called it "the runs"

No.

Every child in America having a "peanut allergy"

giving everyone antibiotics for everything

I.B.S.

back in my day we called it "the runs"

No.

how about stop eating so many hotpockets?

jokes about nobody "really" being lactose intolerant because you're all white dudes is pretty much the same as clowning sickle cell anemia since ability to process lactose after like age 3 is basically a northern european thing

echinacaea

restless leg syndrome

xp except that people DIE from sickle cell anemia

I've got a friend with IBS and it looks pretty miserable to me, but y'know maybe I should tell him to man the fuck up or something.

giving everyone meds for psych "conditions". sad because your dad died? have some drugs.
god AW get a grip

female hysteria

homosexuality

I mean can you really not differentiate between someone playing the fool "haha *I* don't have it so it must not exist! lolz" and someone "clowning" sickle cell anemia?

neither are funny

this thread is retarded, y'all are just jealous that people haven't thought up a syndrome for being chronically tedious yet

tbh, infuriating as wacko charlatan medicine is, if someone wants to go ama and not treat their cancer, fine. it's when JWitnesses or whatever start refusing transfusions for their children that my head explodes

i had reiki done once. also another time i took a nap.

the ama recognized acupuncture as legit even tho it as no idea how it works - does not belong in the "pop" category at all

― joe the plumber (ice crӕm), Friday, October 17, 2008 12:16 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

wtf are you even talking about here???

i looked around for any such statement from the AMA on acupuncture and all i found was this from 1997:

"There is little evidence to confirm the safety or efficacy of most alternative therapies. Much of the information currently known about these therapies makes it clear that many have not been shown to be efficacious. Well-designed, stringently controlled research should be done to evaluate the efficacy of alternative therapies."

― and what, Friday, October 17, 2008 12:47 PM (6 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ha i remember hearing some such thing on npr like 10 years ago - but whatever i dont really know anything abt acupuncture ive never had it and lets all be cool

anyway i still think its awesome and that yr a jerk - try and disprove that jerk

huh, i didn't know about the demographic breakdown of lactose intolerance but basically all of my mom's family has it, i live in terror that i'll have to stop eating cheese someday.

as i as i know, guys, the AMA basically *can't* support acupuncture or other homeopathic therapies unless they've been submitted to rigorous, evidence-based clinical trials. moreover, it can't just be "acupuncture seems to work but we don't know why." they want to have an idea of the mechanism before it can be endorsed. because, remember, endorse = OK to prescribe. and if you're going to prescribe something to someone, you're liable, and you'd better have some idea of what the fuck is actually going on.

most of the docs that i've met that are friendly to the idea of holistic medicine only suggest it to their patients in a "you might want to check this out" sorta way. they literally can't say "i officially recommend acupuncture."

would be curious to know *how* the practice of acupuncture developed. like, is their some mystic significance to the all the nodes they use, or did it take 2000 years of trial and error to develop a systematic understanding of needle placement? is "chi" meant to interpreted as a literal animal/mineral/vegetable that interacts in some way with needles? do the "maps" used for acupuncture jive in anyway with what we know about nerve pathways?

god, spelling

i have friend who is afraid to have her feet touched because her mother performed rigorous and sometimes painful reflexology techniques on her throughout childhood.

A++ questions from gbx here - whenever somebody comes with this alternative medicine bullshit always ask where the paper trail is, the same stuff that "mainstream" medicine is required to have

I've read several medical studies on acupuncture and they all agree that while it may have some stress relieving factors (most if not all of which is probably due to placebo effect), there's absolutely no evidence that it can do anything else (like cure sicknesses), nor has anyone ever been able to find those mystical energy channels in the human body which acu points are supposed to be connected to. The fact that acupuncture has a long history or that you have study for long in order to practice it doesn't mean anything, because the same applies to many other mumbo jumbo "alternative medicines". It's the same as saying that the Christian God must exist because Western universities have had faculties devoted to studying him for centuries.

anyway i still think its awesome and that yr a jerk - try and disprove that jerk

I think this is actually a passage in Jenny McCarthy's book about her miracle cure for autism.

Here's the picture: a few thousand years before it was known that blood circulates or germs cause disease, doctors who had never dissected a frog, claimed that yin and yang could be balanced by inserting needles into the right points, among the hundreds of points strung along 12 meridians....Scientists suggest the needles stimulate release of endorphins. Jalapeno peppers do the same thing. So it wouldn't matter where you stick the needles would it? Then who needs an acupuncturist?

no way jenny could ever pen prose that beautiful

it should be called assholistic medicine

bringing the a-game

The fact that acupuncture has a long history or that you have study for long in order to practice it doesn't mean anything, because the same applies to many other mumbo jumbo "alternative medicines". It's the same as saying that the Christian God must exist because Western universities have had faculties devoted to studying him for centuries.

word.

another question: do practicing acupuncturists *want* to see their practice reconciled with western medicine (ie - do they believe that there is a rational explanation for it), or do they hold firm to a mystical belief in chi that is by definition unprovable

so many lols

so many lols

― rent, Friday, October 17, 2008 1:40 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lmao my friend/co-worker did this one

http://www.strangetoons.com/strangetoons%20root%20folder/Antony/acustapleweb.jpg

upthread i got carried away a bit when i wrote a "typical example" of getting roped into b1ologie t0tale, that is pretty much representative of what i heard except that fortunately usually ppl drop out of it before dying. but it happened.
http://www.radio-canada.ca/nouvelles/Science-Sante/2008/10/02/002-biologie-totale.shtml?ref=rss

oh yeah they cure aids too.

Morgellons disease

autism overdiagnosis/misdiagnosis really gets to me. Your kid is retarded, folks, deal with it.

ethan that gif up there totally made me cry dude

Well the western model for determining what is effective is hardly fail safe. For example, a study just came out that questioned the efficacy of taking small doses of aspirin to prevent heart disease and stroke. That was pretty much orthodoxy in western medicine for a while now. Even what we understand, we don't necessarily understand that well, and there is plenty we don't understand.

Clearly western medicine struggles to understand certain kinds of systemic body issues (see fibromyalgia and any number of immune related conditions), and treatments like acupuncture, which is based on systemic balance, could provide insight. So why dismiss it as quackary?

People keep using autism as an excuse for their own failings, its so pathetic. "I'm not a jerk, I have asperger's!" Just because I claim I'm the Pope's wastebasket, doesn't mean that it's true.

oh come on super cub.

science over quacking like a duck any day.

Well the western model for determining what is effective is hardly fail safe. For example, a study just came out that questioned the efficacy of taking small doses of aspirin to prevent heart disease and stroke.

how are you using the self-correction principle of this "western model" to criticize itself? the fact that trials can sometimes have misleading or faulty conclusions is not an excuse to believe any old crazy shit, it's a reason to keep having trials until we get it right

"for centuries astronomers thought the sun revolved the earth, so, you know, the earth could still be flat"

The astronomers are just forgetting to take off their 3-d glasses when they look through the telescope, is all.

Really hoping this turns out to be another thread where people make lazy, ill-informed snarks about ASDs, to be honest.

Does that mean that you don't think diagnostic substitution is a major factor in the autism epidemic? I realize that there are conflicting literatures, but a lot of the papers I've read seemed pretty convincing.

And admittedly this attitude probably largely reflects the attitudes of my psychopathology teacher, who was big into the idea that mid-to-high SES white people basically refuse to accept that their kids might have mental retardation if they can "massage" their doctor's perception of the symptoms until it looks like autism.

I'm coming from a UK perspective rather than a US one, and I suspect that diagnostic substitution is not a big factor here. Diagnosis is still hugely problematic and contested, I agree, and self-diagnosis is meaningless. But those are complex issues. It was "cameron"'s comment I was getting butthurt over, not yours Dan. ('Tho seeing the US use of "retarded" still feels weird to me and I have to remind myself it doesn't connote the same as over here.)

It probably does have the same connotations. We're supposed to say "a person with mental retardation" rather than "that retarded guy", but you know, we're on a semi-anonymous message board and all...

From what I've read and seen, autism and retardation are not that similar in terms of symptoms.

I'm not getting at that either, it's just that any use of the word to talk about disability in the UK is a huge faux pas nowadays.

I wonder if the epidemic might also be related to a big increase in doctors deciding they are competent to diagnose ASD? Again that doesn't apply over here.

Sorry, I was responding to Dan.

So was I, whoops.

how much of drug discovery is dependent on scientists reproducing or exploring a bunch of trad therapies

here's a story on 'total biology' referred to by sebastien upthread. does sound completely nutso.
http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2008/10/07/mtl-totalbiology1006.html?ref=rss

No one's mentioned lobotomy yet?
What about post-abortion syndrome?

shock treatment

I thought shock treatment worked!

It does, with limited applications. I once saw a woman go from catatonic in the waiting room, to joking about her husband in the recovery room. Crazy shit.

By the way, most cheese has little or no lactose in it. The bacteria that cause the cheese to ripen eat up all the lactose. I have lactose intolerance & eat large cheese plates all the time.

Whoever said ADD or IBS has never had ADD or IBS. Wait, what was I going to say.. Uh oh, please excuse me for a moment.

PMS.

OK - I don't believe this is actaully a wrong diagnosis (and am sure it exists in some form) and as a student of women's health I would probably be crucified for even implying so but I do think it's often exaggerated/used as an excuse.

i prefer the more clinical term "on the rag"

Shock treatment has been scaled back quite a bit in terms of what it's used to treat, but yeah, still used.

I used to restock the meds in a shock treatment room. That room smelled worse than another in the entire hospital. Also creepier.