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lhsi writes:
A petition on Change.org was created: "Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia: Create and enforce new policies that allow for true scientific discourse about holistic approaches to healing."
Jimmy Wales
responded.
No, you have to be kidding me. Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful.
Wikipedia's policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately. What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse". It isn't.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:15PM
Holistic healing seems to cover a lot of things. In fact, sometimes it covers combining things. Aroma therapy, for instance. I can't say it works, but headaches do seem to disappear when you're surrounded with pleasant smells. Oil extracts - seemed pretty bogus to me, until someone convinced me to try it for my son. Didn't "cure" a damned thing, but the lavender oil seemed to help symptoms.
I'm no believer in this stuff, but I do see people that it seems to help. If it doesn't actually help them, just making them feel happier is conducive to healing.
Maybe someone should just start a holistic healing wiki, independent of Wikipedia? A lot of ancient old wives remedies are worthless, but some of them are still around because people thought they were worthwhile!!
As a side note, look at how many people are praising cannabis for it's medical properties today. I can't imagine myself toking up to cure a headache, but if the stuff makes people feel better about their ailments, hey, GO FOR IT!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Sir Finkus on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:28PM
This looks to be more than old remedies, based on TFP. They want Wikipedia to include information on the benefits of things like "Energy Medicine", "Energy Psychology", "Emotional Freedom Techniques", and "Thought Field Therapy".
As for cannabis, its medical properties are rather well established scientifically, Especially for cancer and glaucoma patients.
Join our Folding@Home team! [stanford.edu]
(Score: 4, Informative) by SleazyRidr on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:35PM
The placebo effect is well known and documented. Selling holistic supplements with the promise that they'll ease symptoms is ok. You don't need to "open up" Wikipedia to say that, it's already there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Complementary_ and_Alternative_Medicine [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:36PM
He himself has a false premise. There are so many junk journals out there and even the ones that are respected often have an agenda. Every postgrad knows that if you do research in an unpopular area then you wont get published.
Essentially, just because something is published does not mean that it is scientific, or even respectable, and just because journals wont publish specific works does not mean that they are not scientific and repeatable.
I am sure you can see by the time he resorts to ad hominem that he does not care about what useful facts are, merely what his organization chooses to believe in. I suppose that is a pretty good reason to add to the pile of why wikipedia is not a valid citable source itself.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Kilo110 on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:50PM
I like how you whitewash holistic "medicine" as simply unpopular. No, it's insane. Holistic "medicine" has already been looked into many times. It's crap. Placebo at best, outright fraud otherwise.
(Score: 2, Informative) by ClownFactory on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:50PM
Wikipedia is inherently not a citable source because it is an encyclopedia.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by kebes on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:52PM
But in fact the effects you describe may very well be real. There are well-documented ways in which reducing stress can improve health [wikipedia.org], or conversely how stress/noises [wikipedia.org]/environment/etc. can both directly impact health, and indirectly (e.g. by affecting sleep [wikipedia.org] and resting). There are also well-documented ways in which placebos [wikipedia.org] operate: it is known that placebos can affect a person's mental state sufficiently to alleviate symptoms. (Placebos can be used successfully as part of a broader medical treatment.) And no one will deny that quality of life [wikipedia.org] is important: if someone finds that a particular aroma, colour, sensation, or activity makes it easier to cope with life, then by all means they should exploit that!
My point in peppering my reply with all those Wikipedia links was to emphasize that Wikipedia does provide coverage of the things you mention, of all the benefits of such treatments. It doesn't need to provide special coverage/inclusion of holistic medicine: the bits that are shown to work will be absorbed into medical science, and will in turn be reflected in Wikipedia's medical articles. (Indeed some aspects of medical science--e.g. particular drugs--can be traced back to Ancient remedies that were shown to be effective.) The bits that don't work will be mentioned on Wikipedia as placebos or frauds, as the case may be.
I'm not saying that Wikipedia is perfect; nor are science or mainstream medicine perfect. But they do a pretty good job, and if some holistic treatment is truly effective, then the proponents shouldn't have much difficulty conducting a study to show that it is indeed effective. As such, I have little sympathy for their call for "scientific discourse" on the pages of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and they have a clear policy that states that only verifiable information is to be included. The proponents of a given treatment shouldn't be trying to have a "scientific discourse" on Wikipedia: they should be having that discourse in the scientific literature. If their ideas have merit, they will prevail.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Kilo110 on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:55PM
They likely want it on wikipedia pages so they can sell more healing crystals, eye of neut, or whatever has a 1000% profit margin.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @12:33AM
Eye of newt, ball of neut.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:56AM
Hey, Ig Nobel prize winning research shows that expensive placebos work better:o bel-prize-for-study-on-placebo.html [blogspot.com]
http://psychologyofpain.blogspot.com/2008/10/ig-n
Ethically it might be dubious but since we're talking about scientific discourse and healing, you can see there's plenty of science to prove it that in enough cases it works better than no treatment. It may not be science or results you like, but it's still science :).
As it is, it would be good to figure out the limits of what placebos can and cannot do.g ery-study/ [cnn.com]
And what can be defined as "placebo" - does sham surgery count - it definitely makes some changes to the body: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/26/health/knee-sur
And there's also the Hawthorne effect - where people behave differently when they believe they are being observed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday March 25 2014, @03:09PM
That's a nice and long response, but a short summary would be something like:
"Real medicine works better than a placebo even if no one involved has blind faith in it."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by kebes on Tuesday March 25 2014, @03:56PM
(Score: 2, Insightful) by spiritfiend on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:58PM
It's unfair to lump marijuana in with holistic medicine. Due to it's classification, there have been limited opportunities to actually test it's effects in a controlled scientific manner. There's a difference between not testing something that has anecdotal because it is not economically feasible to do so, and risking your freedom to test something that has anecdotal benefits.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday March 26 2014, @02:04PM
I'm not sure, really. There was a time, when many, many medicines included marijuana or hemp extracts. Snake oil salesmen included it in all sorts of preparations. Marijuana does have some verifiable benefits, but marijuana also has a lot of undocumented claims and uses in it's history.
There used to be a site on the web, kept up by some old graybeard, with photos of medicine bottles, and their contents and ingredients listed. Recipes, uses, and claims for "cures" for all kinds of things. To bad his site was taken down, there was a LOT of information on the site in addition to his photo pages. I simply cannot believe ALL the claims for marijuana that I read on that site. I'm sure that some of those snake oil salesmen just made sure that the mixture of alcohol, cannabanoids, and other ingredients were mildly to highly intoxicating so that the victim - errr, I mean patient - was sure to "feel good" after drinking it.
Yes, there is science behind the use of marijuana, but there is a lack of science behind many of the claims made for it.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Skarjak on Tuesday March 25 2014, @06:23PM
Demanding proper evidence before you will believe something does not make you close-minded. It just means you're not gullible.
(Score: 2, Funny) by EETech1 on Wednesday March 26 2014, @03:10AM
A Wiccapedia of sorts....