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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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:47PM
The Hawthorne and Placebo effects are quite strong.
If you really want to talk about "scientific" there's plenty of replicable evidence that the placebo effect can heal significantly more than "no treatment" in many cases (but not in all cases of course).
After all if the placebo effect didn't work, it would be far easier to figure out whether various medical treatments worked or not- you only need to have "no treatment" and "test treatment". But in so many scientific studies they need to test against placebo too.
By the way, too many new drugs don't seem to do that much better than placebo as compared to the old drugs: http://www.forbes.com/sites/harlankrumholz/2013/09 /03/is-no-worse-than-placebo-good-enough-for-new-d iabetes-drugs/ [forbes.com] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/03/new-drugs -effectiveness-old-medicines_n_3380347.html [huffingtonpost.com]?
And the other thing is even when patients know it's not real it can still work: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-22/placebos- help-even-when-patients-know-what-they-get-harvard -study-finds.html [bloomberg.com]
But maybe this is because the placebo pills used are actually not as inactive as the researchers think. Sugar pills have an effect. There's some concern that placebos used in some studies might not be inactive enough.
"scientific healing" is messier than Mr Wales and others think.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 25 2014, @06:42PM
Also medicines often have sideffects. Therefore, compared against some medicines, administering a placebo can also be perceived as doing less harm.