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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: 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