Reddit reviews Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations

First, you might have gotten a bad/lazy doctor (even though his objections are sound). It is good-practice to get second opinions as often as possible, but for some reason people only do it when they're diagnosed with cancer or something. And second opinions can (should) come from other real doctors; you don't need to go to "alternative" practitioners to get a fresh look at a problem.

Second, to the extent that chiropractic has been tested, it appears to have some relevant degree of success regarding musculoskeletal disorders, the purpose it appears to have been originally devised for. The common opposition against chiropractic is that its proponents are now claiming that it can also treat asthma, cancer and other ailments that have nothing to do with manipulation of bones, muscle or nerves. A claim that has also never been properly substantiated by experiment.

Your problem was a musculoeskeletal disorder. That's what chiropractic "is for", and the little success rate it has, it has in that field.

Also, keep in mind: that kind of testimony is very easy to find. Just check out some of the praise for urotherapy and you'd be amazed. When you have no solid understanding of how substances interact with the human body, it's natural to doubt the efficacy of treatments and medications, when they fail to produce results you imagine they should, and very easy to experiment with "alternative" treatments and fall prey to the cognitive bias that's basically the father of superstition.

For example, not much long ago I had a bad throat infection. In the second day of throat pain and high fever I went to the ER and started taking the prescribed antibiotics, which I should keep doing for the next 10 days.

Seven days later, it was as if I had never even started treatment. So I went back to the ER, got examined, this time by a different doctor. He examined me (a tad more thoroughly this time) and saw no reason to believe the first doctor had made any mistake. So he recommended me to stay on the prescribed meds for the remaining 3 days of the original treatment, and if I was still in a bad shape by then, to start taking some other meds he prescribed, and return there in 10 days (from that day).

I followed his advice and on the 9th day of the original medication (2 days later) I was as good new, and have been for a couple months now.

Had I seen that failure of the prescribed treatment to produce the results I imagined they should (and not the doctors) and started drinking my own piss, for example, and 2 days later I was cured; that would be outstanding proof that urotherapy works – and works fast!

There is a passage on John Diamond's book, Snake Oil, in that he mentions this phenomenon, and comments on how, by the logic and beliefs of people who get convinced by that kind of "miracle cures" from alternative medicine, what really caused his cancer to go into remission would be vodka and cigar, I think.

So who knows, perhaps you were cured by the meds the first doctor prescribed and you just don't know it, because when you thought it didn't work you went ahead to try a different approach and then thought "after this, therefore because of this".

> So the doctor gave me some prescription to mask the pain that was the symptom, not the problem...

Classic argument from "holistic" therapies proponents. Look, if you go to a specialized doctor with a specific symptom (e.g. an ear doctor to check why your ear aches), 9 times out of 10 the general treatment for the specific problem will work. If it doesn't, you either look for another doctor or, better yet, tell that doctor, in detail, it didn't work. He will adjust his approach accordingly. That's what doctors are trained to do (each treatment is actually a hypothesis being carried out) and what science is, after all.

However, if you want a "holistic" experience from the get-go, get yourself a general clinician for "family doctor", and go there when nothing is wrong with you for a check up. He needs to establish the baseline of what you look like when you're healthy so he can start recognizing when things are off in other areas (e.g. you ear hurts, but you're also a little pale; could it be related?).

Holistic practitioners start out from some idealized notion of what the healthy, normal human body is supposed to be – often colored by their preferred flavor of woo; for example, your chakras are aligned, your Ki is balanced, the energy flow in your body is good, your aura is green, etc. They know nothing about you.

But then they take you in, make you feel comfortable, take more time with you and appear to take more of an interest in your life as a whole – and then you're sold and the placebo effect kicks in.

If they had to treat as many people as real doctors do, believe me, all the attention and illusion of personalized care would be the first thing to go.

And your last argument, really?

If people didn't think astrology was a legitimate divination option, why are there so many successful astrologers practicing?

Replace that by psychics, dowsers, homeopaths, etc, and the answer will always be the same: uninformed (or ill-informed) people can not properly evaluate the efficacy of those ideas.

John Diamond (a journalist) wrote about this after he was diagnosed with cancer. I haven't read the book myself, but I've heard decent things.