Germ theory denialism

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Big deal.

ALCHEMY does exist:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=6276

Its interesting because I believe that bacteria and viruses, and the diseases they cause have played a massive part in shaping our beliefs over the course of our development as a society. Back in biblical times it seems the culprit was god. Just one simple entity was enough for those people because they knew so little.

Then I think the idea of witches and spells came into play during the middle ages. I would assume people had noticed that death by disease didn't seem to correspond with god punishing people. Because seemingly good people perished while others escaped. So the idea of a witch casting an evil spell became the more appealing reason for disease.

And of course the discovery of bacteria changed that again and the idea of witches went out the window.

It seems very odd that people deny bacteria being the cause of infections.

Microbes have been OBSERVED to cause disease. It's just silly to deny something that in our day in age is so obvious. You don't get to plead ignorance on this one. You might as well deny that a great big fiery ball that rises in the east every day is the sun.

Here's my take on it from a religious perspective: Prior to Jesus, God allowed the human population to expand rapidly. There's no need to fight disease or treat disease because diseases weren't even a meaningful threat. Hebrew faith recognized disease as punishment from God for misdeeds and prescribed certain remedies--namely quarantine. A person with a skin disease had to live apart from the rest of the population, had to declare themselves unclean to anyone they might come into contact with, was considered dead by family and friends, and had to go through ritual purification and report to a priest once the disease passed. If you so much as touched that person or anything that person touched, you yourself became unclean even if you showed no symptoms, and you would have to go through a waiting period to be declared clean again, along with ritual washing. As horrible as it sounds, it does not mean that a healthy person cannot go to the sick and provide them with food or clothes or, at the very least, emotional comfort. By showing mercy through these actions, a clean person takes the unclean state of the sick on himself and shares (truly sympathizes) in the diseased person's calamity. Jesus healed lepers by laying hands on them, thereby making Himself ceremonially unclean

War, disease, and famine were and still are punishments from God for sinful behavior.

The Bible indicates that all knowledge and wisdom is granted to us from God. The Bible also does not say that such knowledge and wisdom is restricted to believers only. Therefore, if we are able to heal people suffering from injury or disease, it is only because God has allowed us to learn what we need to know to do so. While mental instability was caused by demon possession in Jesus' day, we can buy medical-grade knitting needles that we can insert through the eye sockets and wiggle around to cure such maladies as schizophrenia and extreme cases of ADHD.

OK, bad joke, sorry.

The point is we understand the chemistry of the brain and can develop supplemental chemicals to restore the brain's normal function or at least moderate and balance the anomalous function. We are able to develop antibiotics to combat bacterial infection. We can relieve swelling and pain with something as simple as aspirin. We can develop preventative measures such as vaccines.

So denying the role of microbes in causing disease is to also deny God's gift of such knowledge and hence our ability to apply that knowledge to preventing and treating illness. And I really do think that Christ represents a turning point in scientific study and understanding. Before Christ, all are guilty of sin and must take care to atone for those sins. As long as sin exists in a person's life, there also exists the potential for God's punishment through disease. But with Christ comes forgiveness. And if there is forgiveness, there is no need for temporal punishment through disease. We are allowed to seek those answers for ourselves through faith that in God, all things are possible, including cures for diseases.

Regarding the main topic, is anyone surprised? Consider how many people believe in homeopathy and acupuncture. Those two things are actually based on COMPLETELY WRONG understandings of what causes diseases.

Homeopathy / Acupuncture are so amazingly broken, that for them to make any sense, you have to forget germ theory. Germ theory completely kills those techniques. The cause for diseases is suddenly not "miasms" or energy imbalance but microbiological life.

All the people that buy into homeopathy and acupuncture are really a form of germ theory denier. For they made the conscious decision to ignore the evidence that points to the real cause of diseases.

Now wait a minute--acupuncture DOES assist with pain relief and is well documented as such. I'm not suggesting it's a viable replacement or even the best treatment for all pain-related illness, but evidence DOES show it's efficacy for some symptoms.

But then again, some will say that Tylenol works just as well...

What's your opinion of chiropractic care? I've personally avoided them, but they do seem to get good short-term results.

The problem is that acupuncture is based on the belief of energetic centres, for which we have no real evidence whatsoever.

Acupuncture is claimed to work for pain, but here's something 'strange': when instead of an acupuncturist selecting the appropriate energy spots to put the needles you use 'sham acupuncture" which is just putting needles in random locations, it works just as well for it...

I am not qualified to explain it so I will just put links up.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?cat=8
http://www.skepdic.com/acupuncture.html

placebo effects aside, the energy points used by the traditionalist just happen to be ganglia. There is most likely a good physiological reason why acupuncture works in some cases.

ruveyn

I am not saying putting needles does not work, I am saying that acupuncture as a whole is based on a completely flawed premise. And that it seems that just putting needles in random spots works just as well as acupuncture so that meridian stuff should be trashed.

Not different to people getting healed by taking holy water. Certain conditions improve after hydration so it is possible that drinking water could make an improvement, but that does not mean the water is really holy.

Right.

But sometimes we do make accidental discoveries, in this case pain relief from a physiological reaction to having thin pieces of metal stuck in you. I don't really care to study it, nor do I care to try it myself. Maybe one day just to say I did it. But then again, I did the same thing on a visit to Korea when I was told not to ask what it was I was eating...

But that wouldn't make acupuncture less of a piece of BS. It would just mean that we found out that sticking needles is useful. We will still require actual research on how to turn it into a non-BS method that does not rely on unproven supernatural stuff to be explained.

There are a few logical hypotheses to explain it, so being unexplainable is out. When you're talking about supernatural energies in acupuncture, you're talking about the traditional Chinese method. There ARE some (7, I think) indications that acupuncture has been clinically shown to treat effectively.

Homeopathy is not TOTAL BS, either. I'm not talking about that "memory water" garbage. One treatment that I KNOW of that has had successful clinical study is zinc treatment for the common cold. In at least that one instance, the effects of zinc are known to interfere with the life cycle of rhinovirus and temporarily boost immunity. The only problem is that it's a specific preparation of zinc that actually works, so good luck actually finding a reliable zinc lozenge (positively charged ionic zinc).

Again, putting needles may work, but that's not acupuncture, that's just putting needles on the body. What we know is that it may as well be the placebo effect as just getting a guy to put needles on random spots in your body has the same effect.

Now homeopathy, is 101% TOTAL BS. There is really no other way to see it.


That's not a homeopathic treatment. It is a common mistake to assume that homepathy = "natural" treatments. But it is not the same. *

The law of similars and the law of infinitesimals are complete and utter BS.

Edit:
* In part this is because of the supplement industry feeding up of all those claims about "homepathy not having secondary effects" (of course it doesn't have secondary effects, it has no effects at all) to put the "homeopathic remedy" label on their things. Zicam is not homeopathic as it does not have infinitesimal amounts of Zinc, in fact, it has dangerous amounts of it. http://www.resource4thepeople.com/defec ... zicam.html

Well, just as with acupuncture, it comes down to an issue of definition.

Homeopathy is based upon introducing into the body such things as cause symptoms in order to force an immune reaction to something. Now, I agree that a lot of it is garbage. But I also think that whoever came up with the idea started out on the right track. It's the same basic idea as vaccines, introducing factors into the body that will be seen by the body as harmful, even if it isn't. Building a response to it builds immunity. Zinc treatment is the same idea, but of course you'll notice that clinical methodology on zinc has been repeatedly called into question. About the best we can come up with for zinc is it's effective in about 50% of cases. However, we DO know that zinc does have an effect on immunity, hence why some OTC manufacturers are trying to package it as a "cure."

And, just as I said with acupuncture, I'm not likely to try "memory water" cures any time soon. A lot of it does sound hokey to me.