Eli5: how are treatments like acupuncture, kinetic tape and homeopathy still a thing, if scientific studies disproving their effectiveness are publicly available to everyone and doctors?
In: Biology
In addition to the parts where people aren’t actually that scientifically minded there is one other thing:
You go to those people and you get listened to by someone sympathetic who takes your concerns seriously (well, or seems to anyway), gives you time, and makes you feel like they care. What they say seems to make sense, and they say it works and sound confident about that.
Compare to real medicine which is done by people with dozens of other patients who are all in need so you talk to them for a short time, they say confusing stuff, they make you feel like a task on a list.
Worse, while it’s damn effective real medicine isn’t actually 100% effective. And the practitioners don’t pretend it is. If you do ask them about how effective a given treatment is they’ll tell you it’s X% effective Y% of the time given Z conditions which doesn’t sound nearly as comforting as “I’ve never seen it fail yet!” or the like that you’ll hear from quacks.
Still worse, real medicine often doesn’t leave you feeling a whole lot better right away even when it does work, and there simply aren’t effective treatments for many conditions.
Go to a real doctor with arthritis and they’ll tell you that there really isn’t a whole lot they can actually do. Maybe, depending on the type, they can give you crazy painful injections of stuff into your joints that might, sort of, once the pain wears off, make things a bit better for a while but then you need it again. Go to your local quack with arthritis and they’ve got a zillion things to sell you that they’ve never seen fail but if the first one does well here’s this other one. and this other one. and this other one…..
Go to a real doctor with certain kinds of cancer and the answer is “sorry, we can try X or Y but it’s not likely to do much but make you feel awful for the next six months or so before you die.” Take that same cancer to a quack and they will yet again have all sorts of stuff that totally works and sounds mystic and stuff.
Another thing is, quacks really love treating people with a bit of money who aren’t actually sick but just don’t feel great. And they’ll listen patiently, seem concerned, offer emotional support, and sell a wide range of products that don’t do anything, but since there’s nothing really wrong with you that’s not a problem!
TL;DR: quackery often has offer better customer experience and customer service than real medicine, promises relatively cheap and easy treatments they say work all the time.
There are so many medical conditions that we cannot adequately treat, or cannot consistently treat, and in the absence of options, even scientific minds turn elsewhere.
The placebo effect is a real thing. If someone feels like they are healthier for having done something, there’s a certain extent to which they will actually benefit from having done the thing. It doesn’t mean the practice is effective in and of itself, it means the person will convince themselves they’ve done the right and healthy thing and the brain has the ability *to a certain extent* to convince the body to be healthy
A lot of people are already speaking to the point about acupuncture but here’s an anecdotal example of why it’s awesome and can have great benefits. I had a ganglion cyst in my wrist that persisted over time and was getting bigger. Western medicine’s only treatment option at that point was surgery which carried a significant recovery time for full recovery.
Instead I did about four weeks of acupuncture (2x/week) at which point the ganglion cyst was completely gone and has not returned in 2+ years. That experience sold me on acupuncture as a viable and effective option. The randomized controlled trials that show it’s effectiveness will probably be more convincing to a lot of people but having that personal experience with it made a big difference in my perspective of acupuncture.
A lot of it is effective, but in limited scope as compared to how the public normally approaches it.
for example chiropractic adjustments can be an effect palliative adjunct to physical therapy that will help maintain range of motion and allow the patient to perform their therapy exercises with less pain, and is quite safe as long as you avoid neck adjustments.
However most clients of chiropractors treat it like the adjustment itself is the cure, and not a temporary relief mechanism.
Same with Kinetic tape, it was developed and designed to provide temporary support to muscles for active recovery and during high-intensity workouts and/or games for sports players, and is now treated as a god-tier way to fully restore joint mobility.
again with acupuncture, it can resolve nerve pain. That’s it. However acupuncturists often promise FAR more than that.
In addition the thing that alternative medicines are selling are that they are distanced from the broken US healthcare system, the practitioners are often more personable and caring, and more importantly they make you feel good through a more intimate setting, person contact, and placebo effect, so people that go tend to keep going.
So, here is the deal about homeopathy in India:
Most homeopaths are actually ameteur psychotherapists in disguise. In India, visiting a psychotherapist or psychologist is considered taboo in vast majority of the country (though this has been changing recently), and people have a ton of PTSD and stress and what not. So, even ameteur psychotherapists under the disguise of homeopathy can bring out tangible changes, and that gets attributed to homeopathy.
Really, op? You made a post asking why humans are irrational?
I’ve had acupuncture. It really helped.
Don’t care if it worked by its own merit or by placebo effect.
We’re electrically operated beings. We’ve not got the pinnacle of knowledge yet, I think, so it would be strange to say out and out that it doesn’t work. Perhaps we are still a bit too thick to understand it?
No matter how much evidence there is proving or disproving something there will ALWAYS be some people out there who are unwilling to believe it.
Its like that joke: a guy and his flat earth friend go to heaven and meet God
They ask God to once and for all emd their age old dispute about Earth’s shape
“The earth is a globe” God replied
Upon hearing this the flat earther whispers to his friend: “see? It goes deeper than I thought!”
Because scientific studies can’t “disprove” the effectiveness of a medicine. That’s not how science works.
Instead, scientists can *try and fail* to prove the claims of people who sell that medicine, which is almost the same thing but a lot more narrow in scope.
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