> Sure, it’s all just chance and luck, but when the advice ends up being relevant (or becomes self fulfilling in its relevance) and actually helps the receiver, why not?
It's like homeopathy: still a mixture between fraud, pseudoscience and sometimes outright dangerous advice, the ratio depending on the provider. And people can and do lose entire life savings to that shit. Just because someone's cold "went away" after downing a ton of sugar pills, it doesn't mean the homeopathy caused that - it was the person's own body all along.
The worst thing about all pseudoscience stuff is that accepting it as a society means that non-scientific opinions are accepted as an equal in democratic discourse - and that is the foundation on which quackery, vaccine denialism, MMS and a whole lot of conspiracy myths grow.
Besides: there's a reason why therapists (at least in Europe) generally have to be licensed similar to doctors... bad advice can literally kill people.
We, as a society, should push for equitable and accessible actual mental health care for everyone, provided by trained and continuously educated professionals - not for quackery.
Research has been done and we know why some people see good results from alternative practitioners.
It is because alternative practitioners with bad bedside manners don't stay in business very long.
If you have a minor problem, sitting down with someone who you trust and talking about it for half an hour (much longer than the 5 or maybe 10 minutes you'll get with a traditional doctor), who then gives you some sugar pills and some other good advice (get up and stretch very half an hour), is almost always going to result in an improvement of symptoms.
A lot of problems, including pain, measurably improve when a patient feels they have been listened to, and that advice they are given is tailored to them.
Those longer, and often more frequent, appointments, also means the practitioner gets to know the patient better, which means underlying lifestyle problems can be identified. If the alternative doctor finds out someone is eating a lot of canned food, recommending they switch to "fresh natural vegetables" is a damned good way to lower someone's sodium and potassium intake.
The actual treatments are woo bullshit, but the care setting makes a huge difference.
We could have actual doctors giving that device and detecting symptoms early, but no, we have far too few doctors everywhere, and in the US y'all have your insurance bullshittery on top of that.
The solution to the severe understaffing is not enabling quackers that end up recommending their patients MMS or against chemoterapy like they did with Steve Jobs.
> The solution to the severe understaffing is not enabling quackers that end up recommending their patients MMS or against chemoterapy like they did with Steve Jobs.
I agree it isn't the solution.
> We could have actual doctors giving that device and detecting symptoms early,
One potential lesson is that we don't need full on doctors giving advice. We need people trained to forward to a real doctor if something really wrong is going on, but for a crap ton of problems, someone with basic medical (or just lifestyle/health) training is enough.
Heck there was one study that showed that elderly folks talking to each other about their arthritis pain while getting an evening drink at their local watering hole served to reduce pain symptoms.
Chatting with local bartenders and barbers can be nearly as good as professional therapy for some issues.
Having someone trusted just listen and parrot back common sense advice works really damn well.
Trusting the source of the advice, and believing it will work, has a huge impact on treatment.
The use of tarot cards as therapeutic projectives is actually backed by science though, [1] and more and more practitioners are making use of them in clinical settings [2].
You're jumping to call it quackery without having an open mind. That's not science, that's prejudice.
Is it ok for doctors to give sugar pills for ailments too? They're shown to be effective for a variety of ailments.
Tarot reading goes hand in hand with reading people's fortune. I don't see how you can separate the 2 and therefore have an ethically acceptable treatment, and that's assuming the placebo isn't entirely based on the fortune reading expectation.
Tarot cards can't just be used as a projective because of their history. They are associated with fortune telling.
Denying that is like walking around with a swastika armband telling anyone who calls you a nazi that it's got nothing to do with the Nazis. Even if you're a Buddhist you still have to accept there an association there.
That is the problem with tarot cards. Some people are going to think you are reading their fortune, no matter how much you preface it.
It's like homeopathy: still a mixture between fraud, pseudoscience and sometimes outright dangerous advice, the ratio depending on the provider. And people can and do lose entire life savings to that shit. Just because someone's cold "went away" after downing a ton of sugar pills, it doesn't mean the homeopathy caused that - it was the person's own body all along.
The worst thing about all pseudoscience stuff is that accepting it as a society means that non-scientific opinions are accepted as an equal in democratic discourse - and that is the foundation on which quackery, vaccine denialism, MMS and a whole lot of conspiracy myths grow.
Besides: there's a reason why therapists (at least in Europe) generally have to be licensed similar to doctors... bad advice can literally kill people.
We, as a society, should push for equitable and accessible actual mental health care for everyone, provided by trained and continuously educated professionals - not for quackery.