Quote:
Originally Posted by pachyderm
I think sometimes the explanations of things like this have the sound of some kind of new-age with-it-ness, an attempt to make sound "scientific" something which they do not understand -- and that may do a disservice to the reality of the process.
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Pachy... I agree to explain this treatment in terms of physiological benefits would be difficult. However, there are ways to demonstrate efficacy without really saying "how" the benefits are achieved. For example there have been some controlled scientific studies on the effectiveness of prayer in improving healing rates or one some outcome variable. In these studies, they didn't really attempt to determine HOW prayer worked, they just randomly assigned patients to either a prayer group or a control group and compared them at various points. In one of these studies was even used double-blinding to improve the validity. In the cardiac study I am thinking of the researchers found that the prayer group demonstrated significant improvement in the variables assessed over the control group.
These alternative therapies can be studied and should be studied at least in some way. Maybe science can't determine why they work, but having something other than anecdotal evidence would be nice. Maybe I'm just cheap and don't want to spend the $60.
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