Little rubber band gives my journalism extra balance

notbrown says:

08:15am | 09/09/10

12% of Australians voted for The Greens. There really is one born every minute.

Reg says:

10:52am | 09/09/10

I prefer my iridescent orange Smiggle usb band. It beats the lot but is unfortunately made for small female wrists, thus indicating a gender bias.
Yes I think they come in GREEN.

T.Chong says:

09:32am | 09/09/10

aint it marvelous what a hologram etched bit of plastic will do.?
Now Adam, yur only real worry is to keep clear of kryptonite

James the REAL Sceptic says:

11:14am | 09/09/10

You aren’t a sceptic.  You’re wearing one because some part of you wants it to be true ...... and therein lies your placebo effect.

Send me your address and I’ll a courier over a rock that will prevent your house from falling down.  If after 2 weeks you’re house has not fallen down, you will be staisifed that it works and can therefore send me 4 easy payments of $59.

If, at some point in the future, your house does fall down then just imagine how sooner it would have fallen down had you not had the “Magnifi-Rock” (TM) in place to channel your house’s natural energy flows and deflect the toppler waves away from your home.

Steely Dan says:

12:39pm | 09/09/10

How did you test it, Adam?

DG says:

09:51am | 09/09/10

Why the hell would someone pay $60 to try something that has no medical/scientific basis at all? By paying $60 to “try it” you are buying into it, and providing the supplier with their benefit, without their proving anything.

Just as I don’t need to “try” homeopathy to know that it’s bunk, try chiropractic treatments to know that it can’t cure cancer or any other nonsense or try acupuncture to know that it performs no better than a placebo for some conditions and no better than “fake acupuncture” for others. The research is out there if one cares to learn - in the modern ear it is no necessary to make every mistake for yourself, the research has been done and you can avoid being caught up in scams with a little research.

The person selling the band is the one making the claim - they have the duty to prove their claim. In the absence of any proof their claim should be ignored - or at the very least should be considered with heartfelt scepticism. Just as any other person who makes a claim of the presence or absence of a being/power/ability should be required to prove it’s existence or admit that they have no evidence to support their claims.

Then again, if people are dumb enough to throw away their hard earned on these things - it’s their own look out. Just another tax on mindless optimism (like the pokies, Nigerian money scams and so forth).

Richard says:

11:27am | 09/09/10

Speaking as a trained acupuncturist, I just thought I’d let you know DG that you are categorically wrong when you say acupuncture “performs no better than a placebo for some conditions and no better than “fake acupuncture” for others”.

For a start, how can you measure acupuncture against a placebo? Acupuncture is not a pill that you can pop, you can’t substitute it with a sugar pill and compare it to a ‘placebo’. Its a practice, not a substance, so that’s how it must be measured. Interestingly, whenever it is measured in practice, for whatever purpose it is used in treating, it is found to have statistically significant therapuetic effects. Nice!

But “oh no”, say the sceptics “wait a minute… My pompous closed mind won’t allow me to accept that anything unconventional or ‘alternative’ can work.” So they demand it be measured against a ‘placebo’, but since (as I noted before) this is impossible (not to mention irrational), they set up these convoluted tests, not conducted by real acupuncturists with years of training and experience, but by doctors who’ve done a weekend course in ‘medical acupuncture’, and then measure it against so-called ‘sham acupuncture’.

But there’s just one problem with this… The ‘sham acupuncture’, which they choose because its its supposedly not going to work, is in practise precisely similar to the less well-known branch of ‘Japanese acupuncture’, which involves shallow needle insertion/non-insertion, superficial stimulation and differing points and meridians. When I was working at the Queensland Sports Medicine Clinic, the Japanese acupuncturist there thought was funny that ‘Sham Acupuncture’ performed better that the ‘Real Acupuncture’ in some studies: “Of course” he would say “You TCM barbarians with your deep insertion and vigourous stimulation, how could you possible get as good results as we subtle Japanese artists”.

For 30 years now sceptical researchers have been trying to discredit acupuncture as a valid therapuetic method, but despite their best efforts, evidence for the efficacy of this ancient discipline, which has withstood the test of time, keeps accumulating. In my opinion, the best evidences are in the lives of the millions of people who have had positive experiences with acupuncture, and have derived, and continue to derive health benifits from acupuncture every day.

Warren says:

11:47am | 09/09/10

@Richard: You clearly don’t understand the scientific method.

Acupuncture is a technique used to lower the amount pain that people feel. So lets say we have 5 groups:

1) Get nothing at all (Control)
2) Get a sugar pill (Placebo)
3) Get a panadol (Chemical)
4) Get acupuncture from a trained professions such as you (acupuncture)
5) Get someone randomly poking them with pins (fake acupuncture)

Now, when we get everyone to rate their pain to a researcher in an empty room at the beginning on a scale from 1-10.

Then we give them one of the five randomly selected treatments listed above and then those people go back into the same empty room with the same researcher who doesn’t know which of the five treatements that they recieved (so it is a double blind).

They they rate their pain again on a scale of 1-10.

Now if we look at the difference between their original score and their scond score, all five groups will (generally) score their pain lower after the experiment than before it.

BUT, and here is the magic part, the chemical group will rate their pain as having decreased the most, and the following four groups will all rate their pain as having decreased by about the same amount, but all will be less than the people who took a panadol:

chemical > acupuncture/fake acupuncture/placebo > nothing.

So, while acupuncture is better than nothing, it is not better than either fake acupuncture or taking a sugar pill and it is WORSE than taking a panadol.

The scientific method doesn’t favour chemical solutions over traditional ones, it just favours things that actually work over things that don’t. Sorry.

DG says:

12:33pm | 09/09/10

Warren,

I was planning a long post outlining something similar together with references from research by the AMA, WHO and various other bodies, but I feel that would be a little over the top after reading your succinct reply. In particular I was going to refer to a book that was recently linked to a defamation case in the UK, which made a good analysis of the evidence as it stands.

Instead I’ll just jump to my punch line:

In 2009 on the conclusion of years of research by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, they said:

“Ten years ago the government set out to test herbal and other alternative health remedies to find the ones that work. After spending $2.5 billion, the disappointing answer seems to be that almost none of them do.”

I think Tim Minchin said it best “You know what they call ‘alternative medicine’ that’s been proved to work? Medicine.”.”

Ana says:

12:46pm | 09/09/10

@Warren

Okay, panadol works better than acupuncture
acupuncture/fake/placebo works better than nothing

at least it does work better than nothing..

I’m considering acupuncture because I’m getting tired of popping pills every time something hurts.. Which is all too often..

I’d much rather have acupuncutre to help at least a little bit, then continue to take codine which is messing up my stomach in the long run..

I guess they cancel each other out?
Sure, it might be less effective but it’s also not going to harm me either?

But I don’t know, it might have other side effects I’m unaware of..

Richard says:

12:59pm | 09/09/10

Complete nonsense Warren, that methodology contains serious flaws. The double-blind randomised trial is great for evaluating pharmacuetical compounds, but it is a very blunt tool for measuring subtle and subjective effects. It also completely misconceives the concept of acupuncture, which is not grounded in medical science: how could it be? It’s a practice which predates modern medical science by about 1500 years, and its utilities are completely different to that of a panadol tablet.

Acupuncture is an holistic individualised therapuetic system. To try and isolate it, cut it down to a standardised format and then measure it against a pill will of course distort the outcome of any acupuncture treatment. I suggest you look into the more recent research using more sophisticated tools such as positron emission tomography (PET) scans to see what was happening in the brains of people having acupuncture treatment for arthritis pain… Or you could just ask someone who has experienced positive benifits from acupuncture, oh but that’s right~ despite millions of individuals over thousands of years benefiting from it, that doesn’t count because its not ‘scientific’.

TheRealDave says:

01:26pm | 09/09/10

I’m not that skeptical, I already accept that most of it is crap….except acupuncture.

A little offtopic but - out little Jack Russell woke up one morning with his back legs rigid and in obvious pain. We naturally thought it was a tick and checked him out but couldn’t find anything. We took the little fella to the vet who couldn’t find a tick either so he gave him a cortisone shot of some description and told us to bring him back the next day. The poor bugger was trying to drag himself outside but couldn’t pee. The next morning the vet gave him another shot and showed me how to press down on his bladder to ‘force’ the pee out. After 4 days of daily shots with zero improvement the vet suggested we give the dog ‘the needle’ and put him down. We decided to give him another day to see if he would come good. That night a friend of ours suggested we take him to her vet as a last resort. We took him to the new vet who wanted to give him acupuncture. I rolled my eyes - acupuncture for a bloody dog?? What the?? The missus had tears in her eyes and said yes. We left the little fella at 9am. We went back to pick him up at 4pm - and he was running around. I nearly chocked on my own tongue. That was 6 years ago and at 15 the little Jack Russell is still going strong.

So whilst I am sceptical of ‘home remedies’, ‘natural medicines’, ‘aromatherapy’, ‘crystals’, ‘heated glass bulbs’, ‘feng shue’ and all that crap - I’d give acupuncture a go.

I fail to see how it would have a placebo affect on a dog.

DG says:

02:27pm | 09/09/10

Bad news for the Real Dave - the placebo effect has been demonstrated in animals, It has also been demonstrated in infants that are incapable of understanding the nature of the medical treatment or placebo that they are receiving.

That said, there are some things that acupuncture does provide results for - stress relief is one, however it performs no better than a massage, a placebo, the consumption of alcohol or many other non-zero effect treatments. But only in relation to symptoms and conditions that are highly subjective.

remlap says:

03:42pm | 09/09/10

DG. Are you saying that in The Real Dave’s case, the “placebo” treatment for his dog (acupuncture) was more effective than the medically proven cortisone injections that the dog had? A little incongruous perhaps?

DG says:

04:54pm | 09/09/10

remlap -

Not at all. I am just pointing out that the placebo effect is possible in animals as well as in adult humans.

Dave concluded by saying that he didn’t see how the placebo effect could occur in dogs. My point was that the placebo effect has been demonstrated in other animals.

Of interest, and perhaps relevant, when birds are given a reward for behaving in a certain way they will repeat the behaviour in search of the reward. If you feed them randomly, the birds will repeat the behaviour that last gave them a reward. This demonstrates the origin of ‘superstition’. It also shows the importance of appreciating the different between a causal and coincidental relationship.

In the case of the dog - the question becomes this:  what did the vet think that they were treating with the cortisol injections (did they think they were treating for the tick they hadn’t found)? Was that the same thing that the acupuncturist thought that they were treating. We do not know if it took a couple of days for the injections to have effect, whether the dog ate something, passed a gallstone, kidney stone or some other natural process that cured the ailment (such as the dogs own immune system)?
Simply, on the face of it in this one anecdotal case there is insufficient evidence to establish a causal relationship between acupuncture and the dogs recovery.

Michael says:

12:19pm | 09/09/10

At which point one might note the existence of the Kabbalah, which actually promotes wristbands.  Although they’re not rubber, and not purple.

KH says:

10:31am | 09/09/10

Then you will lose your money…........

TheRealDave says:

01:52pm | 09/09/10

I’m a sceptical, lazy, unmotivated bloke who also has lower back pain and trouble sleeping. Guy - send me one and I’ll test it and report back on it for you to see if it has any benefit or if its just all marketing crap.

Robbo says:

02:28pm | 09/09/10

Did Guy also happen to mention how much he is being paid to wear and spruik it’s benefits?

Ant Sharwood says:

04:11pm | 09/09/10

Robbo, he’s not being paid. He was on Sky to talk about iron man but we ended up having a spontaneous discussion about power bands on air anyway. Good fun!

Bethany says:

08:16pm | 09/09/10

I’ve spent a lot of time in Asia. There, at least, a queue outside an eatery invariably does mean it is better. For a hungry traveller, it is an infallible method of finding good food. Great story BTW.

davido says:

06:13pm | 11/09/10

Yes well a queue should indicate demand exceeding supply.

And a queue may indicate a good product at a good price. If that is the case then the line is an indication of people voting with their feet.

Unfortunately, so many other things might be the cause of the queue: for instance: slow service. I asked the guy who owns the shop with the long queue why he has a long queue each day. He said it all started because restricted counter space meant a little slower turnover and consequently a longer line. Then the line itself started attracting people of it’s own accord!

You may have noticed the ‘sheep attracting other sheep theory’ at work at nightclubs where queue’s are artificially induced in order to simulate demand.

Marketers use it all the time… they call it ‘simulating demand until you stimulate demand!’ It is the reason restaurants will first seat people in highly visible spots by windows.

Ant Sharwood says:

12:09pm | 09/09/10

Dr Karl already has been asked. His reponse is in the third last blue linky in my story. Hang on, here you go.
http://www.smh.com.au/small-business/entrepreneur/a-question-of-balance-20100907-14ysj.html

Pete says:

01:28pm | 09/09/10

Cheers mate. That’s good enough for me!

DG says:

12:43pm | 09/09/10

“A real skeptic would try the product to see the result for themselves”

No, a real sceptic asks that a person making a claim should provide evidence to support their claim. Not anecdotal evidence, but the result of double blind testing. That, before making an extraordinary claim one accumulates extraordinary evidence to support their claim.

It is certainly not the position of a rational person to test every claim that is made, by every person, but to consider the evidence that a person puts forward to support their claim, to analyse the methodology and results, and hopefully replicate your results. It is not a duty for the world at large to do the hard work of disproving a claim while the claimant reaps the rewards of their unsupported claims.

A real sceptic is well aware that their own subjective experience is not strong evidence, and appreciates that there are others in a far better position to carry out the appropriate double blind testing.

The alternative rewards hucksters, frauds and other merchants of woo at the expense of those in need of hope (or who are just plain gullible).

KH says:

12:57pm | 09/09/10

I can give you a 20c rubber band that will achieve the same thing - but it isn’t fancy, it doesn’t have a ‘hologram’ or some mumbo jumbo written on the pack, so you won’t think it will do anything.  Therefore it won’t.  Dress it up a bit, thrown in some pseudo scientific gobbledegook, and get someone famous to champion it, and voila! 

If you think it will have an effect, you will assume it is the reason you feel better.  The reality is you have changed your thinking.  You are anticipating less pain (or whichever thing you are trying to improve), so you feel less pain, or you aren’t as focussed on it.  That is what cognitive behavioural therapy is about - you change how you think about something (say, pain) and you can change the effect.  Perception is everything. 

Skeptics know you are already in possession of the most powerful tool available - its called your brain.  Its actually you that is effecting the change.  Not the bracelet.  I don’t have to waste the money to know this.  But you go right ahead and waste $60…........whatever.

david says:

02:22pm | 09/09/10

@ DG - what if you are skeptical of the double blind test. What if the testers are also hucksters and frauds?

@ KH - “It’s actually you that is affecting the change. Not the bracelet.”

Do you know this from a double blind test or do you believe it based on personal experience? This is a conclusion from a wanna-be skeptic.

If the brain can affect the external world - perhaps it can effect the result of a double blind test as seen through the eyes of the tester. This makes all testing unreliable.

Steely Dan says:

02:51pm | 09/09/10

@ david

“what if you are skeptical of the double blind test. What if the testers are also hucksters and frauds?”
That’s when you’d use a triple-blind test.

“If the brain can affect the external world - perhaps it can effect the result of a double blind test as seen through the eyes of the tester. This makes all testing unreliable.”
This why test results have to be repeatable.  If two tests give signifcantly different results under the same conditions then there is an unidentified variable that needs to be addressed.

DG says:

03:25pm | 09/09/10

In the case of a double blind test - the subjects do not know if they are being treated with the real thing or a placebo. Accordingly it is rather difficult for the subject to deliberately skew the sample one way or the other. However this is part of the reason that a variation must be statistically significant in order to be considered a result rather than just ‘noise’ in the data set. The same is true for the persons that are assessing the efficacy of the treatment. They are unaware as to whether the subject is receiving the placebo or the official treatment. They only know the effects, if any, that the procedure is having.

Also, it is preferable to have a number of studies with large samples rather than one study or studies with small datasets. Variation between studies is possible and may demonstrate flaws in the methodology, may suggest that further study is necessary to provide more reliable results or, as you suggested, may suggest that in one or the other test some subjects or testers were less than honest with their reporting.

dancan says:

04:14pm | 09/09/10

The sheer awesomeness of the band means if you wore it on both wrists, the competing energy fields would literally RIP YOU IN HALF

DG says:

02:34pm | 09/09/10

Are you really surprised? Or would you like to think that they would do that research before they sell the product and make claims about its efficacy using anecdotal evidence.

focker says:

12:24am | 17/12/10

power balance bands  AD.