Health

Big surprise here (not). A 10-year study funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine to the tune of $2.5 billion has found that glucosamine and chondroitin, black cohosh, saw palmetto, and shark cartilage fair no better than placebo in treating their targeted ailments, much as echinacea had previously been found to be no help in dealing with colds. Only ginger (specifically for chemotherapy nausea) and stress/tension relief treatments (such as accupunture and yoga) offered marginal advantage over placebo.

Not exactly a comfortable finding for the multibillion dollar snake oil business, though I have no doubt the alternative medicine companies will protest these results and will continue to expand their product lines for years to come despite little to no proof of efficacy.

Critics on both sides of the issue point out the Center's numerous issues, including funding research for faith-based treatments, such as distance healing, as well as an advisory board filled with propoenents of alternative treatments. Other problems include the wide-range of components making up the various compounds tested:

There are 150 makers of black cohosh "and probably no two are exactly the same, and probably some people are putting sawdust in capsules and selling it," said Norman Farnsworth, a federally funded herbal medicine researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

So long as consumer continue to have 'faith' in alternative medicine and buy billions of dollars of the products and treatments each year, and so long as the government refuses to regulate the products and producers, the alternative medicine business will continue to flourish despite the lack of proof of efficacy, and often in spite of contradictory evidence. In an age where adults still believe in a mythical, magical imaginary friend called Jesus, can we expect any more rational behavior. Of course not...

As most of those close to me know, one of my biggest beefs with the Christian Bible and its doctrine is the story of God's demand of Abraham of a blood sacrifice of his son Isaac. Not only is the Judeo-Christian God shown to be unbelievably cruel and sadistic, Abraham's blind faith in God leads him to the brink of an equally cruel and sadistic act: sacrificing his own son.

PZ Myers has been all over the story of Daniel Hauser, a 13-year old boy who has been so brainwashed by his mom that he has 'decided' he doesn't want chemotherapy for his Hodgkins lymphoma, a treatment with high degree of success. In his latest post on the subject, driven by the news that Hauser's mother has taken the boy and fled to locations unknown in order to avoid judge-appointed treatment, Myers assaults the mindset that leads to this sort of behavior, a 'Modern Day Isaac' mentality.

What she has done has gone even deeper. Daniel is 13 years old; he has been tested for his competency, and has been found to be completely illiterate. He was homeschooled. Colleen Hauser has been wielding the sacrificial dagger of her faith on her son for years, crippling his brain and rendering him unable to evaluate the real-world consequences of their decisions. I wonder how many Daniel Hausers there are in this country, living lives of quiet ignorance, unexposed by the trauma of a physical disease?

And here's the real tragedy: Colleen Hauser almost certainly loves her son and believes she is doing what is best for him, every step of the way. I can identify with her in that regard — I can understand that deep, gut-wrenching love a parent can have for her children, the kind that can put you to your knees with agony at every little hurt they suffer…and Daniel Hauser faces deeper pain and an imminent threat of death that my kids have never had. But Colleen Hauser is so afflicted with the poison of religion that she has lost sight of reality, and is going to kill her son with her ignorance.

Go read the rest. Myers puts it much better than I can, and his analysis is spot on with what I feel about this blatantly evil part of Christianity.

Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist found a disgusting and disingenious 'interpretation' of the results of one of the most well-known empirical studies of intercessory prayer known as STEP (Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer). I covered this study previously and noted that the results released in 2006 demonstrated no difference in recovery for patients prayed for compared to those who received no prayer. The results were clear cut here, there is no advantage to being prayed for. God, it seems, does not care who gets prayed for. Or does he?

This new article from Christianity Today, though, offers a rationalization I’ve never heard before. You can tell they’re really straining to find a silver lining…

Ironically, STEP actually supports the Christian worldview. Our prayers are nothing at all like magical incantations. Our God bears no resemblance to a vending machine. The real scandal of the study is not that the prayed-for group did worse, but that the not-prayed-for group received just as much, if not more, of God’s blessings. In other words, God seems to have granted favor without regard to either the quantity or even the quality of the prayers. By instinct, we might selfishly prefer that God give preferential treatment to those who are especially, deliberately, and correctly prayed for, but he seems to act otherwise.

True to his character, God appears inclined to heal and bless as many as possible.

So the fact that the prayers had no effect on the sick? Don’t think about that, say Gregory Fung and Christopher Fung, the authors of the article. Instead, they want you to consider that prayer works because the un-prayed-for people didn’t die a horrible death.

Yet again, religious folks choose to interpret solid science as a function of God's mysterious ways rather than accept that they are simply wrong about their assumed supernatural powers.

Via the blog Epiphenom, I'm alerted to another study finding absolutely zero evidence that praying for a sick person can offer them any better recovery or health than those who are not the recipient of such prayers.

Every few years, a group based at Hertford College at Oxford puts together a statistical analysis of all the studies conducted to date that have looked at whether praying for sick people helps them get better (or at least stay alive).

The latest has just been published, and it contains something pretty radically new in their conclusions: the evidence is now so clear cut that they think that no more studies should be done. The book is shut. Praying for sick people simply doesn't work.

In both Dawkins' God Delusion and Hitchens' God is not Great, there were references to a large Templeton Foundation experiment which attempted to determine whether prayer could indeed have benefits. Interestingly, as each author pointed out, not only did praying for the sick fail to increase the likelihood of recovery, those patients who were aware that others were praying for them fared worse than those who did not. Please, religious people, stop the nonsense faith in pseudoscience and that 'God' or prayer will see you well.