Quickies
Skepchick Quickies, 5.13
- Acupuncture for bad backs: even sham therapy works. (Thanks to Jenea & Question Authority.)
- Why Oprah loves Jenny McCarthy. Also: poem to Jenny. (Thanks to Stimpson and Malte.)
- Teenagers are becoming increasingly logical, Swedish study finds. Or maybe they are just in Sweden.
- Speaking of Sweden, they won’t let a man start a Madonna of Orgasm church.
Teenagers are becoming Vulcans?
@Outsider: Becoming?
A church that worships the orgasm? It turns out I’ve been devoutly religious for years. I’m as surprised as you are.
Sham Acupuncture:
And while these results suggest that you might not even need the full-fledged needle-penetrating version to find relief, no physician is quite ready to recommend pricking yourself with toothpicks.
“Dr.” Durnett’s All Toothpick Medical Treatment “Clinic” – coming soon to a strip mall near you!
I’m going to call my treatments “neurodentology”.
Um….
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s27924.htm
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/acupuncture/SA00086
*shrug* As an organ, skin isn’t exactly cognizant of the difference between you willingly having needles stuck into the skin of your back or you backing into a cactus.
@ durnett, outsider:
As the father of two teens, I rarely found mine to be logical…
@QuestionAuthority: Well even Spock lost his shit when some kid called his mom a whore.
so they do sham acupuncture with toothpicks at the actual acupuncture sites, find benefits to both, and conclude that they both work?
i feel this is obviously missing the sham acupuncture at non-acupuncture sites.
The Oprah-Jenny article is fantastic, and reminds me of my sister in law. She’s quite fond of sending around email “warnings,” and once she sent around one of those “child rapist getting out of prison” emails asking me to contact the government and demand he stay in prison (the exact details elude me.)
Well, my SiL is not the most rational person, and I am (at least amongst my family) so I of course snoped it, found out it was an old email about a British prisoner that was already released a decade ago.
Being the NICE skeptic I am, I emailed her (and just her, not everyone she forwarded the fake email on to) and told her about it, suggesting that snopes was a great website for this kind of stuff.
Needless to say, she replied (and included everyone she originally sent the email to) excoriating me for such callousness and suggesting that when I had children I’d think differently (fyi, I now do and I don’t.) I just didn’t understand why she would react this way to obviously a fake and useless email suggestion, but the article is a perfect explanation of it.
Oprah-Jenny sounds like a critical mass of woo to me…
I’m sold on acupuncture for sore backs! It seems to work for me.
I just drove a 16 penny nail through my left knee and I suddenly don’t care about my sore back at all.
Anyone got a band-aid?
rod
@MyNameIsTim: Exactly what I was thinking. The people doing the study seem to have a bias towards believing acupuncture works. I don’t see anything suggesting they’re planning a follow-up study to rule out placebo effect.
Sham therapy does not really “work”. Steve Novella takes it down here.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=492
I just thought of a TV show pitch:
Harpo’s Island, a 13-week series in which one person dies from preventable diseases each week.
This Oprah/Jenny business is making me sick… Think I am going to turn off my brain for a while. ;)
In a magical world where pink unicorns poop only the candy you want, speak in 15 languages, and pigs fly, Harpo Marx would rise from his grave and sue Oprah for defiling his great name.
A skeptic can dream, right?