Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: Snake Oil - magnet therapy



At 09:09 1/11/00 -0500, Michael Edmiston wrote:
... good scientists should
view the evidence before making judgements about whether something is
science or pseudo-science, I am not clear how to gather good data with
respect to magnets.

It is vitally important in this type of study to do double-blind
testing. ...

Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.

I must admit to a level of discomfort when physicists offer
opinions on life science experimental protocol.
What was that expression that Professor Hake used?
"Face validity" is what physicists sometimes expect.

Life scientists expect to associate a magnitude of stimulus
with a graded (even if non linear) response.
(Can a subject easily tell if she has a x1, x3 or x10 field
strength applied?)

They are not shocked to find a strongly affirmative result
from a double blind study, and then read about an equally
respectable double-blind study that favored the null hypothesis.
(Like two I turned up for AC magnetic field bone-healing,
for example...)

Barlow Newbolt offers this:

... One might examine
the probability that a high fat diet and cancer occur in
the same person, but the fact that they occur in the
same person does not constitute a causal chain!


Barlow may be unaware that a staple of the biologist is
over/underfeeding animals of the same genetic strain.
She finds that such subjects live shorter/longer lives on average.

It remains that as a mammalian population lives longer, an
increasing proportion dies of cancer. In this case, one expects
a slimmer person to succumb from cancer.
The excess weight has spoken for the heavyweights
(like the US population, on average) months or years earlier,
despite huge expenditures on prescription medicine and surgery.
brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>
Altus OK