June 2023 speaker

Our speaker for June was Kevin Murray on Putting Alternative Medicine to the Test.
One crucial question: How can we know it it works? What are alternative medicines?
Any therapy not accepted by doctors & using methods which lie outside conventional medical practice
Criteria for evidence based medicine.
Controlled Clinical Trials “The Gold Standard”
The trial should include:
Largest possible numbers of subjects.
Random selection should be used to select subjects.
Placebo controlled.
The trial should include a treatment group and a placebo group so that the results for the 2 groups can be compared
Double blind tested.
Neither the experimenter nor the treatment group should know which group has been given the placebo.
Published results
The results should be given the widest possible publication
Peer reviewed
The methodology and the results should be peer reviewed
Independently replicated
The trials and results should be independently replicated by groups not associated with the original trials
The speaker commented on 3 Alternative Medicines subjected to review
1 Homeopathy
Based on theory of treating “like with like.” that is healing can be achieved by administering substances that mimic symptoms of the disease in healthy people.
Homeopathic .
Dilution requires that the smallest possible proportion of the substance should be used to the extent that the treatment usually eventually resembles little more than water
2 Acupuncture
Claims to redirect flows of the life force Ch’i by inserting needles in meridian points. There is no unanimity among practitioners about where needles should be inserted
to achieve desired results, despite the practice having been used for centuries. The Cochrane Collaboration has found insufficient evidence that this is an effective treatment. Also the acupuncture method makes blind testing impossible
3 Chiropractic
Contends that lower back pain is the result of misplaced vertebrae. Uses manipulation of the spinal column to treat and allleviate symptoms. In recent decades physiotherapists adopted techniques of spinal manipulation, but only under the guidance of qualified medical practitioners.
None of these 3 alternative medicines can be said to have met the criteria of controlled clinical trials.
Speaker report by Peter Clark.