> we should report on new ideas with a great deal of skepticism until the evidence becomes very strong
A nutritionist with Ph.d with good credibility claims that he got good results with using black sesame seeds. The way he used it is - roast 2 spoons of black sesame seeds and eat once a week for 6 months (no need/should not take every day). He claims to have cured them in 6 months.
If I have someone I know I would try as there is no harm in having a regular food item taken once a week. Don't know how it works or if any studies already done to back it up.
Great! Until he does a double-blind pre-registered randomized study (with a control group) and it is published in a serious peer review journal (and reproduced a few times by independent research groups), it should be treated like snake oil.
The harm is indirect, because they are mixing real medicine wit pseudoscience. There are a lot of miracle "cures" that appear every month. Many of them steal the patients or the family money, other steal just time and hope. And in some cases, people following the alternative cures avoid following the standard treatment that is better ot at leas reduces the suffering.
May be you forgot the context I mentioned it in. We have to look for alternatives when there is no definitive one present for the time being.
He's been curing patients for past 20 years with diet changes alone. So, I am impressed with his results and shared his idea. Doing a study on it and not using it until you study is your problem. In other words, I sense your worry of how your medicine will react since it's posion (full of unnatural chemicals) compared to a natural food item in it's unaltered form which is being used in daily food consumption in many cultures. Are you suggesting people taking medicine to stop eating food on a daily basis? I never suggested to stop any medication.
I am more than willing to contact him, will you be able to fund the study?
> He's been curing patients for past 20 years with diet changes alone.
From your other comment:
> He claims to have cured them in 6 months.
I'm not sure how long it takes to transform a 6 month treatment to a paper. I guess 1 year before for designing, filling all the forms and preparations. And I guess 1 year after to process all the statistics, write the results in a nice form, fighting with the referee/editor. So in 2.5 years it could be published. Let's round it to 3 years because it's not my field of study. [1]
So in 20 years he has enough time to publish a serious paper on a cure an a popular illness that has a lot of people working on it. (Perhaps if the evil Big Pharma is blocking his study, he can replace the pre-registration to a single big announcement in a blog post an a hash of the post in the bitcoin blockchain. It's not official, but any
good registration is enough. Most of the other steps, like double-blind, can be made anyway.)
[1] In Physics the typical time is 3 month, but there are very few paperwork because the study doesn't use humans. In Math the typical time is more than 1 year, perhaps 2, because math is forever and the review is proportional.
Where’s his paper in Nature or some other high profile journal? Even as a preliminary result in mice, this would have been big news. The lack of said news means something is wrong with the study.
There is an alternate. To wake up from the ignorant direction the so called studies are taking the human kind to. And stop calling it science. Dr. B.M. Hedge suggested long ago that all the studies done on animals or humans are wrong and inefficient in so many fronts. His words - According to ayurveda, human body can be classified into around 200 types based on the K/P/H balance of a body. A medicine that works for one may be totally neutral for another. So, you read a paper that claims it got awesome results on a random blindfold study, the question Dr. Hedge asks is what type of the 200 human body types is it efficient? Apparently there is a body type that gives neutral or negative results (ignoring side effects). Talk about working it on animals first!
(-ve downvotes welcome)
Here's a nice smackdown which I don't have the time or knowledge to offer myself:
"He abandons [Dr. B.M. Hegde] all rational thinking and embraces fantastical belief systems. The sad thing is I personally know many people delaying cancer treatment being swayed by his speeches and ending up with incurable metastasis later."
Understood. May be the modern world needs another wim hof to become a subject to the existing science - validity though current limited existing medical tools to prove/validate that humans can get access to autonomous nervous system and heal themselves (which was thought to be impossible in modern days). The approach Dr. hedge took is not registering with the rest of the world according to the comments above. May be he should have proven his claims subjecting to the existing methods just to give that level of confidence who trusts it like wim hof did.
It's not about giving confidence to people, the existing methods are part of the fundamental idea of the scientific method. Dr. Hegde's claim of body types doesn't really mean anything until there's evidence to back it up. And modern medical trials are crafted and investigated with a wide variety of statistical tools to determine the exact impact of a treatment method. Only if his claims can stand up to this rigorous scrutiny can they be accepted the way existing models are. The rest of the world will then sit up and take notice, exactly because only then will there be something for them to take notice of.
An appeal to the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda doesn't really stand on it's own until it's backed by solid peer reviewed science. It's really not that hard, a well designed set of trials proving your point will have the entire world at your feet. Modern science is extremely receptive of new ideas that way.
Agree. Unfortunately, this is never going to happen. The few still practicing Ayurveda properly come from a background where they learned it from their ancestors within their family and practicing it for free and never allow commercialization of their knowledge. But they can gladly share the knowledge to people who want to learn. Food, Education and Medicine/health are the 3 things the practitioners in Indian culture believes to keep free. A few decades ago, you want to gain education, you seek a guru and become a disciple and he teaches for free. You got a health issue, you go to a doctor and he treats you for free. Same with food, every town/village used to have centers where food is served free to anyone. Although it's all gone decades ago, there are still practitioners who treat patients for free and only take donations and not fee. Sounds, funny but It's easy to understand the underlying wisdom, how many studies today are funded by people with commercial interests? Research on egg is funded by Meat industry, Research on milk is funded by Diary industry etc. How is that turning out for everyone?
In fact, most studies are funded either by governments or via donations from the public. Some public studies are partially funded by industry, but with a big caveat: industry has no say on how the studies are conducted, or even what is being studied: industry contributions to public research are not bound to research outcomes. And all this information is readily available, since publicly funded research institutes publish their funding sources.
It’s true that industry is funding some (publicly published) research directly, and that some research publications fail to disclose their funding source and other conflicts of interest. But for the vast majority of biomedical research, especially fundamental research, this simply isn’t the case.
And it requires a complete suspension of one’s critical thinking capacities to imagine that some vast, weird conspiracy encompasses all of public research, to suppress the “truth” that Ayurveda works, contradicting everything we know from modern medicine as well as basic physics and chemistry. And all that just to make a few pharmaceutical company bosses rich? Why would I, lowly researcher on a sub-par salary, contribute to such a conspiracy? It’s completely irrational.
I appreciate the honestly in this answer, and your willingness to accept how people see something you clearly seem to care about.
As for commercialization of Ayurveda, I see this as exactly what's happening now with Patanjali etc trying to cash in on people's trust in their culture without providing a proper research base for their claims.
Another reply to your comment above makes very good points about research funding, and in my experience, funding is to a large extent non partisan, and free from industry influence. There are even rules on disclosure of funding about major studies, which makes it possible to criticize them.
I only wish that Ayurveda is held to the same standards as other medicine, and passes through the fire of testing the same way all modern medicine has. It's how we know that antibiotics work, or about interactions between medicines, or about side effects and complications. It will ultimately benefit the field, and medicine as a whole.
> Unfortunately, this is never going to happen. The few still practicing Ayurveda properly come from a background where they learned it from their ancestors within their family and practicing it for free and never allow commercialization of their knowledge. But they can gladly share the knowledge to people who want to learn.
How is it possible that they could have prevented that information from ending up in the hands of profiteers even after all these years? And no profit hungry pharmaceutical company has ever been able to rediscover and commercialize those techniques, even though the details of them are mostly freely available on the internet?
I don't get it. If you can't trust researchers who perform studies to validate their results, then what is it which makes this guy trustworthy to you? He has done strictly less than that to validate his results.
I am not against validity through studies. But the approach/methodology taken in most studies on food/drugs are very limited in nature and often flawed giving skewed results (e.g. I hope everyone knows about the approach taken in dividing fat into 3 categories and how it is taken as reference to ruin health of so many humans over decades through refined oils). I totally agree with him in that regard.
Tried them once. Their windows app by default only connects at 128 bit encryption! Had a chat with their CS and they tried to convince 128 bit is enough. Stopped after the trial.
I am a member of ACM and BCS for few years. BCS used to have access to EBESCO host with few CS related databases where I used to read papers often, but the service is now discontinued.So, I feel BCS is not worthy of subscribing. ACM has Skillsoft and Safari online access which I use almost every week that has LIVE and on-demand training on almost any tech subject. Although access to ACM digital library is provided as a separate subscription which is available for members at extra cost ($99), it's up to the member to see if it benefits them to pay extra.I considered IEEE too, but it seems almost same as ACM interms of member benefits, but it might be more inclined towards other engineering disciplines than CS.
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A nutritionist with Ph.d with good credibility claims that he got good results with using black sesame seeds. The way he used it is - roast 2 spoons of black sesame seeds and eat once a week for 6 months (no need/should not take every day). He claims to have cured them in 6 months. If I have someone I know I would try as there is no harm in having a regular food item taken once a week. Don't know how it works or if any studies already done to back it up.