Detoxification of Heavy Metals

[John V]

Wanton advocacy of pseudoscience, causing inestimable damage yearly.

Er, OK. Little and none are in the range of inestimable.

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I clicked on Rayaan's links.

From Science Daily -

"The confirmation among a new set of patients that fasting is associated with lower risk of these common diseases raises new questions about how fasting itself reduces risk or if it simply indicates a healthy lifestyle."

Bolding mine. Correlation is not causation.

No, it isn’t. However, it’s also fallacious to simply dismiss correlation. From a site you’ve quoted yourself:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/inde...causation/

Much of scientific evidence is based upon a correlation of variables – they tend to occur together. Scientists are careful to point out that correlation does not necessarily mean causation. The assumption that A causes B simply because A correlates with B is a logical fallacy – it is not a legitimate form of argument. However, sometimes people commit the opposite fallacy – dismissing correlation entirely, as if it does not imply causation. This would dismiss a large swath of important scientific evidence.
For example, the tobacco industry abused this fallacy to argue that simply because smoking correlates with lung cancer that does not mean that smoking causes lung cancer. The simple correlation is not enough to arrive at a conclusion of causation, but multiple correlations all triangulating on the conclusion that smoking causes lung cancer, combined with biological plausibility, does.

IOW, correlation is frequently actionable, even if it doesn’t strictly prove causation, and particularly regarding a treatment with no serious downside.

Suppose your friend has a certain condition; your friend is healthy enough to exercise but doesn’t currently; a study comes out showing correlation between exercise and improvement in that condition; and your friend says he’s therefore going to start exercising. Do you dismiss his approach as woo because correlation doesn't prove causation? I doubt it.

Note also that doctors can and do prescribe drugs for off-label uses based on correlational studies and an assessment of the risks and potential benefits. If he thinks there's significant upside and insignificant downside, he'll prescribe the drug for a condition for which the drug hasn't been adequately tested. Is this woo?

Please remember that when treatments have been properly tested and found to have efficacy, they stop getting the label of pseudo-science and become simply part of science. That's how it works.

No, that’s not how it works. Read the link above, which covers this issue as well. At best, your statement is simplistic. The link notes these categories:

This leads us to the final continuum – the consensus of expert opinion based upon systematic reviews can either result in a solid and confident unanimous opinion, a reliable opinion with serious minority objections, a genuine controversy with no objective resolution, or simply the conclusion that we currently lack sufficient evidence and do not know the answer.

Personally I would split the last into two categories – items which have had very little testing, and items which haven’t been studied at all.

Going by your statement of how it works, science is actually the study of pseudo-science!

The important thing to me, though, is to note that a treatment is effective or not regardless of scientific evidence supporting it.

A treatment that passes from pseudo- to science ( in your view) or moves up the continuum of consensus was effective before declared so by science.

The problem then is: what if an effective treatment for a condition exists, but science just hasn’t gotten around to testing it?

I take it from your arguments that you would not consider such treatment. That’s your choice.

However, if the treatment is safe and inexpensive, it’s not unreasonable to consider it just because science has focused on other things.

Getting back to your hypothetical friend. Suppose there’s not even a study showing correlation between his condition and exercise, but he hears many anecdotal accounts of improvement of the condition due to exercise. It would be reasonable for him to give exercise a try. That’s not an application of woo. That’s a recognition that science just hasn’t studied everything yet.

With fasting, science largely hasn’t studied it in humans. We’ve seen a couple studies which show benefits in some areas. Animal studies have shown benefits of caloric restrictions for decades. It’s reasonable (assuming no contraindications) for a person with symptoms of toxicity to try a cleansing fast. It doesn’t cost much (a juicer runs $50 - $200 and all the info you need is available free on the internet), it doesn’t do harm, and even if it doesn’t help the particular condition, we’re starting to get evidence that it has other health benefits.