Detoxification of Heavy Metals

[thesummerqueen]

Hahaha

[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.

[thesummerqueen]

1) I still haven't seen anything specific regarding this "toxicity," which on the same site we keep using (and many others) has been dismissed as a catch all term with no evidence behind it. Diseases and ailments have names and specific symptoms. The toxemia in your original link had no such relation to what the doctor was trying to get at. It's just a good buzzword.

2) Science is the study of ideas and hypotheses. It's a way of approaching a claim or idea in order to see if it has efficacy. There is bad science and good science. Bad science includes biases and misrepresentation. Good science works with multiple testing to remove these. If something is in the realm of pseudo-science and gets repeatable scientific studies evidencing its efficacy, the treatment, creature, or activity moves from psuedo-science into 'good' science. This is true in medicine, cryptozoology, etc.

3) You are right that a treatment which works would work whether science had proved it or not. Before good science gets a hold of it, though, you can't be sure if that treatment is actually doing anything, if the body is healing on its own, if the placebo effect is in place, etc. So no, I wouldn't waste my time on a treatment that hadn't had any scientific study, because science has the advantage of tracking side effects... unlicensed 'medical' cures don't.

4) I do believe we've just been discussing that fasting was in the process of being tested, and at best can be said not to do any harm. At worst, it can severely fuck up someone's system. It's not being ignored, and in the light of safer remedies responsible doctors will continue to promote answers that they know work with the least amount of harm, or will cause the most amount of good. Fasting hasn't shown the ability to provide more good than harm yet. Therefore, how about regulating your diet and exercising instead? At least with responsible exercise you're getting more benefit than just the "safe" taxing of your system.

5) Correlation does not imply causation. That doesn't mean I throw correlation out - a point I was about to address per Rayaan's post. Correlation, much like the symptoms exhibited in a human body, gives you a springboard for finer questions to test. Let's continue to use Apo's ice cream truck analogy. It may be that if someone found that kids drowned in pools in high numbers in neighborhoods where ice cream trucks were known to circulate. You don't immediately assume that the ice cream trucks are involved. You ask questions: do the kids hear the truck and run outside heedless of the watery danger they could get in? Do they run outside in general regardless of the truck and drown in such high numbers that it doesn't matter if a truck is there or not? Do neighborhoods with swimming pools simply have a higher incidence of trucks patrolling them because swimming pools indicate more affluent parents who might therefore buy more ice cream? In the case of health, I told Fallen that symptoms can mean many things. He might have two different factors causing different sets of symptoms at the same time. They are SPRINGBOARDS FOR QUESTIONS TO A DOCTOR. Not direct indicators. I think you'll notice that in the case of tobacco, multiple sets of data were said to be triangulating. This is far more than juice fasting has to offer. Or chiropractic. Which, by the by, has been pretty thoroughly studied.

6) We have evidence that fasting does SOMETHING, which may or may not improve the condition of those at high risk for heart disease. The "may or may not" part is why we still have to study it in human beings and see what happens. And this again has only to do with heart disease. It has nothing to do with this "toxicity" you people keep mentioning, which seems to have no definite medical term , and certainly still has nothing to do with removing heavy metals, which I do believe has a medically approved process which sort of sucks and doesn't involve a simple juice fast.

7) "no down side". You might be right that juice fasting for a few days has no real downside except hunger. And very well, it's a small price to pay THIS time. But what if he has a placebo effect from it and doesn't receive proper treatment? In the case of most of these treatments not approved by science, the cost can include and might not be limited to only one of the following: time, energy, sometimes massive quantities of money, ill-health, death, maiming, and continued ignorance. What if Fallen has a bad reaction to fasting? While we're speaking in anecdotes, I never fasted on Yom Kippur - it gave me massive migraines even as a child, and the doctor said not to do it. We have a history of diabetes in the family, and the fasting was for stupid religious purposes, so there was no reason to follow it and every reason not to. Who knows - Fallen could also have unknown reactions to complete fasting. On the other hand, you were suggesting a juice fast...which would be like eating salad or fruit salad for several days. And what is that wiping out? I hope you're suggesting all 'organic' fruits and veggies, because of those nasty toxic pesticides on the regular kind... except whoops! Organic farms use pesticides and fertilizers with the same chemicals too. You're replacing one made-up toxin with another.

This all started because Fallen suggested he had heavy metal poisoning, and you suggested he try a juice fast in order to "chelate" things out of him that weren't even tested to be there in the first place. Then you linked pages all from the same one doctor who gave a biology lesson and did not cite any evidence for his "toxemia." Further google searching of other proponents of juice fasting and its supposed benefits have led to wilder and wilder claims, uncovering people with something to sell, and only one study so far showing that fasting does something - not that it yields net positive results in a treatment mode. Further, there's no evidence that juice-based chelation even works, should he actually have metal poisoning - unless you're holding something back.

The suggestions should have stopped with "go to another practitioner for second and third opinions and get a blood test" before trying different remedies.

[KichigaiNeko]

Not responding to anyone here.

All I can say is that two days maximum of a juices only food intake will not harm any one. HOW AND WHAT you chose to eat when you get back onto solid food is another matter. It is a non-ending wonder that people are so divorced from their own bodies that they do not know what to eat.

As for being in Western Australia and having to deal with reluctant medical practitioners does NOT indicate that alternative medicine has the answers. As I have stated, GPs here do seem very reluctant to investigate weird health issues. Why? I have no idea. But that should not stop a determined individual demanding a referral to a Specialist in that field to follow up on the patients concerns.

Like I said FTR..... PESTER YOUR GP FOR A REFERRAL!
And be prepared to pay.

[thesummerqueen]

Or if they're diabetic they could go into shock. "Any one" is too general a term. Eating sensible meals until tested for whatever problem he's having is the wisest course he can take. I'm not saying he's diabetic. Just that starving yourself of regular nutrients with unknown issues in your body is pretty stupid.

[Jackalope]

Placebos don't kill either.

Nope, they don't.
But this chemical compound does: Dihydrogen Monoxide

Can you believe that DHMO is legal pretty much everywhere?!?!?!!!1!?!111

Won't someone think of the children?

[Angrboda]

Nope, they don't.
But this chemical compound does: Dihydrogen Monoxide

Can you believe that DHMO is legal pretty much everywhere?!?!?!!!1!?!111

Won't someone think of the children?

DMO the silent killer


Can you believe that a google search for a material safety data sheet on this chemical returned 0 results. That's right, zero. None.
Information about this dangerous chemical is so tightly controlled by the manufacturers of DMO, that they are able to get it exempted
from the safety and reporting requirements that the federal government requires for just about any industrial chemical. That scares me.

What you don't know can't hurt you? Wrong!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6Xb4dmQOyY

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi3erdgVVTw

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[John V]

@summerqueen:

Before replying further I need to see your evidence that fasting is as harmful as you claim. Seems to me that many animals go days without food with no ill effects. Animals are known to instinctively fast when they're sick - they "go off their feed." Eating 3 squares a day seems to be our hangup, rather than a requirement for good health.

[thesummerqueen]

I'm not arguing that it's going to harm an otherwise healthy person for not eating for a couple days. I'm arguing that it could harm people who have other health problems or undiagnosed problems, and that it doesn't have the effects your sources are claiming that it does. Quit putting words in my mouth.

[thesummerqueen]

Let's put it this way:

You were the one who was making positive claims about fasting - particularly in regards to heavy metals. Here's the thing about any and all treatments: they fall along this scale somewhere:



If you need help seeing that not getting your normal nutritional and moisture requirements for a period of time could affect people with problems, and eventually affect healthy people if extended out for too long, you're being deliberately obtuse.

When something falls along the side of "does nothing," it also runs the risk of taking the place of a substance or treatment that ACTUALLY does something positive.

YOU made the claim. You need to bring the sauce.

Come back with a certified study that fasting is a legitimate FDA approved treatment for health problems, particularly for heavy metal poisoning.