Paraben & Nasties free shaving cream?

Bechet45 said:
How did I know the scoffer you referred to was you, Chris?

My personal experience is where allopathic remedies failed to cure I tried Ayurvedic and Ayurvedic cured in no time at all. It is simply an approach, not a threat to your way of being and believing. It may not even seem to exist if you ignore it.
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I'm not scoffing, Carl, just suggesting that the reality is more complex than the "conventional medicine = teh eebil corporations, alternative medicine = teh nice, cuddly, friendly stuff" equation that some (not yourself, I hasten to add) make it out to be. I'm not saying that alternative doesn't work - in many cases it does, and, of course, different individuals react differently to the same treatments, just as we know here in terms of blades, soaps, etc. All I'm saying is that, on the whole, I'd rather go with the product of intense research (albeit including the caveat I mentioned earlier) rather than a treatment that is less well-regulated and for which the evidence is purely anecdotal - as much as your experiences have convinced you, science doesn't progress via anecdotes; if it did we'd probably still be diagnosing almost every condition by examining the balance of the patients' four humours and the colour of their urine.

BTW, I've just remembered - the source of that quote about the useful alternative medicine becoming "medicine" was Dara O'Briain, and, before you take your turn to scoff, bear in mind that he does have a physics degree and therefore knows how science works and how to reason in a scientific manner (which, contrary to what many people might like to think) is a skill that, for most people (myself included) needs to be learned. This is because it's far from being universally innate - indeed, humans are infamous for seeing patterns in everything and being spectacularly bad at working-out whether they have any significance or whether they are, in the literal sense, random. In fact, determining whether the results you perceive are due to chance or not is probably the biggest part (and greatest achievement, IMO), of the scientific method, precisely because it helps us to get past our innate tendencies and actually draw valid conclusions from our findings.
 
Edwin Jagger do a range of soap and cream that is 99.9% natural. VitaMan (an australian company) produce a range of natural skin care products including a shaving cream.
 
I'm sure you are right, Chris - and I'm equally sure that in its five thousand years of existence Ayurveda has been refined and has documented evidence of its abilities. All I know is - it has worked for me when I sought its cures.

How did Dara get involved in this?

den_rugby said:
Edwin Jagger do a range of soap and cream that is 99.9% natural.
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99.9% of the bullets missed me.
 
I brought him into the conversation because he included his dislike of fake science in one of his stand-up routines. Of course, like most stand-up, he was using hyperbole quite heavily, but in the midst of it he made a serious point that several drugs which many consider to be the acme of allopathic medicine were originally derived from organic, and seemingly "natural" sources - acetylsalicyclic acid (aspirin) being the best-known example, and that they did so because research demonstrated a measurable effect. Therefore, the line between allopathic and "alternative" is regularly crossed, but this inevitably means that some treatments which for centuries were considered to be highly efficacious have been shown to be complete bunk.

[video=youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMvMb90hem8[/video]

One example of this which, for me, proves the point is that, even today, rhino horn is prized by advocates of traditional Chinese medicine (which, IIRC, discovered many genuinely efficient treatments along the way) as an aphrodisiac, despite the fact that it's just keratin. If I claimed that my toenail clippings were an aphrodisiac, I'd be no further from the truth than those who insist on powdered rhino horn, as both are chemically the same.

Rest assured, conventional medicine has its own cock-ups - I'm sure those of your generation will remember the disaster that was thalidomide - in that case it was a case of the wrong enantiomer being used - the molecule is "handed" or in two forms each of which is a mirror image of the other. If the correct stereoisomer had been used, all would have been well, but, tragically, it wasn't.
 
Ayurvedic medicine considers and treats the complete organism...and doesn't just target isolated symptoms as do modern pharmaceuticals...many of which are driven by profit.........It would be foolish to fall into the trap of considering Ayurvedic "Cranky"...
I firmly believe that eventually Ayurvedic, modern medicine and other Fringe treatments, will all come together as one healing discipline...
After all, Its not so long ago, that in the West, acupuncture wasn't taken seriously.........but it works, I've used it myself.
 
Where's the scientific reasoning behind treating the whole organism unless there's justification, though? To take the principle to its absurd limits, we'd be rubbing herbs on someone's forehead to help speed the healing of a fractured big toe. Just because Ayurveda treats the whole organism doesn't intrinsically make it any better or worse than any other form of treatment, just different. Sometimes it might be beneficial to treat the whole organism, sometimes it would be pointless, but the point is that, of and in itself, there's no logical reason why treating the whole organism (BTW, I'd be interested to hear from you chaps who know more than me on the subject precisely what that means in practice rather than as a nebulous concept) is any better than targeted treatment.

Oh, and, without wishing to offend, whilst I'm personally delighted that acupuncture worked for you, William, scientifically speaking we're back to the "anecdotal evidence" chestnut - the fact that it appeared to work for you, or the Queen, or any other individual, for that matter, proves nothing - proper, long-term studies can, and I seem to recall that this is indeed the case for acupuncture, though the mechanism through which it acts is, IIRC, unproven.

Also, the "driven by profit" comment harks back to my point about "allopathic = bad" assumption - the idea that huge profits aren't sought or made by practitioners or providers of alternative medicine, Ayurveda, crystal therapy or any other treatment you care to mention is, I'm sorry, highly disingenuous. There are plenty of Big Pharma researchers whose primary motive is altruistic, and there are plenty of money-grabbing shysters in the "alternative medicine" field as well - the idea that somehow everyone outside of conventional medicine is wholly unmotivated by monetary considerations seems vastly unlikely.
 
Sometimes when you are feeling down, Chris, does Mrs Chris take your hand and look you gently in the eye and whisper sweet nothings to you? And do you feel better for it? And if you feel better, are you better?

Or is that bollix because there isn't a study to prove it works?
 
I can see this is one of those threads that can go on and on and on....

Keeping an open mind folks...thats the main thing.................But then...if you keep an open mind, all sorts of things can fall in...MMMM I see yet another problem there.
 
Bechet45 said:
Sometimes when you are feeling down, Chris, does Mrs Chris take your hand and look you gently in the eye and whisper sweet nothings to you? And do you feel better for it? And if you feel better, are you better?

Or is that bollix because there isn't a study to prove it works?
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Sadly, there is no Mrs. Chris*. Anyway, I'm not saying that everything in life needs proof (though I suspect that psychological studies have demonstrated that certain areas of the brain show increased activity when sweet nothings are whispered), those areas will have been demonstrated my many other studies demonstrating their link to certain emotional responses and ahem - physical responses to said sweet nothings (the nature of which I'll leave to your imagination):icon_razz:, which, in turn, will be based on years of studies developing brain scanning techniques, which in turn are based on...you get my point. Science rarely, if ever, proceeds through leaps and bounds; it's based on the incremental build-up of evidence, each new fragment of which is added to that which already existed, and an assessment of whether the new evidence supports or contradicts the established hypotheses and therefore what the next piece of research ought to be is made. It's because of this way of working that modern science very rarely takes a wrong turn or heads down a blind alley, and, if it does, it ends-up being corrected when new evidence fails to support the current hypotheses.


*My personal theory for this is: physical disability + wheelchair use + lack of good looks + living at home = undesireability + lack of confidence around the opposite sex. Sad, innit?
 
BazC said:
chrisbell said:
For anyone interested in the Ben Goldacre link, here it is:
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That was a 'king awesome vid, thanks for posting!
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I sometimes find him hard to listen to, because he's always trying to say the next word before finishing the previous one, but it's worth the effort. Another good (and much less frenetic) source of information on Youtube is potholer54, AKA Peter Hadfield, a retired journalist both in the press and for the BBC. Quite a few of his videos are on evolution vs. creationism, climate change etc., but his "Made Easy" videos and those he's done on how to determine whether the latest science news you hear of is accurately reported, and how TV interviews are made to show the interiewee appearing to say what the producers want are fascinating, and well worth watching, IMO.
 
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