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Thread: Why does Jerusalem make people crazy??

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    Default Why does Jerusalem make people crazy??

    http://www.salon.com/2013/08/25/what...ople_go_crazy/



    Excerpted from Falling into the Fire.

    In the British Journal of Psychiatry, Yair Bar-El and his colleagues describe Jerusalem syndrome, an acute “psychotic decompensation” that afflicted 1,200 tourists to the Holy Land from 1980 to 1993. “On average,” the authors write, “100 such tourists are seen annually, 40 of them requiring admission to hospital.” The paper divides the patients into three categories. The first is made up of people who have already been diagnosed with a psychotic illness before traveling to Jerusalem. “Their motivation in coming to Israel,” the authors write, “is directly related to their mental condition,” frequently involving delusions. A subset of these patients “strongly identify with characters” from the Bible “or are convinced that they themselves are one of these characters.”

    Visitors in the second category lack a psychiatric diagnosis but have what the authors call “idiosyncratic ideations.” These are groups or individuals with “unusual ideas” who are “outside the mainstream of the established churches.” They settle in Jerusalem believing, for instance, that doing so will bring about the resurrection of Christ. They may “wear distinctive clothing which, according to them, is similar to that worn in the days of Christ.” At some point these patients shift from merely harboring extreme religious beliefs to engaging in behavior that becomes more problematic. Bar-El and his coauthors give the example of a man who set out to preach his message of “true religion” to the people of Jerusalem and eventually, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, “succumbed to an attack of psychomotor agitation and started shouting at the priests, accusing them of being pagans and barbarians and of worshipping graven images.” Eventually the altercation became physical, and the man began destroying paintings and statues in the church, resulting in his psychiatric evaluation. He was found to have no identifiable mental illness beyond his extreme religious beliefs, even three years after the episode.

    It is, however, the third category of tourists afflicted by Jerusalem syndrome that is the most mind-boggling. This category is described as a “pure” form of the syndrome, because its sufferers have no history of mental illness. These tourists experience an acute psychotic event while in Jerusalem; they recover “fairly spontaneously, and then, after leaving the country, apparently enjoy normality.” As a result they are considered to be mentally well, but for these isolated episodes. However, what episodes they are!

    Tourists with the third subtype of Jerusalem syndrome succumb to a sequence of identifiable stages that are consistent, characteristic, and highly specific.

    First, such sufferers exhibit “anxiety, agitation, nervousness and tension.” They then announce that they wish to split off from their tour group or family and explore Jerusalem on their own. The authors write, “Tourist guides aware of the Jerusalem syndrome and of the significance of such declarations may at this point [preemptively] refer the tourist . . . for psychiatric evaluation.” They add ominously, “If unattended, [the following] stages are usually unavoidable.”

    People afflicted by Jerusalem syndrome will then demonstrate a “need to be clean and pure,” becoming obsessed with bathing or compulsively cutting their finger- and toenails. Next is my favorite step in the sequence: the “preparation, often with the aid of hotel bed-linen, of a long, ankle-length, toga-like gown, which is always white.”

    Once appropriately clad, the person in question will proceed to “scream, shout, or sing out loud psalms, verses from the Bible, religious hymns or spirituals.” He or she will then proceed to a holy place within the city and deliver a sermon, which the authors describe as “usually very confused and based on an unrealistic plea to humankind to adopt a more wholesome, moral, simple way of life.”

    The affected person typically returns to normal within five to seven days, feels ashamed about his behavior, and recovers completely. Between 1980 and 1993, the authors report that forty-two cases met all the diagnostic criteria for this third subtype.

    Similar syndromes have been reported in Paris and Florence, each with its own odd specificities. Paris syndrome strikes Japanese tourists, sixty-three of whom were hospitalized with the condition between 1988 and 2004, according to a paper in the French psychiatric journal Nervure. Apparently the condition was common enough—and severe enough—that the Japanese embassy arranged for a Japanese psychiatrist to assist in treating cases at the Parisian psychiatric institution Hôpital Sainte-Anne. The Canadian philosopher Nadia Halim notes in her paper “Mad Tourists” that “Paris holds a ‘quasi-magical’ attraction for many Japanese tourists, being symbolic of all the aspects of European culture that are admired in Japan.” Tourists who fall victim to Paris syndrome “arrive in Paris with high, romanticized expectations, sometimes after years of anticipation, . . . unprepared for the reality of the city. The language barrier, the pronounced cultural differences in communication styles and public manners, and the quotidian banalities of contemporary Paris—the ways in which it is like any other 21st century Western city—induce a profound culture shock” that results in symptoms ranging “from anxiety attacks accompanied by feelings of ‘strangeness’ and disassociation, to psychomotor issues, outbursts of violence, suicidal ideation and actions, and psychotic delusions.”

    In the 1980s Graziella Magherini, an Italian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, identified a syndrome in Florence in which visitors to the city become emotionally unmoored by their encounters with its art and architecture. Magherini reports on 106 cases from Santa Maria Nuova Hospital over ten years. Symptoms include breathlessness, palpitations, panic attacks, and fainting or collapsing to the floor. Severe cases have involved persecutory delusions and paranoia.

    Nadia Halim writes in “Mad Tourists” that in many of Magherini’s case studies “patients report some sense of disintegration” or feel themselves breaking apart. After becoming transfixed by Caravaggio’s Bacchus, a fifty-three-year-old man felt “there was no longer any precise definition” in his life. The New York Times reports an event in front of the same painting, in which a man “collapsed onto the floor of the Uffizi, thrashing about madly. He was carried out on a stretcher, raving and disoriented.”

    Also according to the New York Times, a twenty-five-year-old woman named Martha “became ‘delirious’ after standing for a long time before the Fra Angelico paintings in San Marco. She returned to her hotel,” the Times reports, “and stood for a long time in a corner, mute and withdrawn.” A twenty-year-old woman was seized by terror in the Uffizi and screamed for help, believing that she felt “the anguish of breaking into a thousand pieces.” Halim writes that she was “so agitated she had to be physically restrained.”

    A 2009 paper in the British Medical Journal describes a seventy-two-year-old artist who went to Florence “to fulfill a lifelong wish to see the art and culture that so inspired him. He described some works of art as ‘like seeing old friends.’” The Ponte Vecchio apparently had a particular allure for him, being “the part of Florence he was most eager to visit.” Once he was standing upon it, he had a panic attack, became “disoriented in time,” and became floridly paranoid, believing, among other things, that his hotel room was bugged and that he was being monitored by international airlines. His symptoms resolved in three weeks.

    Magherini dubbed the condition Stendhal syndrome after the French author of that name who became overwhelmed as a result of viewing the frescoes in the Church of Santa Croce. Stendhal wrote that as he exited the church, the sight of Brunelleschi’s dome on the Florence Cathedral nearly led him to madness. “I felt a pulsating in my heart,” he wrote about the experience. “Life was draining out of me. I walked with the fear of falling.” He was cured only by sitting down to read the poetry of Ugo Foscolo, who had written about Florence and hence was “a friendly voice to share my anguish.”

    The mere existence of these “city syndromes,” as Nadia Halim dubs them, is controversial. Many voices have weighed in to argue that these episodes are merely exacerbations of preexisting psychiatric disease or the initial onsets of mental illnesses that happen to occur in foreign cities. Still others have chalked up the circumstances to jet lag or some other mundane variety of travel-related disorientation. At this point no one knows.


    Excerpted from “Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist’s Encounters With the Mind in Crisis.”. Reprinted by arrangement with the Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Christine Montross, 2013

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    Jerusalem Syndrome has been thoroughly debunked.



    Schizos go there with their new age shit, made up shit, and dumb shit believing that being in this spot brings them closer to something spiritual. In one instance, an Irish woman went to a hospital, claiming she was about to give birth to Baby Jesus, even though she wasn’t pregnant. Another man from Canada thought he was Samson and tried to destroy a wall. An Austrian man asked chefs at the hotel in which he was staying to prepare him the Last Supper. There have also been reports of tourists thinking they are Biblical characters like King Solomon. Others suddenly start giving sermons or just shout on the streets. One notorious case involved a British man who planned to get himself killed by Satan in order to trigger the end of the world.

    With that nagging weight of their assumptions, their psychosis' poked through, making them truly believe they were Biblical characters.

    I imagine an American Jew "coming home to the holy land", moving there and then getting struck down by culture shock. Finding he can't afford a car because of inhuman taxes, everything is small and crammed, merchants ripping you off at every corner because you can't haggle, and everybody speaking a lingo that does not sound like what Rabbi Schwartz taught you back in Wisconsin.

    Paris syndrome is probably a condition suffered by tourists when they discover that Paris is not some romantic mecca of high culture and art, but an overpriced urine smelling dump filled with dirty and rude people.
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    Who cares about Jerusalem, trash place with trash people.

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    Quote Originally Posted by sean View Post
    Jerusalem Syndrome has been thoroughly debunked.



    Schizos go there with their new age shit, made up shit, and dumb shit believing that being in this spot brings them closer to something spiritual. In one instance, an Irish woman went to a hospital, claiming she was about to give birth to Baby Jesus, even though she wasn’t pregnant. Another man from Canada thought he was Samson and tried to destroy a wall. An Austrian man asked chefs at the hotel in which he was staying to prepare him the Last Supper. There have also been reports of tourists thinking they are Biblical characters like King Solomon. Others suddenly start giving sermons or just shout on the streets. One notorious case involved a British man who planned to get himself killed by Satan in order to trigger the end of the world.

    With that nagging weight of their assumptions, their psychosis' poked through, making them truly believe they were Biblical characters.

    I imagine an American Jew "coming home to the holy land", moving there and then getting struck down by culture shock. Finding he can't afford a car because of inhuman taxes, everything is small and crammed, merchants ripping you off at every corner because you can't haggle, and everybody speaking a lingo that does not sound like what Rabbi Schwartz taught you back in Wisconsin.

    Paris syndrome is probably a condition suffered by tourists when they discover that Paris is not some romantic mecca of high culture and art, but an overpriced urine smelling dump filled with dirty and rude people.
    All of psychiatry is easily debunked the only reason why it is tolerated is because it is useful for the neoliberal capitalist ruling class.

    For instance, being gay was once a mental disorder then magically it wasn't one day !

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    I know one guy who went there and came back all Christian, but the hip type donning a shining cross and backpack full of beer. Personally I’d rather venture to Tel Aviv and have a revelation at the renowned night life. Better than Agia Napa was 10 years ago? That’s what I’ve heard.

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    Quote Originally Posted by sean View Post
    Psychiatric treatment for mental illness is not capitalism, dude. What happened to the naturopathy treatment for your mental illness btw? Psychiatry has as much scientific and medical evidence to support, but naturopathy is good if it's a minor thing (herbs and shit instead of ibuprofen for a headache or whatever), not major shit like schizophrenia lel.
    Nope, mental illness does not exist -- one can't be 'mentally ill' any more than one can have a 'purple idea' etc...

    I have dedicated much of my professional life to a critique of the immorality inherent in the practices of the modern misbehavioral sciences (the term is Jacques Barzun’s), particularly psychiatry. I say inherent, because deception and coercion are intrinsic to the practices of the mental health professions. The core concept of psychiatry, mental illness qua medical disease, and the profession of psychiatry as a medical specialty based on it, rest on the medicalization of malingering.1

    The imitation of illness is memorably portrayed by Molière (1622–1673) in his famous comedy Le malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid). As created by Molière, the imaginary invalid, then called a “hypochondriac,” is someone who wants to be sick and be treated by others, especially doctors, as if he were sick. Telling Argan, the self-defined patient, that he looks well is considered rude in his household. Molière’s invalid confuses religion and medicine—imparting to medicine a sanctity that echoed the mysteries of religion—a confusion then obviously pregnant with comedic possibilities.2

    Since those days, we in the West have undergone an astonishing cultural-perceptual change of which we seem largely, perhaps wholly, unaware. Today, medical healing is regarded as a form of applied science, the very opposite of faith healing, which is dismissed as hocus-pocus. Mutatis mutandis, the medical profession defines imaginary illnesses as real illnesses, in effect abolishing the notion of pretended illness. Malingering has become a disease “just as real” as melanoma.

    Counterfeit art is forgery. Counterfeit testimony is perjury. But counterfeit illness is illness, “mental illness,” an illness officially decreed “an illness like any other.” The consequences of this policy—economic, legal, medical, moral, philosophical, political, and social—are momentous: counterfeit disability, counterfeit disease, counterfeit doctoring, and the bureaucracies and industries administering, adjudicating, and providing for them make up a substantial part of the national economies of modern Western societies.

    According to classic, pathological-scientific criteria, disease is a product manufactured by the body, in the same sense that urine is. Diagnosis, in contrast, is a product manufactured by persons, in the same sense that works of art are. Charcot and Freud discarded the somatic pathological criterion of disease, destroying the empirical-rational basis for distinguishing real medical disorders of the body (disease) es) from fake psychiatric disorders of the “mind” (nondiseases). Modern psychiatry is a gigantic edifice built on the poisoned ruins of this destruction.

    Except for a few objectively identifiable brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, there are neither biological or chemical tests nor biopsy or necropsy findings for verifying or falsifying DSM diagnoses. It is noteworthy that in 1952, when the American Psychiatric Association (APA) published the first edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), it did not include hysteria in its roster of mental diseases, even though it was the most common psychiatric diagnosis-disease until that time. The term’s historical and semantic allusions to women and uteruses were too embarrassing. However, the APA did not declare hysteria to be a nondisease; instead, it renamed it “conversion reaction” and “somatization disorder.” Similarly, in 1973, when the APA removed homosexuality from its roster of mental illnesses, it first replaced it with ego-dystonic homosexuality; when that term, too, became an embarrassment, it too was abolished. However, psychiatric researchers lost no time “discovering” a host of new mental maladies, ranging from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to caffeinism and pathological gambling.

    Objective (biological, chemical, physical) tests for diseases are based on the assumption that diseases are somatic phenomena. Accordingly, the claim that mental illnesses are brain diseases is profoundly self-contradictory: a disease of the brain is a brain disease, not a mental disease.

    Because there are no objective methods for detecting the presence or establishing the absence of mental diseases, and because psychiatric diagnoses are stigmatizing labels with the potential for causing far-reaching personal injury to the stigmatized person, the “mental patient’s” inability to prove his “psychiatric innocence” makes psychiatry one of the greatest dangers to liberty and responsibility in the modern world
    .-- Doctor Thomas Szasz from his book "Psychiatry : the Science of Lies"


    "As I have stated in an earlier chapter, in the natural world there is no such thing as mental disease or defect, but rather certain patterns of behavior to which, in a given social context, we apply certain names which enable us to talk about and to effect certain changes in the social relationships of those who exhibit them and to effect changes in the individuals themselves. At best, we are left to the imposition of purely arbitrary criteria in selecting such persons." Psychiatrist Philip Q. Roche, M.D., winner of the American Psychiatric Association's Isaac Ray Award for outstanding contributions to forensic psychiatry and the psychiatric aspects of jurisprudence, in his book The Criminal Mind (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy 1958), p. 253

    "mental disease...The very term is itself nonsensical, a semantic mistake. The two words cannot go together except metaphorically; you can no more have a mental 'disease' than you can have a purple idea or a wise space." Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., in his book The Death of Psychiatry (Penguin Books 1974), p. 36

    "In The Myth of Mental Illness, I took this semiotic bull by its metaphorical horns and showed that it was "bull" indeed: there is no mental illness." Psychiatry professor Thomas S. Szasz, M.D., in his book Psychiatry: The Science of Lies (Syracuse University Press 2008), p. 24

    "I have had to use several terms in this book that I am not comfortable with, but they are in common use and better ones do not exist or are not widely understood. ... Thus I refer sometimes to 'mental illness', although I do not consider that psychiatric conditions are usefully or validly regarded as illnesses." Joanna Moncrieff, M.B.B.S., M.Sc., MRCPsych, M.D., Senior Lecturer in Mental Health Sciences, University College London, UK, in her book The Myth of the Chemical Cure — A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment (Palgrave Macmillan 2009), p. xi (Note on Nomenclature)

    "[T]here is no definition of a mental disorder. It's bullshit. I mean, you just can't define it." Allen Frances, M.D., chairperson of the Task Force that created two editions of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-IV (1994) and DSM-IV-TR (2000), quoted by Gary Greenberg, "Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness", Decembber 27, 2010, Wired magazine

    "[T]here is no such thing whatsoever as a psychiatric or psychological disease." Neurologist Fred A. Baughman, M.D., author of The ADHD Fraud: How Psychiatry Makes "Patients" of Normal Children (Trafford Publishing 2006), in his lecture at the Empathic Therapy Conference 2012, "The ADHD/​Stimulent Epidemic" (at the 33 minute, 2 seconds point), available for purchase on DVD at EmpathicTherapy.org

    "... we have argued, the existence of a disease of mental illness has never been established ... together we've amassed over seventy-five years of teaching mental health courses in graduate schools of social work to thousands of students and practitioners ... after more than ten decades of determined research and the expenditure of untold sums, no one can verify that madness is a medical disease. ... There is, of course, the unpredictable but remote possibility that the psychiatric system produces it's 'Gorbachev,' a widely acknowledged leader and spokesperson who says plainly and loudly that the emperor has no clothes, that while many people could use help for their distress or have their disturbance contained to preserve our peace of mind, there is no mental illness." Stuart A. Kirk, D.S.W., Tomi Gomory, Ph.D., & David Cohen, Ph.D., in their book Mad Science—Psychiatric Coersion, Diagnosis, and Drugs (Transaction Publishers 2013), pp. 195, 301, 302, 328 (underline added)

    "Nobody should be diagnosed with mental illness." Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D., a psychologist, in her "Diagnosisgate" presentation at the annual conference of the National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy (narpa.org) in Washington, D.C., August 23, 2015

    "Quite often, psychiatrists prefer to talk about a mental disorder, rather than a mental illness or disease, which is because psychiatric diagnoses are social constructs. ... psychiatrists have blown life into a social construct that is nothing but a variation of normal behavior and have given this construct a name, as if it existed in nature and could attack people." Dr. Peter C. Gøtzsche, a physician specializing in internal medicine, and professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen, in his book Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial (People's Press 2015), pp. 26 & 145

    "The conventional mental health industry goes to great lengths in an attempt to perpetuate the myth of mental illness ... ISEPP's goal is to dispel the myth of mental illness. ... The problems we've dubbed mental illnesses are about inter- and intra-personal, spiritual, existential, economic, and political matters, not real disease." Chuck Ruby, Ph.D., a psychologist and Director of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry (ISEPP), in the April 2018 ISEPP newsletter

    "[M]ental illnesses cause suffering, and evidence-based treatments are sparse. Indeed, the field has seen no significant pharmaceutical breakthroughs for many years. Biological causes remain elusive, and biomarkers non-existent. ... And common genetic variations with large effects on mental disorders are elusive. ... [T]he American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) ... impinges on the territory of healthy mental function." Dr. Adrian Woolfson B.M., B.Ch. (Oxford University), Ph.D. (Cambridge University), "The biological basis of mental illness", Nature, 11 February 2019

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    Quote Originally Posted by sean View Post
    You didn't answer my question. I asked about your naturopathy treatment.
    There are two kinds of health research, but only one of them is currently recognized by medical science, namely, what I call group study, i.e., studies of groups of people who are subjected to some form of procedure, diet, supplementation, etc. Group studies have obvious value, at least when competently done, although there are certain important problems inherent in these studies which I have discussed elsewhere, including proper choice of variables and the need to replace double-blind with multiple-blind studies . However, the fact that group studies are not -- or not consciously -- combined with the second form of research is perhaps the most important flaw in allopathic medicine, and one which is actually leading to its collapse in the face of competition with naturopathy. This second form of research what I call self study, by which I mean the process in which an individual subjects his own body to some form of procedure, diet, supplementation, etc, to see if it works for him. This procedure, of course, is different from that of various medical heroes, who subjected themselves to such things as yellow fever, AIDS and other dread diseases in order to prove something for others: Rather, self study is merely the way an individual can find out if the result of some group study -- or his grandma's advice, or his own intuition -- has any relevance for his own personal well-being. Self study is important not merely for the obvious reason that group studies are irrelevant to what works for some particular individual, but also because the individual is the one person with the greatest interest in promoting his own health -- unlike his doctor, whose interest inclines to collecting his fee -- and because the individual has access to "research data" (his own feelings and reactions) not accessible to the white-coated set.

    But there is an important caveat for those involved in self study, namely, what the famous Harvard psychologist BF Skinner called "the development of superstition". Skinner's famous experiment, performed on my favorite animal -- pigeons -- is one which should be read, marked, learned and inwardly digested by not only those involved in self study, but also religionists, astrologizers, superstitionists, allopaths and others of their ilk. What Skinner did was to place hungry pigeons in a so-called Skinner box, which would drop food grains to the pigeon at random times. What Skinner found is that, if food were dropped when a pigeon was performing some particular action (e.g., strutting, grooming, scratching, etc), the food would "reinforce" the behavior, so that the hungry pigeon would tend to perform such behavior in order to get more food. Thus a pigeon, after some time in a Skinner box, would be found to be performing some action over and over, thus indicating that it had developed a "superstition" about how it could cause food to appear -- a superstition which would become more and more strongly reinforced as the pigeon was "rewarded" for this behavior by the random appearance of food. (Note: Skinner was a behaviorist, and thus did not believe in the existence of mentality apart from its behavioral manifestations; hence superstition to him meant merely "behaving superstitiously". Please don't ask me if he knew the difference between when he was awake and when he was not.)

    One does not have to be a rocket scientist to see that Skinnerian reinforcement is the basis of not only superstition and religion, but also all kinds of other misbehaviors, particularly allopathy. That is, a person gets sick, he goes to the doctor, the doctor gives him a pill, he gets well, and Voila! -- he (and the doctor) thinks there is a relation between what the doctor did and the fact that he got well, when in fact there may be no relation and -- as many of us well know -- we would probably have gotten well sooner without the doctor. This situation is exacerbated by the so-called placebo effect, ie, the fact that irrelevant "cures" are successful in curing 1/3 of all diseases anyway -- or at least that 1/3 of us get well after visiting the doctor (please don't ask what happens to the other 2/3).

    The lesson of the Skinner box for self study should be obvious, but I will spell it out anyway: Just because you feel better after taking some pill, enduring some regimen, or whatever, this does not necessarily mean that the pill, regimen or whatever had anything to do with your feeling better. Furthermore, in cases where a pill, regimen or whatever is not in fact helpful, one should attempt to determine this fact, not merely because the cost of pillage or whatever can mount up, but also because such therapies may actually be doing some unrecognized kind of harm. Thus in order to purge your life of "naturopathic superstition" you should make a list of your pills, regimens, etc, and then systematically drop each one for awhile to see if it makes any difference. In fact, if you want to be really scientific about it, you could try dropping all possible combinations: For example, if you are taking three different pills, first drop one, then the second, then the third, then the first and second, then the first and third, etc, etc, etc. Following this, you could fool around with different dosages, and in general spend your whole life figuring out what you should be taking, all the while forgetting that what you need now may not be the same thing you needed last year, and isn't science wonderful?

    In closing, I would like to make one final point which is also not recognized by allopathic medicine, but which is unconsciously recognized by many engaged in self study, namely, that the best method of curing or preventing disease is to utilize a multiplicity of strategies. What I am getting at here is a lesson from systems theory, to wit, that the best way to prevent a "system" from breaking down is to have a backup system. We see this in hospitals, for example, which generally have backup power systems to insure power in case a squirrel gets into the power company's transformers. In the case of our body "system", the best way to keep it from "going down" is to have multiple backup strategies for staying healthy: For example, we might try to keep healthy both by eating a good diet and by exercising, so that if one strategy doesn't provide optimal health by itself, the other will "take up the slack". Likewise, in order to assure cardiovascular health, we might take both vitamin C and vitamin E, even tho we feel that one of them may be "redundant".

    Naturopaths have a great deal to teach allopaths, but allopaths are unlikely to learn anything. One reason for this is because they will probably all die from their own treatments first.

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    Quote Originally Posted by JamesBond007 View Post
    There are two kinds of health research, but only one of them is currently recognized by medical science, namely, what I call group study, i.e., studies of groups of people who are subjected to some form of procedure, diet, supplementation, etc. Group studies have obvious value, at least when competently done, although there are certain important problems inherent in these studies which I have discussed elsewhere, including proper choice of variables and the need to replace double-blind with multiple-blind studies . However, the fact that group studies are not -- or not consciously -- combined with the second form of research is perhaps the most important flaw in allopathic medicine, and one which is actually leading to its collapse in the face of competition with naturopathy. This second form of research what I call self study, by which I mean the process in which an individual subjects his own body to some form of procedure, diet, supplementation, etc, to see if it works for him. This procedure, of course, is different from that of various medical heroes, who subjected themselves to such things as yellow fever, AIDS and other dread diseases in order to prove something for others: Rather, self study is merely the way an individual can find out if the result of some group study -- or his grandma's advice, or his own intuition -- has any relevance for his own personal well-being. Self study is important not merely for the obvious reason that group studies are irrelevant to what works for some particular individual, but also because the individual is the one person with the greatest interest in promoting his own health -- unlike his doctor, whose interest inclines to collecting his fee -- and because the individual has access to "research data" (his own feelings and reactions) not accessible to the white-coated set.

    But there is an important caveat for those involved in self study, namely, what the famous Harvard psychologist BF Skinner called "the development of superstition". Skinner's famous experiment, performed on my favorite animal -- pigeons -- is one which should be read, marked, learned and inwardly digested by not only those involved in self study, but also religionists, astrologizers, superstitionists, allopaths and others of their ilk. What Skinner did was to place hungry pigeons in a so-called Skinner box, which would drop food grains to the pigeon at random times. What Skinner found is that, if food were dropped when a pigeon was performing some particular action (e.g., strutting, grooming, scratching, etc), the food would "reinforce" the behavior, so that the hungry pigeon would tend to perform such behavior in order to get more food. Thus a pigeon, after some time in a Skinner box, would be found to be performing some action over and over, thus indicating that it had developed a "superstition" about how it could cause food to appear -- a superstition which would become more and more strongly reinforced as the pigeon was "rewarded" for this behavior by the random appearance of food. (Note: Skinner was a behaviorist, and thus did not believe in the existence of mentality apart from its behavioral manifestations; hence superstition to him meant merely "behaving superstitiously". Please don't ask me if he knew the difference between when he was awake and when he was not.)

    One does not have to be a rocket scientist to see that Skinnerian reinforcement is the basis of not only superstition and religion, but also all kinds of other misbehaviors, particularly allopathy. That is, a person gets sick, he goes to the doctor, the doctor gives him a pill, he gets well, and Voila! -- he (and the doctor) thinks there is a relation between what the doctor did and the fact that he got well, when in fact there may be no relation and -- as many of us well know -- we would probably have gotten well sooner without the doctor. This situation is exacerbated by the so-called placebo effect, ie, the fact that irrelevant "cures" are successful in curing 1/3 of all diseases anyway -- or at least that 1/3 of us get well after visiting the doctor (please don't ask what happens to the other 2/3).

    The lesson of the Skinner box for self study should be obvious, but I will spell it out anyway: Just because you feel better after taking some pill, enduring some regimen, or whatever, this does not necessarily mean that the pill, regimen or whatever had anything to do with your feeling better. Furthermore, in cases where a pill, regimen or whatever is not in fact helpful, one should attempt to determine this fact, not merely because the cost of pillage or whatever can mount up, but also because such therapies may actually be doing some unrecognized kind of harm. Thus in order to purge your life of "naturopathic superstition" you should make a list of your pills, regimens, etc, and then systematically drop each one for awhile to see if it makes any difference. In fact, if you want to be really scientific about it, you could try dropping all possible combinations: For example, if you are taking three different pills, first drop one, then the second, then the third, then the first and second, then the first and third, etc, etc, etc. Following this, you could fool around with different dosages, and in general spend your whole life figuring out what you should be taking, all the while forgetting that what you need now may not be the same thing you needed last year, and isn't science wonderful?

    In closing, I would like to make one final point which is also not recognized by allopathic medicine, but which is unconsciously recognized by many engaged in self study, namely, that the best method of curing or preventing disease is to utilize a multiplicity of strategies. What I am getting at here is a lesson from systems theory, to wit, that the best way to prevent a "system" from breaking down is to have a backup system. We see this in hospitals, for example, which generally have backup power systems to insure power in case a squirrel gets into the power company's transformers. In the case of our body "system", the best way to keep it from "going down" is to have multiple backup strategies for staying healthy: For example, we might try to keep healthy both by eating a good diet and by exercising, so that if one strategy doesn't provide optimal health by itself, the other will "take up the slack". Likewise, in order to assure cardiovascular health, we might take both vitamin C and vitamin E, even tho we feel that one of them may be "redundant".

    Naturopaths have a great deal to teach allopaths, but allopaths are unlikely to learn anything. One reason for this is because they will probably all die from their own treatments first.
    Ahh, nevermind. Sad that you can't give a direct straight answer other than waste my time with links.
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