http://c.microsiervos.com/

thanks

And while my chiropractor does occasionally believe in woowoo stuff (sigh), she’s also pretty good at things like “your shoulder’s hurting because your infraspinatus and superspinatus muscles are both irritated, I’m going to massage them and then put ice on them, and after that let’s talk about how you sit while you’re typing.”

“I will never scoff at chiropractic medicine. At 10 years old I feel asleep on my parents bed for a nap. Sleeping with my neck bent to the left got me ’stuck’ that way for hours. I was completely unable to move my head back to a normal posture without incredible pain. After a visit to the family doctor (who also practiced chiropractic medicine) cracked my neck , I was instantly back to normal without any side affects.”

At around a similar as Theramansi was, I also got the same kind of kink in my neck. Theramansi is right, it really is very painful. I remember after Sunday school one day the parent of one of the other kids sat me down to try to help. He would slowly rock my head and then suddenly give it a sharp jerk, repeating this for I don’t know how long. I don’t know if this is chiropracy or not but it was a painful and horrible experience for me. I remember everyone around watching while I somehow managed not to cry despite being terrified that he would break my neck. At the end of the experience I was absolutely no better off. Luckily there were no side effects and eventually the problem went away on its own.

Sorry for the anecdote but Theramansi’s post brought up these memories and I had to share them. ~|-<

For those into home remedies, if you ever have an abscessed tooth and have to wait thru the weekend for treatment, slosh some tequila around the tooth for a few minutes. THAT will kill the pain,,,for a little while.
Caution: it’s a good idea to expel the tequila and save it. Ingesting will also work but after a while you run out of tequila.

For some reason, whiskey doesn’t work nearly as well.

Whisky is, however, very good for treating sore throats.

I sense a much-needed research project here. Care to collaborate on the grant application?

Let’s see . . . we’d need lab space in a reputable university (that’s the most expensive part of any research, BTW!), much whisky and tequila (I suggest one of us needs to be sited in Mexico, and the other in Scotland, in order to ensure consistent quality of our raw material), a couple of PhD students to do the grunt work, and a ready supply of guinea pigs – er, I mean undergraduate volunteers.

. . . the white willow, which, of course, gives us salicin, and then salicylic acid – aspirin.

Sorry to be pedantic, but aspirin is an ester of salicylic acid – acetyl salicylic acid – not the free acid itself.

I’m all in favour of research on medicinal plants, because yes, there are many, many good medicines to be derived from them. But there HAS to be some sort of regulation! Just slapping some plants in a capsule and saying it improves your Total Wellbeing is NOT good enough.

Hear, hear!

Ear candling? Why is that on there? I’ve tried it and it works great if you get good ones. Totally clears out your ears and you can actually hear better afterwards.

Pardon?

Re: headaches. I’ve had my head squeezed a few times when I was back in university, and it does seem to work depending on the type of headache. It wouldn’t help my tension headaches that crept up my neck into my skull, but it did help the pounding-behind-the-eyes headaches–I suspect it had something to do with the pressure and release allowing blood vessels to dilate (a vasodilator to offset the vasoconstriction of headaches)??????? Bet there’s a paper on this treatment method somewhere…I’m mildly curious as to whether it is a placebo effect or something more.

Edit: Jeffersonian beat me to it.

Then your challenge is to explain the mechanism and provide the (missing) proof.

quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/candling.html

For some reason, whiskey doesn’t work nearly as well.

Gary 7

- Jakc

In an attempt to avoid going into battle, Capt Blackadder fakes insanity by putting a pair of underpants on his head, a pencil up each nostril, and starts saying wibble

It’s on youtube, watch it, its some of the funniest TV ever

Wot’s a Wibble?

2. I doubt it. Mostly because I was absolutely surprised it worked. He is a physical therapist contracted for work by the air force, and he does a lot of “normal” physical therapy as well. If he had given me a list of exercises to do for a few weeks to try to help lower back pain, I’d have thought it fairly credible. But I really didn’t even consider the possibility that his pressing on my head could help my headache.

3. That’s . . . possible, but I think it’s unlikely. I had woken up with that headache, and it had stayed with me regardless of medicine throughout the entire day. By the time he got all jabby on it, it was about thirteen hours old. So it’s very possible that it would have gone away, but it seems pretty coincidental. Also, it just disappeared. There was no period where it gradually felt better.

I want to stress that I don’t think that he got in touch with my cerebrospinal fluid and called forth some sort of deep healing energy, or something. :p It just seemed to work so instantly and well that it seems like he must have done *something*, even if it was just your number 1 explanation.

This was the first time I’ve let him near me, but from what my girlfriend and her mom have said, his “help” tends to hurt like hell. Which I can attest to, in this case. (The pain from the jabs was much worse than the headache, momentarily.) This seems to be very different from the “relaxing, gentle touch” that all the pro-CST websites seem to spout off about. So I also don’t know if he’s actually doing something more useful, that isn’t what is normally called CST.

I’m afraid to ask him about it directly, because if he says something like, “Oh, well it has to do with fairies,” then I’m screwed. I don’t want to reply, “Oh, I had no idea fairies existed. Neat.” But I also don’t want to be like, “Fairies? Huh. I’ll just back away slowly now.”

The problem? There isn’t anything at ALL in the US that’s actually regulating this stuff. For every plant-derived medicine that’s approved, there are hundreds that fly under the radar. America’s laws don’t actually allow herbal suppliments to claim to have curative effects, but the language they use certainly implies that they do (for instance, they can’t say they cure heart disease but they can say they improve cardio health), so people will take them anyway. Where there’s a demand but no regulation, you can get all sorts of dodgy stuff happening – cocktails of pharmaceuticals mixed in, ingredients swapped for others (after Ephedra was banned, Bitter Orange was substituted in – which, quite frankly, doesn’t do anyone any favours), all sorts of stuff.

I’m all in favour of research on medicinal plants, because yes, there are many, many good medicines to be derived from them. But there HAS to be some sort of regulation! Just slapping some plants in a capsule and saying it improves your Total Wellbeing is NOT good enough.

1) When you bump you elbow, you rub it and it feels better. This may have something to do with giving the local nerves something else to “think” about in that area besides the pain, or an actual neuro-chemical release that helps dull the pain, I can’t recall… (where’s Steve Novella when you need him?). Is it possible that his prodding of your head that “hurt like heck” had a similar effect without actually manipulating your cranial bones? When I was a kid, I stubbed my toe once and was complaining about it. My big sister punched me in the arm as hard as she could and made me cry. When I asked her why she did it, she said “does your toe still hurt?” and I had to admit it didn’t.

2) Knowing that he is a licensed PT and trained in this technique, is it possible that just having him do *something* to you that he said would help did in fact help? The placebo effect is a funny and powerful thing, and if he had been a trained chiropractor, maybe a spinal manipulation would have also helped your headache symptoms feel better if he told you it would?

3) Is it possible that your headache would have gone away on its own about that same time if you hadn’t been there getting your melon squeezed? I think many of us, myself included, sometimes experience strong headaches that come and go quickly and unpredictably. Maybe if you had been driving your car at that moment, the headache would have subsided on its own?

There are any number of other possible explanations too. Remember that correlation can imply causation, but does not have to mean that one thing directly caused the other. I applaud you for asking the questions and not just assuming that because it seemed to work for you one time, it must be real. Maybe it is, but one event isn’t enough to base any conclusions on.