Testing The “Individualization” Of CAM Treatments Shows No Benefits [View all]

[HuckleB]

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/testing-the-individualization-of-cam-treatments/#more-21725

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So what were the results? Well, as is usual in a study looking at a subjective measure like pain, all patients improved. There was, however, no difference between those who received individualized treatment and a random herbal concoction not expected to have any effect on arthritis. This most likely indicates nothing happening here other than nonspecific effects associated with participating in a trial, including placebo, regression to the mean, the Hawthorne effect, and all the usual suspects that fool us in clinical trials, and in real life.

This study nicely illustrates several of the issues associated with supposed individualization of CAM treatment. First, it shows that such treatment is not, in any meaningful sense, any more individualized than good quality science-based medical treatment. Choosing a selection of herbs based on previous experience, historical use, tradition, and the unscientific theories of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and then selecting which of these herbs to give each patient based on the same prior experience and unscientific theory, is still applying generalizations based on groups to individuals. It simply uses generalizations based on unreliable sources of data.

The study also illustrates that individualizing therapy in this way doesn’t add any efficacy to the treatment. Not surprisingly, the study showed, as the others mentioned early have as well, that tailoring treatment to individuals based on generalizations derived from biased and unreliable sources of information leads to a therapy no more effective than randomly picking herbs out of a hat.

The difference between effective science-based medicine and ineffective medicine of any kind, conventional or alternative, is that the general principles used to guide therapy are derived from formal, controlled research that compensates for the weaknesses in our individual, informal, and unstructured judgment. If individualized medicine is just a code for using informal group observations instead of structured scientific ones to guide therapy, than it is not surprising that it doesn’t work any better than just making up a treatment haphazardly with no guiding principles at all."


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A good piece worth reading, IMO.