[email protected]orgetit (BL 1204) wrote in
news:
[email protected]:
> I agree that I am an anonymous internet poster and that everyone
> should take EVERYTHING said on the internet with a grain of salt!!
>
> But...............the story is true. She had terrible life
> threatening reactions to peanuts, and had about a dozen NAET
> treatments, then ate three peanuts at the hospital, epi pen available
> and had no reaction.
>
> And, nobody is under any obligation to believe the story. Your
> loss.
I think the point here is that the claim that NAET eliminated a life-
threatening peanut allergy in someone is an extraordinary claim and
therefore requires extraordinary evidence in order for anyone to pay
attention to it. A second- or third-hand account simply doesn't cut it, if
only because many of the details are likely to mutate in the retelling.
The problem is that there are so many "friend of a friend" (FOAF) stories
told every day that turn out to be literally too fantastic to be true
as told (see snopes.com or any of Jan Harold Brunvand's books), *even* if
there's a kernel of truth in them somewhere.
If advocates of NAET want such claims to be taken seriously, they've got to
demonstrate them in a structured and controlled fashion. For example, you
could take a group of twenty peanut-allergy sufferers and collect serum
samples from all of them; these would be the "before" samples. Then you
would use some random procedure, like flipping a coin, to decide whether
each person would undergo NAET or nothing. Afterwards, you'd take "after"
serum samples from all of them, and have both the before and after samples
tested for reactivity to peanut proteins. The lab doing the testing would
*not* know which subjects had undergone NAET and which hadn't; all they'd
know is which "before" sample corresponded to which "after" sample.
You'd eliminate from consideration any subjects whose "before" samples were
negative, since that would indicate that either they were misdiagnosed, the
allergy spontaneously remitted, or the test was for some reason unreliable
in their cases. Then you'd compare the proportion of reactive "after"
samples in the NAET group with those in the "nothing" group. Ideally when
doing this, you'd know only who was in "group 1" and "group 2," not which
option each group corresponded to. If one of the groups differed
significantly from the other, then you'd "break the code" and discover
whether the less-reactive group was the one who had had NAET.
Even then, though, you'd have to decide whether the difference in
proportions was clinically important rather than statistically significant.
For example, if NAET resulted in an improvement in only 1% of sufferers
(OK, OK, twenty people isn't enough to detect such a small effect), you'd
have to question its clinical utility in treating a fairly rare condition
(OTOH, if you were dealing with something very common like heart disease,
improvement in 1% of the subjects would be quite important clinically).
The point is that if such a study (for which you could probably get an
NCCAM grant) were to show positive results, you *would* have extraordinary
evidence for your extraordinary claim. Others would still have to
replicate your result before it could be generally accepted, but since you
did a formal, structured study rather than just repeating anecdotes, your
writeup of the study and its results would contain all the information
anyone needed to replicate it, and at this point there would be plenty of
researchers clamoring to do so.
And if the results were replicated, it would be considered a breakthrough.
And in the case of peanut allergies, for which there's no existing
treatment, there are no big players with vested interests in having a new
treatment *not* be discovered.
So it's really a matter of "put up or shut up." It's often the case that
many of the claims made for various "alternative" therapies are ones that
could be tested, easily and cheaply, if their proponents merely had the
will to do so. With the NCCAM, lack of funding is no excuse. Why, then,
do the proponents whine that there's no money, that their results wouldn't
be accepted regardless of how well the tests were done, or that it's
somebody else's responsibility to do the testing? It simply doesn't make
sense, and it just fuels speculation that the reason the proponents don't
do the tests is that they aren't confident that they'll have anything to
show. If the proponents want to dispel this speculation, then all they
have to do is show a little courage and *do* the tests.
The only other reason I can imagine for the proponents' unwillingness to do
the tests is that doing so would destroy their self-styled "radical" pose
(it would be "selling out" to the "mainstream"), which would in turn
destroy their ability to sell what amounts to pre-packaged adolescent
rebellion to people who should have long ago grown out of such. Or maybe
it wouldn't. Just ask Marshall Mathers.
