There's a recent story in The Guardian about how Michael Flately is back on his toes and ready for more Celtic prancing following a baffling illness. He credits this to a visit to some bozos at the Plexus Bio-Energy Clinic, who(accoding to their website) use a system that "represents the integration of a network of powerful and effective healing techniques that work by rebalancing the life energy within". For good measure we're told that they have "achieved exceptional results in the treatment of a wide range of conditions often in cases that have proved difficult to treat by conventional means alone".The website includes a section on "scientific research". This is where you'd hope to find reports of respectable clinical trials. You know, double-blinded ones with placebo groups and decent statistical analysis. Unsurprisingly, there's none of that. The section on scientific research is a bunch of waffle, much of it pointing back to the Plexus clinic itself (so providing no independent evidence of effectiveness at all). The final paragraph is a choice bit of junk that is worth quoting in full:
Einstein with his new model of the universe, determined that energy and matter are one – thus transforming the classical western duality. Soon the Subatomic World of "leptons" and "quarks" emerged to challenge the existing concept of the atom as the final building block of matter. The Subatomic World seems to be a complex web of inter-relationships – one could say – a "holistic pattern".
This is confused gibberish. It is confused about atoms. After all, plenty of physicists realised that atoms were not truly atomic before Einstein. (His illustrious 1905 year included work on already established sub-atomic phenomena, including the photo-electric effect.) It is confused about leptons and quarks and what they have to do with Einstein. Be clear, though, that the various upheavals in physics say bugger all about 'bio-energy' and that the talk of a "holistic pattern" is gratuitious bullshit.
If I don't start dealing with my actual work in the next day or two, I might write to these folks and ask them if they know of, or are planning, any of the sort of clinical trial that would provide evidence of an effect greater than placebo. It won't be easy bothering, because what they do say about evidence would make it very surprising if the answer was yes. At least, unlike Roger Coghill, they're not offering incentives to kill babies as a sort of rhetorical pseudo-evidence.
6 comments:
I see this item also crossed PodBlack Cat's desk, and got a write up. Check it out:
http://podblack.com/?p=1147
Thanks for the post, I hadn't heard of this. I think that it is worth a try contacting them to see if they would undertake a peer-reviewed study into their claimed phenomenon, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if they ran a poorly-designed trial, cherry-picked to construct a result and then published in an uncritical journal such as Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine.
So, my mate Dave just sent a polite email, including the following two queries:
"(1) As far as I can tell, the research does not include a single double-blind placebo-controlled trial. Have any in fact been performed, and if so where are the results published?
(2) It is not clear to me how the closing remarks (on the 'scientific research' section) about Einstein relate to bio-energy, or to any specific therapies. It's also not clear to me that anything specific in Einstein's contribution to physics warrants the assertion about a "holistic pattern". Could you please clarify?"
Let's see...
I was a complete skeptic regarding the whole subject until i reluctantly went for a treatment for severe chest pain resulting from a car accident. I was told by several doctors that I would have the pain for the rest of my life and that the only solution would be painkillers that left me feeling doped up. After a the four day treatment my pain had gone and it has never returned. My energy levels are high and generally feel better than ever. You cannot argue with results. This method of energy balancing has been used for thousands of years by different cultures and is nothing new. Ignorance and fear of this subject is sad and what is worse is that people (like myself) exhaust every other option available before turning to something that really works. Drug companies are making billions out of the disease market when it can be prevented. The results speak for themselves. I really hope that people don't continue to have to find out that it works the way that I did. Even if it were to be a placebo then who cares if it can remove pain and illness from the body. You obviously have done zero amount of research on the matter yourself.
So, my mate Dave never did get a reply from Plexus, to either question (is there any research that's remotely scientific, and WTF? re Einstein).
Anonymous: The point is that Plexus have done no research of any scientific value.
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