Latest post of the previous page:
Hello LilyI think the answer to that will depend on whether you make false or misleading claims in your promotional material. In your previous paragraph you say that you will not claim to treat conditions that you cannot treat yet the advertisement Alan has complained of does exactly that.Lemonade Lily wrote: Are you going to attack me when I set up in practice? From where I sit today, I'd say that you are.
You say the osteopaths you know work from a medical scientific/basis. How so?
According to Ernst & Singh, the evidence for osteopathy is that it is no better or worse than conventional medicine for treating muscular skeletal conditionals (in other words, it is largely ineffective for back pain) and that several clinical trials demonstrate a failure to be effective for non muscular skeletal conditions such as migraine.
The British Institute of Osteopathy's website promotes "traditional osteopathic practice as first disseminated by Andrew Taylor Still in June 1874 and his followers" and offers this defintion:
Osteopathy is a system, or science, of healing that uses the natural resources of the body in the corrective field:
* for the adjustment of structural conditions
* to stimulate the preparation and distribution of the fluids and free forces of the body; and
* to promote cooperation and harmony inside the body as a mechanism.
(snip)
'The body is its own commissariat, taking in material substance in the form of the proximate principles, such as water and oxygen. Nothing is assimilated to the body that is not first vitalised and every process that takes place in the body is a vital process; every lesion that we find in the body is a vital lesion in relation the vitality of life, of the patient. This implies that every part of the body is supplied with blood and nerve force, a dual activity that is used continually as corrective means in osteopathic practice.
As you say, there is a lot of woo and quackery out there. I am curious as to why you would exclude osteopaths from this definition. The fact that osteopaths - like chiroquacks - have achieved a degree of incorporation into mainstream medicine, especially in the US, seems to me a reason why it is more important to go after those of them who make unsupportable claims than it is to worry about the more demonstrably ridiculous therapies like ear candling, which aren't so widely supported. However, in defence of Alan, he complains to the ASA about every false claim he comes across, whoever makes it and has been doing so for many years.Lemonade Lily wrote: Why don't you focus on the nutters first? They are lined up waiting for skeptics to have a shot at them. Why take a shot at this osteopath?
Calling it a witch-hunt seems strangely appropriate given the appeals to the supernatural that these therapies - including osteopathy - appear to depend on. I'm all for hunting witches myself and don't understand why it's perceived as wrong to do so.