Alright, for those who wish for more, here goes:

A Comparison of Three Treatment Modalities for Back Spasm, by Dr Daniel M Ingram, MD MSPH FAAEM FACEP, ABEM Diplomat

Last Spring I sprained my back. The story I tell about fixing my back a few posts ago is just the end of the story. Here is the beginning. I can't remember at this point how it happened, but the effect was that any movement of my back was really painful, I had to roll over and use my arms just to sit up, and standing up straight was totally impossible. I had to sleep curled up in a ball as laying flat on my back was impossible, as was laying on my stomach. It was really hard to sleep and it made my fast paced ED job very difficult. This went on for a week. I kept thinking it would just get better, but it totally didn't. A fellow physician who had had some similar problems saw me all bent over and said, "Hey, you should go see my Chiropractor friend Ben," and he called Ben up, and Ben agreed to see me the next day.

The Chiropractor is the first modality. He was also an acupuncturist, but I will combine that into one modality. He put me on an articulating table, did some adjustments in which I bounced up and down rapidly with pressure on certain points. It really hurt. He put 28 needles into my lumbar spine area and left me there for about 10 minutes. After all of that, I was about 15% better, which meant I was still barely functional. Cost so far: for me, nothing, as I had insurance, other than the time and pain, of course, for the insurance company, not sure, but let's say it was $100. This is just a guess, but I will bet it is not that far off.

That evening I had to work a shift again, and my colleagues all took pity on me and were quite sure something must be horribly wrong. At the end of my shift I signed in as a patient. This is the second modality. It involved an IV, labs, a urinalysis and an MRI of my Lumbar spine. It took a few hours. The IV really hurt, much worse than the acupuncture needles did. The result: nothing, except now I have a permanent rider on one of my disability policies against covering me from disability due to my back, as it all went on my medical record. The doctor, a good friend, gave me the hard sell to take opiate pain medications until it went away. I declined his offer of addictive, constipating, side-effect producing medications and went home 4 hours later than I would have otherwise after a 10-hour, totally painful shift. Total cost to me: 4 hours, one IV of pain, 4 hours lost sleep, $200 copay. Total cost to insurance company: I am guessing a few thousand dollars. Total result: no better at all, time and money wasted.

I went back to the chiropractor the next day, and he put 5 needles deep into the tendons of my groin. They actually didn't hurt much, though it was an extremely creepy thing to have done, but the sensations they produces were remarkable: strange electrical sensations, odd movements in other limbs, and my back began to straighten out. When they pulled out the needles I was 90% better, and within about 30 minutes it was all gone. Total cost to me: nothing but time and the creepy feeling of the needles, cost to insurance company, I am guessing another $100 or so. Total result: cured.

So far, the chiropractor who used acupuncture is in the lead by a long shot in terms of pain, cost, and effectiveness.

Let's consider modality #3, mentioned above, that I applied the next time my back went out, in which I simply turned my mind to the problem with a magickal paradigm and methods, had a bunch of interesting visual and energetic experiences that you would term either non-existent or pathological or psychotic or all of those, and 3.5 hours later, at no cost and with no pain, and without even interruption of my travel plans, I was cured, and it was totally fascinating to boot and fun.

If you were a health-care administrator, which would you want to see happening? Clearly, magick wins on all fronts, with chiropractor/acupuncture second and standard medicine a dead last.

If you were a patient, which would you prefer? I am guessing the third one unless you are basically a masochist or really crazy.

Why would you deprive people of those sorts of methods and effects at that price-point and with that side-effect profile? Why would you prefer the "scientific" approach that modern medicine represents? It is not that there aren't lots of good things we can do in medicine, as I do them every day that I work, but it has serious limitations, and to break down those limitations and access the full healing powers that we have available to us, it is going to take some serious paradigm revision, all of which you seem determined to stand in the way of for no obviously good reason at all, a phenomena reminiscent of our recent government shutdown which was determined to make sure that some people didn't get health care: totally wasteful, totally crazy, totally ignorant.

I suspect someone is going to come up with some argument about mechanisms and all of that, but my question is: could you access the mechanisms that I accessed if you believed it was all psychosis or impossible? I am guessing not. Thus, belief is part of the mechanism, I will claim, so, those of you with broken mechanisms, it is not surprising you get no results and have the view you do, which just reinforces the effect, and you are caught in a dysfunctional, disempowered loop of delusion.

You are not fighting the good fight: you are depriving people of useful and powerful things if they are foolish enough to buy into your paradigm. You are causing damage and you don't even realize it. It is like people who don't like the maps of the progress of insight as they never had any insights, and so never really try insight practice in sufficient doses and with sufficiently good technique as they don't even believe in the intended results. Mushroom-factor all over again.

I didn't say they were exactly the same. I said they are not causally independent (for people who experience both) and they can become indistinguishable.



People are much much less likely to go to an emergency room if their hallucinations are being positive. Manic A&P-like psychoses/hallucinations actually do tend to run positive with fairies and butterflies and everything (for first episodes especially). People start thinking they are Jesus himself! Demons/shadows/ are often par for the course in a depressive Dark Night-like psychosis. Also, the positive generally tends to pair with the negative and you state this as a warning in MCTB:



When the powers become so overwhelming in someone's experience that the person spends their weeks creating universes and talking to spirits instead of eating, sleeping or talking to actual people, then how is this different than psychosis? If the powers knock out normal "day-to-day" function then that is psychosis (and this isn't as voluntary a process as you make it sound in MCTB in the quote above) . I'm not suggesting that it is schizophrenia or any specific mental illness, but it is most definitely psychosis regardless of whether or not it re-occurs as part of a pattern that can then be later diagnosed and identified as a mental illness. This is what I mean by saying that they can become indistinguishable for people who are already prone to psychosis.

edit: In addition to this, most psychosis is very difficult to describe. You're likely forgetting the psychotic patients in your emergency room who don't bother to describe their experience or who are keeping their mouth shut because they're off in a hyper-vision quest la-la-land.

Daniel,

How about an essay contest for the prize of admission to the Group Powers retreat.  

Why I Should Be Admitted to the Group Powers Retreat Even Though I'm Such a Hopeless Noob and Sycophant 

By The Sotāpanna Jen Pearly

The argument about reproducibility is an interesting one.

Consider the problem with this relate do the number of factors you have to consistently control to do the sort of reproducible science you seem to be asking for related to this.

Consider the system: the brain, the body, the external world, our internal mental states, our psychological states, our relationship to external objects and ourselves. Moment to moment very large aspects of all of those change radically. The system is extremely complex and unstable.

Consider one of the foundations of modern physics, the Schrödinger Equation. It would seem straightforward enough, and given really simple systems and really simple boundary conditions, you can solve it. Want to predict the shape of the orbit of an electron probability cloud around a hydrogen atom in a vacuum and without external electromagnetic influence? Easy. One proton, one electron, clearly defined forces, all just a walk in the park. Try do to that for, say, sodium. Not that big an atom, really, not that many particles, and straightforward forces, so you would think it would be easy. Not! Nearly impossible. The largest computers struggle against the task. Schrodinger Equation for larger atoms

Ok, consider a much larger system: the brain, a trillion neurons, connections beyond number, varying neurotransmitter levels, varying glucose and blood pressure levels, varying configurations even minutes apart, as the plastic structure of the brain constantly remodels itself, and then add in psychology, whatever that is, and the "external" world in all its staggering complexity.

Those who demand the level of reproducibility of, say, simple Newtonian physics, whatever that is, for a system with that degree of complexity: it is hard to even begin to come up with polite enough terms to address that level of naiveté.

Even Newtonian physics works only under really simple conditions, and then things begin to break down. Consider a simple case: take a weight, put it on a flat surface, and gently increase the angle of the surface until the weight begins to move, and record the rate at which the weight moves and accelerates until it reaches the end of the surface. Straightforward, right? Except that, if you do this again and again and measure carefully, you won't always get the same angle at which the downward forces overcome the static friction and the thing begins to move, and you won't always get uniform acceleration between experiments or even during the same experiment, as kinetic friction is an average, and moment to moment will vary depending on small variations in the surface. To try to get really good reproducibility you would have to really craft the weight and the surface with extreme precision and control all sorts of other conditions (temperature, air movement, etc.) to get really consistent results.

Did any of these people who talk about science take physics? Did any of them try this sort of thing in the lab? It is really surprising how variable a really seemingly simple system can be. I suspect they have never really done any science.

Take something pretty simple: a 4-cylinder, 4 stroke engine. The computer power required to model that even remotely well under various conditions is simply staggering, and even then, only real-world testing will really tell you how that system with all of its fluid mechanics and varying friction and turbulence and the like change as the temperature and metal properties and air density and volatility of the fuel and the like change under varying conditions and with time. That is not a zillionth the complexity of how the brain interacts with the body and the world, with zillionth obviously being a really scientific word.

Try predicting the orbits of the planets around the sun and their positions in, say, 10 years, taking into account all their gravitational pulls on each other as well as the force of the solar wind and the like: staggeringly complex, even if you have all the basic physics down. That is a really, really simple system in comparison to the mind, and simple by orders of magnitude that are best describe with large exponents that themselves have large exponents. Anyone looked at chaos theory? It is, well, chaotic.

Consider studies in medicine, which is now getting to the level of system complexity that we are having to deal with. I have all the coursework in study design that a PhD epidemiologist would take, so this is something I know something about.

We would sit there in class and tear down study after study, ripping apart the methods and conclusions, pointing out the huge flaws in top-funded studies that appeared in the very best journals there are, JAMA, Lancet, NEJM, ripping them to pieces, and doing so easily. The number of naive assumptions made about how statistics would work in those settings was staggering, the number of confounding variables huge, the ability to really control key variables really weak most of the time, and the numbers to try to get meaningful effects of a scale that very few researchers will ever be able to afford to do. Those are peer-reviewed studies, peer reviewed by some of the best researchers out there, and most of them have real problems with them. The best cardiac drugs, like Lipitor and the like, show effects so small that it takes thousands of patients to try to show they do something and years of carefully collected, albeit often really flawed, data.

Where is the perfect science these people postulate? It is a fiction, a fantasy, a pie in the sky, particularly about a system the likes of which we are talking about. I am not saying we shouldn't try, as plenty of good comes out of science that is not that great, as well as lots of problems, like Vioxx.

Look up the outrageously expensive debacles around Natrecor and Xigris. They will blow your mind. All the rage when I was in residency, extremely expensive, based on basically junk science, and now you really never see them used at all.

Try to do something on that level we are talking about consistently, such as consistently induce the exact same feeling and thoughts in a person two days in a row at the same time for a few seconds. Nearly impossible. Try to do it yourself! Good luck. Why do you expect this for the powers when you can't even do it for ordinary thoughts and emotions even for one person two times in a row? Have the people critiquing this stuff really thought about what they are asking and if they would ask it of other similar questions and systems?

Look up the science of what we should be eating! There are hints, fads, trends that reverse all the time, and tons of studies that get thrown out a few years later based on other studies that will get thrown out a few years later. You would think that, given how important the question is, we would have really good science on this. It is all simple biochemistry, right? Not!

Vitamin D: in, out, in, out, maybe in again?
Fish Oil: maybe, maybe not! Does it cause prostate cancer? Does it help inflammatory conditions or heart disease? Let me know when you find out.
Carbs: in, out, in, out, etc.
Tell me definitely if gluten is bad for you. Best of luck!
Are saturated fats bad for you? Look up the science on butter. In, out, in, out, maybe in again
Look up the science on cholesterol: we lowered it as much as possible, now we think that excessively lowering it is a bad idea, and that will probably change soon enough

There has been a ton more research on diet and its effects on health with zillions of more dollars and scientists working on this than the powers, and the definitive conclusions you can draw are so flighty and wishy washy as to make may throw up their hands entirely.

Vitamin E: in, out, in, really out
Vitamin C: Nobel prize! Yeah, and then maybe it doesn't do much, or does it?
Should you cook with olive oil? Coconut oil? Canola oil? Let me know when you are certain.

Science! What an amazing thing! What a total joke! It is both of these and more. Worship it like the definitive guide to how to live, and you will be dancing around like a puppet being played by someone with a seizure disorder.

Should you exercise to lose weight? In, out, in, not sure now. Those who exercise to lose weight might, on average, eat an additional 100 calories per day more than than they burn in exercise! Or, perhaps not! Tell me definitely, clearly and for all time what the answer is! Best of luck with that.

Eggs: eaten daily by hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions. You would think we would know something about their health effects. They go in and out and in and out. There was just a study that showed that perhaps moderate consumption has no effect on heart disease, whereas for decades they were thought to be killing people due to their high cholesterol content. Some now think they are probably good for you. I am going to eat some shortly...

Is obesity all caused by clever gut bacteria manipulating neurotransmitters, whereas for years we thought these people were just pathological eaters or had some endocrine disorder? We don't know.

The whole question of "reality based framework" does get to the heart of the thing.

Which reality is that? Yours? Mine? They are clearly not the same, nor is anyone else's.

Consensus reality is a convenient fiction.

Scientific models are that: models.

Most apply only to idealized cases, and the rest is extrapolated assuming that in aggregate the effects are the same, when emergent properties surprise us all the time. What level of biology do you have to rise to to adequately predict, say, the Tea Party...

All scientific models are extrapolated from people's experiences. This is the first basis of all science. A perspective that was in theory abandoned, yet it resurfaced as being so integral to modern physics as to be frightening in its implications: somehow observation causes the system to seem to resolve to something definite in a way that we think it just might not if it wasn't observed. That is totally freaky and should provoke deep skepticism of many of our assumptions about this "objective reality" that is so often posited.

It is a model, a story, a way of predicting things that sort of works in some cases, doesn't work at all in others, and for very refined cases is generally pretty good and often really amazing.

When we abandon experience and instead favor models that were based on experience, we have a deep cognitive problem. It is not that much that is useful can't come out of that, but we must remember what we are doing when we do it, and keep our eyes on the prize, however defined. I define mine as happiness. Yours is what again?