Oh, oh, Michi,
I think I already told you that “it happened to me personally”: about 12 years ago, when I worked in ornamental gardening, I did very strenuous physical work, and even so in the winter I was so cold that I had to wear two pairs of pants and a sweater under my heavy coat. Conventional medicine found no remedy for me, until a nurse suggested I try Chinese acupuncture.
Within two days the cold problem completely disappeared!
After that the alternative therapist gave me Bach flower drops, because for many, many years I suffered terribly from sensitivity to cold in my throat, and I couldn’t even enjoy ice cream in the summer unless I was standing in the sun. And again—the Bach flower drops solved the problem for me.
On the other hand, the therapist did not succeed in solving other problems for me, but even so, my experience with her led me to place a great deal of trust in her!

Have a good week

A., we already talked about this. One case in an uncontrolled trial proves nothing. To test a medical phenomenon you need to conduct a controlled double-blind trial with a sample group and a control group. If we see results—we’ll talk. All of alternative medicine is built on inferences from isolated cases that are worth nothing.

Your words:
I am willing to accept mystical phenomena for which I have no explanation. But I am skeptical about them. That is, I would be willing to accept their existence after I am convinced that there is indeed good evidence for them. In many cases we are dealing with faulty thinking or charlatanism

My reply was:
About 12 years ago, when I worked in ornamental gardening, I did very strenuous physical work, and even so in the winter I was so cold that I had to wear two pairs of pants and a sweater under my heavy coat. Conventional medicine found no remedy for me, until a nurse suggested I try Chinese acupuncture.
Within two days the cold problem completely disappeared!
After that the alternative therapist gave me Bach flower drops, because for many, many years I suffered terribly from sensitivity to cold in my throat, and I couldn’t even enjoy ice cream in the summer unless I was standing in the sun. And again—the Bach flower drops solved the problem for me.
On the other hand, the therapist did not succeed in solving other problems for me, but even so, my experience with her led me to place a great deal of trust in her!
So then—do you see any room for faulty thinking or charlatanism in the way I was treated and recovered?
I emphasized the word see, because you can presumably claim that since you were not present at the time, you are forced to relate only to my testimony, which perhaps is not sufficient from the standpoint of scientific grounding?!
Associatively—this argument reminds me of the difference between Judaism and Islam regarding adultery:
According to our Torah, adulterers are to be executed if two witnesses saw the penetration during intercourse. Since it is impossible to see penetration—it is forbidden to kill. [At least that is what I was told…]
Then came the prophet Muhammad and went further, saying that four witnesses are required who see the intercourse in all its details. But Muslim believers are not interested in that—it is enough for them that people slander some woman as having committed adultery for her family members to kill her.
Well—you can develop this issue of seeing and evidence endlessly and derive countless insights from it.
So meanwhile, have a good week and all the best

Our rabbi A., you have no way to infer that conclusion. There is spontaneous healing (people recover on their own without treatment), and maybe that happened to you by chance and not because of the treatment. There is placebo (healing because you believed you received treatment), and there are also psychological illusions (you think you’re no longer as cold as before, but really it’s similar). Therefore your case says nothing. In order to neutralize all these failures, the scientific method was invented, which requires a controlled double-blind trial on two large groups of patients as I explained. Without that, you saw nothing.

The accepted scientific method assumes that in most parameters human beings are identical. On the basis of that assumption, experiments and observations are conducted. But allow me to remind you that until recently, medical experiments that formed the basis for developing and approving drugs started from the assumption that there is no significant physiological difference between the two sexes [except for the reproductive system and all its derivatives.] But it turned out that the reproductive system dictates different physiology and also a different brain structure between males and females.
If you had raised such a claim about a decade ago, you presumably would have been considered an idiot!…
And again—“it happened to me personally”:
About 32 years ago I tried various means to cope with involuntary falling asleep that attacks me. [That’s why I stopped driving long distances!]. My son Yiftach suggested that I read a book that proposed a technique of autosuggestion to deal with this sleepiness. At the base of the autosuggestion was relaxation, which according to the book one could reach by counting out loud in a quiet place.
The only place I could do this was our turkey farm at the foot of Mount Gilboa.
And here is what happened—while I was counting out loud, leaning against the wall of the shed by the coop, I entered a crazy trance and started laughing out loud. This laughter was accompanied by sexual arousal!…
This lasted a few minutes and afterward I was very calm. I did this relaxation for about two weeks.
Until then I had suffered from lots of sore throats and flu-like illnesses without fever [just terrible weakness]. Since then I have had no more sore throats or flu.
Until then I could do 70 push-ups. Since then it jumped to 110!
How do you test such a phenomenon scientifically?

My friend A.,
It’s a bit frustrating to write the same thing again and again. An intelligent person like you should understand this the first time and not add yet another example and another example of exactly the same kind.
Einstein already said that stupidity is thinking you can fix a system that doesn’t work by repeated attempts of the same thing. Adding incorrect examples that are equally invalid doesn’t help and doesn’t improve the argument. So you brought another case in which you improved through an “alternative” suggestion. Nu, so what…

1. What is the problem with conducting a controlled trial of this matter? Take a sample group and a control group of people suffering from the same problems and see whether it helps or not.
I’m not saying this technique doesn’t work, only that your evidence says nothing about it. If you conduct a controlled double-blind trial and statistically significant results emerge, I will admit and fully accept that it works.

2. Bringing examples that the scientific technique can also miss things is like pointing to optical illusions and claiming on their basis that we should throw out trust in the eye.

Good evening,
These are two essentially different cases!
In the first case of the acupuncture—the action was performed, and indeed the expected result was obtained.
In the second case—I only wanted to reach relaxation, which is the stage before autosuggestion, through which I hoped to solve the sleepiness problem.
And then, completely unexpectedly, came the trance, after which my health improved very significantly, even though that was not my intention, but I did not solve my falling-asleep problem. [Evidence of that: two cars…]
What you are basically saying is that if I don’t manage to find other people who react as I do to counting out loud, that is a sign and proof that I still get sore throats and flu often…

No. What I am saying is that if you do not find other people in sufficient quantity and in a controlled double-blind way, then you indeed recovered—but not necessarily because of the technique you used.

Hi Michi,
Indeed, I was not necessarily healed because of the technique I used, but maybe still yes?! Can my claim that I was healed as a result of the counting be disproved?
After all, my main claim is that alternative medicine, even more than conventional medicine, quite clearly does not suit everyone.
But my daughter Einat suggested another argument to me: it is well known that laughter is good for your health. [Maybe you heard of Dr. Dina, who was a doctor in our kibbutz. At the time I tried to convince her that body and soul are one, so she refused to accept my positions, but later she became the high priestess of healing through laughter.] So I assume you agree with me that laughter can greatly improve health. Now there remains a small question: does counting out loud indeed arouse laughter?
Since you too [and not only I…] are a very intelligent person, I am exempt from laying out for you the range of implications that follow from this question.

I assume you would agree with me that if word gets around that there is a magician who succeeded in healing people from a certain disease for which there is no conventional cure—then even though there is no scientific confirmation for his healing method, it would be proper to try to heal patients in this way, even if it still does not have FDA approval.
In my opinion, the challenge is to find ways to examine the effectiveness of alternative medicine, where the starting point should be that this medicine is not suitable for all human beings! And even if some person responds positively to an alternative method for ailment X, that does not necessarily mean that he will respond positively to every other problem, or to treatment by another alternative means!

We already talked about that too. The fact that something cannot be disproved does not make it true. You also cannot disprove that a fairy has three wings. The claim that alternative medicine is possible is banal. By the same token, it is possible that standing on one leg cures cancer. In order to validate a medicine, it has to pass tests of significance; it is not enough that it is possible. Everything is possible. Even if you do not want to reach the level of significance required by the FDA, it is still clear that one cannot make do with something on the basis of a single example. That is a joke, not an argument.
If you claim that scientific techniques are not suitable, then propose other techniques (there are none, of course. Because every logical testing technique is scientific by definition. Science will accept it. It is not based on arbitrary hocus-pocus but on logic). By the same token, I can claim that the statement that every fairy has three wings does not meet scientific tests and should be checked by other, subjective tests (such as asking people about their dreams), and conclude from that that it is true.

Indeed I have no choice but to agree with you [even if through gritted teeth…] that the phenomena I describe are not scientifically grounded.
But I ask again: would you refrain from using alternative medicine if you did not find a conventional, scientifically grounded remedy?
But let us return to the issue of scientific confirmation of oddities:
It may be that with the help of a broad survey I would find people who testify about themselves that they enter a kind of trance as a result of counting out loud. In this matter allow me to confess that even now, when I count out loud, I enter a sub-trance state without laughing!
Since this is a very subtle matter, I am not sure how reliably one can conduct a survey on this topic!

It may be impossible, but then we are stuck. You don’t expect me to accept a claim just because there is no way to test it?!
As for what I would do in the absence of a conventional solution, I don’t know. It depends on how serious it is, how much evidence there is nonetheless that it helped, how much it costs, how burdensome it is, and so on.

Even though there is almost no solid evidence even regarding a topic that is already almost agreed upon—namely Chinese acupuncture—still it seems to me that despite denying scientific validity to alternative medicine, it would be proper to add that perhaps for a certain profile of people, this method may be helpful.

That I am willing to add about anything: maybe there is a certain kind of person for whom X may help. Put in place of X anything you like, including Chinese acupuncture.

The comment was deleted because of a disrespectful and unbecoming style, and I will do the same with future ones.

I wrote in that style because of the frustration over the waste of time of a great rabbi on long, repetitive, and unintelligent questions whose answers are already known and publicized. In my opinion this is insolence or too much free time on the part of the questioner

Please, no need to worry about me. Certainly not in that style.

There are things where the only way (at least at this stage in human history) to know clearly that they are true is through experience.
If any of you has ever undergone real healing work (of course there is a lot of charlatanism in the field) or experienced deep meditation, he would not argue about it in scientific-rational terms—he would simply say that one cannot deny what he himself experienced in a way that, as a sane person, he cannot deny, even though science can deny it from now till tomorrow.
When, as a result of healing work or meditation, you simply experience something you have never experienced in your life, something that causes you to look at reality differently, then even if you wanted to you could not deny it—unless you are a fanatic to the point of blindness, denying what is felt because of worldview considerations.

If it does not stand up to the test of a controlled double-blind experiment, then it is probably nonsense. And in my opinion the feelings can be thrown in the trash together with the techniques.