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James Harden Right Shoulder, Air Cupping Treatment

Discussion in 'Houston Rockets: Game Action & Roster Moves' started by rockets1995, Apr 19, 2018.

  1. D-rock

    D-rock Member

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    Anyone in pharmaceuticals industry would know the reference. Placebos are becoming just as effective as the actual drugs.

    Visualization technique is a form of placebo. Don't confuse a placebo pill with placebo effect.
     
    vlaurelio likes this.
  2. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

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    Little cups in hot water is much cheaper.

    PROTIP- Don't stick a vacuum cleaner on your body.

    Mind over matter. Athletes believe that more than us couch potatoes.

    Like what was just said, placebo is a powerful thing in research. It's affecting several billions of dollars of Western research and trials, let alone how people and sufferers are effected beyond that.

    Diff kinds of placebo too.
     
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  3. durvasa

    durvasa Contributing Member

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    How many research dollars are being spent on developing cutting edge placebo treatment? Can you give an example?
     
  4. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

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    The meta point I was making above your reply is that it's cheap to do and at worst a nocebo.

    I don't see how the results for cupping would change either camps position on alternative medicines. It's a binary take on what's a nuanced and amorphous topic that affects people deeply on matters most people are content to be ignorant upon.

    Problem is that it's easier to get conned that way, but that's not an automatic or justified stance for the skeptics either.
     
  5. RC Cola

    RC Cola Contributing Member

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    I'll re-post the blog post I shared earlier:
    https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/cupping-olympic-pseudoscience/
    The big system review Dr. Novella seemed to rely on was this one (at least in this blog post):
    https://www.researchgate.net/public...e_Treatment_An_Overview_of_Systematic_Reviews
    As a system review, it covers many things, including using cupping for pain, hypertension, herpes, etc.

    Novella kinda hits on several different studies/system reviews while also trying to summarize the general conclusion of all of these results. Orac seems to have also covered the topic (as noted at the end). These are a bit outdated, though I doubt things have changed substantially since these were posted. A newer post by Dr Harriet Hall seemed to hit similar points:
    https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/facial-cupping-a-kinder-gentler-sillier-kind-of-cupping/
     
  6. wizkid83

    wizkid83 Contributing Member

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    Most of the article suggests that researches are biased and results should be discarded. It was basically "I see no value and I'm not convinced". It also go into some random stuff like face cupping that are not relevant to the traditional practices.

    Unless there was a real test and control, 2 groups, both getting similar cosmetic effects (bumps and etc.) and similar results of improvement, leading to result that any feeling of improvement is likely placebo, buried in all other stuff in that post I don't find the conclusion necessary scientific.
     
  7. legacygt777

    legacygt777 Member

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    That's not true. A Chinese Medical Dr I know treats pro Houston athletes and travels around the world to give seminars in acupuncture and cupping. There are lots of studies on both treatments. It's more than just a trend.

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095754814000040
     
  8. aroundtheblock2

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    What are you some sort of holistic medicine person? Cupping is just used to loosen muscles, it doesn't mean there's an injury. If you watched the olympics the swimmers all used cupping in between/before races and you could see the suction spots all over them.
     
  9. RC Cola

    RC Cola Contributing Member

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    The blog post is a high-level summary (with opinionated conclusions) of some high-level system reviews regarding the research around cupping. The system reviews include summaries of various RCTs/studies for cupping for various treatments (pain, hypertension, acne, etc as I mentioned earlier). I believe they refer to each set of studies they included, so you can go deeper into those if you'd like. The 2nd blog post was partly about facial cupping, though parts of it were about cupping in general as well. It included a conclusion by American Cancer Society about cupping, as well as some quotes/information about one of the researchers from the system review in the 1st blog post about cupping (Edzard Ernst).

    I'm not sure exactly what more you want. IMO the blog post is a good way for the layperson to understand what all is going on as the research articles can be a bit difficult to read and understand. If there's more specifics you want, or you don't understand why Novella made certain conclusions, I can try to explain the reasoning as I understand it. I follow Novella through his skeptical podcast quite a bit, so I generally know how he comes up with his conclusions.

    I can go into why many reject some of the studies as biased/low quality. It is pretty common with pseudoscience, and again, why it is useful to sometimes refer to an expert like Dr Novella (or whoever you prefer) instead of reading the research directly (as a layperson). For example, I think both Novella and the main system review noted that nearly 100% of acupuncture research from China resulted in positive outcomes, which indicates a bias in the way research is reported there (though honestly, I think *most* places have this problem as generally only positive results are sent to journals, while negative studies typically just go nowhere). Generally speaking, it seems like I see summaries indicating things like "cupping *may* be useful for things like pain," which indicates the potential of a small benefit for a subjective thing like pain. You can assume that is true, in which case cupping is probably less useful than a couple of ibuprofen. Or you can assume that this small benefit is probably just a factor of bias impacting some of these positive outcomes (which is common with things like cupping, acupuncture, homeopathy, etc.).


    I spent the last 30 minutes or so, skimming over the details here. The results seem kinda similar to the other reviews I've seen, though they seemed a bit more happy to proclaim that cupping likely provides a benefit for pain management.

    They also say things like this though:
    That seems like a lot of potential bias, as noted in some of the links I gave earlier. The lack blinding is a pretty big deal IMO. I understanding you can't really easily blind cupping, though I know they've done so with acupuncture IIRC. Even if they can't do that for cupping, it doesn't look like these RCTs did it for acupuncture (which was often studied alongside cupping in these studies), which seems to show why many don't trust results like this.

    I'm trying to make sense of their pain results. This is getting into nerdy stats stuff, and I'm not as familiar with this stuff vs other forms of measurement for pain (I think I've often seen things like "% of users who reported pain being cut in half" or something like that...these pain results seem much smaller in effect). I'd be happy to dig into it more if people want to discuss the results (especially if they're more knowledgeable on how to interpret these numbers), though I'm guessing all the data basically summarizes to the points already made. Basically we see some positive results for pain for cupping (and little else). But those results could be biased. If you don't think there is bias (despite some of the points made about it), then yeah go use cupping for pain and maybe you can expect a (probably) small benefit. If you think there is bias affecting these numbers, then yeah there's probably no real benefit to cupping (especially compared to similar "proven" treatments).

    BTW, I'm assuming we're all on the same page that if cupping is beneficial, it's primarily only for pain (or possibly something like acne or some skin issues...I didn't really look into the research there). There are claims it can help with hypertension, digestion, weight loss, fever, and probably 100 other things (FYI when a treatment claims to work for all of those things, it is probably pseudoscience...at least on some level). Many of those things are *much* easier to measure/research relative to pain, and I haven't really see much positive results for those.



    On a side-note, if people in the GARM are getting tired of seeing this discussion, perhaps we can move it to the D&D or something similar. I love debates like this, so I probably won't stop responding if others continue to contribute. But I know most in the GARM couldn't care less about cupping.
     
  10. legacygt777

    legacygt777 Member

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    Cupping is based on acupuncture and meridians. There is a lot of research on acupuncture and Chinese medicine. I can go on with more studies and we can have this debate but there is a reason why athletes have turned to eastern medicine. Aaron Rogers and Kobe Bryant are among the elite that have received TCM.
     
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  11. RC Cola

    RC Cola Contributing Member

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    Top athletes like Kobe Bryant, Shaq, Blake Griffin, etc., all used Power Balance bands IIRC. So I guess that means, despite the research, those things work? ;)

    You could possibly argue that Power Balance was just a failed sponsorship deal where these guys showed poor business judgement. But somehow TCM has nothing to do with business, and these folks are just convinced TCM (like acupuncture) works. I could probably buy that, though while that says a lot about the strong PR for TCM, it says little about its efficacy. Plus, as mentioned earlier, athletes are probably more likely than the average person to use pseudoscience, so I wouldn't really put much stock in that. I would be more curious to see how many MDs use acupuncture or something along those lines.
     
  12. legacygt777

    legacygt777 Member

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    The TCM DR I've worked with has made diabetic nephropathy patients have feeling in their foot again. I could list more stories. This same Dr was currently working at UTMB in combination of Western and Eastern principles. I myself have mange my back pain through TCM. Is it a cure? Not alone but can work with other things holistically to manage pain.

    To answer your question I know 2 people personally, one is a friend of mine that is an urgent care ER dr that has gone through training for acupuncture that uses it. Another friend of mine is a Dr at MD Anderson that is using acupuncture. MD Anderson is using acupuncture for symptom management. You don't apply TCM at UTMB or MD Anderson without have success with it.
     
  13. wizkid83

    wizkid83 Contributing Member

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    Give me the design of the experiments with a good null hypothesis, the target variable, controlled variables, and data of outcomes. Something like 5 bullet point would suffice.

    BTW: I'm not saying cupping works or not, I'm just actually looking for an actual controlled scientific study that proves or disproves that all the benefits of cupping are placebo based or not.
     
  14. RC Cola

    RC Cola Contributing Member

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    There are something like 15 RCTs (or at least 8 RCTs, not sure if they were all exclusive) and 12 studies referenced in the system review I shared earlier. Assuming I had the time, ability, and desire to track down all the specifics for those individual studies, are you really wanting me to post all of that here? The link legacygt777 provided included a bit more info on some of the trials it included, though even that was missing some finer details as it too was more of a summary (and it was still pretty dense at 12-13 pages). I'm assuming you want more than what was provided in the links I've already provided (the summaries didn't seem to provide some of the specifics you requested, unless I missed it).

    I mean...I guess I can *try* to provide those things, but I'd basically be creating my own system review on cupping, recreating what's already out there with those two examples.

    There's isn't any one perfectly done study on cupping (i.e., a blinded RCT with several controls treating multiple symptoms), if that's what you're getting at. If we had that, then sure, we could just go over the bullet points of that single study. But that doesn't really exist. Hence the need to rely on some of these system reviews that combine multiple studies into one in order to get a feel on how effective cupping is overall. Honestly, that's probably a bit better than a single study as a single study could be a bit of an outlier (even if everything was well designed and executed).

    I'm a bit tempted to just say go find that data yourself :p, though if I get bored later in the week, maybe I'll PM you what I find.
     
  15. wizkid83

    wizkid83 Contributing Member

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    I think that's kind of my point, there hasn't been a good enough study to truly discredit it. Most of counter argument is "we haven't find a good explanation why it should work, so it's likely placebo" rather than it doesn't work.

    Think about this, most of how/why antihistamines regulate our brain isn't understood, but we know antihistamines makes enough people sleepy that we sell zzzquil. I don't see cupping and it's effect on how it makes people feel better to be too far away from that.
     

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