Recently on Facebook pursuant to a conversation about alternative cancer treatments, I was inspired to wax eloquent on the topic of whether there will ever be medical-level evidence for my practice, Eden Energy Medicine (EEM). Here follows the blip that got me going and my thoughts that clearly have needed expression for some time!
> [MD's are] brainwashed and believe [chemo and massive surgeries for cancer are] the only solution. If it's the only solution, what alternative is there to offering it? That's how they rationalize the horror of pumping poison into a child.
This is a very uncharitable reading. Doctors are good, rational people. I agree with John Allison, "99% of all people want to make the world a better place." It is true that Vitamin C therapy has been vilified, but hasn't every treatment? All treatments should be heartily discussed and debated. Bring on the criticism, please. Also, let us not denigrate pills and surgery, which are indeed terrific, amazing tools and in many cases and have clear, immediately obvious and astoundingly good results for specific problems. It's natural that people want more of such a great thing that appears to cost so little in time from the client.
As best I can tell, the deeper reason that MD's support more conventional particular therapies rather than complementary/alternatives is simply because they agree with the modern research criteria of evidence.
Let us first consider what is -not- considered evidence. From there, we may consider how, without such non-evidence, will complementary/alternative therapies like TCM or EEM ever be considered to produce such evidence.
I focus on my discipline, EEM (Eden Energy Medicine), which has a large base of TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) composing a good chunk of its theory. I am a certified practitioner and I personally think it is so amazing that I'm committed to sharing it with as many people as I can. I am also an Objectivist who thinks reality and evidence is of the utmost importance. Becoming acquainted with EEM was quite an eye opener for me, as it turned upside down a number of my cherished beliefs, but that story shall be for another day.
An example of non-evidence according to the current medical model (I'll shorthand it to 'evidence') is personal experience. If 100 people uniformly feel better after treatment X, that is not evidence. All those good results together do not constitute evidence but rather are considered hearsay. "The Plural of Anecdote is Not Data", as the Skeptical Medicine website touts. evidence is when all 100 people were 'controlled' to have the 'same' condition at the input of the study, the 'same' treatment during the study, and the 'same' output measurement results afterwards, which should be better than a group of similars who did not get the treatment under scrutiny. I use scare quotes because people differ so significantly among themselves and also it is probably impossible to fully control for all these factors.
The scientific evidence view has a corollary that bars even more data that is prevalent within EEM. It is that if people's improvements came in different ways, there is no 'evidence'. Thus if two clients both improve in the EEM measure of "less blocked energies", but their physical symptoms improve very differently, this is not considered evidence. Only if the outcome measure is already itself verified by prior 'evidence' or it is merely perceptual, only then is the outcome category considered valid for grouping results.
Explicit in this view is a statement that some good outcomes are ruled as irrelevant: if the effect is on the controls, this is considered a placebo effect and meaningless. Interestingly, the controls in modern studies do often improve. In fact the controls have been improving more and more each year, which has made it even harder and even more expensive to do drug-approval research. In some cases, the placebo effect, ie the improvement of the controls, has been 30% and the treatment in question only improves upon that by 5%. Such a difference, if statistically significant, is considered positive evidence for the treatment. I wonder if people's learning about EEM and other therapies has helped improve the placebo.
A third part of the scientific evidence view that should be noted is its lack of focus on side-effects and costs to the clients. Study authors are focused on the results of a treatment on a particular outcome. Other outcomes are generally assumed to be insignificant, even when clients may not consider them so. For example, even the FDA recently agreed to put a warning on Prozac to indicate that even though it is prescribed for depression, it relate to increased suicidal and homocidal thoughts. On another scale, increased cost is another risk to clients but not to study authors. Neither of these two factors are generally considered in the outcome criteria.
TCM and my discipline, EEM (Eden Energy Medicine), do not currently have much, if any, 'evidence' of the scientifically-approved type as described. Honestly, I am not sure if we ever will.
There are numerous significant reasons for the lack. One is that EEM is not patented nor patentable; so for any one company to do the research to prove its value would yield too little income to justify its enormous costs.
A second reason is that the EEM methods involve significant manual human labor and, naturally, people try to minimize human labor - we try to conserve expensive resources, and people are especially costly in the USA. In China, for example, there are more studies of TCM.
The third and fourth reasons, possibly the most significant ones, for the lack of evidence for EEM is a larger time delay and more difficult protocol compliance.
With regard to delays in results, EEM, in stark contrast to pills and surgery, often shows its results not in the next hour but the next day after treatment. This delayed effect compounds the problem of gathering evidence by at least a factor of ten because so many confounding factors can occur between the 'treatment' and the 'result'. A day or two is a long time. For example, if I give you a session and your sleep improves, who is to say that your sleep that night wouldn't have been better on its own? Maybe you had a great date with your spouse after our session and that led to an amazing sleep. All we really know as a scientific fact is that if your sleep is better, your body will be better off. How much? We don't know.
Protocol compliance is an issue in two ways: follow up work is necessary and yet because it requires significantly more time and education than taking a pill, it is sometimes harder to achieve. Differences in self-care or follow-up care may easily muddy any evidence for EEM. People understand that pills wear off - taking a single solitary pill is acknowledged to be insufficient. EEM has no pills, but the necessity for repeated work is similar. EEM is a practice of tests like dousing plus exercises similar to Tai Chi. Paying the time and money for one EEM session is very rarely enough to effect a complete result and significantly more personal investment is required to see its dividends than conventional medicine. This required longer-term protocol would make studies of it even more prohibitively expensive.
Those are some of the problems with doing research for 'evidence' on EEM.
For myself, though I am a researcher by training and by inclination, I no longer seek scientific quality 'evidence' for EEM. The significant difficulties of researching complementary/alternative care over conventional pills/surgery give it a much lower return on my personal investment. Instead, my focus is on sharing my knowledge and helping to educate as many people as possible to help themselves.
I am extremely convinced that there is real, solid, but unconventional evidence for EEM.
On my own body, I have done many accidental A/B experiments. Sometimes I feel out of sorts and I don't do EEM's tests and exercises. Other times I feel out of sorts and do them. The downtime I need to get back to productive work is reliably better by at least a factor of ten when I do EEM. One of my biggest problems is forgetting to do them enough! So I'm completely satisfied that it works great for me.
As a practitioner, I want objective results for my clients. How do I get that given the dearth of 'evidence'? I focus on education. Qua educator I care most about two things: my clients' thinking skills and their self-reports. Everything else will follow.
First, in accepting people for EEM sessions, I know my job is education - it is not medical care and it is certainly not medical diagnosis. I train people to better notice, better manage, and better multiply their own bodies' positive energies. As an educator, my top concern is that my clients think for themselves and selfishly care about their self-improvement. Independence and self-motivation puts a natural priority on noticing improvements. This part of EEM work is easy. One great perk to working with the alternative/complementary medicine crowd is that most of them love to think for themselves. They may be right or may be wrong, but either way I applaud their independence and spunk to live their lives "My Way."
As a consequence of clients' independence and goal-directed living, EEM is truly a natural complementary self-care. It is a helpful adjunct to whatever other treatments the client deems personally important. For example, my teacher, Donna Eden, has several incredible stories of how her work greatly aided recoveries from major surgeries and intensive hospitalizations.
My second concern as an educator in self-care is to ensure that my clients leave having perceptually felt a positive shift in their energies. Such a shift is usually highly motivational because the effort is usually very small. I help them by testing, asking them to feel the test results, and offering corrections for energies that need help. Once people feel the benefits of EEM in their bodies, then, depending on their context, they may be interested in furthering their education and training to help themselves even more. Their self-report reflections plus my observation can start that happy cycle.
In conclusion, the evidence for EEM is at the perceptual level, but it often takes training to perceive it because this is a Subtle Medicine. My EEM clients always leave feeling at least a little better than when they arrived and they usually want more EEM. I consider that evidence of success and EEM's efficacy.
2014-03-28
Windows Phone Store App for EEM Tips.
Hello! If you came from my Windows 8.1 Phone Store app, my privacy policy is currently very simple, as below. I plan to change it in the future as the app develops more features.
This first early beta of the application does not share personal information with third parties nor does it store any information about you.
This privacy policy is subject to change without notice and was last updated on 2014-03-28. If you have any questions feel free to contact me through Blogger.
//Update 12.50a Saturday my micro app was approved by the store! It has a ways to go before I consider it a MVP (Minimally Viable Product), but it took me through the whole workflow, which is a Devops best practice.
This first early beta of the application does not share personal information with third parties nor does it store any information about you.
This privacy policy is subject to change without notice and was last updated on 2014-03-28. If you have any questions feel free to contact me through Blogger.
//Update 12.50a Saturday my micro app was approved by the store! It has a ways to go before I consider it a MVP (Minimally Viable Product), but it took me through the whole workflow, which is a Devops best practice.
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