This "study" looked at whether external qigong, an Ancient Chinese practice involving waving your hands over someone to guide "qi energy" through them, could reduce chronic pain.
Might be good to have a sham control, right? Nope! That would impose "Western biomedical concepts"!
Might be good to have a sham control, right? Nope! That would impose "Western biomedical concepts"!
What the hell is the point of even doing a study and submitting it to a journal if you refuse to use the methods that would enable you to determine whether or not the effects were real and infer a causal relationship between treatment and outcome?
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20626055/
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20626055/
By the way, their EAT treatment they used as a "control" (it's not) stands for "equal attention time" and consisted of someone just chatting with the participant for 30 mins.
And all the participants were people who already believed in the efficacy of qigong for chronic pain, since they had called the spa for treatment. Their gift for participating in the study was 50% off their next qigong treatment, which they say is "$200 value". 😫
So sham controls are considered too much of a "Western biomedical practice" but "randomized control clinical trials" and obtaining university IRB approval aren't?
No, they just wanted their work to *sound* sciencey without the rigor needed to demonstrate that qigong is a fraud.
No, they just wanted their work to *sound* sciencey without the rigor needed to demonstrate that qigong is a fraud.
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