From ART to Pilates...

[Guest guest]

Sorry this is a bit late out of the gate, but I've been a wee busy... I can

see value in both sides of this argument, but I must make mention of our

favorite fallacy of false cause, demonstrated in the following:

>>Let's use an analogy, Mel. I have several friends (including Dr. Leahy)

who overcame cancer with nutritional therapies--they are fine now (even

though Dr. Leahy was given about zero chance of survival). However, I

personally know two people who got cancer this year who were told by their

doctors not to take any form of nutritional supplements when they were being

treated with chemo because nutritional methods have not been proven to their

satisfaction to the medical community. Should Dr. Leahy have simply endured

traditional therapy and died because the appropriate research study hadn't

been published<<

I certainly don't mean to offend the poster here, but it is illogical to

conclude that the nutritional therapy was the causal factor in Dr. Leahy's

survival of his bout with cancer and that it stove off sure death in the

face of traditional medicine. While nutritional therapy certainly may be

effective treatment, it's success in the lack of traditional treatment does

not in any way provide damning evidence against chemo. We will never know

if it would have worked in his case, as he chose to follow a different path

to health. Perhaps he would have gone into remission without any treatment,

or he may have survived cancer only to be killed by the chemo.

Part of the problem with " alternative therapies " is the tendency of some of

its practitioners to couch failure in the very nature of mortality. If a

traditional therapy fails, traditional medicine is damned. If naturopathic

treatments fail, the patient was simply " too far gone " to be saved, or it

was " too late. " Both reasonings are certainly not unheard in the medical

community. It is popular in the mainstream press to cover alternative

medicine, and success in the face of great odds is much more interesting

than failure. Jumps in reasoning such as the shark cartilage business are

no better than any other form of shysterism, but they find fertile ground in

ad hominem attacks on the establishment. The lay public wants to have hope

to latch onto, and there are other personal benefits to alternative

therapies - the patient may see him/herself as more in control of his/her

fate, which may in itself lead to healing - our old friend Mr. Placebo.

From any angle, more research is needed. Personally, I would like to see

epidemiological studies comparing the two populations...

This brings us full circle to the Pilates business. Mel and Burkhardt

have pointed out the mainstay of the Pilates errors in the article posted on

this list, so I'll not waste time reiterating them. Suffice it to say that

while there may be value to some ideas in the original Pilates programs,

those ideas are continually eroded by couching them in commercialization and

tangential reasoning.

In the end, histrionics only serve to cloud the issues and delay learning,

while we address fallacy after fallacy, trying to mine concepts for ideas.

Regards,

Zillah, Washington