The New York Times today has an article on scientific studies of “alternative” medicine. Quack-bashing isn’t my usual line, but it seemed to me like there was a good bit of stuff that will torque Orac off. I couldn’t help laughing at the final paragraph, though:
“In tight funding times, that’s going to get worse,” said Dr. Khalsa of Harvard, who is doing a clinical trial on whether yoga can fight insomnia. “It’s a big problem. These grants are still very hard to get and the emphasis is still on conventional medicine, on the magic pill or procedure that’s going to take away all these diseases.”
This, of course, is in contrast to “alternative” medicine, where the emphasis is on finding the magic… magic to take away all these diseases.
(As an aside, does anyone else hear the phrase “alternative medicine” and picture a painfully thin doctor dressed in black, smoking clove cigarettes, and talking about how acupuncture used to be really cool, but since they sold out and started getting major funding for clinical trials, they totally suck? Or is that just me?)
It’s not just you!
Damn clove cigarrettes.
Yoga is not an alternative medicine. It is a form of exercise and relaxation. To lump it together with untested remedies that are sold over-the-counter at vastly inflated prices is itself unscientific. On this very blog there is another article about where attention goes money follows. It talks about marketing. Marketing is itself is a form of magic — you give to certain products a type of glamour by associating it with certain colours, forms, celebrities, styles. This is how Coca-Cola, a sugary brown flavoured water, is sold. This is magic — the art of persuasion. However, in yoga one is taught to focus one’s attention on parts of the body and then relax them. One is taught to control one’s bodily state instead of being a victim to it. I would rather be in this position than be a victim to the manipulation of drug companies who compete with each other for incremental gains on existing drugs instead of releasing into the public domain drugsg which could save lots of people’s lives in developing countries. Why is it left to the likes of Bill Gates to finance a cure for malaria? Because drug companies don’t see any profit in it. However they do see profits in creating drugs like viagra. If you want to increase your sex drive, yoga is much better than viagra!
That’s fairly representative of your overall position (by which I mean it’s both wrong and misleading.) Viagra isn’t about libido it’s about erectile dysfunction. It’s about achieving and maintaining the tool (so to speak) to do something about your existing “sex drive”. Even if yoga did have a demonstrable effect on libido (as you claim) it’s not the same issue. Likewise your claims about yoga and insomnia: wrong and misleading.