 clipped from www.timesonline.co.uk
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Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Religion and Society
Needles 'are best for back pain'
 Acupuncture is said to release the body's vital energy |
A German team found almost half the patients treated with acupuncture felt pain relief.
But the Archives of Internal Medicine study also suggests fake acupuncture works nearly as well as the real thing.
In contrast, only about a quarter who received drugs and other Western therapies felt better.
Ruhr University Bochum
The researchers, from the Ruhr University Bochum, say their findings suggest that the body may react positively to any thin needle prick - or that acupuncture may simply trigger a placebo effect.
One theory is that pain messages to the brain can be blocked by competing stimuli.
Researcher Dr Heinz Endres said: "Acupuncture represents a highly promising and effective treatment option for chronic back pain.
"Patients experienced not only reduced pain intensity, but also reported improvements in the disability that often results from back pain and therefore in their quality of life."
Needles not manipulated
More than 1,100 patients took part in the study. They were given either conventional therapy, acupuncture or a sham version.
Although needles were used in the sham therapy, they were not inserted as deeply as in standard acupuncture. Neither were they inserted at points thought key to producing a therapeutic effect, or manipulated and rotated once in position.
After six months 47% of patients in the acupuncture group reported a significant improvement in pain symptoms, compared to 44% in the sham group, and just 27% in the group who received conventional therapy.
Dr James Young, of Chicago's Rush University, said: "We don't understand the mechanisms of these so-called alternative treatments, but that doesn't mean they don't work."
Acupuncture is based on the ancient Chinese theory that needles can be used to release the body's vital energy, or qi.
Conventional therapies tested in the study included painkillers, injections, heat therapy and massage.
It is estimated that as many as 85% of the population experiences back pain at some point, and the problem costs the NHS around £500m a year.
The study echoes the findings of two studies published last year in the British Medical Journal, which found a short course of acupuncture could benefit patients with low back pain.
Mike O'Farrell, of the British Acupuncture Council, said: "Through these controlled research findings demonstrating the effectiveness of acupuncture, we believe that both the medical health profession and members of the public will see the benefits of acupuncture as part of an integrated healthcare service."
listen to debate about Pros and cons of AcupunctureTuesday, September 25, 2007
Time for a Change - Richard hogg leaflet v0.7
reposted from: http://www.humanism-timeforchange.blogspot.com/
Time for a Change - Richard hogg leaflet v0.7 dated 17th September 2007 replaces v6 leaflet.
I've compared v7 to the new BHA leaflet which was produced July-August 2007 (after Toynbee became President).
| BHA | TFAC | DHA | |
| A5 sides | 4 | 2 | 1 |
| Beliefs | |||
| freedom of belief / human mind | Y | Y | Y |
| positive alternative to religion | Y | Y | Y |
| Rational approach to ethics / morals | Y | Y | Y |
| One life | Y | Y | Y |
| Non religious | Y | Y | Y |
| without superstition | Y | Y | N |
| Non religious statistics | Y | Y | N |
| anti - Fundamentalist | Y | Y | N |
| Humanists are atheists or agnostics | Y | N | N |
| freedom of speech | Y | N | N |
| charity | Y | N | N |
| Science | N | Y | N |
| supernatural beliefs are human creations | N | N | Y |
| treat all with compassion & sympathy | N | N | Y |
| practical help whatever beliefs | N | N | Y |
| resist prejudice and dogma | N | N | Y |
| equal rights for non religious | N | N | Y |
| no religious bias and conflict | N | N | Y |
| Privilege | |||
| End Religious privilege | Y | Y | Y |
| religious have disproportionate influence | Y | Y | Y |
| Bishops in Lords | Y | Y | N |
| Public services contracted out | Y | N | N |
| support Separation of church and state | N | N | Y |
| Education | |||
| educate regardless of parental beliefs | Y | Y | N |
| faith schools | Y | Y | N |
| reform RE | Y | N | N |
| balanced education | Y | N | N |
| worship at school assemblies | Y | N | N |
| Humanist beliefs included in childrens education | N | N | Y |
| BHA & local groups | |||
| campaign methods | Y | N | N |
| Join local Humanist group | N | Y | Y |
| Link online to local groups | N | Y | N |
| Humanist ceremonies | N | Y | N |
I suggest v7 is amended to include the following features
page 1, para 5
Humanists are mostly atheists or agnostics who make sense of the world..
Burmese protests increasing
Monday, 24 September 2007
Protests against the ruling military junta in Burma have been increasing in size over the weekend. Protests have been taking place since mid-August after the junta doubled fuel prices, and demonstrations involving Buddhist monks and nuns have been on the rise since monks were hurt in a crackdown on 5 September.
On Saturday 1000 marched in the city of Rangoon, visiting the home of Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader who has been under house arrest for much of the past two decades. Yesterday 20,000 monks and nuns marched in Rangoon in the largest protest for almost 20 years, and reports today suggest that as many as 30,000 have taken to the streets.
In our May/June issue the novelist Karen Connelly examined the resistance of Buddhist monks and nuns to the Burmese dictatorship, and
asked whether Buddhism should be considered a form of humanism.She argues that while Buddhism is fatalistic, deeply misogynistic and riven with superstition, it also inspires resistance to tyranny and the fight for freedom.
(and Buddhists believe in Reincarnation - without a scrap of evidence to support this idea!) Buddhism is NOT Humanism!
Labour Humanists condemn Government’s Faith in the System report
September 19, 2007
Labour Humanists today maintained their firm opposition to ‘faith’ schools with a clear condemnation of the Government’s recent statement lauding the contribution such schools supposedly make to ‘community cohesion and integration’.
Chair Anthony Burn denounced the document as: “a clear example of the Government’s continuing folly in this area."
“The Government claims such schools will promote community cohesion - yet it stills fails to point to ways in which this will genuinely occur. Requiring ‘faith’ school pupils to have occasional contact with pupils from other schools will hardly equip our children with the skills to get on with those holding different beliefs - or indeed no religious beliefs.
“This is without again highlighting the squeeze on the rights of non-religious parents, caught in a system that assumes all Britons must belong to one religion or another.”
Labour Humanists also highlighted research released this week from the LSE showing ‘faith’ schools take in a far smaller proportion of children from low-income families than do their community school counterparts.
“Snaffling in the most teachable pupils under the guise of religion is wrong in any circumstance. But this creates only a redoubled division within communities – by both alleged religion and by income.
“As Labour people and humanists we can only fear for the shape of our communities in the future. How will out children truly learn to live together unless they first study, grow and become adults together?”
Scientific Literacy and the Habit of Discourse
by Thomas W. Martin, Seed
Reposted from:
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/09/scientific_literacy_and_the_ha.php
The First Prize Winner of the Second Annual Seed Science Writing Contest answers the question:
What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st Century?
Twenty years ago, as a college freshman, I knew precisely what it meant to be scientifically literate. In fact, I held an objective measure in the palm of my hand, courtesy of E.D. Hirsch. His book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know was a bestselling paperback, and conveniently listed thousands of names, terms, and phrases with which every educated person—he informed us—should be familiar. After plodding through the entire list during the course of an afternoon, I smugly discovered I could easily define each item of scientific vocabulary. Fuzziness about literary examples such as "Aeschylus" caused me no discomfort, but
inability to rigorously describe "aerobic respiration" in the biochemical sense (not the superficial, then-popular Jane Fonda sense) would have induced severe nerdish embarrassment.
Today I teach science and its history at an honors college, and am naturally far less confident about how to measure scientific literacy. The students who enter our program possess not only the expected high SAT scores, but also perfect or near-perfect scores on a battery of Advanced Placement exams, particularly in the basic sciences.
A noticeable portion of those students also believe in the literal truth of certain ancient accounts of earth's history that, to put it bluntly, directly contradict mountains of well-established data from geology, climatology, and biology.Without rehashing the ongoing culture wars surrounding this topic (and certainly without berating my own students), this serves as a useful place to begin tackling the notion of "scientific literacy."
We frequently hear the refrain that
if our nation simply raised the level of science courses, taught our children more subjects, and/or gave them more hands-on lab work, we could ensure the production of a citizenry capable of understanding an increasingly complex world.They would then be prepared to make the difficult choices of the 21st century, etc. However,
my incoming students' technical mastery already exceeds what even the most rosy-eyed optimist could realistically dream for America (or the globe) as a whole.In other words,
even if a citizenry were to achieve an impressive degree of scientific literacy—construed as raw conceptual competence—it would still be entirely possible for those same citizens to routinely subordinate scientific evidence to their own deeply-ingrained cultural suppositions.
More importantly,
the phenomenon of "evidence blindness"is hardly restricted to inexperienced students, or even to ideological segments of the general population. To varying degrees, it can be found across the spectrum, including some very striking examples in the realm of professional science itself. As noted recently in Seed, leading disciplinary practitioners who feel threatened by unorthodox new findings will sometimes band together to suppress such information, with the explicit intention of blocking its appearance in the journals. While these luminaries undoubtedly convince themselves they are merely upholding the integrity of their fields, the truth is that they (in quintessentially human fashion) are often more interested in preserving cherished beliefs than in encouraging potentially disruptive discoveries.
Over the past few decades, growing evidence from cognitive science has revealed significant
limits on the ability of individuals to criticize their own viewpoints.
Even the most analytically gifted and experienced among us are susceptible to bias and self-deception to an extent that we (ironically enough) generally fail to appreciate.As psychologist Daniel Gilbert puts it in his book Stumbling on Happiness,
"Each of us is trapped in a place, a time, and a circumstance, and our attempts to use our minds to transcend those boundaries are, more often than not, ineffective."The reason science does manage to be astonishingly effective is not because large groups are automatically wiser or less prone to self-deception than individuals. History adequately demonstrates that, if anything, the opposite is more nearly the case.
Science works because its core dynamics—not its methods or techniques per se—are rooted in pitting intellects against one another. Science eventually yields impressive answers because it compels smart people to incessantly try to disprove the ideas generated by other smart people.
The goal of science is to find those ideas that can withstand the long and hard barrage of evidence-based argument. That lesson must be experienced anew by the members of each generation, irrespective of their careers.Mastery of scientific concepts and theories is a necessary starting point, but it serves only as a prerequisite to joining the never-ending dialogue. Students must learn first-hand how to both imaginatively create new hypotheses and to dispassionately critique them. Many commentators have rightly implored us to make certain that young people encounter the "thrill" of discovery. While this is undeniably desirable,
it is arguably even more crucial that they experience the agony (if only on a modest scale) of having a pet hypothesis demolished by facts.
Several current presidential candidates have insisted that they oppose the scientific account of earth's natural history as a matter of principle. In the present cultural climate, altering one's beliefs in response to anything (facts included) is considered a sign of weakness.
Students must be convinced that changing one's mind in light of the evidence is not weakness: Changing one's mind is the essence of intellectual growth. By forcing students into evidence-based debates with one another, this mode of interaction, like any other, can become habitual. After being consistently challenged by their peers, most students eventually see that attempts to free themselves from facts are a hollow, and fundamentally precarious, form of "freedom."
In an era in which we tremble at offending the sensibilities of our neighbors, students must comprehend that it is not only possible but absolutely vital that we criticize each other's ideas firmly yet civilly. They must do this despite clear cases of prominent scientists falling into petty, acerbic (and therefore counterproductive) exchanges. The responsibility for fostering scientific literacy of this sort—that is, literacy construed as an ongoing commitment to evidence over preconception—falls upon all of us in our discussions both formal and informal, both public and private. When scientific celebrities fail to set a good example for students, it is especially incumbent upon the rest of us to set them back on the proverbial right track, rather than to reflexively hasten their derailment.
We do our children no favors by going easy on them—or, more to the point—allowing them to go easy on each other. Nature has a way of being far tougher. If we can create environments in which they can safely have small epiphanies in the light of evidence, they will be motivated to share those lessons. They will then be scientifically literate in the sense that scientific discourse will continue to endure and flourish. And that is the sense that ultimately matters.
—Thomas W. Martin is an Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ.