What’s your subjective probability that this model is correct, and for what proportion of people suffering from chronic pain? I must admit that it sounds rather sketchy to me. Alternative medicine usually sends my crackpot alarms blaring. But I have two family members with chronic pain, so this is interesting to me.
The studies in Section 1.2 suggest a first-pass guess that 65% of the population [that those studies were drawing from] is “non-orthodox”.
…But then you’d need corrections, like if there’s an “orthodox” subset of the population, then some of them might heal by coincidence despite being in the non-orthodox treatment group, and in the other direction (maybe more importantly) there could be non-orthodox people who didn’t respond to the non-orthodox treatment. Actually, the latter would hardly be surprising, particularly given that I think the non-orthodox treatment providers are very confused about what they’re doing and why it works. I think “95% of the population are non-orthodox, or even more” should remain on the table as a possibility. Much lower numbers are also on the table. I don’t immediately know how to narrow it down.
As for subjective confidence, umm, I’m 95% confident that if I spent more time and did more research I would want to make at least minor edits to the model I’m proposing, and 25% that I would want to make major edits. But I don’t really expect that my probabilities are calibrated on this anyway, so maybe those numbers are a bit meaningless.
Hope that helps.
For what it’s worth, I share your general skepticism towards “alternative medicine”. As mentioned in the post, I thought the Healing Back Pain book had a bunch of baloney in it, even at the very moment that I was benefiting so much from it. I continue to have no interest in alternative medicine apart from this one topic.
What’s your subjective probability that this model is correct, and for what proportion of people suffering from chronic pain? I must admit that it sounds rather sketchy to me. Alternative medicine usually sends my crackpot alarms blaring. But I have two family members with chronic pain, so this is interesting to me.
The studies in Section 1.2 suggest a first-pass guess that 65% of the population [that those studies were drawing from] is “non-orthodox”.
…But then you’d need corrections, like if there’s an “orthodox” subset of the population, then some of them might heal by coincidence despite being in the non-orthodox treatment group, and in the other direction (maybe more importantly) there could be non-orthodox people who didn’t respond to the non-orthodox treatment. Actually, the latter would hardly be surprising, particularly given that I think the non-orthodox treatment providers are very confused about what they’re doing and why it works. I think “95% of the population are non-orthodox, or even more” should remain on the table as a possibility. Much lower numbers are also on the table. I don’t immediately know how to narrow it down.
As for subjective confidence, umm, I’m 95% confident that if I spent more time and did more research I would want to make at least minor edits to the model I’m proposing, and 25% that I would want to make major edits. But I don’t really expect that my probabilities are calibrated on this anyway, so maybe those numbers are a bit meaningless.
Hope that helps.
For what it’s worth, I share your general skepticism towards “alternative medicine”. As mentioned in the post, I thought the Healing Back Pain book had a bunch of baloney in it, even at the very moment that I was benefiting so much from it. I continue to have no interest in alternative medicine apart from this one topic.