posted
Just sensing that the vibe of the board has changed (of late), I was wondering . . . can someone help me construct a tin-foil hat?
My main points of concern are materials, design, ornamentation, and margin-of-error for wavelength conductivity. Is it like a waveguide? Essentially acting as a short or open circuit to signals of a specific frequency? Or is its use more . . . esoteric?
Or if anyone has any good links, please let me know. I'm also now interested in chiropractic theory, homeopathy, healing with crystals / light / laser-beams, Tea-Party economic theories, and the anti-vaccination movement.
Posts: 1204 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
Just have your walls lined with screens to turn your house into a Faraday cage. Then you only need the hat when you leave the house, which would be never if you are actually concerned about such things.
Posts: 891 | Registered: Feb 2010
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LOL, the title alone is worth a laugh. I'm sure there is a Treyvon Martin joke in there somewhere but I think I'll pass Posts: 891 | Registered: Feb 2010
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posted
I'm going to respond as if I support tinfoil hats.
In all reality, tinfoil hats aren't about stopping normal electromagnetic waves. It's about stopping other, more esoteric energies*, that can be very damaging. Aluminum does this much more effectively than other substances, and aluminum foil is cheap and easily available, as well.
*Sometimes the government sends out deadly orgone (DOR) waves as a way to sicken and/or control the population, and aluminum is the best substance for blocking this energy.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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chiropractic is pretty much completely voodoo. Which is, I guess, a more polite way to say it's crap.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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The theories of chiropractic are not really accurate, but the practice of it seems to have legitimate therapeutic value sometimes. I'd like it better if the field firmly jettisoned the voodoo and stuck with verifiable stuff.
Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
Spinal adjustment has some value. But there are doctors / nurses who practice spinal adjustment. Chiropractic is a pseudoscience. Just because it happens to include spinal adjustment doesn't make it valid.
Most shamanistic healers incorporate traditional herbs into their "healing" practices. Many of these herbs have therapeutic value. That doesn't mean that spirit animals are real. . . .
Posts: 1204 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
I had one visit to a chiropractor. For sciatica. There was an X-ray, an "adjustment", a lesson on some exercises to do to ease any recurrence, and no voodoo. I felt much better and never needed to go back. Also, it was cheap and covered by my insurance.
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
The thing that bugs me the most about "Chiropractic" is that it ends in -ic, which is usually an adjective forming suffix. I know, I know, in this case it's coming from the end of "praktikos", but still. It drives me up a freaking wall every time I see or hear the word.
Posts: 1087 | Registered: Jul 1999
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posted
Full disclosure: I have many chiropractors in my family (around 15), so I am biased.
There are a few different fields of chiropractic and many of them *are* voodoo crap. I saw a chiropractor once because I was having body aches, particularly in my back (I was in another state for college and couldn't see the family docs). His specialty was "kinesiology" and he had me take my shirt off and hold a can of green beans. He told me to try to lift the can with my arm outstretched while he pushed on different muscles in my chest. Then he told me "You have a sinus infection. Take these pills and you'll feel better." The pills were $30 and made from beef liver, sheep brains, and other odd things.
That guy was nuts.
The chiropractors in my family don't do the homeopathic stuff. They do spinal manipulation to correct alignment problems. Their main goal is pain relief/management, and they will refer to a surgeon if needed.
My dad is a chiro and treats every member of his church for free, and will treat people who can't afford to pay by trading for vegetables from their garden or whatever they have. He's a good man and isn't conning anyone. And he's made my pain go away many, many times in my life through "cracking" my neck or back.
Chiropractors go to college for four years, then do four years of medical school, which includes the same courses as any other general practice doctor. They even work on cadavers. They get *real* medical training, in other words.
They don't perform surgery and can't write prescriptions. Those are the main differences between MD and DC. It's the many, many chiropractors who buy into pseudo-science who give the rest a bad name.
Posts: 298 | Registered: Sep 2011
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: I had one visit to a chiropractor. For sciatica. There was an X-ray, an "adjustment", a lesson on some exercises to do to ease any recurrence, and no voodoo. I felt much better and never needed to go back. Also, it was cheap and covered by my insurance.
Replace "sciatica" with "motorcycle wipeout" for me.
Posts: 6683 | Registered: Jun 2005
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The Chiropractic world is divided into Straights and Mixers.
Straights are the purists who do not deviate from Palmer's vitalistic concepts whatsoever, so they're all 100% crap.
Mixers are the reformists, like those who followed the General Chiropractic Council's reform-minded announcement that chiropractic vertebral subluxation was not supported by anything whatsoever. They still pretty much all still do pseudo-osteopathic work based off of Palmer's ideas of "innate intellegence," subluxations, and "bone out of place (BOOP)" and so they range from about half crap to mostly crap. But they're much better than straight chiropractic, which literally denies germ theory and claims that all disease is pretty much the product of spinal misalignment.
So, in the end, what percentage of chiropractors are worth going to?
None of them.
Go to an osteopath. Osteopaths are better. An osteopath can re-arrange your bones without the requisite years of training in utter quackery like 'vertebral subluxation.' A medical examination originating with your GP will usually make sure that whatever manual corrections you are given are in any way shown to be necessary, as opposed to a chiropractor, who will default to it and if consulted will recommend and provide treatment which is unnecessary in nearly all of cases. Go to an osteopath because their medical qualifications are much more significant, better, and you don't have to worry about them having such an ongoing tendency towards giving people strokes and permanent physical impairment with pretty much worthless treatment.
Unless you're in a situation which actually needs bone realignment (nearly all of the time, you don't), if you want the same kind of good feeling that you get after a chiropractic session, without all the stupid worthless unnecessary treatment and associated risks, go get a sports or therapeutic massage. You will get pretty much the same effect. You'll feel awesome, you didn't put your neck at risk of being procedurally mishandled by a practitioner of a dumb vitalistic make-believe theory founded in 1895. You'll be treated by someone with actual medical qualifications. You'll feel better and you won't be supporting a dumb pseudomedical snake-oil holdover from the 19th century.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
The issue is not with the individual results of certain chiropractic practices, but the underlying assumptions that chiropractors are taught and work under are often pseudoscientific.
DustinDropps
quote: Chiropractors go to college for four years, then do four years of medical school, which includes the same courses as any other general practice doctor. They even work on cadavers. They get *real* medical training, in other words.
Not *exactly*. First off, a doctor of chiropractic is not a medical doctor, in the sense that we generally understand it. While they *may* complete the same medical training as a physician, they do not necessarily complete residencies as physicians do, and they don't pass the medical board in order to practice, nor do they pass residency boards, meaning that they do not have, nor are they tested for, the experiences that a resident physician would gain by working in a particular field of medicine, nor do they necessarily possess the same breadth of knowledge as a physician must have to pass board exams.
Basically chiropractors != physicians. While they certainly do study some of the same things, they are *not* generally as broadly or as thoroughly trained as an MD should be.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
They're certainly not medically qualified enough to be doing anything like what they do, which is why the treatment is shown to be so often completely unnecessary and come at too high a risk of inducing stroke, paralysis, permanent impairment, etc.
To quote a Real Actual Not-Make-Believe Doctor I know:
"Chiropractors do not have medical training. They have a piecemeal quantity of medical teachings, but not enough to sustain the idea that they are medically qualified to do what they do. There's absolutely nothing a chiropractor can do for you that a physiotherapist cannot, except that chiropractors are taught how to do their beneficial things as part of a pseudoscientific spiritual religious practice, which means that they are higher risk, since they can't separate the practically effective methods from the unnecessary and ineffectual methods. They don't really understand why what they do helps - their training does not distinguish between the functional aspects of their treatment and the pseudoreligious bunkum.
The whole field is corrupted by their totally unscientific worldview, but like many alternative medicines, it gets some things right purely by accident and combined with a liberal dose of anecdotal evidence still commands undeserved respect from the general public."
or, maybe, the AMA:
"It is the position of the medical profession that chiropractic is an unscientific cult whose practitioners lack the necessary training and background to diagnose and treat human disease. Chiropractic constitutes a hazard to rational health care in the United States because of its substandard and unscientific education of its practitioners and their rigid adherence to an irrational, unscientific approach to disease causation."
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
One of the reasons why you'll be getting an earful from us about Chiropractic is that I got jacked by my network chiropractic care. Utterly jacked. I used to be a total believer.
And then Sam made fun of my robot walk for a week, and I didn't get to do a flats tour that year.
Could be worse though I guess they could have given me a stroke.
Posts: 805 | Registered: Jun 2009
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