Science and BFR: Part 2

[Nyal]

Now this one is going to get me in trouble.

There is such a thing as quackery. We have all heard of this, a medical practice or medicine that has no rational support, no scientific backing, but is purported to be effective. Throughout the pre-scientific age, most medicine by necessity fell within this category, and we could have expected progress within the last century in eliminated bad cures.

But we haven't. Quackery is going strong and beginning to cause serious problems in a world where we actually have progressing technology to cure and treat disease. Billions are wasted on acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropracty, and untested herbal remedies (warning: untested is the key term here. I likes my St. Johns). In my blazingly egotistical opinion, this is folly. We should be doing better than this after all this time.

I really don't care, fundamentally, or I haven't cared about the trend until I started BFR. There seems to be a stronger vein of this among this community. I am worried that BFR will come to be poisoned, or tainted, by the proper disgust people should be having for quack remedies.

Boom!

 

[Jimmy Hart]

 my two cents because i half

my two cents because i half way agree with you.

acupuncture has been around for centuries and you can find studies on it. it has been shown to work for some things but not all that it is used for. the same goes for chiropractic care. when done properly it can help alleviate a lot of issues in the body but far too often these practitioners just set up a money making business that requires you to go more than you really need to. the average herbal remedy has been tested, even your st johns, and they all show some sign of benefit. that is why they are all out on the shelves. the problem is that a lot of times they only have .5% improvement or something to that effect. the marketing machines get ahold of that and boom you have the next big cure for what ails you.

the barefoot community has it's share of quacks but no more than anything else. take a trip around any conventional running website and let me know if you can get through it without any of that quackery you mentioned. they are everywhere my friend and they are just dying to jump on a cause and take it too far.

 

[Nyal]

 I disagree about the

I disagree about the acupuncture and certainly about the chiropracty, but the specific quackery is beside the point. I think we are the same page.

 

[Barefoot TJ]

I would like to throw Bill

I would like to throw Bill Bowerman into the list of quacks. Speed forward = boat anchors of today.

 

[Jimmy Hart]

 TJ you can do that to a

TJ you can do that to a certain extent but it's Phil Knight you want on that list more than Bowerman. Bowerman had a theory and was testing it out when the marketing machine known as Knight came along and ran with it. Bowerman's shoes were actually just supposed to be lighter. He was obsessed with trying to make the shoe lighter to make his runners faster. The shoe that he and Knight came up with for jogging, the Nike Cortez, was thicker than other shoes at the time but nothing like what we have today. It was never meant for long distance or hard training but for the casual runner who was not fast and just wanted to get some exercise. The problem is the shoe became misused because people realized that if you could land on your heel while running you could get a longer stride which would help the average person become faster. The rest if history but Bowerman is catching a bad rap because of it when it really wasn't his fault. He was a minimalist and wanted the smallest, lightest shoe possible for his runners.

 

[Barefoot TJ]

Yes, Bowerman is known for

Yes, Bowerman is known for wanting to make his athletes' shoes lighter, but it is my understanding that the "heel" was also his idea. Bowerman was the "mad scientist" (no true scientist at all) who had no medical training in regards to the human anatomy, and Knight was a marketing machine. As far as I am concerned, they are both quacks and should be added to the list.

And let's just say the "heel" wasn't his idea. How did he, being the minimalist he was, allow that to happen and allow himself to be associated with it?

 

[Jimmy Hart]

good questions TJ!  the truth

good questions TJ! the truth is that by the time the modern day running shoe was being built bowerman was not really a player at nike anymore. he was just collecting checks. he is credited with the thick heel and modern shoe design but he really didn't do it. what he did do was shave the back of the heel of the cortez off at an angle. he did that to facilitate the jogging form he was shown in new zealand. the idea was that it would help catch the heel and get it moving forward to the forefoot because the new jogging stride was different than a running stride.

the modern running shoe designs came from nike designers and scientists and knight, who ran for bowerman in the 50's, knew that if i had the coach's name behind him it would give him instant credibility.

you are correct that bowerman had no medical education but i cannot take anything away from him as he was the greatest track coach to ever live.

from wikipedia: Bowerman's "Track Men of Oregon" won 24 NCAA individual titles (with wins in 15 of the 19 events contested) and four NCAA team crowns (1962-1964-1965-1970), and posted 16 top-10 NCAA finishes in 24 years as head coach. His teams also boasted 33 Olympians, 38 conference champions and 64 All-Americans. At the dual level, the Ducks posted a 114-20 record and went undefeated in 10 seasons. In addition, Bowerman coached the world record setting 4-mile (6.4 km) relay team in 1962.

Not to mention 16 sub 4 minute milers in his career.

 

[stomper]

Nyal, I'm curious.  Could you

Nyal, I'm curious. Could you give some examples of the quackery you are responding to? No need to use names.

I looked up some definitions of quackery, and it was interesting what I found. Here are two:
[*]medical practice and advice based on observation and experience in ignorance of scientific findings.[*]The practice of fraudulent medicine, usually in order to make money or for ego gratification and power; health fraud.[/list]
Are you referring the second kind, fraud? Like shod running (or barefoot running) is being sold by people who know it doesn't have any real benefits?

My guess is that you're referring to the first kind.. medicine and advice based on observation and experience in ignorance of scientific findings.

Well, I've been a working scientist, and I can tell you that there VERY few people out there, including many medical professionals, including people who talk about "wanting to see the evidence," who really understand and apply the scientific method in its full sense of observation, generating disprovable hypotheses, etc.

A LARGE part of western medical practice (not just flaky stuff like homeopathy) is based on tradition and anecdote, not an application of the scientific method. Some physicians are aware of this; that's why you hear the defensive term "medical science" used in some publications. (They are trying to distinguish themselves from centuries of bloodletting and the modern equivalents.)

Also just as a practical matter some of the arguments for/against running shoes would be difficult to test using the standard "double blind" type of experimental design used in medical research. Obviously participants won't be blind to whether or not they wear shoes.

Other research designs are possible, and I'm sure somewhere people are starting to do them. But in the meantime we're left with individual observations like "I've run in these shoes and never gotten hurt" or "when I took off my shoes my injuries went away."

Those kind of observations are not quackery. They are the beginning of any real research. Observations like those provide the ideas that research tests.

It's when those kind of observations are translated into a faith like "(Not) wearing shoes is universally better; If you have a different experience then something else is wrong with you" that it becomes quackery. It's a hypothesis that is nondisprovable through the vagueness of its variables ("better") and the attached condition ("if you have a different experience..").

My way of dealing with this has been to not make big sweeping arguments about running shoes when asked about it. I just say, "well, losing the shoes has definitely been good for me," and list a few of the benefits I've seen.

But curiously even I, who consider myself a pretty hard core appreciator of the scientific method, have developed my own little brand of quackery. If a study came out that said definitively "90% of shod runners can go uninjured while only 10% of barefoot runners can" I would still run barefoot. Individually, I'm getting something out of it that I appreciate, regardless of what research says about whole groups of people.

Now if develop a similar appreciation of homeopathy will someone please shoot me? Thanks.

 

[Jimmy Hart]

 check out stomper with the

check out stomper with the big brain. nicely put sir.