Interesting posts from the forums

In the last several days a number of interesting posts were added to our Parapsychology and alternative medicine forums. Here I’ll present several of them.

User anonymous, who often writes on the topics of psychic development, healing and spiritual churches and is happy to answer people on the topics lately wrote that Army is going to test alternative medicine for PTSD. PTSD is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, for those who don’t know and many soldiers suffer from it, coming back from war. He quotes an article from Wired about the news:

The military is scrambling for new ways to treat the brain injuries and post-traumatic stress of troops returning home from war. And every kind of therapy – no matter how far outside the accepted medical form- is being considered. The Army just unveiled a $4 million program to investigate everything from “spiritual ministry, transcendental meditation, [and] yoga” to “bioenergies such as Qi gong, Reiki, [and] distant healing” to mend the psyches of wounded troops.

But many of these treatments haven’t been held up to much rigorous scientific scrutiny before. So the Army is looking to hand out $4 million in “seedling grants” to “conduc[t] rigorous clinical studies” into all sorts of “novel approaches.” Projects “containing preliminary data” will be eligible for up to $1 million. But even “innovative but testable hypotheses without preliminary data” could get as much as $300,000. Proposals are due May 15.

“Music, animal-facilitated therapy, art, dance/movement, massage therapy, EMDR [Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing] program evaluation, virtual reality, acupuncture, spiritual ministry, transcendental meditation, [and] yoga,” might all be considered worth of the military’s largess. So would “biologically-based treatments, botanicals, and nutritional supplements for enhancing cognitive function and mood in patients with trauma spectrum disorders, including TBI and/or PTSD, depression, anxiety, and/or substance dependence/abuse.” Even proposals for wild-sounding “therapies using bioenergies such as Qi gong, Reiki, distant healing and acupuncture” would be accepted.

This is good news indeed. I might add using the EFT therapy. One of its teaching videos even shows several sessions with people suffering with PTSD after vietnam war. And it seems that EFT helped them very much.

Another interesting post by the same anonymous is called Skeptics duped by Fraudulent Skeptics. Here’s the intro:

There is a big problem in the skeptical community. There is rampant obscuration of the truth by prominent skeptics who have misled masses of people. Skeptics often say that believers in the paranormal have been fooled by charlatans but it is the skeptics who have been fooled by prominent members of their community who seem to be more interested in winning the debate than in illuminating the truth.

Following, he provides a significant number of links and excerpts from various sources that signify the point. Including quotes from Randi, Dean Radin, Michael Prescott and more. Another forum user, LeoM, added several sources of his own.

In Home remedies forum user Allen Green posted a number of articles on various conditions and news from research from the web.

User Drynal wrote about the Art of making a psi ball, where he describes how to create a psi ball, which is an energy practice.

User Jozen-Bo writes about The Incredible Mind Portal which is something that he kind of invented and now promotes on the forum. It seems to be a technique that should help people to deal with their problems, generally speaking.

On the very active Skeptiko podcast forum there are lots of interesting discussions, both philosophical ones about the consciousness nature and psi and also discussions of the various episodes of the great podcast itself. One interesting post was added by user Open Mind, where he writes about The Collective Placebo Effect. Collective Belief & Disbelief?. He provides several quotes from various articles about the placebo effect. For example:

’......Cimetidine was one of the first anti-ulcer drugs on the market, and it is still in use today. In 1975, when it was brand new, it eradicated 80% of ulcers, on average, in various different trials. But as time passed the success rate of cimetidine – this very same drug – deteriorated to just 50%.
This deterioration seems to have occurred particularly after the introduction of ranitidine, a competing and supposedly superior drug…..

So, if you haven’t done this already, take a look at our various forums. Read the posts that interest you, ask your questions and write your answers and ideas, where they are fit. All you need to post is to register for the forums for free. You’re all welcome.