Comments on: What Big Pharma Doesn’t Want You to Know About Pain

By: Robin Schapiro

Robin Schapiro — Thu, 14 Apr 2016 16:39:51 +0000

I’m glad you’re in the trenches, Sifu! We share some history with the depression and the back pain. I’ve just set my morning gym alarm back so that I can begin my day with Qi Gong and meditation – trying to act as smart as I am 😀

By: George

George — Thu, 31 Mar 2016 18:11:13 +0000

Excellent article. I have degenerated disc disease. And just like you said, the best relief so far has been with meditation, tai chi, and qigong.

Thanks!

By: mintorcia

mintorcia — Thu, 31 Mar 2016 14:30:29 +0000

Sifu Anthony, there is an increasing body of studies published on the benefits of meditation in several diseases. When assessing these publications we should use a scheme like PICOT, Patients, Intervention, Comparator(s), Outcome(s), Time or Follow-up. This means it should be very clear and explicit who are the patients enrolled in the study, what is the interventions (ie what meditation methods, how, when, etc etc?), what has meditation been compared to? Nothing? Drugs? etc etc. How the benefits (Outcomes) has been measured? Is the measure validated? And finally for how long patients have been followed up? These are key piece of information when assessing the efficacy of any course of action. Let’s bear in mind that even placebo (ie sugar-pills believed to be drugs) somehow “works” for some patients. So, “doing something” rather than nothing is sometime effective but we need to have a PICOT scheme to assess how good the study has been designed.

By: Lilly

Lilly — Thu, 31 Mar 2016 02:50:04 +0000

Sifu Anthony, I agree with you. Opioids shouldn’t be prescribed as much since they are so addictive and can kill people. I also think Big Pharma wants to maintain people sick so they can sell more pills. (They are not interested in curing anything). And then when they get side effects from taking that pill, the doctor will tell them to take another pill because they developed another disease. And on and on it goes…