Posted by:
ificouldhietokolob
(
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Date: June 22, 2018 09:59AM
matt, let me start by saying I'm glad you feel better.
That said...you don't know that crystals were responsible for you feeling better. So saying they helped isn't, well, helpful. Because you don't know they did.
See, correlation isn't causation. You got some crystals, your headache got better -- the latter isn't necessarily caused by the former.
Would the headache have gone away by itself? You don't know.
Did you eat/drink/take something else that affected it? You don't know. Did the weather change and affect it? You don't know. There are lots and lots of other things that could have affected the headache, and you didn't "control" for any of those.
That's the benefit of controlled, objective clinical studies. They control for as many confounding variables as possible. So that actual cause and effect can be more reliably determined. And when such tests are done with crystals, there is no cause or effect that comes out.
Now, I get it -- you might say, "Who cares, as long as my headache is better?"
Well, I care. And I think we all should care.
Because if there *really is* something that crystals can do to make people feel better, that would be good to know. And to know what they can/can't affect. If they really "work," we should all have 'em with us, all the time. They could alleviate a whole lot of human suffering, for little cost and with no side effects. That would be great stuff.
And if they don't do anything, that would be good to know, too. Because then we wouldn't waste time and money on things that don't have any real benefit, and we can concentrate on things that DO have real benefit.
So there's great value in *knowing* whether stuff does what it's claimed to do or not. And in the case of crystals, what we know is that there's no actual effect from them. There may be, sometimes, a placebo effect (which could also explain your headache going away, but again -- you don't know if that's the case or not, and neither do I). And a placebo effect can be had without crystals.