Your arguments against doing science in this case seem fully general to me. They could be used by anyone promoting their brand of alternative medicine no matter how bizarre their claims would be.

And indeed it turns out they are: this is a pretty standard part of the alternative medicine anti-rationalist toolkit.

I haven't made a simply argument against doing science in principle. I made arguments that you shouldn't assume that everything there is to know is discovered by science_2014.

How would you evaluate placebo effects? (Note that I think utilizing placebo too is important.)

Hypnosis is basically about utilizing suggestion in efficient ways. If you do it right then you can switch off any pain with it. How can argue that this is basically placebo but that doesn't change anything about the fact that the person isn't in pain anymore and the person wouldn't get the same effect if they would go to a person who's not skilled at using suggestion.

Furthermore any somatic intervention by definition targets someone's subjective experience. The notion of placebo's doesn't make any sense for somatics.

Instead of testing against placebo I would prefer testing against the Gold standard for treatment. A person who's in ill cares whether he gets healed better by treatment A or by treatment B. He doesn't care about placebos.

In some cases you can run additional trials with placebos to get additional knowledge, but comparison to Gold standards seems more important to me. Of course it's good for big pharma to have placebo blinding as the default standard. That way there less pressure to show that new drugs outperform old ones and treatments that aren't blinded as easily because they aren't pills or injections get shun.

I also think that the system that Eliezer proposed in his first april joke post, would work better than what we have.

The doctrine of blindness also shuts down a lot of phenomenological investigation that's important to understanding treatments.

Would it be possible to do some sort of meta-science on this topic?

Yes. I also care more for that then for chiropractors. I have no personal experience with chiropractic treatment nor know someone personally who has.

I'm not sure to what extend fascia is simply the latest buzzword or whether it a concept that yields a lot of new insight. The International Fascia Research Congress will be hold next year for the fourth time with makes it a pretty new field.

Somatics in general is possible to research by asking people to report their experience. It''s not straightforward. I took 2 1/2 years to understand a concept expressible in 21 words to the extend that I internalized it and could really use it. The little literature there is on somatics feels like it's making a bunch of trivial points but most of what matters is hidden in plain sight.

Standardizing that knowledge and structuring it in a way that's well communicated by a book is a hard project.

Last year I had the experience of trying out my newly found perception ability. I noticed a friend strangely interacting with grass and after asking him what he's doing he talked about it. I couldn't perceive anything special about the grass. Then he suggested tries because they are easier and it was an interesting experience.

WIth that new found experience I went to my somatics teacher and asked her about perceiving trees to check if my own perception matches with hers and she found what I'm doing a bit strange. If her tree at the balcony needs water than she gets a feeling that it needs water but she never goes out and actively trying to perceive a tree. I felt like a child playing with his new toy while the adults consider that playing and experimenting immature.

It still don't know whether I understand the full extend of the problem let alone the solution.

You could have been at some point that was far enough within the range to be considered okay, yet still not be 100% okay.

It's a measurement I did every day I know how the value fluctuates and it was in the middle of the normal range.

A measure that is wrong in one particular case may still be the best measure available on a statistical level. I highly doubt that doctors would get better ideas of which therapies are good if they discarded this measure and instead used "does the patient claim to feel restricted breathing".

I don't claim that doctors should just replace FEV1 with "does the patient claim to feel restricted breathing". That's the kind of thing that doesn't need any reference experiences and is easily communicable via text.

I claim that the actual experience of interacting with a measurement in a involved way is important to train your intuition to be able to understand a measurement. If you don't have that understanding you are going to make mistakes.

If someone would give me a million dollars I might also produce a device that measures something better than FEV1 but that's not the main point of the argument. But that would be me wearing a bioinformatics hat and that's not the main hat I'm wearing in this discussion.

Note that solving the problem doesn't automatically mean knowing what the problem is or even knowing how to solve it

Of course. On the other hand similar things go for doctors. Just because a clinical trial has shown that given certain patients a certain drug helps those patients, you don't know why it helps them.

I plausible that some psychopharmaca work by reducing inflammation in the gut.

In addition most doctors who diagnose a problem as a misplaced vertebrae don't look at why the vertebrae got misplaced in the first place. A misplaced vertebrae is visible on an X-ray. The underlying problem isn't.

If you've leg pain and you visit both a competent orthopedic surgeon and a physiatric doctor and they can't help you, good luck with your leg pain, generally.

If pain is your only problem and you score decently on hypnotic suggestibility a good hypnotist can remove it. In general that's often no good solution because pain is a signal and you would want a fix for the underlying problem but simply removing pain can improving someone's well being.

The human mind is capable of simply shutting of a pain signal.

That's obvious, but there's significant overlap if we're talking about problems with the body, which is also obvious.

Doctors are essentially trained to be blind and not trained to perceive what goes on inside a body. That has advantages because the can give you treatments that work in blinded trials but it also has it's issues.

My own primary physician can't distinguish whether I tense up or relax in a conversation and she's a Yoga teacher on the side, so probably more kinesthetic than average.

The night I stopped being a bioinformatic student I thought "beliefs have to pay rent" as far as my nonstandard beliefs go. I went and fixed one of those problems doctors have told me I have to live for the rest of my life because I didn't feel as bound anymore to the scientific way of doing things.